I liked the first season of SAC, but it did kind of annoy me how they basically decided to put Major Kusanagi in lingerie throughout most of it. She was nude in a good percentage of the 1995 movie, but it wasn't really "sexualized." In SAC it kind of felt like, instead of being a conflicted character unsure of her place in the world, a large percentage of her character was just there as fan service/eye candy, and I thought it cheapened her as a result.
I agree. Major's nudity in the movie feels like a person driving a robot that was human shaped. Her character felt, to me, like an AI trying to figure out what it meant to be human. Trying to figure out whether she/it is human or not. Her character blurred the lines between human and AI and that was IMHO the soul of the film. There's one particular pair of scenes where the human Major is tracing the steps of the human-shaped robot body and you can see her robot eyes trying to piece together what that experience ... is.
SAC Major feels like 15 year old me felt when I first started playing EverQuest and discovering that I could "be" a woman and take all my clothes off in public.
Exactly! If I watched SAC as a fourteen year old boy, maybe I wouldn't have as many issues with the more problematic aspects, but I didn't watch SAC until about a year ago, and it felt a bit gratuitous to me.
SAC and 1995 movie effectively base on different chapters of the first manga volume (all of them avoiding certain bits though, like Major's "on the side" enterprise), and the character design used in both matches the source material - just different scenes (SAC arguably follows the design more closely)
EDIT: to make it clearer, Major's clothing choices in Manga were definitely her own and it didn't feel like it's just random cheap sexualization, but then you have to consider that some of the off-the-books income streams Major had were censored from some releases, and she definitely knew how to play off people's looks at her (explicitly called out in GitS 2.0 manga)
I guess part of my issue is that I wasn't a huge fan of the manga either; it felt borderline-hentai at some parts and just wasn't my jam, I never finished it.
The 1995 movie is easily in my top five favorite movies, and I think a large part of it was because I liked that specific version of her character.
> Major's clothing choices in Manga were definitely her own and it didn't feel like it's just random cheap sexualization
I mean, I guess? These are fictional characters, so these depictions are still created by people. Yes, it's the character's decision in-universe, but it's still the author's decision to put her in situations that require her to be in skimpy outfits.
I don't mean to come off as super social-justicey, I guess I just never really liked the trope in anime of every female character being hyper-sexualized.
Ah, I meant it in the sense that Major, compared to many... other creations even from the same time, felt more punk/counterculture in that approach, fitting also with how Section 9 pretty much didn't give a crap about things like dress code (other than poor boss needing a suit for meeting other suits)
It's awkward to be sure, and often seems out of place, but that is Anime. Evangelion is no different. To be fair, there are such gratuitous elements in most TV and movies.
