I don’t think anything actually grows in the full cyborg bodies, they are basically completely inorganic, though I suppose the hair is artificial/implanted.
Given how things have turned out in SAC, I think only Kusanagi, Batou, and maybe Boma are full cyborgs. Maybe the cyberbrains have blood, tissue, and nutrients, it’s a little hard to tell.
You never see Kusanagi or Batou bleed, so they are probabaly full cyborgs. She can feel it all right, but you never saw any when her arm got blown away or when her cheek was grazed by Saito’s rifle bullet.
Togusa of course is in Section 9 partially because he’s the least mechanized - he probably has an implant or two but that’s about it… probably the same with Aramaki. I say Boma is a full cyborg as he has no hair, plates in his head, cybernetic eyes, etc. Saito is an obvious half-cyborg, with a mechanical eye (as the original organic eye was blown out by Kusanagi) and the neck implant. Pazu seems to be one as well; he wasn’t really effected when he was sliced by his body double, though the double bled when the knife was stuck to the hilt in an eye. Ishikawa got the crap beat out of him and obviously bled (from the mouth), but considering his expertise I gotta think he’s at least a part cyborg.
Kusanagi, Batou, and Boma seem to be the only ones with combat cybernetics. Most of the others seem enhanced, but in ways that augment their functions in Section 9.
I’ve never been able to pin down exactly how cybernetic Batou is. I’ve seen some sources that say he’s almost as fully converted as Kusanagi, but that seems unlikely given that her status as fully cybernetic except for her “ghost” is apparently unusual. I’ve seen some sources that say he’s only got combat cyberarms and the eye implants, along with some basic comm and muscle enhancement stuff. This also seems unlikely, since he’s exceptionally tough and shows he can keep up with the Major several times in all continuities.
I’d guess Batou is more like 70/30 in favor of cybernetic parts. Mostly in terms of his combat arms and the resulting reinforced skeletal and muscular structure he’d be needing in order to support that kind of hardware. He’s obviously tilted more toward the cyborg side, since GitS2 makes a visual point of his weight when he gets in and out of cars, as well as the comments about how he’ll sink like a rock in the ocean sequence.
Is there an authoritative source on this somewhere? I can’t remember Shirow mentioning anything about it in the original manga, but I haven’t read it in years.
I thought the idea was that his arm had been human up until the point it was replaced.[/quote]
I think they were just older models and the new one was the fancy gun type. I suppose the comment on “don’t even think about trying to rebuild them” would apply to an organic arm, but Batou’s questioning of where his “old arm” is along with his non-reaction to having a new cybernetic arm indicates to me that he’s had one for some time now and just preferred the old model. That new one seems pretty cutting edge, too, so his discomfort in that scene may just be due to the fact that they’ve started putting high tech and possibly secret stuff in him, and such parts are the primary reason they want Kusanagi back.
Additionally, some major skeletal and muscular retrofitting would have to happen to allow the use of a combat-level cybernetic arm, and it looks like they just snapped a new one on rather than totally reworking Batou’s shoulder and spinal assembly.
Apparently dreamworks forgot to put on a real subtitle track and just used the closed caption track instead. Complete with [footsteps] etc… I’m not really surprised though. The GITS series on dvd has been jinxed from the get go.
Yeah, that was a pretty silly blunder. No English dub either, which is really unusual. The captions for the hearing imparred are distracting at first, but I managed to forget about them after a while. The 5.1 Japanese mix sounds great, though, and the movie looks brilliant on my new HDTV with the new Toshiba scaling DVD player. I watched it scaled to 1080i over an HDMI connection. Really beautiful.
