For those who don't know, like me: he moved into adult manga, hentai-ish poster book work.
His popularity may have corrupted him...
His popularity may have corrupted him...
The most recent manga he involved with was Ghost Urn, which explores the world of GitS from a different protagonist. He did not do the drawing, but did most of the worldbuilding and mecha design.
Whatever narrative you've invented of Shirow changing over time is a stretch.
Shirow's manga is horny though, partly why I dislike it.
It's arty but there's no doubt it's done that way in part due to horniness.
I view the portrayal of Kusanagi as being steeped in aspects of the male gaze in a metatextual way. Japanese society has a high emphasis on traditional beauty standards, and the artists depicting her as a character use her beauty as a foil against the audience, by contrasting her beauty with her strength, and by subverting the desires of the audience by drawing our attention to her humanity by alienation through destroying her body at multiple points in the series. Her desire to protect her comrades at the cost of her body shows us how she is willing to sacrifice her femininity, being forced to regress to a childlike body.
The series have a lot of fan service, but I believe that it’s intentional so that the audience is forced to confront their own biases and stereotypes about women and about cyborgs/robots. The cyborg nature of her body as it is destroyed reads to me as a visual metaphor for the Madonna/whore double standard women are subject to society.
I guess I don’t disagree with your view, so much as I think that how she is depicted works on multiple levels in-universe and with respect to the viewer, and said depictions serve multiple functions in the text.
Movie Kusanagi is her own thing, mostly unrelated to the manga or other adaptations.
The manga is different.
I agree that you can find genuinely disturbing things in the manga world and that Masamune's work is relatively benign (though some of his depictions of less-developed adult women might upset some). In general, I find the idea of commercialized erotica amusing, especially when coming from sources with more mainstream claims-to-fame. In these cases, I don't attach a connotation of moral bankruptcy or anything like that to the idea of them being "infamous", though maybe that's just me using the word wrong. I intend it more in the sense of, "Hahah, oh wow, THAT guy did THAT? That's crazy." Kind of like when we found out about Tezuka's softcore furry/snakewomen doodles.