Anima-l Magic Revisited

Okay, not really a new installment, but more of an addendum...
Mike pointed out that I may have sounded a bit too didactic, or stuffy, or otherwise unclear in my intentions in the last post... so I aim to clear things up.
Okay... basically, in reference to the Toren Smith / Adam Warren thing in the last post... which I will freely admit is a very old piece of beef that has been stuck in my craw for many years... there is nothing wrong with cheesecake. There is nothing wrong with women wearing sexy outfits. I realize that, yes, the convention scene has changed radically since I was a regular attendee (in the early 90s) from fat, unwashed fanboys to beautiful young women wearing fetish gear and hot anime chick costumes... and what they wear at Daytona Beach and other hot spots speaks for itself... so... yes, I DO realize that women DO wear clothes like this. I DO realize that cheesecake can be fun. My POINT was that cheesecake inserted for the sake of cheesecake- i.e., in a situationt hat makes no sense- like, say, professional women wearing bikinis to the same workplace where the men wear suits... is dumb. Wearing silver bikinis for police work is dumb, unless, like the Dirty Pair (which I won't abbreviate using its initials, which mean something very different these days) it is a work of parody. My issue with Smith and Warren was that they (or whoever responded to the letter) tried to claim that the Dirty Pair were, in some way, justified in a real-world sense in wearing what they wore. Look... Parody is parody. The universe you create only works if it obeys its own internal logic. Not necessarily the logic of the real world, but the logic as defined by the work itself. Let's take Cowboy Bebop... we can accept little spaceships being driven and used much like we use cars, as silly as that might seem, because the show established it. We know that Ein is smarter than any real dog, and we accept it, because the show established that. If, however, halfway through the show, we had a scene where Spike walks out of his spaceship's airlock and swims to the surface of Jupiter, it would be jarring... because everything before that indicates that he is a normal human who is not immune to the various rigors posed by hard vacuum.
Mike also pointed out to me that GitS Stand Alone Complex was attempting to justify Kusanagi's bizarre wordrobe choices by backfilling the story so that the social mores match her clothing. This is good, but obviously rather silly... the mores should have been established first. They weren't because the director thought it would be cool to have his main female character dress like a cheap sex doll, and the fan outcry was so bad that they had to justify it... but not bad enough to justify going back and fixing it. But let's say I can accept it... fine, no problem, the society allows women to dress like this in professional circumstances, and furthermore the women do so willingly (I wonder- if the justification is that Kusanagi is so proud of her body, seeing as how she gets shot at pretty regularly, wouldn't she want to wear some kind of practical armor over it instead of a frilly swimsuit?) , then why don't the guys do it, too? I mean, Batou has a godlike physique... why not show up in a G-string and motorcycle boots? (Urgh...) Not the kind of thing I would love looking at... but fair's fair. Do the creators of GitS think that their potential women audience members are all interested in seeing every crevice of Kusanagi? What? The creators don't care? Because... perhaps... it's still mostly a guy thing?
Enough on this. Anyone out there wish to comment?
Next time, a new subject. We get into some news about the rapidly-progressing EBEJEEBIES animated short project. Until next time...