The first six episodes of SAC_2045 are a movie poorly split into serial form; they don't end, they just stop. They're continuous and slow and feature a new character who leaves at the end of #6 and does not appear again during the season.

ep 7 is a "Batou is a nice guy" solo episode. Not a great one, but it's pretty solid. Subsequent eps are dumbed-down SAC episodes very weakly paced over the rest of the remaining series space. Togusa is basically the main character.

But not in a character-writing kind of way. It HONESTLY feels like it was "made for america" in ways that SAC & 2nd Gig weren't

Remember how there was a whole season of Catcher in the Rye teenfeelings Society stuff back in the '00s? Well now it's an even younger, even sadder boy, and he loves 1984!

On the other hand, though, it feels LESS like it was made for america because the political stance of the text is very hard to parse (but maybe that's me being neither japanese nor american). The movie has some 1%-based rhetoric that had me

There's stuff about people being "cancelled" and online mobs and there's a pepe ref that's like, at least I can see it's something to get, I can appreciate that. But there's an ep called Edgelord that is not apparently about an edgelord? It's perplexing

Mostly this season made me think I was wronger about the intentions of previous seasons that I thought, but not in a way that offers a lot of reflection or growth. I'm just all ??? so are you saying it's good that S9 is sort of fascist...?

And idk if I'm veering off the road but there's a guy that looks to me a lot like Hideo Kojima and his role is sort of mm ok mmmm are we,, hmmmm is this where you got distracted by metal gear? Not sure??

there's WAY LESS cyborg-life stuff, and people carry around tablet and smartphones, which is confusing, and we never see them use their brainphones, and... it just... it didn't feel like THE CONTENT to me. You know?

I also feel like "autistic mode" is outstaying its welcome as an unexplained piece of jargon.