What I'm trying to get at is that wonky shit that throws you in the deep end hoping to make sense of it in the margin notes like the GitS manga wasn't then, and arguably still isn't now, mainstream. Star Trek and Twilight Zone generally posed one or two troubling questions at a time. Their purpose was to render sci-fi's challenges legible and digestible to a primetime audience.

The uncut stuff by and for the stigmatized throws it all at the reader at once, drops some key clues, and counts on the readers to work out amongst themselves how social reality in the story has become so freaky and foreign to the world we know (yet hauntingly plausible if the same forces played out here), because the intended reader is into that shit and wants it in ever stronger concentrations.

Being digitally psyopped and possibly depersoned in real time is increasingly relatable to regular westerners, as is being materially exposed to international geopolitics, and watching anime is pretty normal there now, so I guess if the crank otaku GitS manga was ever going to be broadly legible, it's never been closer to being so.