All very nice (the art)! Someone should start a fan art thread (didn't there used to be one?)... I'll dig out my little SD SAC Motoko sprite gif and post it too
Plus she will always be the original
Ah no... As I say in another post, the 1st
manga Motoko is technically the original... by a good few many years. Masamune Shirow wrote the manga, and the first film was adapted from that (SAC is of course a mix of both those two -especially in SSS- as well as being it's own thing).
I think that the SAC/SSS Motoko actually looks a lot less relatable, human-wise. As I probably said somewhere, she looks much more like a generic anime design to me, with the shape of her face and her big pink eyes and purple hair. Although there is nothing wrong with her looking artificial or slightly generic, since she is a cyborg, I prefer the more human looking movie design with the unsettling piercing looks (the first movie one really *does* look a lot like a couple of people I've actually met and known).
There is something surreally beautiful in the doll bodies that Motoko inhabits in the second film, I agree. And Motoko Aramaki... I totally forgot about her, bet yes I think that is a beautiful character design also from Man-Machine Interface. I felt sorry for her for what the other Motokos did to her -my humane self really finds the 'survival of the fittest' aspect of evolution cruel- but I guess in biology it really is necessary (modern human values and nature really aren't with each other, lol).
Isn't the black-haired Motoko with the dragonfly mech things in the 1.5 manga and in Shirow's old painting also known as Chroma? I really find that design beautiful... she reminds me of my favourite anime heroine Sylia Stingray from the original Bubblegum Crisis
. I was kind of disappointed when the manga revealed that the woman in that painting was another version of Motoko, because she looks like a completely different seperate person to me.