Fully prosthetic

A person counts as fully prosthetic once every part of the original body, brain and all, has given way to synthetic hardware. Nothing organic remains except awareness itself, the thread of consciousness the series calls a Ghost. People in this state go by full-cyborgs, or simply fulls.

The concept came into focus across the opening two seasons of Stand Alone Complex, where it anchors a running meditation on identity, communication, and where technology leaves the individual. Writers hang big questions on it, weighing idealism against materialism, and many of the show's most important figures are drawn as full-cyborgs precisely because that condition sharpens who they are.

Motoko Kusanagi, who leads the cast, is the clearest example. Takeshi Kago, a smaller-scale antagonist, goes as far as inhabiting the shell of an armored vehicle. The elusive hacker and meme-maker known as the Laughing Man, tied to the figure of Aoi, is thought to belong to the same category and drives the first season from the shadows. Hideo Kuze, a onetime peacekeeping soldier turned rebel against the UN and its power brokers, moves from villain to ally across the second season, while Philip Kukushkin, a Russian engineer, narrowly survives an attempt on his life by a fellow full-cyborg from his own country.