Setting
Ghost in the Shell takes place on the cusp of the mid-21st century. World War III was a nuclear war primarily involving wealthy and powerful developed countries whose destruction resulted in fundamental changes in the global balance of power, as long-established national boundaries and concentrations of population were broken. World War IV was a non-nuclear war (also known as the Second Vietnam War) triggered by the ensuing collapse of many Third World states.
As a result of these wars the global geopolitical landscape has become heavily balkanized, with even formerly strong First World countries like the United States divided into smaller, less stable competitors. Civil wars and non-state revolutionary movements pose a constant security threat worldwide, and the millions of refugees displaced by the global tumult have become a major problem. The continuing advance of technology, particularly cyberization technology and the internet, has also drastically increased the frequency of cyber-terrorism. The island nation of Japan emerged from these conflicts politically intact, and occupies a position of relative privilege.
Read more about this topic: World Of Ghost In The Shell
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship—a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.”
—Anthony Storr (b. 1920)
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)