Character · Ghost in the Shell
Batou
Section 9's heavy hitter has cybernetic eyes that cannot blink, and a soft spot he would rather nobody mentioned.
In Otakana the clue reads: Bulky operative with metal camera eyes
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Ghost in the Shell
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Batou came out of the Rangers and into Public Security Section 9, where the work is counter-terrorism and most of the staff have swapped their bodies for machines. He is the bulk of the unit. Where the Major goes through a wall, Batou goes through the people standing behind it, and he keeps a small arsenal in a van in case the day turns strange.
The eyes are what everyone remembers. Two dull metal ports sit where a face expects sockets, wired for thermal and telescopic vision and incapable of closing. Masamune Shirow drew them that way in Young Magazine in 1989, and every adaptation since has kept them, because a character who cannot look away is useful in a story that keeps asking what is left of a person once the parts are replaced.
In Stand Alone Complex he lifts weights nobody else in the office could shift, cooks properly, and adopts a basset hound. He also spends a lot of energy pretending he is not worried about Major Kusanagi, who outranks him, outguns him and did not ask for the concern. He offers it anyway. The show mines that for its quietest moments, usually right after something has exploded.
Spelling BATOU
BATOU keeps the long vowel that most romanisations throw away. The Japanese is バトー, Bato with a bar over the o, and the usual English fixes are a macron or a plain BATO. Otakana spells it out instead: five letters ending O then U. If you learned the rule from GOJO, where the U vanishes, this one runs the other way.