I finally watched the entire GITS SAC 1, and I have to agree 25 is totally sad, I was brimming.

I wouldn't think too much into the OAV movie in relation to SAC. I mean...stand alone complex implies that it's a seperate storyline. At first, I would have placed the events in SAC prior to the movie, but there's a good point that the all human guy was new to the team in the movie, and he acts like a regular in SAC.

For me, I felt like the OAV storyline was taken apart and then expanded on and paced so it could work as a 26 ep series. If you think about it, the plot in the movie and SAC is somewhat similiar (Puppet Master, Laughing Man). But yeah, don't get too hung up on what was said in the movie, or else you won't enjoy SAC as it is.

Personally, I thought there was way too much talking, which meant there was a lot of reading involved. It is definetly not a kids show. Lot of "food for thought" topics, that they don't explain at the end of the episode, and leave viewers to answer for themselves. The last 4 episodes (23-26) that I have was ripped/translated by a different crew then my other episodes, and you can tell that it's really bad (Instead of Chief they translated it to Supervisor). I'm not sure how much they butchered the sequence of events in Ep 25...I'm going to redownload a better version of it. Either way, it was pretty powerful. Sad stuff.

It's strange, because in the show they talk about how robots are designed to look a certain way so humans don't become emotionally attached to them. On a larger scope, how do people associate and relate to anime? These characters aren't real, and ontop of that, they don't look human, yet you're still able to form emotional attachments to them, even in a short period of time (I watched all 26 ep in 2 days).

Maybe i'm just a huge wuss.