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In my review of GitS SAC I talked about its idea of the standalone complex. This idea is described as copycats with no original, but in the context of the series I think it is more appropriate to think of it as leading by example with no example. The protagonist, referred to as the Laughing Man, finds this phenomenon working both for and against him, as he uses it to effect actions without acting himself, and as he fights to ensure the integrity of his idea even as others hijack it for their own ends. I compared this to the idea of textual history and the protection of its integrity, as presented by Stephenson in ‘Snow Crash’, but I failed to mention the much closer parallel: Muad'dib in Herbert's ‘Dune’ sequence.

In ‘Dune’, Jessica makes use of a religious predisposition brought to the Fremen by the Bene Gesserit's Missionaria Protectiva years before to protect herself and her son. During the course of the book, Muad'dib becomes a messiah and founds a holy army. His vision of the future shows him a bloody and inevitable conquest of the known universe. (Incidentally, he uses it to realise the dream of Liet, now dead, whose idea has lived its standalone existence among the Fremen.)

But in ‘Dune Messiah’, Muad'dib realises his manifesto has been hijacked by those with political ambition. His unstoppable army has fuelled undesirable change, and his followers have forgotten the original meaning of his religion. So he must die, though he knows his legend will live on without him. In ‘Children of Dune’ Muad'dib's twins see the same bleak future as their father, and know there is only one way to return humanity to its proper course: the golden path. ‘God Emperor of Dune’ charts the multimillennial course of this path and its conclusion.

Muad'dib's actions throughout are broadly parallel to the Laughing Man's: he starts out with only a vague idea of what to do but (by literary study and hacking, or by direct observation and spice visions) learns how to generate the all-consuming idea that will make others achieve his aim for him. (In SAC, this all takes place in backstory.) Later on his self-propagating manifesto has gone into Sorcerer's Apprentice mode and he has no way to control it, so after a period of keeping to the background, he takes drastic action to subdue his own creation.

As I mentioned in my original review, in SAC all this is a story arc interspersed with standalone episodes that don't advance the main plot (other than through character development). But what I have only spotted on a second viewing is that the standalone episodes also contain examples of the standalone complex.

One episode features an obsolete model of consumer android more popular after they stopped production than before, creating a ‘standalone’ market for spares and mods for a product that is not being manufactured. This is clearly based on real-life examples of the same phenomenon, relating to computer hardware, cars, fashion, and fiction. The same episode deals with the very stylised behaviour patterns associated with extreme fans, which of course amounts to copying a fictional example.

Another episode deals with a dead financier whose automated trading systems are still amassing a fortune for him, not realising their owner is dead. This is another Sorcerer's Apprentice case of a tool created for a specific end persisting after its time.

A third example is the episode where a boy receives someone else's memories and they cause him to seek a revenge that neither of the two people alone wanted. In this case, the boy is not quite acting as a copycat, but in carrying out the revenge he is following a plan with no planner, having received the memory that makes him want revenge but not the restraint, the abhorrence of vengeance, of the memory's original possessor.

There are other, minor examples throughout the series, and having noticed how even the standalone episodes, with their individual plots that can be appreciated outside the context of the story arc, connect to that arc, reinforcing its philosophical underpinnings with concrete instances related to the phenomenon it describes, I think the series is twice as important as I previously thought.