If you know both series and how Lain interacts with and effects the Wired you might already see where I am going with this.
The way she ends up actually in the Wired and able to rewrite reality through it is unique while most others in Serial Experiments Lain who join the Wired end up leaving their bodies behind to die.
What if Cyberization were started as a way to keep bodies from suffering from a disconnect with the spirit? How many people in GitS do not have brain cases even if they are otherwise fully Human? Its a preventative measure to ensure there is a digital anchor to ensure the soul can return from the Wired and find the body still alive and well where it was left.
Anyone have any ideas to help shore this up and maybe suggestions about how a Wired and Cyberized people's history could have progressed between the time of SEL and GitS?
I want this to be the root of what is effectively a Ranma and GitS crossover but Ranma's time frame is before Lain.
My idea to make sure he makes it to that time frame is that he has a long, normal for him, life at the Tendo Dojo seeing the advances around him as he raises his family with Akane. the GitS time frame happens after she has died of old age. Similar to Highlander Immortals though he hasn't aged along with her. Reason for that is the already used "Drowned Young Girl" aspect to his curse. Not to mention how good a Martial Artist he is by that time training so many students and building from both their mistakes and new challenges over the intervening time.
I'm not sure if it is far enough in the future though for Akane to die that way. Would it make more sense to say she died of her own cooking slowly poisoning herself on accident as Ranma continued to try to teach her to avoid making toxic sludge? Should anyone else from the NWC still be around? All the Curse victims come to mind but then again their curses might have cut down most of their life expectancies.
I'd like to make it so Ranma remembers the accidental deaths from people entering the wired in Lain's Time and having lost students to it. Ones that at first he though just stopped class because they were too caught up in their VR games. It would be one of the things to flash back to. Finding they died by watching about it in the News or reading about it in the paper. But still feeling their Ki around networking cables and the like. It would be something to flash back to. And inspire him to try contacting those souls in the Wired with Meditation and Ki control. Eventually letting him access the Net of GitS without needing any Cuberization or computer at all.
He ends up assumed to be full prosthetic, from the not aging naturally , and under the attention of The Major's team because he appears some time on the Net when they are researching something else happening in the area and he's suspicious because they cannot find any records of cyberization. Technically Ranma is an impossibility and an impossibility hanging around a case, even on accident, is too big of an unknown to leave alone.