Blame! is about our silent, stoic, and dreary looking main character Killy on his own endless odyssey trying to halt the construction of the endless megastructure
an artificially created city/municipality with an agency of self-expansion in all directions via a global network called the net sphere humans were speculated to be able to control the expansion of the city but due to unseen mutations in human DNA the gene that allows people to connect has been robbed causing the megastructure to continue protruding and building in nearly every direction possible endlessly the sky now permanently replaced by endless expanding layers and levels divided by monolithic partitions
Killy is searching for the genes and encounters morbid and macabre creatures and creations that have sprouted from the endless net sphere that are obstacles of horror that stand in his way.
THE MEAT OF BLAME! AND ITS WORLD
Blame is one of those off the beaten path stories that’s so dense with a non-traditional style of an incoherent narrative at all that it can be really hard to actually get invested in the story
Stylistically almost nothing exists that’s similar to Blame! in the manga or anime industry other than perhaps Angels Egg which was made with the creator's own loss of faith being a bit of the core of what stemmed from that film in contrast though Blame! Is utterly confusing its hard to pinpoint one facet that explains or gives insight into Blame’s creation and perhaps the meaning of its story
The only sense I get from most of Nihei’s works is the desire to craft an interesting and alien world out of reach of common sensibilities or normality such that every common step throughout the world inspires wild confusion in the reader as well as fascination
in one of the interviews with Nihei he directly says something of the like 2016 Interview
Interviewer: I was reading some of the commentaries about your manga, and other critics have praised you for creating such complete and detailed worlds, that they can get lost in them.
Nihei: I wanted to draw things that don't exist in the real world.
and that’s an important thing to note in relation to the characters whose expressions are just as monolithic as the world around them hardly speaking and moving forward in unhinged exploration
these are not characters that will be explored as humans would be and in some ways, that’s fitting to the dangerous and cold world that the series is while there are humans in this world most of them are on the edge of death and extinction while others have evolved and mutated to acclimate to the different levels of the megastructure.
Going back to Blames style I’d also like to mention the works of H.R Geiger which had a clear style of blending machine with flesh in an industrial-like harmony and horror instead of the cybernetics simply being an augmentation or add on its quite literally fused into the creatures of Blame! Becoming part of them. This organic and fleshy machine artwork also plays into how the world feels more like a living thing with tubes acting as veins pumping a black glutinous solution through the bronchial ribbed conduits.
STRUCTURE OF BLAME!
Something thing to add is how the series is bisected into two portions
A. The full-on chaotic and beautifully disorganized action with hulking superhuman cyborg frames unleashing artillery and shocks as these fights escalate into sheer levels of total wreck
And B. Silence pure ambient silence with nothing but the buzz of generators producing electrical currents as our main characters traverses silently through almost never-ending and hopeless barren capitals with deafening silence
These two contrasting and juxtaposing enhance Blame! By providing respite and peace after a chaotic situation and then a spike of adrenaline after sensual loneliness that borders on apathy this is shown through chapters like 57 The Observer where our main character killy wanders through a completely flat and void dark level with the scope and distance of a planet.
this really helps both facets of the series enhance each other and really prevented me from getting bored in the setting which could have easily happened if the author went overboard.
THEMES OF BLAME:
one of the things that really come to me when Is not really a mary shelly "technology outpaces human morality or the law" but rather the utter dread that humans and the culture we've known have become extinct.
this could be why there's this certain motif with a coelacanth showing up at numerous points throughout the manga
coelacanths are effectively referred to as the "Fossil Fish" and live up to 100 years old and have predated dinosaurs being almost 400 million years old
this might be a direct link to how "we" humans have become living fossils and what further illustrates this for me is a scene in which a coelacanth is flopping on the floor
even a fossil on the vestiges of total extinction.
EXCERPT
really like how someone just straight up created an entire soundtrack to an underground sci-fi manga like Blame! albeit most of them are electronic and ambient tracks but it's still pretty cool how they've captured the sound of the manga even for specific scenes
all around it gives you ghostly loneliness lost within the technological boundaries of the superstructure
one of the most beautiful fan-made passion projects I've ever seen I definitely rec
this was a fuckin loooong review hopefully it wasn't too packed and loaded and I didn't want to stretch it out even further I might put out an Evangelion review soon but I'm not gonna rush it.
