Blame!

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“Maybe on Earth. Maybe in the Future”


Content:
As expected of most cyberpunk titles, Blame! is a dark futuristic story laced with enough action to keep you at the edge of your seat. Unlike other works in the same genre, however, Blame! avoids most of the philosophical/existential questions usually associated with cyberpunk. Also not present are the verbose in-battle rants/soliloquies that some would find unnecessary. Instead, the author demonstrates that actions do speak louder than words sometimes.


Literary Style:
One of Blame!'s unique features is its lack of narration: only a few details are tossed in and it's up to the reader how to connect the dots (the ... "no spoonfeeding" policy). Because the author doesn't specify how everything comes together, there are multiple interpretations of how and why events actually happened. The story parallels The City itself in having endless possibilities and the imaginations of the readers are given plenty of room and materials to roam freely and do as they wish. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing would depend on the reader’s attitude towards open endings. Although some would be left unsatisfied due to the lack of details, others may also take it as a form of interaction with the story.


Visuals:
It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and in Blame!, pictures do almost all of the talking. Rather than describing how powerful Killy’s gun is, Nihei spends a few pages showing the havoc caused whenever the trigger is pulled. Instead of saying “The Megastructure is vast and gloomy”, the artist shows the characters wandering through the labyrinth for months, through endless hallways or under pitch-black skies. More often than not, the deafening silence is only broken by the humming of machines or the roar of explosions. To say that the art simply complements the story would be incorrect since the art is pretty much integral to its delivery.

As for the quality of the art itself, it’s nothing short of impressive. The character designs may take some getting used to at first but Nihei’s style gradually improves throughout the series and his illustrations in the latter volumes are flawless. Also, the settings and action scenes are smoothly drawn and insanely detailed. Given his background in architecture, it’s no surprise that Nihei is exceptionally good at drawing colossal structures and perspective shots.


Overall:
Not many manga out there could offer straightforward action, extraordinary art, and a little grey matter exercise at the same time. While most of the characters aren’t exactly emotionally charged, it’s a refreshing break from the clichéd personalities of anime and manga.

tl;dr: A terrible plot with badly developed characters set in a pretty interesting world.

Blame is a manga set in a really interesting world. It’s essentially post-apocalyptic cyberpunk, wherein there’s what seems to be a city that goes on endlessly in every direction, including up and down, that’s managed by some sort of AI in the background in what is called the netsphere. However, humanity lost control of that AI, so it’s essentially running things on its own based on the parameters that it was given. As a result, the city has functioning systems, but only barely. Within this city there are four main factions essentially. ... There are humans who are simply doing their best to survive. There’s what’s known as Silicon Life, who are as their name suggests silicon lifeforms that are fully sentient and acting on their own desires and motivations, the primary of which is to access the netsphere and take control of the city. There’s the Administration, who are also AI with some access to the netsphere, but only a limited amount, who mostly seem to have the goal of protecting humanity and the city. And lastly there are the Safeguards, who are AI that were basically put in place to protect the netsphere from outside threats unconditionally and seemed to have decided the best way to do that is to brainlessly eliminate all those that could potentially access the netsphere, meaning all humans and Silicon Life. There are also various others in the city, such as the Builders who mindlessly build the city on and on endlessly, as well as various dangerous monstrosities.

The problem with this manga is that all of this is conveyed badly. And furthermore, in addition to it being told badly, the plot of the manga is pretty awful too. It involves a mysterious character named Kyrii and a scientist woman named Cibo going on a search for a human with the Net Terminal Gene which apparently would allow them to access the netsphere. That’s not too bad of a premise on its own, but the way it’s written it flows really badly. Kyrii’s motivations and actions make no sense half the time. He gets some background, but not really enough to establish why he’s doing any of what he’s doing. Cibo is somewhat better in that regard, as it’s established that she’s a scientist that’s mainly just in it for curiosities sake but that helps out other humans when she can, but the lack of any character development or any relationship development results in her not being much of a compelling character either. And that’s not even getting into the wide cast of side characters who are all pretty much pointless. The way the plot flows is that on the search for someone with the Net Terminal Gene, they end up involved in various situations where they fight various others, mainly Silicon Life and Safeguards. But all of these battles seem completely pointless. They generally have very little to do with the overarching plot, and the lower-level plots are pretty much random nonsense. The characters are all terrible and impossible to get invested in at all as well. Thus, it’s impossible to really care about what happens at all with anything. On top of that, it felt like most of the action was centered around the fact that Kyrii’s gun was overpowered and could destroy pretty much everything, which got really repetitive really quickly.

Lastly, there is the matter of art. It’s largely considered amazing, but to be frank I just don’t see it. The art on the covers is great, but the art in the manga itself I thought was of pretty mediocre quality. It seems interesting at first just because the world is really interesting and it does do a good of portraying that. The bizarre designs for pretty much everything do manage to invoke a sense of dread, and things like endless concrete landscapes, human architecture at an imaginable scale, do manage to invoke some level of awe. However, the art is incredibly repetitive, and these feeling started fading by the end of the first volume and were completely gone by the end of the second, and thus I thought that the art and in the rest of the manga was simply dull and didn’t find it visually appealing or interesting at all. I think a large part of why that happened is that a very large amount of panels in the manga have absolutely no story purpose and are basically just there to show the world. If the story moved at a faster pace and it was more sparing with its art, I probably would have found the art interesting from beginning to end. But just being bombarded with it just results in being numb to it and thus it not have much of an effect. That combined with how the paneling reduces the speed of the manga to a crawl and with how the story is nonsense and characters are impossible to care about, results in a manga that becomes sleep inducingly boring at times.

Also, the master edition by Vertical uses a translation that’s different from the old Tokyopop version of the manga and the anime. Most of the differences don’t seem that important to me as someone with no prior experience with the franchise, though the protagonist being named Kyrii in this but Killy in everything else is a pretty big difference in tone, so I can’t say I’m much of a fan of that.

I wanted to like Blame!, but Blame! wouldn't let me.

The first 2 volumes are unreadable. The paneling is so poor that it takes a lot of time to decipher what is supposed to be shown. There's no flow; no sense of position or direction, so it's hard to tell where Killy is in relation to his environment, or where the safeguards are in relation to him. The style would look nice if you were able to tell what you were looking at. This improves in volume 3, where you can mostly decipher what's on the page, but it still has the issue of being ... completely lost with position and direction. It remains like this through volume 8. Volume 9 is where it picks up significantly. Instead of being in the cluttered underbelly of the cyberpunk apocalypse, it's a lot more empty, which allows the architecture to be more visible, and is able to display the character and mechanical designs more effectively. In the last two volumes, where you can see the art properly, the character/mechanical designs are quite interesting and spooky. There's an organic, insectoid look to them. The page spreads every few chapters are usually nice, with good architecture and a view of the environment from a good angle, but this does not justify the first 2 volumes being unreadable and 3-8 being barely passable.

There's no story to Blame!, which isn't that big of a problem. I was looking forward to reading about some guy walking through a cyberpunk apocalypse without any particular motivation. Killy is looking for the "Net Terminal Gene", whatever that is, and for whatever reason. That's all that's need to justify a manga primarily about the atmosphere and aesthetic. But when the visuals are dreadful, it's hard to be immersed in the simplicity of the journey. There's some lore every now and then, but none of it is relevant and it only serves to feed the fans who like this. That's a good thing. If you're interested in Blame! you deserve some sort of reward.

Just like there's no story, there's also no characterisation. Killy the spandex wanderer is looking for the "Net Terminal Gene" and that's all we ever know through to the last chapter. He has companions along the way who are often called Cibo, and one time there was another spandex wanderer who stayed around for a few volumes. Just like with the story, I was looking forward to reading something simple, without any characterisation. And again, when the main selling point isn't good, there's no reason to care.

Blame! is not worth reading. If you like architecture, type "Hagia Sophia" into your search engine. If you like cyberpunk, find something that doesn't look terrible. If Blame! didn't fail horribly with its art and paneling it could have been a great manga. Unfortunately, it's awful.