Hello forumers! I am once again using this place as a dump for my thoughts on a random piece of media. Yesterday, I read a manga titled “Blame!” It’s a cool sci-fi adventure series by Tsutomu Nihei, and seems to generally be pretty well regarded. It follows the mysterious Killy on a journey through The City, an unfathomably large structure that is being perpetually expanded by out-of-control machines. His goal is to find a human with the possibly extinct ‘net terminal gene,’ which would allow humanity to shut down The City.
The core concept of this manga is fucking awesome, and the art lives up to it. The City is foreboding and massive, filled with a massive quantity of
elaborate, illogical, and useless architecture. Most characters, even those who are considered human, have robotic components, blurring the line between man and machine. Every living entity feels ominous and uncanny, sometimes even veering into borderline body horror.
However, it isn’t really all that enjoyable to read. It’s very light on dialogue, the little that there is existing mainly to push the plot forward, with almost nothing in the way of characterization. All of the main characters could be described as ‘quiet, determined, self sacrificing person on a quest,’ and none of them really grow or change at all. They’re all basically robots, and the few who don’t fit into that box get promptly killed off or otherwise removed from the series. The plot is also pretty hard to understand because everything that happens is so alien and strange, with relatively little text to explain any of it.
Overall, Blame has incredible worldbuilding and great art, but ultimately fails as a story. I wouldn’t really recommend it.
