PicoBlog

The story of how I found Blame! is weird, and only possible because I am terminally online. I was scrolling Reddit and saw a post on the r/worldbuilding subreddit, a community to either talk about worldbuilding or share your own. Well, this guy posted his futuristic megastructure concept he created, and it was… something:

“This image isn’t Blame! yet. Please don’t click out…”

If you’re as much of a critical thinker as say, a 10-year-old child, you might blurt the following observations:

“Just adding a bunch of zeros or using the world billion won’t make your world feel grand!” “You can’t just say it’s powered by “fusion reactors, a Dyson sphere and a gravity repeater/weakener without explaining how they function!” and “You just drew a big ass sphere, man.”

There are many problems with this. Primarily, once you scale things up, our brain has a hard time conceptualizing. It’s easy to imagine a small village of 60 people. Farmers, guards, a healer, some kinda mayor or spiritual leader and a semblance of a social structure are reasonable enough to maintain our immersion. You can flesh out a world that small really well, allowing you to focus on making the little you have to feel vivid and alive. 

However, once you start having a population in the thousands, or millions, (or in this guy’s case… a quadrillion? A quintillion? I genuinely cannot even read that number) it gets more difficult. When you add continents, subcultures, multiple religions and written history, you’re gonna have to explain. Look at how ridiculously complex our world is. Imagine having to explain all that to someone not familiar with it. When masterful worldbuilding authors like Tolkien, Eiichiro Oda or Frank Herbert write, they put in the time and work to make their worlds feel real. 

Now, imagine making a world as unfathomably large as the one in the Reddit post feel believable. It seems impossible, but according to one of the commenters on that post, it’s not. In fact, it’s been done. And, well… it’s called “Blame!”

The best way I can describe Blame!’s world is that it’s dizzying. Admiring and trying to wrap your head around Tsutomu Nihei’s equally jaw-dropping and haunting art is most of how the manga’s story is told. It’s a bold choice: Most chapters, especially in the beginning, have very little dialogue, with some having no dialogue at all. Nihei allows his art to breathe and tell the story for him, in what we call environmental storytelling. He doesn’t tell you much, if anything, outright. 

Blame! leaves you to try and understand this mind-boggling world on your own. The protagonist, Kyrii, roams it for what’s implied to be centuries (yeah, it’s hardcore Cyberpunk. We’re way past ageing). Early chapters especially follow less of a story and more so encounters and sparks of action that break up Kyrii’s desolate journey to find a human with the Net Terminal Gene (more on that later) through ruins devoid of life. Having so much silence is a large risk, and it takes a lot of faith in your own skills to pull it off. But it does. In fact, it’s one of Blame!’s biggest strengths. 

As for the world, “The City”, the name given to the giant space structure humanity created, is incomprehensible in its scope and build. It is similar in concept to the one in the image but actually fleshed out into a believable world. Now, think back to when you first saw the Reddit post. You might’ve thought to yourself “wait, there’s no way that’d work in real life”. And you’d be right. Nihei also realized this and decided to base his whole world on that concept. He dares to ask:

“What happens when humanity fucks up at an intergalactic level?”

This is not the story of a Utopia, hell, it’s not even a Dystopia. This is the story of what happens when we humans completely lose control of our own creation. The City was, maybe, one day, a thriving technological marvel. We don’t even get a glimpse of that. All we see are the long-decayed ruins turned into an artificial purgatory. It’s hard to even call this world post-apocalyptic; that implies that the apocalypse is over and people are starting to restart society. 

No. Everyone is basically dead or hides like rats in holes within the nooks and crannies of the structure. There are stretches big enough to take centuries to traverse with zero signs of life. It’s all ruins. Ruins that hint towards something that was. What is left is all the artificial life that was created to autonomously run the megastructure. The same artificial life that destroyed humanity once we lost control of-

Wait wait wait. While I’m gushing about the world, I’m trying to avoid going into detail about the story. While the dialogue-light storytelling makes the manga very immersive, the story is very spread out and extremely difficult to parse. A guy on 4chan managed to make an impressively good summary which really helped me understand the story better, but it still ends up being ten paragraphs long. Either way, this is an incredible story. It’s not for everyone and it’s not very approachable, so I completely understand if you’d just rather me break down the world and talk about it. But if it even slightly interests you, especially if it happens halfway through reading this, close the tab and give it a shot. You won’t regret it.  

Well, you’re still here. Time for the world.

The City is run by the aforementioned artificial life. They built, protected and administered the City autonomously, but ultimately under the control of humanity. Understanding these robots is essential to understanding the world, so I’ll make it quick. There are two main ones:

The Safeguards were designed to attack humans who committed crimes against the City. They all seem to share a consciousness and are completely devoid of individuality. In a way, they’re more like automatic turrets than actual living guards. 

And the Builders: massive machines built to expand and repair the City. They were the way humans developed to scale our constructions to such astronomical proportions. 

Humans controlled them and the rest of the City through a network called the Netsphere. Humans had developed what was called the Net Terminal Gene, a gene allowing them to tap into the Netsphere and control the City. Sometime before the events of the manga, a cult of extremist transhumanists rose (a real-world philosophy for those who want to use technology and medicine to transcend beyond humanity). Its members were known as Silicon Life, and they ran cruel experiments on themselves to modify their bodies past their biological limits. 

They were deemed to be dangerous, and thus, were hunted down by the Safeguards. Not being a huge fan of this, members of the cult, spread out throughout society, orchestrated a major terrorist cyberattack, and overrode the programming of the City. Suddenly, the lifeblood of the City turned against it, like a cancer. The Builders began building chaotically and with no purpose, both expanding the outer limits of the City further into the universe and also filling the insides with the nonsensical architecture we see. And instead of killing dangers to the City, the Safeguards instead were programmed to kill every single human with the Net Terminal Gene. Eventually, after this massacre, we were left with no one to tap into the Netsphere, and this programming change was made permanent. This was the turning point for making the City into what we see at the start of the manga.

“Here’s what that Builder from before was making. Kinda looks like a tumour, growing into the otherwise orderly structure around it…”

This kind of worldbuilding is what makes Blame! special. It’s depressing, it’s hopeless and yet there is so much beauty in the world. The architecture is gorgeous. The large-scale structures are absolutely breathtaking. But you also see the haunting ruins of housing and cities that once existed. You see enormous robots looming in the background. You see Kyrii standing there, hopelessly overshadowed by these colossal buildings and you think to yourself “My god, he really is nothing. How can you hope to change a world this big?”. That’s how you make a world this big feel believable.

“This is the first time Nihei makes any mention of the passage of time. It completely recontextualizes Kyrii’s journey so far.”

And this sets the stage for the story. Centuries have passed since all that happened. Silicon life has somewhat taken over but hasn’t really established a society of any kind, instead thriving on the chaos that it created. And we follow the story of Kyrii in search of a human with the Net Terminal Gene who can retake control of the City. He toes the line between human and robot; if the term human even means anything in this world anymore. He was a provisional Safeguard, whose memory deteriorated over the many years he spent on his quest. It’s all he remembers, at this point.

Remember the quietness that Nihei uses to his advantage? A lot of that is because of Kyrii. He’s been around for thousands of years. There’s nothing to say. He roams silently through the City as he has for ages, allowing us to see it for ourselves. Everything I explained here was never told to me explicitly. I took bits and pieces of dialogue I scrapped together, reading into the backgrounds and the architecture, using the very incomplete wiki and a little bit of imagination to put it all together. And that’s incredible. Nihei created a world I want to understand. Blame! is just so… different. It’s a bleak world. And while certain stories like Berserk use infuriating scenes to then highlight hope in an unfair world, Blame! doesn’t do that. It doesn’t really show any particularly horrific scenes. It also doesn’t show scenes of hope or great virtue. It just lets the existential dread of its world sink in. It lets you have this realization on your own. There’s no scene of Kyrii going “wow, this sucks. I wish things were different”. In fact, remarkably, not a single character ever complains or vocally wishes for a better world, despite this being one of the most desolate worlds in all of fiction. It’s never even addressed. This drives the hopelessness up to a thousand, and it makes those long silent walks across the ruined world that much more poignant. 

“Bottom right corner on the bridge. That’s Kyrii.” 

The City could be seen as the worst outcome of progress: overextending our limits and losing control. The automatization of its internal systems allows the City to become immortal. But as mythology continuously warns us, immortality is a curse. It’s the classic catch: being immortal does not make you immune to disease. Even when it wants to die, it can’t. It’s instead left existing as a rotting but conscious carcass. Barely functional but not allowed to pass over to the other side. The builders continue to keep it alive. This is what happens when the “Off” switch breaks. It’s a real danger of automatization.

This sense of dread can only be evoked because Nihei’s style of storytelling allows us to sit with the world and contemplate. Yes, we are left with a world so far off into the future that Blame!’s reality holds nearly no similarities to ours. Unlike Cyberpunk fiction, there really isn’t a strong emphasis on social commentary. The Silicon Life aren’t a metaphor for anything. There are no critiques of Capitalism. It’s impossible to tell what the world was like before, and what led us to take it in this direction. Much like Kyrii, the world has forgotten its past. In a state of lifelessness, just cold existence. The only difference between the two is that Kyrii still holds onto his core imperative, his mission. The City, on the other hand? It’s completely gone. It breathes, but it is not alive. It continues to act without a clue of what its original orders were. During those year-long walks with Kyrii, the silence is deafening. And so, your brain starts to wonder: 

What does it mean to transcend biology? At what point do we stop being human? Is sickness what makes us human? Is it flesh and bone? Is it the ability to die? If we no longer have a biological brain, do we still feel emotion? Will we still want to expand and conquer without the evolutionary drives coded into our bodies? Can we still love?

How about the world around us? How do we strike the balance between progress and environmentalism? Should we want to explore past the earth? How far is too far? What are we willing to sacrifice? Should we ever stop?

Maybe Kyrii himself, like us, had once asked himself those same questions during his walks. A long time ago, of course. It doesn’t matter anymore. We’re past the point where any of those questions matter- for better or for worse, we find our answer in the architecture around us. They’re engraved in the walls and ceilings of the City.

The reality is, Kyrii isn’t the protagonist of the story. The City is. Blame!, to paraphrase Nihei himself, is “the story of a city told through an ant’s perspective”. Kyrii is merely a set of eyes for us to experience the story. Look at all the backstory we get for it compared to him. Sure, the plot follows his quest, but in reality, as a provisional Safeguard, he is an extension of the City itself. It’s ambiguous, but I would interpret that he doesn’t have feelings or free will. Just a conscious artificial intelligence given full freedom to complete its core imperative. This is a classic sci-fi conundrum: if an AI becomes sufficiently advanced, could it pass as a human? These questions are starting to become relevant as we head into the AI age. Try not to be fooled by Kyrii’s anime boy hair and eyes: he may seem human, but “his” mission is the City’s internal system’s attempts to heal itself. The story of an antibody. 

And it’s not just Kyrii, either. Isn’t everything the City, at this point? The Safeguards. The Builders. The Silicon Life. The other characters in the story, so unimportant I haven’t even mentioned them. Everyone’s existence is entirely predicated and intrinsically connected to the City itself. The City is the universe. Everyone we see is not just living in it, or a part of it. They are it. Every bit of ink, every page, every dialogue box and every onomatopoeia we see in the pages of Blame! are the City. Even in those final pages.

Blame! is something truly special. We live in the age of “content”, where entertainment has to fight for your attention. TikTokers have to algorithmically optimize their videos to even be a part of the crowd, much less stand out from it. They try their hardest to hook you in the first few minutes because if they don’t, you’ll just go somewhere else.

I have always been a fan of stories that make you chew your food instead of feeding it to you. I like reading into things, interpreting, theorizing and imagining. Blame!, I feel, goes beyond that. If I’m to stick to that metaphor, it’s a story that makes you hunt and cook your food before you can chew it. It’s extremely rewarding once you commit to doing so. The art depicted on its pages will stick with me for a long, long time. And if Nihei had chosen to engage in these industry practices, we would have never gotten Blame!.

And so it really breaks my heart that Nihei was eventually forced to do exactly that. He shifted to more conventional stories, admitting it was a money issue. Blame!, Nihei’s first manga, is now a cult classic. But that wasn’t the case upon its original publication. Nihei struggled with money, and has said before that he resents the fact that he wrote “for himself, not for an audience”. I feel his pain. It’s such a delicate balance as an artist; do I focus on “making it” or doing what I love?

In those interviews, he seemed disillusioned. He’d gone through a divorce and was complaining about the multiple revisions he had to make to the cover art of the manga, as he was “forced to draw more breasts” to sell copies. None of his other works (Knights of Sidonia, Biomega, Abara), despite the better sales, seem to have garnered the same level of passion from fans. And thus, we never got something like Blame! from Nihei ever again.

We need to be better. We need to ask for more from our entertainment and support the artists who are putting in the work. There are people out there who are pouring their hearts out into pages, canvases and instruments. Don’t let them end up like Nihei. Forced to resent his Magnum Opus. I don’t know if Blame! could be made today, and the fact that other works like it will be left forever buried in their creator’s minds is a grim thought. So, if you’re out there and you have an idea; just do it. I know it’s cliche, but I mean it, dude. Look at me. I read this manga yesterday and wrote a nearly 3000-word essay on it today. I don’t expect a lot of people, if anyone, to make it this far. And that’s okay. I’m writing this for me.

So thank you, Mr Nihei. Your work has not gone to waste. Blame! is a masterpiece, and although you have been forced to come to the opposite conclusion, you have inspired me to write for me, and for no one else. Because if you do that… that is when the real power of art shines through.

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