Blame



""Maybe on Earth, Maybe in the Future""

Blame! is a 10-volume Cyberpunk Seinen Manga and a short six episode Web-Anime series created by Tsutomu Nihei.

The story follows Killy, a silent loner possessing an incredibly powerful gun known as a "Graviton Beam Emitter", as he wanders an immeasurably vast technological world known as "The City". The City is inhabited by scattered human and transhuman tribes, as well as hostile cyborgs known as Silicon Creatures.

Killy's primary goal is to recover the Net Terminal Genes, an extremely rare genetic marker that allows humans to access the "Netsphere", and gain control of The City's network. Doing so would allow him to halt the unhindered, chaotic expansion of The City, as well as stop the murderous horde known as The Safeguard from destroying what remains of humanity... or more correctly all humans who lack Net Terminal Genes (which is essentially all humans).

This story has a short spin off manga of three chapters, featuring all the characters of Blame! in...high school? That's right Blame Academy! Adventure-student Killy in the Cyber school quest! Tsutomu Nihei is obviously even more insane than we gave him credit for.

Blame! contains the following tropes:
""By the way, you might see my arm lying around somewhere. If you could pick it up, that'd be great.""
 * Abnormal Ammo: Darts that turn people into Faceless Mooks, guns that fire a murderous sentient polymer that absorbs all surrounding raw materials to make itself larger, etc...
 * Abusive Precursors: The Safeguard.
 * Action Girl: Cibo, Sana-Kan.
 * Affectionate Parody: Blame! Academy - A non-canon spin-off series by the same author, which involves putting his characters into stereotypical Japanese school-life comedy situations. The effect is very amusing given the original series' tone.
 * After the End: Or if you look at the prequel works, it's technically after, after, after the end.
 * Anti-Hero: Killy is a type III or IV.
 * Another Dimension:
 * apparently take refugee in one.
 * Anyone Can Die:
 * Arm Cannon: Sana-Kan.
 * Art Evolution: Nihei's style and character design changes dramatically at several points in the manga.
 * Art Shift: Used in the spin-off, Blame Academy for laughs. That girl with the ahoge is the Silicon Lifeform with the slasher smile Killy killed early in the manga. Same with the Gonk.
 * Back-to-Back Badasses: Killy and Dhomochevsky in one chapter.
 * Badass: Many of them. Most notably Killy, Sana-Kan and Dhomochevsky.
 * Badass Bookworm: Cibo.
 * Badass Longcoat: The protagonist of Net Sphere Engineer wears one of these.
 * Badass Normal: Seu, so very much. In a world where baseline humans are armed with BFGs or hyper-sophisticated hacking equipment, and still die by the dozens, Seu stands alone, as an almost-baseline human who fights off dozens of cyborgs, including the genuinely Badass Ivy and Maeve while armed with nothing more than a perfectly normal BFS.
 * BFG: Abundant, and frequently played with. The biggest and baddest guns are the Graviton Beam Emitters, of which Killy's tiny pistol seems to be the most advanced. More of a Wave Motion pistol. However, some unnamed characters are seen using BFG style weapons.
 * GEB's have a range mesured in dozens of Kilometers, no mater what is in their way. Killy's GEB is stated to have a range of 70 kilometers.
 * Bizarrchitecture: Nihei's architecture is more improbable than bizarre most of the time. The amount of raw materials that would be needed to create most of the structures in Blame! is mind boggling.
 * Seeing as how the City is at least the size of the solar system...
 * Big Damn Heroes: It seems everyone gets at least one Big Damn Heroes moment in Blame! Even Cibo...
 * Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
 * Body Horror: A common occurrence. Cibo fighting Sana-Kan for springs to mind.
 * Boom! Headshot!
 * Bottomless Magazines: Justified, seeing as how the GBE takes its power from Killy himself.
 * City Solar System
 * Chiaroscuro
 * Cloning Blues: In one chapter, Killy and Cibo stumble across a machine that The worst part?
 * Clothing Damage:
 * Oddly averted - Killy's outfits seem to be as resilient as he is. It's revealed to be "Second Skin." Whatever that means, it's probably tough.
 * After  Killy is revealed to be a , thus the cloths are literally a part of him.
 * Played straight in Blame Academy. Several times.
 * Conservation of Ninjutsu: Applies to the Safeguard.
 * Justified in that there are apparently several different classes of Safeguard.
 * Cool Guns: Again, lots of these.
 * Cool Sword: The Safeguard Sword. Think GBE, but instead of shooting you get cutting. Strangely enough, only Silicon Life like Pcell are seen using this blade. Seu and Ivy have cool swords too.
 * The one wielded by Susono in the Prequel Noise is a powered up version, easily slicing through an enormous building.
 * Cyberspace: Both the Authority and the Safeguard exist within the Netsphere, a Cyberspace that also.
 * Cryptic Background Reference: Ubiquitous.
 * Cyberpunk: Has its roots here. Monolithic megacorporations, The Government inept or out to get you, anti-heroes, and transhumanism that creates as many problems as it solves, are all taken to such extremes that, like The Matrix, it becomes less like traditional cyberpunk. Post-post-cyberpunk, if you will.
 * Decompressed Comic: Blame! personifies this style.
 * Deflector Shields: . The GBE often act as such.
 * Dented Iron: Though Killy spends most of the series as a unstoppable badass, by the final volume he is visibly tired and injured - even forced to use a piece of bent metal as a crude prosthetic leg.
 * The Determinator: Killy is the epitome of the Determinator trope. Sana-Kan and Dhomo fit, too.
 * Dull Surprise: At first justified due to Killy's stoic nature, but with the benefit hindsight it's mostly due to Nihei's character designs not being particularly emotive. Cibo does show some surprise early on, though.
 * Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Probably the strangest example in recent history, but every time someone meets up with the Authority, this is pretty much how it feels. And in a dystopian cyber-punk post-apocalyptic wasteland who better to count as an Eldritch Abomination than an ancient omniscient A.I-like ruler who is essentially a god?
 * Dystopia: Blame! is a prime example of dystopian fiction.
 * Earth-That-Was: As the ending of NOiSE shows, the Earth is completely engulfed by The City's automated construction system. By the time Blame! takes place, nobody even remembers that there was an Earth. One chapter towards the end implies that the machinery has swallowed most, if not all, of the Solar System.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Faceless organic-machines that morph out of ordinary people and six-story tall monsters with guns for mouths certainly qualify.
 * Elevator Action Sequence: Though it quickly ends up outside.
 * Elite Mooks: Higher level Safeguard and Silicon Life.
 * Energy Weapon: Lots of these.
 * Evil Minions: Davine has a small army of them.
 * Evil Twin:
 * Face Framed in Shadow
 * Faceless Goons: Safeguard. Killed in the thousands, mostly because they line up and Zerg Rush the guy who has a pistol that can penetrate 50 miles of steel.
 * Fan Nickname:
 * Killy = Mr. Expressive
 * Cibo = Albino Girlfriend, or Jesus Chick because she comes back to life or escapes certain death by stealing or making new bodies
 * Graviton Beam Emitter = Noisy Cricket 2.0, Limb-Breaker 9000
 * Sana-Kan = Loli McBeamspam since she carries a GBE and is very small when she first appears, Sana-Kan the Forever Girl since she survives so much punishment, S. Snacks which is a 4chan reference
 * Feel No Pain: Killy just seems to be used to massive physical trauma by now. Maybe he still does feel pain, but since he's The Stoic, it's hard to say.
 * Flash Back: One of these is used to introduce Dhomochevsky...
 * Flashback Cut: ...and Killy has multiple single-frame flashbacks.
 * Foe Yay: Between Dhomochevsky and Pcell. Maybe...
 * Forgot I Could Fly: Killy's ability to scan things with his eyes, among other things, got restored after he was hit with darts from a safeguard.
 * Frickin' Laser Beams: Here and there.
 * The Fog of Ages: Killy is incredibly old, and admits to having forgotten a lot. This could be averted by the reactivation of the Netsphere, which is implied to house the memories of all humans. Though it isn't certain that like Killy would be included in the deal.
 * Gainax Ending: Although it is actually a good ending, its utter vagueness has confused many readers, perhaps because, in a way, the whole point of the series is for the Gainax Ending. Some consider it to be a Downer Ending since.
 * Gangsta Style: Killy has a notable fondness for firing the GBE this way. As with most things about Blame, whether or not there's a reason for this is anyone's guess.
 * Giant Mook: Some giant Safeguard units and Silicon Life, proving that size doesn't matter when you have a GBE.
 * Good Is Not Nice: Killy
 * Good Scars, Evil Scars: Averted. Killy could easily pass as a bad guy in any other series, if one were to judge on looks alone.
 * Actually the character design tends to purposely lean towards pale, sickly and generally depressing.
 * Good Thing You Can Heal: Especially when you have a gun that can snap your arm in half on its lowest settings.
 * The Government: The Authority and The Safeguard. The former is a benevolent yet mostly impotent system that requires regular humans with a extremely rare genetic marker to tell them what to do, while the latter acts like an anti-virus system that happens to see all humans without said gene as viruses.
 * Grey and Gray Morality: Since everyone is technically human they do what humans do best, fight so that their faction can prosper at the expense of others. Who do you side with? The freedom loving but utterly insane Silicon Life who want to maintain the chaotic decay of the City, and are willing to exterminate humans who have the net terminal gene to prevent the Authority from regaining control? The Knight Templar Safeguard who will kill anyone to keep the City from decaying further than it already has, even though it is evidently hopeless? The inept bureaucrats of Authority who want to reverse the decay of the Megastructure and employ sometimes heroic, sometimes ruthless protagonist on a quest that has gone on for millenia without tangible results? Or the more human factions that struggle to get by in this crapsack dyson sphere?
 * Guilt-Free Extermination War: The Silicon Life have been hunting humans since the dawn of the city, as they pose a threat to the established state of the Net Sphere. Humans fare no better: Neither seem to consider coexistence to be possible, even though the City is big enough to house both their civilizations..
 * Gun Porn: Nihei loves his guns.
 * Guns Akimbo: A Killy does this once, and
 * Gratuitous English: Common fan speculation is that the series title is a mistranslation of the English onomatopoeia for gun-fire, "BLAM!". The Author has yet to comment on this.
 * Hard Head: Killy, literally, has half his head blown off and survives.
 * : . Just go with it, okay?
 * Healing Factor: Killy has the most resilient one. Various high level Safeguard and Silicons also have the ability to reform their bodies much more quickly, but no one sticks around like Killy does.
 * Heel Face Revolving Door:.
 * Heterosexual Life Partners: a very weird - and oddly justified - example is in Domochevsky and Iko. They are born from necessity to be partners, and are pretty much bound together and would literally die for each other and their cause.
 * High School AU: Blame! Academy.
 * I Am Who??:
 * Ideal Hero: Seu
 * In a Single Bound: Justified, seeing as how most characters are augmented in some way.
 * Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains: The two nameless Silicon Creatures killed off near the beginning of Blame! return in Blame! Academy 2&3 as a pair of these.
 * Infant Immortality: Haha, no.
 * Inherent in the System: Doubly so, seeing as how the system is literally trying to wipe out humanity at the same time.
 * Instant Death Bullet: Justified in that even the most mundane weapons in this 'verse are quite powerful.
 * The Juggernaut: Killy, Sana-Kan. But especially Killy.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: Some volumes of the English translation go for roughly nine hundred dollars used.
 * Kick the Son of a Bitch: In chapter 4, Killy finds a factory were baby cyborgs are born. After eating all their food the nursebot becomes angry with him. His response? Blow things up. In the next chapter he taunts a pair of Silicon Life about killing their kids. Keep in mind that the Silicon Creatures as a whole are on a campaign to wipe out all of humanity, except for the one Silicon Life member who is apparently nothing more than a dedicated amateur astromoner. Killy shoots him just to be safe.
 * Killed Off for Real:.
 * Large and In Charge: In the grim darkness of the far future every president of every remaining corporation is literally The Big Giant Head. Many headshots ensue.
 * Law of Inverse Recoil: Averted spectacularly. At it's lowest setting, firing the Graviton Beam Emitter causes Killy's arm to violently jerk backwards; at higher levels, it sends him flying; and even tears off his arm at maximum output.
 * Legacy Character: Another "version" of Pcell is the main character in Blame! 2. It's not entirely clear if she is a reincarnation of the same Pcell, or a descendant.
 * Little Miss Badass: Again Cibo, when.
 * Lost Technology: Lots of this. Even Killy's own weapon is considered as such.
 * Made of Iron: Many characters.
 * The Man Behind the Man: Killy seems to be on some kind of a mission, and towards the end it is shown that his actions are being monitored by some unknown authority. He is actually shown to be in contact, or at least on friendly terms, with said Authority several times prior to that.
 * The Medic: Again, Cibo.
 * Mega Corp: Toha Heavy Industries. A subversion, as despite being a monolithic and once mighty organisation, they lack any real power outside of their jurisdiction.
 * Messianic Archetype: Killy, and later.
 * Mind Screw: You'll be lucky if you catch everything the first read through.
 * Mooks: Basic Exterminator units. At least if you have a GBE. The Safeguard is apparently commanded by Zap Brannigan, since they Zerg Rush targets armed with kilo mega teraton class weapons.
 * Mook Maker: Conversion Towers
 * Ms Exposition: Cibo fills this role at times, if only to give the story a semblance of coherency. This is justified though as she was a scientist, and so most of the time she is trying to sort things out.
 * Mysterious Past: Again, Killy. May also apply to Dhomochevsky.
 * Nineties Anti-Hero: Killy is just a stoic, less muscle-headed version.
 * Non-Indicative Name: But only if you assume the title is supposed to be Blame! in the first place. It's a misspelling of Blam!, and there's certainly a lot of gunfire going on.
 * Not Quite Dead: Happens quite often. It is arguable that no one really dies in the world of Blame!, thanks to the . It seems, even though she was not supposed to.
 * Not So Stoic: Though his expression never changes, Killy rips into the trader and the dock workers of the Bio-Electric Company when he realizes that he had unwittingly helped their operation for harvesting organs from the Dry Men (but especially after noticing that the girl he had previous rescued was among the bodies). And though he may not mourn their passing, he does seemingly go out of his way to save his companions from harm.
 * He has been seen grinning several times while causing total mayhem. The guy seems to get off on violence that has been cranked Up to Eleven.
 * No Transhumanism Allowed: Completely and thoroughly inverted. Humans who haven't been altered in some way or another are completely extinct, and it is unlikely a normal person would be able to survive in The City. The MacGuffin itself is a result of averting this trope: only humans with a very ancient gene are allowed to access the "series of tubes" in this future. Attempting to log onto the Internet without said genes will result in an immediate permaban by the Safeguard.
 * The Nudifier: Women's Clothing Disintegrating Beam Emitter
 * Older Than They Look:
 * Killy is well over 3000 years old, but looks to be somewhere in his 20's.
 * Almost all characters, for that matter: Dhomochevsky was fighting Davinel's gang for at least 300 years before Killy arrived.
 * One-Man Army: Killy, Sana-Kan.
 * Only a Flesh Wound: Killy has a habit of losing limbs, only to shrug it off. Dhomochevsky also has a similar outlook:
 * Almost all characters, for that matter: Dhomochevsky was fighting Davinel's gang for at least 300 years before Killy arrived.
 * One-Man Army: Killy, Sana-Kan.
 * Only a Flesh Wound: Killy has a habit of losing limbs, only to shrug it off. Dhomochevsky also has a similar outlook:


 * Only Six Faces: While non-human characters have a great variety facial features, the human ones have a much more limited one.
 * Order Versus Chaos: In Noise, the main character is a cop investigating a cult who worship the power of chaos who are kidnapping children to use for human sacrifices in their bizarre Magitek rituals. When they kill her, she is resurrected by the Safeguard, protectors of order, but they turn out to be a pack of fascists who plan on disenfranchising or killing everybody who can't afford network implants and brainwashing the ones who do. Then in Blame!, we see the aftermath of this; the cult succeeded in throwing the world into chaos, but since they're so poorly organized their descendants, the Silicon Creatures, don't amount to much more than a bunch of roving cyber-barbarians. The Safeguard doesn't fare much better, as their directives become so corrupted that they essentially believe that everything that's not them must be exterminated withextreme prejudice.
 * Padding: Given that it's a Walk the Earth story with a rather simplistic plot, this is to be expected.
 * Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Death: One of the last scenes shows Killy being drenched by rain for the first time in the series,
 * Although there is a sequel,, although there a rather endless number of ways to get around the whole being dead thing in Blame.
 * Percussive Maintenance: Chapter 2. One of the few humorous moments in Blame!
 * Perpetual Frowner: Killy again, though to be fair, he does smile once... Sort of.
 * Person of Mass Destruction: Killy, Sana-Kan. Emphasis on mass.
 * Pet the Dog: Killy indiscriminately destroys any Silicon Life he encounters, regardless of whether they're hostile to him or not.
 * Power Gives You Wings: Slight subversion. Most wings seen in Blame! are black, but they do coincide with the character having a notable upgrade. Considering that most power upgrades coincide with being able to change your body shape, it's fairly reasonable that you would want to have wings in a superstructure with huge chaisms of hundreds (or thousands) of kilometers.
 * Red Baron: In the epilogue, the silicon beings referred to Killy as "The Calamity"
 * Resurrection Sickness: Seu suffers from this, seems being the Badass Normal isn't always enough to survive in Blame!, since this happens to him a lot. The constant amnesia of being healed also interferes with his love life...
 * Ridiculously Human Robot:
 * The Rival: Killy and Sana-Kan, Seu and Ivy.
 * Robot War: Both Safeguards and Silicon Life are mechanical constructs trying to hunt down what remains of humanity. In fact they come from the same template: the former made to secure access to the Netsphere and the latter reprogrammed to serve the machinations of a chaotic sect.
 * Russian Guy Suffers Most: Considering how crap every other character's life is, "most" might be an overstatement, but Dhomochevsky's certainly wasn't pleasant. It should be noted that Dhomochevsky isn't Russian, he just has a Polish sounding name. It's all the same place anyway.
 * Scars Are Forever: Killy gains several noticeable facial scars throughout the course of the series.
 * Scenery Porn: It is impossible to read this manga and not stop on a double page dedicated entirely to depicting a single piece of gritty, abstract architecture and think, "Wow... Just, wow."
 * Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
 * Secondary Fire: Kind of. The GBE has 4 modes of firing. Though this is more of an Up to Eleven thing, really.
 * Sequel Hook: ...And it got two. One was planned to be a full length manga, but the author dropped it after just one chapter. The second was in full colour and also a single chapter long, but it served to show that.
 * Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: Killy has a habit of being in spitting distance of his target before pulling the trigger, despite his weapon having an unstoppable 70km range. It helps to be sure.
 * Silent Scenery Panel: Many, many, MANY of these.
 * Slasher Smile: Most Silicon Creatures have mastered the Slasher Smile. Dhomochevsky is often depicted with one in artwork, and both Killy and Sana-Kan do it at least once.
 * Sleep Mode Size: Sana-Kan's one is a little creepy girl
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Largely idealistic, even if it wears a mask of cynicism.
 * Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness: Hits the Serious end and keeps sliding.
 * Spell My Name with an "S": Early scanlations translated Sana-Kan's name as "Sanakan", but Tokyopop insists Sana-Kan is the correct spelling.
 * The Stoic: Killy defines stoic. Killy is also the latest and possibly leading contender for the title of master of the ellipses.
 * Storming the Castle: See Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
 * Stuff Blowing Up: When your gun does more damage than an atomic bomb, it is hard not to make some explosions.
 * Super Senses: Killy, Dhomochevsky, Cibo... In fact, most beings in Blame! seem to possess superhuman senses. Though it isn't surprising, seeing as how they all live in futuristic dystopian hell-hole where it pays to come prepared for anything.
 * Sweet on Polly Oliver: In Blame Academy, the "Women's Clothing Dissolving Beam"-Emitter reveals that
 * Synchronized Swarming: Issue 7 has the main character briefly interacting with a swarm of microorganisms, which assumes various simple forms -- :) for "hello", O for "yes", X for "no", etc -- to answer his queries.
 * Tabletop Games: Blam!
 * Take a Third Option:
 * Talking Is a Free Action: Averted constantly.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Graviton Beam Emitter. It apparently becomes too much overkill for Killy near the end, as he takes the first opportunity to invest in a more... subtle weapon.
 * Time Abyss: One caption reads off how many seconds later it's been...in the quadrillions.
 * Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Played with. Cibo comes from an area where humans are much taller than Killy is and she's at least as tall (if not a little taller) than him. When both of them get through to an area where humans are short, she looks like a beanstalk. When Cibo moves into her next body, she's half Killy's size.
 * Transhuman: In It's entirety, we do not see a single purely biological human. Everyone is heavily modified, be they cyborgs, human-descended androids, or gene-modded superhumans. The closest to "pure" human we get is Seu, and he's an eight-foot giant with enough enhancements to fight in hand-to-hand combat with advanced Silicon Life warriors, who has been reconstructed and had his personality restored from backup countless times. Most "normal" humans were exterminated by either the Silicon Creatures or the Safeguard, given the events of NOiSE, Blame's prequel.
 * Unnecessarily Creepy Robot
 * Unnecessarily Large Interior: At least one a chapter. Blame! is set in an endless series of Unnecessarily Large Interiors. One of the rooms Killy walks through is roughly the size of Jupiter, and judging from the ending of the prequel comic NOiSE, it's implied that this room is where Jupiter used to be.
 * The artbook explains that The City itself extends out from the Sun to roughly Jupiter's orbit (32.675 AU; roughly 4 billion km / 2.5 billion miles), while "the world" extends to the edges of the system (somewhere between 189-244 AU (that's 28-36 billion km / 17.4-22.6 billion miles) across, whether or not you think Pluto Is Expendable.) In this verse, the planets, along with the Sun, have been absorbed for energy, Dyson Sphere-style. This is what happens when you let mindless nanomachines go rampant.
 * Visible Silence: Take a shot every time someone shows the reader their best impression of Mt. Rushmore accompanied by ellipses. Enjoy your liver transplant.
 * Walk The Solar System
 * Wave Motion Gun: This is Killy's handgun the Graviton Beam Emitter. A pistol so powerful it can carve a four meter diameter shaft through 55km of steel. It is so overpowered that there are actually a couple of situations where it's a bad idea for Killy to use it, but most of the time he just blasts away, heedless of how much damage to the artificial environment he's causing. Thankfully, most of the MegaStructure is uninhabited.
 * Weapon of Choice: The GBE for Killy and Sana-Kan, the 'Electro Rod' for Cibo, The multi-purpose multi-firing-mode gun for Dhomochevsky, etc.
 * What Happened to the Mouse?: So what ever became of that girl with the dog who Killy seemed to know?
 * What the Hell, Hero?: Killy gets one of these when he kills a and his companion calls him out on it.
 * When All You Have Is a Hammer: Killy's immediate answer to most situations is to shoot first and leave questions to those who talk more.
 * World Half Empty
 * Zerg Rush: Safeguard exterminator units.