Follow TV Tropes

Following

Manga / Blame!

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Blame!.png
Part man. Part machine. No parts expressive.

"Maybe on Earth, Maybe in the Future"

Blame! (ブラム Buramu!) is a 10-volume cyberpunk Seinen Manga.

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 Net Sphere, 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 prequel, NOiSE, and a followup anthology called Blame Academy! And So On containing two short sequel chapters: Net Sphere Engineer and Blame!2; as well as a three chapter spin off manga, 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.

A short six episode Web-Anime series adaptation was created by Group TAC in 2003. The manga received another anime adaptation in the form of a cel-shaded CGI film called Blame! produced by Polygon Pictures (who also adapted Nihei's Knights of Sidonia) and has been licenced by Netflix. You can watch the first trailer here and the second here. The film was released in Japan and worldwide via Netflix on May 20, 2017.


Blame! provides examples of the following:

  • 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.
    • In the movie, Zuru.
  • Adaptational Badass: Zuru is more of an Action Survivor in the manga, whereas in the movie she is a prodigy Electrofisher and a skilled warrior.
  • Adaptational Wimp: While Zuru is much stronger in the movie, Electrofishers as a whole are much weaker. In the manga, they are introduced intervening in a fight, helping Killy out and two of them are more than a match for the exterminators he’s fighting. In the movie, Killy has to save them. Additionally, when Sanakan begins her extermination in the manga, she has to bring a lot more firepower to bear, including a Kaiju sized safeguard. Unfortunately, being more badass doesn’t mean much in the end; they end up in a far worse position than their movie counterparts.
  • 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 multiple ends of society.
  • And I Must Scream: In one chapter, Killy and Cibo stumble across a machine that has been continually cloning the same woman for untold centuries. The worst part? the original woman — hooked up to the machine and completely incapacitated — has apparently been alive and conscious for all that time.
  • And the Adventure Continues: In the last chapter, Killy seems to have been killed by a Boom, Headshot!, but the embryo with the Net Terminal Gene starts growing upon being exposed to uncontaminated water. On the very last page, after a Time Skip, we see Killy in The City again, protecting a young girl wearing a hazmat suit, who is presumably the embryo grown up.
  • Another Dimension: The gravity-based engine of Toha Heavy Industries creates a few.
    • Killy is trapped in one for a short period, and meets an alternate-reality (or future) Cibo, whose body is then brought to Killy's dimension and serves as a container for the present Cibo.
    • Mensab and Seu apparently take refugee in one.
  • Anyone Can Die: The number of surviving characters can be counted on the fingers of one hand. A hand that has recently been through a leaf shredder. Not that it's really surprising.
  • 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 Bookworm: Cibo.
  • Badass Longcoat: A fashion statement frequently worn by both Silicon Creatures and high-level Safeguards.
  • 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.
    • GBEs have a range measured in dozens of Kilometers, no matter what is in their way. Killy's GBE is stated to have a range of 70 kilometers.
  • BFS: Ivy's weapon is this even without the additional sections concealed inside that can fold out like a switchblade to make it longer.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Cibo and Sana-Kan are dead, along with many others. However, Killy finds a place to put Cibo's "egg" containing a human with Net Terminal Genes on the edge of the city, which finally restores some form of order.
  • 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, and the City is at least the size of the solar system. Construction bots apparently beam stuff into existence; if availability of matter was of any relevance, the setting simply couldn't happen.
    • The prequel manga NOiSE reveals that the City has grown upwards to the point that it has "captured" the planet's moon.
  • Big Damn Heroes: It seems everyone gets at least one Big Damn Heroes moment in Blame! Even Cibo.
  • Big Bad: While it initially appears that the Safeguard is the main antagonist of the series, it turns out that they aren't even malevolent. The Safeguard command lost control of the city's mechanisms and are responsible not only for Killy's appearance but provide him with whatever help they can. While there are certainly rotten people found within the City, there is no one single person responsible for any of it. In essence, the City itself, with its unchecked growth and rampant Safeguard creatures, is the only thing that can be considered the real threat.
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Sana-Kan, in her first appearance.
  • Body Horror: A common occurrence. Cibo fighting Sana-Kan for control of her body springs to mind, as do the silicon clone factories.
  • Bookends: The manga begins and ends with Killy escorting a child.
  • Boom, Headshot!: Pretty much the only way to guarantee that someone stays dead in the Blame! universe. And in Killy's case, not even then.
    • In the 2017 film, Cibo has the forethought to avert this by putting her brain into one of her arms.
  • Bottomless Magazines: Justified, seeing as how the GBE takes its power from Killy himself.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: Blame! Academy chapter 2 has fun with this when a pair of Silicon Life Forms appear, and ask Killy if he remembers them. Cibo nonchalantly identifies them from the second half of Blame! volume 1 and concludes that they must be out for revenge, but it turns out they're just mad because all the characters shown in chapter 1 appeared except them.
  • Came Back Wrong: Seu is repeatedly healed by a Matter Replicator, but each time his mind degrades more and more.
  • City Solar System
  • Chiaroscuro
  • 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 considering he's a Safeguard.
      • After being nuked, the clothes are revealed to literally be a part of him.
    • Played straight in Blame! Academy. Several times.
  • Composite Character: In the compressed anime "demo" of Blame!, it is implied that Cibo is every female character that Killy has ever met, including the girl on the elevator with the dog at the beginning.
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu: Applies to the Safeguard. Justified in that there are apparently several different classes of Safeguard.
  • 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.
  • Crapsack World: The City grew in a chaotic and insecure manner, leading to loss of control. The Safeguards now attempting to destroy anyone without the Net Terminal Gene (which, in the timeframe of the story, is essentially all of humanity) due to their goals being corrupted is the icing on top of the cake.
  • Cyberspace: Both the Authority and the Safeguard exist within the Netsphere, a Cyberspace that also houses much of humanity.
  • 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. Perhaps Neo-Cyberpunk.
  • Dark Is Evil/Light Is Good: The most dangerous Silicon Creatures, such as Schiff, the one with the "bubbler" cannon, and the Silicon Knights, have entirely black armor. Conversely, the characters who are most good, like Mensab, Seu and representatives of the Authority, are completely white. Everyone else, who subscribe to Gray-and-Grey Morality, tend to have pale skin and wear black clothes.
  • Death of a Child: Anyone Can Die, even children. The very first chapter sees Killy escorting a small child somewhere, but an altercation sees the child killed.
  • Death of Personality: After Cibo enters the Netsphere and transforms into the Level 9 Safeguard, her personality is destroyed and she's left as a child-like Empty Shell.
  • Decompressed Comic: Blame! personifies this style.
  • Deflector Shields: The Silicon Life Knights carry shields that emit an energy field powerful enough to deflect low-level Graviton Beams. The GBE can also be used 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 of 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 when Killy encounters a chamber that has a diameter matching that of Jupiter.
    Killy: (looking up from a very old book) What is "land"?
  • Eldritch Abomination: Faceless organic-machines that morph out of ordinary people and six-story tall monsters with guns for mouths certainly qualify.
  • Eldritch Location: The City, the superstructure that serves as the series' environment, is arguably this. It either defies the amount of materials actually available to build something at this scale, or the Earth's core was used up as well. If the latter is the case, gravity, oxygen levels, molecular friction, etc. would all have to be addressed. Those challenges don't even account for reaching another planet's gravitational pull.
    • Some of the artwork implies the structure reached Jupiter. If that's true, the distance between Earth and the Sun is less than half the distance between Earth and Jupiter. Assuming it still rotates like the Earth, the Sun's destructive energy would have to be neutralized or the structure would tear itself apart.
  • Elevator Action Sequence: Though it quickly ends up outside.
  • Elite Mooks: Higher level Safeguard and Silicon Life.
  • Energy Weapon: Here and there. Flavors include infantry-sized laser weapons to Graviton beams.
  • Evil Minions: Davine has a small army of them.
  • Evil Twin: A hairless, Safeguard-controlled copy of Killy appears in the final chapter and shoots the original in the head.
  • 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.
  • Fantastic Racism: It's not obvious under all the fighting for survival, but when Killy kills a cyborg who didn't hurt anybody who even provided information(!) and wanted to be left alone, that he justifies it with only "he was silicon life" makes it clear that he would murder them even on principle.
  • 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.
  • Fish Eyes: Maeve has these.
  • Flashback: One of these is used to introduce Dhomochevsky...
    • Flashback Cut: ...and Killy has multiple single-frame flashbacks as he reboots after 40.82% of his body is obliterated.
  • 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. It is indicated that he always had the ability when in an earlier chapter he asks some humans if they also see symbols in their vision but his memory damage prevented him from taking advantage of it as he didn't understand what he was seeing.
  • 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 an ancient pre-Safeguard construct like Killy would be included in the deal.
  • 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. He has principles, but he also has his mission, and may the gods help you if you come into conflict with either one of those things.
  • 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. The character design as a whole 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 the Authority who want to reverse the decay of the Megastructure and employ the sometimes heroic, sometimes ruthless protagonist on a quest that has gone on for millennia 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: when they get a hold of the architects, they find no guilt in destroying entire hives, as told by Pcell in the sequel one shot. Neither seem to consider coexistence to be possible, even though the City is big enough to house both their civilizations. She seems to value human life, however, so there might be hope after all.
  • Gun Porn: Nihei loves his guns. Shells ejecting? Check. Nameless Red Shirts using detailed weaponry that is often bigger than them? Check. Safeguard weaponry that range from pistols to portable beam emitters? Check indeed.
  • Guns Akimbo: Killy does this once, and in addition to her GBE, Sana-Kan's battle form has a hand that fires darts which transform organic life into Exterminator units.
  • Gratuitous English: Common fan speculation is that the series title is a misspelling of the English onomatopoeia for gun-fire, "BLAM!". The Author has yet to comment on this, but the title is written in katakana as "ブラム (buramu)", when "blame" would be more accurately transliterated as "ブレム (buremu)" or "ブレイム (bureimu)".
  • Hand Cannon: Killy's Graviton Beam Emitter. A small pistol slightly larger than a small Glock... that better qualifies as a Wave-Motion Gun.
  • Hard Head: Killy, literally, has half his head blown off and survives.
  • 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: Sana-Kan.
  • High School AU: Blame! Academy.
  • Homosexual Reproduction: Sana-Kan and Cibo are the mothers of the child with the Net Terminal Gene. Just go with it, okay?
  • I Am Who?: Killy is related to the Safeguard. It is also theorized (and lampshaded by the author) that he is also a kind of Internet Ghost that appears whenever humanity is in danger... And judging by the sequel, not only humanity. Everyone is human in Blame! anyway.
  • 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 and 3 as a pair of these.
  • 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.
  • Interquel: "Fort of Silicon Creatures" is a one-shot Blame! chapter packaged with the deluxe Blu-ray edition of The Movie, drawn by Nihei in his modern Aposimz art style. It's set during the last volume of the original Blame! manga when Killy was traveling with "Mori", the personality construct recorded on a backup device that Killy wore around his neck.
  • The Juggernaut: Killy, Sana-Kan. But especially Killy.
  • Killed Off for Real: Cibo and Sana-Kan don't survive until the end.
  • 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 its lowest setting, firing the Graviton Beam Emitter causes Killy's arm to violently snap backwards; at max output, it sends him flying; when he overcharges the gun, it rips his arm off.
  • Layered Metropolis: In the form of a Dyson Sphere.
  • 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 she takes over Sana-Kan's sleep-mode body.
  • Lost Technology: Lots of this. Even Killy's own weapon is considered as such.
  • MacGuffin: "I'm looking for humans with Net Terminal Genes."
  • 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.
  • MegaCorp:
    • Toha Heavy Industries. A subversion, as despite being a monolithic and once mighty organization, they lack any real power outside of their jurisdiction.
    • The Bio-Electric Corporation that rules Cibo's home district are a smaller but more conventional example. Although small fry compared to Toha, they'd be an N.G.O. Superpower in any other 'verse. They also seem to have done a surprisingly good job rebuilding civilization from scratch without the help of the Safeguard or Authority.
  • Mega Dungeon: The superstructure is essentially this, and effectively the entire world as well.
  • Messianic Archetype: Killy, and later the Net Gene Child.
  • 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
  • Motive Decay:
    • The Silicon Life start out attempting to destroy all traces of the Net Terminal Genes and forever seal humanity from the Netsphere - but by the time Blame!2 takes place, the new generation of Synthetic Life are being hunted down and simply want to be left in peace.
    • The Safeguard was originally set up to keep unauthorized users like Silicon Creatures from logging onto the netsphere and screwing things up by killing them. Now that people with the Net Terminal Gene that grants authorization are essentially extinct, they usually just kill everyone everywhere and hope that things will work out.
  • 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.
  • Nerves of Steel: Killy; don't expect his composure to crumble under any sort of situation.
  • '90s Anti-Hero: Killy is just a stoic, less muscle-headed version.
  • No Brows: most characters other than Killy and Cibo.
  • Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Basic Safeguard exterminators. In the movie the basic exterminators are considered very dangerous robots, that keep the human population completely terrified, while in the Manga they are in fact low-level Mooks.
  • Not Quite Dead: Happens quite often. It is arguable that no one really dies in the world of Blame!, thanks to the Cyberspace backups.
  • 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 to harvest organs from the Dry Men (but especially after noticing that the girl he had previously 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.
  • 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: The Women's Clothing Disintegrating Beam Emitter from Blame Academy!
  • 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.
  • One-Word Title
  • 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 of facial features, humans have a much more limited repertoire. This is why Blame ver. 0.11, the 2003 series of animated shorts, can justify saying that the girl with the dog from the beginning of the manga is Cibo in some kind of time loop — they look exactly the same.
  • 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 with extreme prejudice.
  • Out of the Closet, Into the Fire: Cibo and Sana-Kan are killed shortly after it's revealed that they conceived a child together (see the entry for Homosexual Reproduction).
  • Overly Long Name: Davinellulinvega, usually shortened to Davine.
  • 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, right before he has an encounter that leaves him pretty much dead.
    • Although there is a sequel, Killy's alive, although there a rather endless number of ways to get around the whole being dead thing in Blame.
  • Percussive Maintenance: In Chapter 2, the woman with the dog gets a communications device to work by kicking it. 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. Level 9 Safeguard Cibo.
  • Pet the Dog: Killy indiscriminately destroys any Silicon Life he encounters, regardless of whether they're hostile to him or not. Until Blame!2, where he rescues a heavily injured SL from the Safeguard and takes her to safety.
  • Platonic Life-Partners: Dhomochevsky and Iko.
  • 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 chasms of hundreds (or thousands) of kilometers.
  • Red Baron: In the epilogue Blame!2, the silicon beings refer 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...
  • The Reveal: Turns out that Safeguard command has lost control of their own security protocols, and as a result they are unable to do anything about the Safeguard creatures that attack anyone who attempts to access the Netsphere without Net Terminal Genes. They are just as confused as the protagonists about the true scope of The City, and are only able to provide minimal support to Killy in hopes of discovering a human with Net Terminal Genes.
  • Ridiculously Human Robot: Killy, apparently. He needs to eat and sleep (at least at first), feels pain and doesn't show up as anything but human to doctors like Cibo who heal him, but he's revealed to be much more than that eventually.
  • The Rival: Killy and Sana-Kan, Seu and Ivy, Dhomochevsky and Davinel.
  • 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.
  • Scavenger World: almost everything that's still working is running on automatic. Killy gets by by finding equipment caches set up centuries in advance; the Electrofishers and tech-nomads have put their suits and guns together out of stuff they found. Partially averted by Cibo's people and Silicon Life, who are both developing new technology and rediscovering the secrets of the City, but tend to overestimate their own abilities.
  • 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: Having found herself on the outside of the City itself at the end of Blame!2, Pcell decides to leave and find a new home where she can peacefully restart the Silicon Creature civilization using the recorded archive of her home she's carried with her.
  • Secondary Fire: Kind of. The GBE has 4 modes of firing.
  • Sequel Hook: ...And it got two. One, Net Sphere Engineer, was planned to be a full length manga, but the author dropped it after just one chapter. The second, Blame2, was in full colour and also a single chapter long, but it served to show that Killy is alive and kicking.
  • 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.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The names of Killy and Cibo are tributes to Killeen and Shibo, the protagonists of Gregory Benford's Great Sky River and its sequels.
    • Silicon Creatures have heads like Borg, bodies like Xenomorphs, and dress like Cenobites.
  • 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 vs. 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 ellipsis.
  • 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 a futuristic dystopian hellhole where it pays to come prepared for anything.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: In "Fort of Silicon Creatures", "Mori" transfers her mind into a new body that looks almost exactly like Cibo's, except for a beauty mark on her cheek. This may be justified if you assume that this type of female body is very commonly manufactured.
  • Sweet Polly Oliver: In Blame! Academy, the "Women's Clothing Dissolving Beam"-Emitter reveals that Iko is actually female.
  • 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!, a homebrew RPG.
  • Take a Third Option: This may be Cibo's motivation when she double registers using Seu's Net-Terminal Genes, and Sana-kan's motivation for advising Cibo against trusting the The Authority after Cibo fuses with the Level 9 and transcribes the Genes into herself, and then going on to be her bodyguard. This makes sense once you realize that, in the prequel (NOiSE), The Authority and the Safeguard were planning to disefranchise all humans without Net-Terminal Genes and install a fascist government of some sort. This would also explain The Authority's "new plan" that involved a 1st Level Exterminator trying to eat the Sphere.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Averted constantly.
  • Tele-Frag: The AI controlling Toha Heavy Industries attempts to teleport the Toha "building" (actually a failed prototype starship) out of the City, but it doesn't realize how big the City is. Each of the building's thirteen caves materializes in a volume already occupied by City structures, wiping everything out.
  • 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 since Killy entered and started walking across a huge, empty and dark spherical room...in the quadrillions. A quadrillion seconds is about 317,000 years.
    • In the film, Cibo mentions she's been waiting 17 million hours for someone to come and find her. That's almost 2 thousand years.
  • 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.
  • Token Heroic Orc:
    • Killy and eventually Sana-Kan are the only Safeguards who want humans to reclaim the Net Terminal Gene, without it falling under the control of the Authority.
    • Pcell VIII in Blame!2 is the sole survivor of her village after Silicon Creatures became victims of persecution from humans.
    • In "Fort of Silicon Creatures", the red-suited female Silicon Creature is considered dangerous by her superiors for wanting to make peace with Killy.
  • Transhuman: In its 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: Every robot and Silicon Creature.
  • 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 where the Earth and Moon are enveloped by the machines, 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 (~5 AU; roughly 750 million km), while "the world" extends to the edges of the system. 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.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: So what ever became of that girl with the dog who Killy seemed to know? Verges on Early-Installment Weirdness as the initial party was just sort of dropped.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
    • Killy kills sentient silicon lifeforms on sight without even the slightest hint of hesitation or remose, even when they're completely non-hostile and harmless.
    • Played to extreme measures by the Safeguard as a whole, who consider anyone without the Net Terminal Gene to be non-human and subject to immediate execution. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Net Terminal Gene practically died out long ago, meaning nobody has it and effectively turning most of the Safeguard into Omnicidal Maniacs.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Killy gets one of these when he kills a Non-hostile Silicon Creature 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 of Chaos: Some of the architecture is just bizarre or large; some of it clearly has more going on. Toha Heavy Industries also has one of these inside it.
  • Word Salad Title: The title is seemingly nonsensical, at least if you assume the title is supposed to be Blame! in the first place. It's believed it may be a misspelling of Blam!, and there's certainly a lot of gunfire going on.
  • Zerg Rush: Safeguard exterminator units.

Top