Unraveling Blame!
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 4 окт 2024
- Use Code BPBKS and get your Killy Statue Here ▶▶ figurama-colle...
Blame! is an entirely unique and fascinating world unlike anything else I've ever experienced. Join us as we talk unravel Killy, his story, and the entire way Tsutomu Nihei designs his universe to tell a story.
SUBSCRIBE here ▶▶ bit.ly/BonsaiPop
Like this video? Support us on Patreon! ▶▶ / bonsaipop
MERCH! teespring.com/...
Check out our Displate link! (exclusive merch!) displate.com/b...
Bonsai Popcast Links:
/ @bonsaipopcast3284
podcasts.googl...
www.stitcher.c...
podcasts.apple...
Keep up with the Bonsai Pop Team!
Twitter # ▶ / bonsai_pop
Instagram ~ ▶ / bonsai_pop
Follow Us On Twitter!
Mike's Twitter ▶ / pikusuri_san
Tyler's Twitter ▶ / zekklash
Blame! is an award winning manga by Tsutomu Nihei. It's a massive, dystopian, cyberpunk world encased in an ever growing building called The City. While many find Blame! incredibly confusing and hard to follow, our aim with this video is to elevate your experience with the manga and show why it's considered revolutionary, unique, and a must read story. It's a journey a little dialogue where the story is told through everything except the characters, with our protagonist, Killy, primarily used as a camera to take of from incredible scene to incredible scene. You've never read anything like this before. Here's why.
About Bonsai Pop:
The brainchild of Mike, and Tyler. Bonsai Pop is our anime passion project, and it's 100% anime, 100% of the time! We make videos for ourselves and our patrons with the overarching goal to be completely financially independent of RUclips so we can make what we want and what you want!
Send us STUFF!
Michael Pixley or Bonsai Pop
PO Box 9
North Hatfield MA, 01066
Unraveling Blame!
• Unraveling Blame!
Bonsai Pop
/ bonsaipop
#anime #Blame! #manga
Hey! I'm awake! I actually slept through the launch of this video lol, I worked from 3am to 1pm today to get this out on time and Tyler launched the vid. I'm really glad we could bring this video to you guys, i even wrote a 13 minute ambient track you'll hear throughout the video for this one, i really wanted to get the feel of the manga with the music... i also did that this morning lol. Anyway, i had a ton of fun reading and researching for this. When figurama came to us we were like "cool, a movie, making videos on movies is the easiest" then i had to read three manga series in less than a week and write a ten page script leaving us only three or so days to edit this, which is mostly manga. editing manga is tuff because you don't want to just make a slide show, you have to keep it interesting and entertaining so it takes work in photoshop and after effects, as well as complete memorization of panels and pages to stream line the process. Needless to say production on this one was was a HIKE, but i'm really happy with the final product and props to Tyler for taking the brunt of straight editing on this one as well. If anyone out there is good at reddit it'd really help if you could share this video!
Thanks so much for watching, and we'll be back soon!
-Mike
This might be your best one
Great manga, great show and awesome author works. His latest APOSIMZ is, in my opinion, his most polished work yet. You should give it a try.
I've tried getting my friends to read Blame!, but I gave them the same bit you did: "You gotta read it to experience it, nothing I say can do it justice," essentially. That said, I loved the video! I might've missed it, but I didn't see the panel where Killy blasts the GBE so hard that he literally snaps his arm in half. That said, it might've been too graphic for RUclips, or you guys lacked the time to remember putting it in there. That said, again: loved the video! Thank you!
This is sorta random, but would love to hear your opinion on Jujutsu Kaisen (:
I'd like to add, in sidonis, the ladt seedship sidonua was in contact with was aposimz. Niheis newest manga is called aposimz-land of the puppets, taking place on the outaide of a giant artifical planet that features creatures that are called gauna (that are more like those featured in abara).
I read through blame and had no idea wtf was going on 999% of the time.
Highly recommend 10/10
Me too, after the third time ( i read it like every 2 years ) i think im understanding most of it. But first time was very disturbing and absolutely phenomenal.
@@oldsql725 read "Biomega" first, then "Noise" and then, pick up "Blame!" again. Same universe, and chronological in that order. -Thank me later.
(They can be read as standalones though.) Done this once every 1-3 years or so since I first discovered Nihei.
i read trough it for the first time now, i just finished the first deluxe-book.... so when he mets Cibo basically. This is so confusing. This whole manga is like... i cant even explain. I like it but i have no idea why i like it.... there is no story... there are not even good characters.... theres no real setting... i have no idea what ive just read.... but for no apparent reason i want more of it. Gonna buy the rest.
same
@@HateMachinist Dog i'm 10 months late; but thank you for these recommendations. The mangaka has INCREDIBLE world building holy shit.
Im an architecture major and my professor made us read the first few volumes of blame! then we had to create a level for the tower. it was pretty sick
I'm 1 year late but this sounds like a really cool and fun work!
what a beast. W for proff.
w professor
Your professor was infinitely cooler than any of my lecturers!
I love BLAME. It reminds me of the "endless paperclip machine" scenario, where an AI gets told to make as many paperclips as possible without parameters, causing it to eventually consume and convert all the matter in the universe into paperclips.
hypercompetent automation minus human values equals Blame!
or the paperclip maximizer, whichever
Every thing in the universe is either a paperclip, or not a paperclip.
Blame reminds me warhammer 40k and more specifically Necromunda.
I came here to read up on Blame! And before I watched I came down to read the pinned comment. Then this ‘paperclip’ thread beneath. this “hypercompetent paperclip automation” conversation already has me sold. 🤝
@@ClosedEyeVisualisations it's a spin-off game/storyline from warhammer 40k. Basically the barely recognized left behind humans who have zero help to live from the billions of humans who live miles above them in functional city spires. Leutin a RUclipsr has tons of lore videos from the 40k and necromunda universe
As an architect myself, really cool to hear you talk about the storytelling and atmosphere that architecture itself can bring to a story.
That's really cool! I'm planning on doing a Master's project about architecture/built space in a couple modern novels; do you happen to know any books or documentaries on that perspective? Architecture seems like a super daunting world
If you like this idea, watch Revolutionary Girl Utena. Seldom have I seen architecture used so strongly to convey feelings, atmosphere and even ideas in an art medium. But regardless of that, Utena is a totally wonderful masterpiece.
@@mariadocarmosobreira8323 ll
"Read all three manga in six days" What a familiar feeling... Nihei's work hits like a ton of bricks
I miss you Mr. Dangerfield
I will never understand how people consume manga this quickly.
Do they just glance over the art and writing and spend like 1 second looking at each page?
Doesn't sound very enjoyable.
@@jakefoley9539 you’re right
@@jakefoley9539 A lot of its is just gratuitous explosions, I got through the 10 volumes in about 4 hours. I enjoyed it and don't feel like I missed out on much. It does get really vague regardless of how long you spend analysing the panels.
@@maxzoka9122 Doesn't seem physically possible to read to that fast and have any quality of retention but to each their own. I guess if you just wanted explosions out of the story, you got out what you put in: the bare minimum.
This series is basically "Impossible Space: The Manga", it's a must for anyone who's a fan of thick atmosphere typical of cyberpunk and old French scifi artists like Moebius.
This is so true. I'm a fan of Moebius work and when I stumbled upon Blame! by chance I was immediatly drawn in by the similitude, I read all the volumes in one session and then read it back again.
Something you should note, that the scale of Blame! isn't actually all that nonsensical. There's a lot of evidence that the City is actually a Birch planet (sometimes called a Matryoshka world), which is a kind of megastructure which could be theoretically scaled up infinitely, layers upon layers, using materials harvested from an entire solar system. Imagine the Ringworld from Larry Niven's works, but just as a series of gigantic shells surrounding the central star in layers.
@@rustyshackleford1508 Which in itself is a derivation of the Dyson sphere idea.
@@mariadocarmosobreira8323 However a Dyson Sphere isn't a solid object, it is a swarm of objects. Enough to block all sunlight for outside observers and make use of it all for its inhabitants.
@@kazaddum2448 that would be a Dyson swarm where it is numerous individual objects versus a Dyson shell that is actually a single object.
I have never bought a statue. But GOD DAMN that Killy statue might get me to
Same , Same! Lol
I've bought a statue from them in the past and they sell out SO FAST, usually same day or within a few hours. My advice? Get on the wish list for the extra reminder, but plan to get it as soon as the PO opens. Set a phone reminder, for sure. Figurama also has a very active Q&A support system in the Figurama Collectors Hub on Facebook if you run into any issues with the PO process etc. Super helpful. Good luck on PO day. I'll be there too! :D
Same! i saw it and felt some type of way!!
Same here, my dude
i will forever envy nihei's ability to draw such heavy landscapes.
it feels as if the city itself is breathing
That is what i’m saying. I did not know something like that was possible. The second time I was wowed after seeing OPM art.
Knight of Sidonia references the Aposimz as a sister ship to the Sidonia. Aposimz coincidentally is his series currently in production, so those two are essentially canonically tied.
I theorize that blame just takes place in a far future of aposimz
WOW IM SO GLAD TO KNOW THIS MAN IS WORKING
Rather felt that all Niheis works are closely related divergent timelines. Not in the same universe but, potential universes.
also gauna from kinghts of sidonia and regular frames from aposimz both use placenta to generate their body and armor, although the ones from apozims have some sort of exo skeleton inside and seem generally a lot less chaotic life forms than the gauna are. wich may hint that the gauna are just something that regular frames were created from. I think there was some conecttion with abara also but i do not remember it in full so yea
Sharing names and themes doesn't mean they're tied.
I really wished there were more media set in worlds like these.
Same I love the scifi genre along with dark stories set in a dystopian futuristic setting. If there isn't much out there, I guess we'll have to create and be inspired
This may be a bit of a stretch, considering that I haven’t read the manga, but I recommend the comic Cerebus (issues 1-180). It’s a dystopian Canadian comic that has incredible landscapes that are a huge part of the story, excellent satire/societal criticism, and intricate storytelling.
You can give NaissanceE a try, it's a video game set in a world inspired by Blame!
Ty all for the suggestions!! keep em coming
NeiR Automata?
I have to imagine this series might have the longest elapsed timespan of any piece of fiction. Killy's journey takes literally hundreds of thousands of years.
Does it actually? I read it over the course of a week so I just assumed that it moved at a similar rate and only a few months/weeks had passed. That's insane to fathom how long his journey took.
@@jenbaminw When you combine all of the massive time gaps that casually occur in the story they really add up. At one point Killy gets damaged and takes roughly 14 years to heal. When Killy and Cibo get separated in Toha Heavy Industries, she spends 10 years waiting for him. In the famous "Jupiter room" Killy is shown walking about a quarter of its circumference to reach the axis tower. At an average walking speed of 3mph that would have taken almost 3 years. We're talking about a story where the protagonist essentially walks from Earth to the edge of our solar system, a distance of around 9 billion miles, and that's if he's traveling in a straight line, which he isn't. Its space and time presented on a scale so vast that it becomes difficult to comprehend or portray.
@@jakefoley9539 That is insane lmao, thanks for filling me in. Blame is just amazing.
Hundred thousand years??? NO
Thousands and thousands of years? YES
@jakefoley9539 eons was mentioned, so probably millions or billions
For anyone who cares Knights of Sidonia didn't get canceled, the final Arc is coming out as a movie this year. They also stated that the movie is looking to improve the somewhat lackluster ending of the knights of sidonia manga.
really dude! nice!!!!
Yo nice
they better not make a shit ending lmao
Real shit?
Gawdamn I'm gonna have to reread the manga then
I remember there was a scene where Killy and Cibon went on an elevator and it took 800 hours but it was over in 1 panel and I’m like WHAAAAT?
Blame was insane, the architecture was so eerie yet amazing. The ending confused the hell out of me but damn it was a fun ride
I remember that, too haha the remaining time was shown in seconds, had to take out a calculator iirc. Similar to some random giant room Killy enters at some point, and the creature measuring the place tells him the circumference if roughly that of Saturn, suggesting that it was swallowed by the megastructure and used as building materials.
Oh yes, the causal 4000 floors :D
Jesus, imagine 800 hours of the Girl from Ipanema muzak. Sure, the first 2 might be kinda groovy, but I'd be hitting the emergency stop button soon after, I reckon.
What about the panel that had the casual “2,000,000 hours later” text in the middle of their search lol
@@viktorepifanov7138 228 years
BLAME! is most definitely in my top 5 manga, solid work here guys. It's one of those works where you can feel the emptiness, and hostility of its world.
So what the other 4 of your favourite?
Just as a clarification, (not as a correction) Killy smiles 3 times, every time with the silicon life killing process, also Killy eats 2 times, when he eats a snackbar and he eats a vegetable when he encounters a vagabond, this is such a great video!!! :3
I'm glad you guys talk about less mainstream manga/anime like Claymore, Dorohedoro and Blame etc. Keep up the amazing work!
*Edit* Great video! Going to be busy reading bio omega this weekend xD
prepare yourself, it's VERY weird
Blame is the only one here not mainstream. Lmao.
Definitely prefered Blame! over biomega, but it's a trip for sure.
@@raze_ Claymore isn't mainstream, and never was.
Dorohedoro really needs more love.
I just realized From Soft should make a Blame video game.
That would be amazing.
Hopefully Miyazaki has read blame! like he read Berserk.
I need a game where I'm walking for hundreds of hours.
@@alastor8091 there's Deaths Stranding.
@@RiotKurhein played the mess out of it, but I need a game that takes like literally hundreds of hours to finish just ONE plahthrough. I want the desolation, the creeping terror, and the wild unknown of Blame captured in the environment. Few words, maybe a couple every 10 hours or so rare contact with other people or creatures thats often hostile or scary. I want the manga in game form.
Congrats: you've actually convinced me to look for this manga. I've never been moved to grab one before, but this is right up my alley.
You're in luck! It's been recently reprinted!
Great thoughts on Blame!. What really gripped me about the story is how it's really not a narrative and more of an experience. Your sense of reality gets so MESSED UP after reading it (just try reading it in one sitting, I dare you!) Time and space mean nothing in this world, and it's absolutely unique in the manga world.
Tsutomu Nihei's art style is even better in Abara. I wish that that was a long runing series.
I agree, it's stunning 👍
Thank you so much for mentioning it! Abara has some of the best character designs I've ever seen in a Manga.
In my opinion that's when his art peaked, followed by Biomega. I mean Sidonia is good too, and Aposimz is not bad it's just a different style. But I think nobody in its sane mind would argue against the claim that his art was better when he was trying to make every look as creep as possible.
@@Rivershield i think the problem is knights of sidonia and aposimz were drawn digitally where as blame, n0ise biomega and abara were drawn traditionally resulting in a lot more roughness and grit in the artwork
@@Drbaden Yeah, that's likely the case indeed
Blame! is my favorite Manga, i bought it by sheer randomness back then in 1999. This Manga changed everything for me it was so good and saddly nothing after this was ever this good and satisfying to look at. the world invented in this manga is so unique and vast its just beautiful to look at and i revisit it at least once a year.
I've always taken the "Provincial Safeguard" designation as Killy, in some form, predating the Safeguard, or at least the contagion that destroyed the Net Terminal Gene. It would free him from the limitations of the Safeguard's programming and allow him to interact with humans. Then, considering just how survivable Tanikaze is without any form of cybernetic augmentation, it is entirely possible that he lives long enough to become Killy after, under Toha Heavy Industry's advancement, as Lem VII becomes The City we know and love. It is also equally possible that Killy is a different clone of Hiroki created later or was created when The Governing Authority recreated Tanikaze's mind and/or body, which would also introduce the possibility of multiple Killies. While I believe that the Killy we see in the manga is the same one throughout the series, I could see The Governing Authority creating multiple Killies to start or even creating a new Killy every once in a while to try to ensure the most likely chance of the Net Terminal Gene of being found. Another possibility that would technically be canon is a multiverse, even with some cross over. We saw that the gravity furnaces created by Toha Heavy Industries in Blame, alternate timelines can be accessed. While that is a bit of a cop out, that turns the references to Nihei's other work as some sort of multiversal constant/alternate instead of just easter eggs.
i like the idea of it being multiversal content or all tied to the seed ships. my thoughts on nagate were similar to yours. he's a special soldier and was already cloned and for all we know the original's corpse is still chilling in the bowels of sidonia, a simple task to clone him again, especially if sidonia runs into trouble. it could easily lead to a killy elsewhere or a zouichi in the future
@@BonsaiPop yeah, each story being spawned off of different colony ships is particularly fitting since Nehei's current manga, Apomsimz, seems to be taking place on the only only other named colony ship in Knights of Sidonia. I am just waiting for Toha Heavy Industries to appear, I have a space for it on my corkboard and red string set up.
The City is set in Earth's solar system, not Lem. There is a direct prequel to BLAME!, called NOiSE!, that lays this out, as said in the video. That said, the video got it wrong; the City in NOiSE was just on Earth. After the events of NOiSE, the City started on earth and grew upward, eventually consuming the Moon and beyond. If any one of Nihei's other works is related to the BLAME! continuity, it's much more likely to be Biomega (though this is unlikely).
I remember reading a oneshot by Nihei of a cop/ detective Killy who also uses a GBE who is investigating the emergence of Silicon Life... It seems to be also on the same timeline as the beginning of NOiSE...
@@vomErsten Yeah, he brought the prequel up then goes off on tangent that all the stories are connected off of one clue. If anything Abara could be a prequal to Knights of Sidonia and it's stated and shown in BLAME! that the TOHA ship is an Interdimensional spaceship that left before the City was built.
read the manga years ago and loved it. i remember scouring the internet for hours reading theories etc trying to make some sense of it. love the little touches that expand the scope of space and time.. like coming across a room that's the diameter of Jupiter, or when Killy is walking and next panel in a corner says "60,000 hours later".. like, ok, 6 year time jump from one random panel to the next
Reading Order:
Abara
Biomega
Noise
Blame
Blame 2
Knights of Sidonia
APOSMIZ
Hero
So they take place in the same Universe
@@isaiahkayode6526 It's never explicitly stated, but there are a lot of hints that they might
Don't you think that sidonia happen before abara? In the end of abara the world is destroyed in half and a lot of monsters that look like gaunas appears
Also, in the end of abara there are ships that are the salvation of humanity
Thanks! I was just browsing Netflix randomly and came across the movie.. is there way to access the other works legally?
There's a special chapter that takes place thousands of years after Blame! ends. Killy appears there as well and finally reaches something....you're gonna have to read it. xD
What chapter is that? I searched it everywhere and couldn't find
@@Rivershield I don't remember the name of the chapter. I've read it in a manga website. Just google the Blame! franchise and you're gonna find the name of the special chapter.
@@Rivershield i think it's the "Net Sphere Engineer" short series
@@proxysoldier2946 It might be the one about PCell's Descendant...?
Hey I just read two extra additions and I still don’t understand what you mean by Killy reaching something? Do u perhaps mean the earth because he reaches that in blame 1
As an introvert I personally find the world of Blame! to be relaxing and therapeutic.
I actually read this back in 2005 , i forgot about this and the name .i would try and remember the name or sometimes think i was dreaming it up since i never saw any mention of this manga anywhere but it always lived in the deep dark side of my subconscious only to pop out every now and then when reading works by Junji Ito or Kentaro Miura . Since their works it would remind me of that type of fear and the drawing style .
SAME!! This has been on the back burner of my brain for years and tho I tried many times I could not find reference to: an anime/manga about an "endless city" and many other keywords. THIS video tho has saved my sanity whilst at the same time testing it by giving me access once again lol... (was always looking for this and one other anime I watched in mid to late 90s about a corporation that takes over the earth except for tokyo..?)
Exactly the same for me I found Volume 1 in a book store in like 2008 and read it but never found anything else for the series anywhere and googled with no luck. Forgot the name and almost everything about it until I saw the movie and Pewdiepies video about it
You know what’s cool? The pure win win cooperation between Bonsaipop and Figurama. It warms my heart ❤️💕🥲💕❤️
I saw the manga on a shelf in Barnes, bought it for a buddy's birthday gift, and a couple days later this comes up. My god.
Bonsai Pop not only has good taste but they're also loyal af. Gotta love em
BLAME! has been one of my all time favorite manga's for at least a decade now. Its so dope to see you cover it in a video.
I love the seen where Killy and Cibo find an machine with a woman attached to it. Ancient beyond all measure, endlessly pumping out clones that gather around the woman who cannot interact with her clones. Killy instantly shot the machine and killed the woman. That was my favorite scene of Blame! His ideals and personal morality was on full display.
One of my Favorite Seinen Mangas of Nihei
Let's go, another bonsai pop video to chill to 😎
Blame! definitely of the dopest einen manga I've read to date. Love the art, the way ambiance of the architectural structure makes you feel immersed within the world is 2nd to none.
Sidenote: when Mike reads a/o watches Chainsawman he'll definitely dub it the anime that epitomizes "punk rock cartoons"
Love to the Bonsai Pop subs 🙏🏿
The sound was *chef's kiss* on this video. It perfectly paralleled the emotions you were aiming to evoke in the video. What a delight!
If you like Blame and it’s atmosphere, I cannot recommend the game NaissancE enough. It is the only other thing thing I’ve experienced that has captured the feeling of Blame. It’s absolutely incredible, and almost impossible to describe. It really is as if you’re inhabiting and navigating the world of Blame. Fascinating and really terrifying. Way more people need to know about it.
So i almost never leave comments under vidoes but i just wanted to let you guys know that i have been binging your channel for the last day or so and its really amazing. Keep up the awsome work guys.
thanks so much!
Blame! is something form another dimension .. to 100% get it you need to watch it alone and focus on it... a not blame the creator for being vague if you don’t get it It doesn’t mean it is bad..............
Really good material.
"His primary mode is Architecture, and the characters are like cameras, to take the story from one place to the next."
So well put!
*TOHA HEAVY INDUSTRIES THEORY;* in reading Blame! I always found myself asking "where was it all manufactured?" I hypothesized that toha heavy industries is where they built a lot of the parts used elsewhere and did the raw materials processing and turned things from ingots, into pipes and mechanisms. Being a major supplier, possibly from the beginning of the city, would give them a special relationship with the net sphere governing body and explain their special exemptions.
t. machinist
Bonsai pop does it again. Excellent stuff my friends!
I love the manga, I knew aboit it more than 20 years ago and I instantly loved it, it's just AWESOME, I haven't read the others, now i'll do
I found out Blame! got a Figurama figure so I already knew Bonsai Pop would be releasing a video on the series soon.
i love Nihei. it feels rare for a manga or comic to really show and not tell to such an extreme. He understands the power of the visual language of manga in a way few do.
Discovered this manga on a shelf randomly. And being an H. R. Giger fan, I was immediately hooked by the art. Little did I know, it would become my favorite manga of all time. Adore this series, and definitely recommend it. I didn't have anyone to guide me through it and it still clicked with me. Just take your time, observe the art and enjoy it to the fullest extent. You won't regret picking up BLAME!
Blame! is probably the first story medium that makes me dread the infinity. Not even the vastness of the universe made me feeling like Im choked out of air or like I'm perpetually drowning on land. So glad I found this manga now!
Nihei’s new manga, Aposimz is also a good one.
Kinda wish all his his works were connected like in the same universe. That be dope af
Source material like this is what can create another timeless dystopic anime series. One can only dream though 😔 the PLOT of noise already sounds like a masterpiece
The best manga I've read for a long time. The somewhat cosmic horror atmosphere is saw alienating to the point I wanted more. 😂
I stumbled upon the 2017 movie & loved it imediatley, the architecture of the scenes is hypnotic.
I was introduced by watching the 2017 movie a few weeks ago and now *I've seen and read everything* there is to know about _Blame! and its adaptations, spinoff, prequel & sequels._ Now I consider Blame! a *masterpiece* and one of my favorites along with _Berserk, Gantz and Jagaaaaan._ I'm very grateful for the movie, not only because it was a fun watch, but because it was a good encouragement into reading the *sublime* dystopian sci-fi source material.
The movie is really good and i like the 3d style (in this case)
Watched it again. Good stuff. i just wish this would have been longer or had more info about the world, but its not bad movie. I think i have seen the blame! series also, but anyone have idea where can i watch it ?
one thing about Blame that i really like is how we only follow one character... Yet we come across all these setting/moments and people/beings that have their own interesting and unique stories that we miss out on completely. Each being had a story but due to the sheer scale of time, and space in the mega-structure we rarely get to find out what happened to all these places and things that made them the way they are, like opening a book to the final page and reading the last sentence. We intruded upon a tale that has already ended and will never be told.
Like in chapter 55 with the robot dog type creature. A speaking builder that was friendly and had probably existed for tens of thousands of years. Yet when it finnished showing the recording to Kyrii it's story was over. Centuries it lay there in the stillness as just a head. We never got to see its life or how it came to 'feel' or speak all was saw was its end. "I'm glad i was able to transmit this video to you.... But it's been a very long time since it happened". Its final words before shutting down. Now it'll sit there until another traveler wanders by in 1000 years barely sparing its lifeless form a glance.
It reminds me of grave stones in a cemetery each person had a life, a family, each loved each hated and each was loved and hated yet in the end all that remains is crumbling stone with their name barely visible on the surface, anybody who knew them has died themselves, and their body has long since decomposed. The grave holds a story but one which will never be told, and that is incredibly lonely to imagine
knights of sidonia has such a great story, the animation caught me off guard at the start but man i ended up loving it so much that i just went ahead and read the manga after finishing the anime. then i watched Blame! as well.
I am quite glad that nihei is now on more people's radars. Man is a god.
Finally someone talk about blame! Is really fucking hard to find content about it
The Netflix film isn't even a snapshot, it's just a cop-out. I get that adapting the manga accurately would be nigh on impossible, but they could've still created something truly unique and mind-bending. They needed to keep the dialogue to an absolute minimum. They needed even just a couple of the random strange encounters that go nowhere but give us a sense of a very weird world that we could never understand. They needed to have a few of the damn cyborgs with their awesome, giger-esque designs.They needed to give us a sense of that ever-scaling size of the city, from thinking it's some kind of Dredd-like mega city, to thinking it must cover the planet, to realising it's a freaking dyson sphere of unimaginable proportions.
Literally everything that makes the manga mind-bogglingly brilliant is thrown away, only to give us a few simple elements fashioned into something like a cohesive and audience-friendly narrative. The result is a completely superficial film. I will say though that I fell in love with Cibo's voice - I could literally listen to her talk all day along.
The manga, of course, really is something else. Utterly brilliant and one of my faves.
i saw the movie without any context and i was just blwon away by the size of everything.
i liked being forced to figure stuff out myself.
and i liked being left, knowing basically nothing about the city and the world.
i just ordered blame manga 1-3 (master edition) and i am HUNGRY to find out more
I agree but at least they nailed Cibo's design hahaha. She's absolutely stunning in the anime.
I feel like adapting the Manga is actually very easy; each Log can be an episode and all you have to do is animate the spaces between panels. Those old BLAME! animated OVAs show how to do this, and even the 2D style was more appropriate for the tone of the manga than the overly clean, 3D hypercolor effects of the Netflix movie.
A lot of vids about Blame lately. I made one a few years back. I thought 2018 was a good year as it paralleled 200 years since Frankenstein (one of the pioniers of Sci-Fi) and 20 years since Blame (which extended the concept to its furthest). The City itself is Blame's frankensteins creature. A mesh of things not meant to, from before and from after. Scale not graspable, complexity and design unclear.
But all in all I think the Builders were not insane. Silicon Life and the few remnants of human civilization fail to grasp it because the Netshpere is just a far long dream. But I believe the City, and all its circuits, tubes, structures, are mostly the Hardware to power the Netsphere. The Netsphere being a collective space made by humans to create direct man-machine interfacing, bring lucidity to every thought and be able to connect with one another infinitely on a virtual plane. Layer above existence. A "Heaven", but to build it, to sustain it, Earth had to be made into "Hell". No religious simbolism, just the pushing of opposite dualities to their furthest.
The Administration being what's left of what was once a human sense of justice, no longer able to accurately distinguish friend from foe. Distorted order. Silicon Life being the remnants of human's sense of progress, getting what they want against all odds, advancing entropy, distorted chaos. Memory being another theme, collective and individual. Even the most advanced of machines/cyborgs, still suffering to quantum noise degradation that ignores their inate resistences, loosing even ancient memories kept in them of the once lost civilization.
There is this sense that media, intercommunication, makes it so that Earth is bigger than the Universe? How so? Scale has to be grasped, it is relative. Even what see and describe of the universe needs to be processed and understood back here in the minds who live on Earth, as its best interpretors. In the end, our infinite game of mirrors due to communication, miscommunication and abstraction, allows it for many "universes" to exist within the structure of humanity/civilization. Self sustaining paradoxes with lone idenitities. There is more variety of things in my room that there are in entire parsecs of the Universe. Dark matter/energy, plasma conglomerates... here I can see objects of artifice, pushing molecules of one things into another to form "design" and "function" only able to attain value to the inherent abstract mode of thinking humans (the universe's best eyes, hands, noses, ears, mouth and mind) have in them. As such, many stars are indistinguishable blobs of gas and plasma, scales irrelevant. But every item a human crafts has an immediate associated cost and fucntion. We were made to be dense, bring variety and novelty to the facsimille universe. This from the eden of life that once was on Earth, to be the fastest bring of novelty. Of course, that is also its own form of entropy. Should we manage to leave Earth. This post-structural game of abstractions, our mirror maze would also migrate to whicever we go to next. Mars will get bigger if we terraform it, because there will be more eyes and more things, more abstractions hence more "universes". If we go to another planet afterwards, then the same exponenciality would occur. Making the universe bigger and bigger.
Blame's city is that notion to an extreme, subverting it. The husk of our civilization is literally terraforming the whole universe. It is about the inate incomptability of our biology to the structures we make in the longest of terms. Impermanence vs time. In Blame, the "Netsphere" marks the singularity of our exponential growth. After it, there is only "The City", everything that was left behind. Infinite structures devoid of the eyes and minds that gave its abstract shape a meaning and function. Replacing the primitive blobs of plasma and elemental geodes that merely float about. Perhaps meant always to be resources for the "structures" that humankind could create.
That is why I started my video with William Gibson's quote: "Time moves in one way, memory another. We are that weird species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting"
Blame! reminds me if you were to combine "The Animatrix" (The Second Renaissance Part I and 2)
with "Ergo Proxy".
Yes!!! The give me the same vibe but weirdly on a grander scale...?
LOVE Ergo Proxy, really cool hard sci-fi and fantasy concepts, when the story unravels, your mind is blown !!
@@nathanfraudik5840 Yes, the atmosphere is beautiful in Ergo Proxy as well. Especially outside of the city.
I’m so glad I found this!! I could not for the life of me remember what that show I watched a few years ago with that freaking amazing gun! I appreciated it then but now I have a whole new appreciation of it now!
I had to be put under for some dental work, and I don't remember the dream or hallucination I was seeing right before I woke up, but I do remember being unable to explain where I had just been, and pulling out my phone to the Netflix app and opening Blame! and showing the dental surgeon and his assistants it and saying "this is where I just went!" But, crucially, I wasn't horrified, I actually felt like I'd had a great time, so, not quite what Nihei intended, I supposed. But I still laugh about it because I was so certain I'd been there when I came to
Something you should note, that the scale of Blame! isn't actually all that nonsensical. There's a lot of evidence that the City is actually a Birch planet (sometimes called a Matryoshka world), which is a kind of megastructure which could be theoretically scaled up infinitely, layers upon layers, using materials harvested from an entire solar system. Imagine the Ringworld from Larry Niven's works, but just as a series of gigantic shells surrounding the central star in layers. And because gravitons can be harnessed in-universe, there's no real issue in maintaining a constant gravitational pull over the entire thing.
I am a huge fan of the new Bonsai Pop and the last few videos you guys put out. You can tell with the extra time put into it, your passion really bleeds through. Keep up the good work, I look forward to watching ANYTHING you put out.
I actually liked the movie knowing that there's a crap ton more, killy's mission is woefully understated as a needle in a haystack.
Blame! is one of the most beautiful and underrated works of Manga I've read
22:17 made me laugh so much when I first read Blame! Cibo says it so casually and then the story continues as if nothing happened lma
When I don't know what anime to watch and what manga to reada, I always go to this channel because of the content and what they recommend.
Oh man, I'm so excited. I'm almost done reading Claymore after your last vid, and I have the vaguest memories of watching Blame! on netflix years ago; needless to say, I trust your recommendations, lol!
Also, there's this concept in architecture called "the sublime" which is basically when something is so big it's beyond comprehension to the point of terror, like true Awe, and it seems the mangaka really took that to heart. I am *psyched* to experience this 🤘
I love when someone has the balls to create an experience in any sort of medium that purposefully withdraws information from the reader/viewer/player. I don't think there are enough stories that are confusing by design. Being confused is actually also something someone can be, and the mystery is often more appealing than the truth.
Love Tsutomu Nihei's bold and unique approach to storytelling, and THE ART HOLY SHIT.
I just recently read this manga and I can't get over how underrated it is. Not a story that holds your hand at all, but one that's told by context clues and landscapes. I'm also a speed reader and I had to stop and take a completely fresh approach to reading it. You really can't just scan the images and read the dialog. You're better off studying the pictures and scanning the dialog instead lol.
For anyone interested, Tsutomu Nihei also did a short little mini series for marvel. Its a Wolverine book, its basically. Wolverine goes thru a portal and lands in a Nihei world, where he helps the inhabitants kill a big thing that is terrorizing them. Its actually how I first found Nihei, and I then kept going and have read all of his stuff except Knights.
I've rewatched the movie after reading the anime, it wasn't so bad. They could have picked a cooler bit of the story but in the end it's not the worst possible adaptation. I like how it still gives a feel of many iconic scenes from the manga that would otherwise have had to be cut out if they had just made a one to one remake of a small part of the original story. You can see that a lot of effort was put into readapting it into a 90 minute format.
That figurine looks outstanding!
If you love BLAME! and the world/architecture, I would highly recommend the game NaissanceE. Short, but so sweet! The only thing I have ever found that give off some of the same feeling and scope as BLAME!
Thank you very very much
Well i talked to the dev of naissance and the game is heavily inspired by blame! . If you want more nihei style games go to the toa heavy industries discord server, there is a seperate channel for related video games and media.
It is inspired by BLAME! Jacob Geller made a great video on that ("Gaming's Harshes Architecture").
@@orvilpym Oh shit, I love Jacob Geller. Never saw that one, thanks
Oh yea it's BP video day, freaking love BP video day
I love this channel, it got me through lunch breaks at my old shitty job plus I love the fact you cover not so mainstream anime.....I fw this.
Thanks for explaining it, I read the full thing and was really confused. Thanks for clearing it up for me
there's this thing called 'superstar system', used by osamu tezuka. nihei maybe uses it too. the mangas he made don't have to be canonically connected.
the protagonist always have killy-face because the 'actor' is the same.
Interesting. Kind of like an illustrated version of a director working with their favorite actor in multiple movies.
For anyone interested Toha Heavy Industries has transcended beyond manga and anime and does exists IRL as an actual company that Tsutomu Nihei and Polygon Pictures that's expanding Nihei's IP in a number of business ventures. So in a meta sense Toha Heavy Industries should be involved with Kodansha in the Figurama deal to make that wicked sick Killy statue. (Love to see a Killy and Cibo duo statue!)
As for the meta elements surrounding the works of Tsutomu Nihei, I view things as if he’s tackling his stories in a mangaka equivalent similarly to Michael Moorcock’s approach as a writer for Elric of Melniboné and the multiversal concept of the Eternal Champion. Self-aware in recognizing all the unique, specific commonalities - themes, tropes, designs, art, characters, plots et cetera - as storytelling creators notice in themselves that they often retread or gravitate towards and decided to connect it all. Is Blame really just an in-universe anime show produced on Sidonia? Or could the world of Biomega and Sidonia exist somewhere in some forgotten virtual corner of the Netsphere itself? Is it so out of reach to imagine that Zoichi or Nagate Tanikaze was brought out from the Netsphere by the Authority like the safeguards and eventually became Killy who now wanders the City? Wouldn't put it past Nihei; anything possible in these worlds.
I’ll also say that the imagery of Blame is some kind of enthralling earworm that doesn’t ever go away. I love it!
BLAME is so dope
BIOMEGA was a manga at my local library, it had it's issue 1 in and I checked it out, very nice and I forgot it's name for YEARS growing up. The VIBES and deep use of black always stuck with me. I had no clue it was deeper into a series at all.
So little is said but actually a lot is said through the amazing art work and world of Blame such a great read
20:26 Provisional means that Kelly is temporary to the degree that he is able to hand over his very important mission into someone's other hands. He's here only for a period of time, even it being extremely long in world Tsutomu Nihei-san had pictured out.
Knights of Sidonia is returning with a movie in May 2021 so let's hope Netflix gets rights
I watched the BLAME movie first many years ago, and honestly I was enthralled, even without the context.
Blame!’s atmosphere invokes an abandonment of so many social constructs that make a traditional sense of living in our daily lives and our understanding of narrative. It shows humanity at its rawest and possibly most basic form? And what if I am just me and I am just rambling all this sh*t?
And What if time is an illusion? Who knows.
And this is what this video has done to me. Lol
Thank you Mike and Tyler. Thank you bros. 👍
I liked the ending.But the journey is absolutely awesome.
Spectacular work, especially considering the time constraints! #proudpatreon
This video is a frickin' masterpiece.
I enjoyed watching Blame! Without reading the manga, I'll watch any sci-fi anime without knowing it's backstory.
Me too!
man why can't I like this twice
You should fo a second channel for manga! Since Bonsai Pop is made for anime, the second channel could be for manga!
That figure was freaking beautiful ❤️
I tried reading Blame and while it was hella interesting it's pretty difficult to appreciate on a phone screen...
Whoo whoo! These bonsai pop videos are the best!!
I always thought that Killy was also going senile like the builders and he is just carrying out the last motivation he remembers by killing silicon life and finding the net terminal gene
yeah that's theorized. Like memories just continually slide away.
@@Emerild That would explain why he would save a Silicon Life who is a Descendant of PCell from Safeguards and drag her unresponsive ass to the outside wall of the Megastructure leading to Outer Space just because her goal is to find a safe place to rebuild and procreate... Post BLAME! that is...
I read Blame! Like 17-19 years ago and it was one of my favorite mangas of all time.
I actually quite liked the blame anime.
Im a no one a few years later
I was floored to learn Blame! was so poorly reviewed. This story, movie, manga is phenominal. ( i cant spell )
You did bring me to the creator tho, thank you!
I am now a life long fan of these works.