Go to eastern Europe or china with commie blocks then you will see a city that is built for nobody. If you added the appearance of Megacities like New York, Tokyo, Delhi & shanghai as places that look artificial were no sane person would want to live you get Ex - Log. I Life in London that is one of the world 1st great cities as both a metropolis & cosmopolitan city it rather immense to new comers but Mega cities are on a whole other scale with often no greens areas with vast portions that have barely any people with other portions that are so densely populated that no one would want to live in either area of a mega city. You have the highest depression, mental illness & self harm rates in megacities as frankly humans are not meant to live like that. Many want to make London a mega city or claim it is but it really isn't as we have few high rises but nothing like in USA, China, India's or Japans mega cities for comparison. I am genuinely amazed that you have never been to a city as how do you manage that in the 21st century?
Have you considered covering The Void video game ? Its an fascinating existential puzzle. Pathologic 2 might also be worth examining, its rich in metaphor and symbolism, while also having a unique world and interaction with the player.
Ground News is a good step forward, but you gotta remember that everyone has a bias, even folks trying to work to cut through it. It's worth at least throwing that out there.
@@Ebani Ultimately, all of BLAME! began with a faction creating Silicon Life, a faction setting the Safeguard to exterminate anyone without the Net Terminal Gene, and that first faction unleashing a pathogen that eliminated the Net Terminal Gene from the human genome. This is the betrayal in question.
i think the one thing that's been overlooked here is that the city isn't actually *dead*. throughout the manga we're shown cultures of who adapted to the city, organisms who feed on the structures, increasingly more variable builders built by builders built by builders all the way down, like a mutating von neumann cascade. some of the builders we meet are even aware; some builders are people now. it's an ecosystem. and the builders are at the top, while what they build is the raw materials upon which the ecosystem is built. the city isn't "for" anyone anymore. it just is. a big dynamic system with diverging clades and cultures and species, robotic and organic. the city truly became a jungle at last
I haven't read the manga, But based on what was shown and spoken about in the video, I feel like it was a disservice to the manga to compare it to nuclear weapons and burial sites. To me, the foundation sounds like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy run through AI A few times tries to build a city and the result slowly gets more corrupted as it continues to grow. The idea that the city is more populous than ever actually makes the setting much more intriguing to me then the idea of A simple eldritch city with A handful of people scurrying at the corners.
Also, there's the substrate for the Netsphere. I don't know the story well enough to know what minds it holds, but it's possible that the structure of the city could be more about the Netsphere's computing needs, with any resemblance to human architecture being a vestigial artifact of the building process.
The moment I saw the thumbnail, I knew it was going to be about Blame, can't wait to leave work so that I can see this video (EDIT: I finally saw it, great video as always, and yeah, Blame has become unsettlingly relevant in today's AI emerging age)
This reminded me of a 1968 Star Trek comic I had as a child: "Invasion of the City Builders" where the crew find a world covered in unpopulated city. The story has its flaws, but the tale of how aliens automated everything until their machines began to design themselves, resulting in unstoppable city-building machines, sounds rather familiar and ahead of its time.
My grandma actually gave me some old retro comics years ago, and one of them was that Star Trek story! I remember it really made me stop and think about the danger of humanity being so creative and curious, that we might accidentally end up making ourselves obsolete.
The crazy part to remember is; in BLAME!, there are more humans alive than have ever been. By a factor of unimaginable proportion. They just can't find each other. They're more than a lifetime's journey away from the next tribe, and unable to venture far from their food source.
In the Space Battle forums, people have even tried throwing different fictional universes and even several Warhammer 40K factions and races to try and control the City. Despite all the absurd coping and calculations, the results are almost always this: "Lost, presumed eaten by locals." And it is not even a joke. That is the MOST LIKELY OUTCOME.
@@y.matocinos8448 So even 40k, THE #1 "Curb-Stomp practically everyone else" series when dropped in discussions...aren't able to conquer the place. Holy Jesus.
@@emperorgalaxian6573 As quoted by a user when someone asked if a billion Imperium of Man can control the City: "To give an idea of the sheer size of the City. The spherical portion stretches out to the orbit of Jupiter, which is 744 million kilometres away from the Sun. This gives it a volume of 1.7e+27 cubic kilometres. If you want a single Guardsman per cubic kilometre, you would need 1.7e+27 Guardsmen. Dividing that by a billion, the Imperium of Man would need to have 1.7e+18 Guardsmen or 1.7 quintillion Guardsmen. I don't think they have that many. Besides which, 1 Guardsmen per cubic kilometre is not going to let them win. It's still not enough force concentration to overwhelm the City." The funny thing about it is that even if the forums would disregard the ridiculous mass and size of the structure (theoretically the size of Betelgeuse, theoretically the size of Jupiter's orbit, and with some parts theoretically reaching the Oort Cloud), what about the Megastructure? Gravitational Beam Emitters are needed to destroy the material in the first place because of the gravity furnaces allowing it to be indestructible without the mass turning into a massive black hole. And if those very gravity furnaces can regenerate on their own, what's not to say the whole City can't regenerate by itself as well? And even if you could meet a new person every couple of years, it could either be Safeguards or Silicon Life. Safeguards have GBEs of their own, as well as GBE shields to block said shots. Same goes for Silicon Life, who even have melee GBE weapons that have the same destructive output, like swordwaves. And in terms of individual power-scaling, the characters of BLAME! are ABSURD. I won't spoil so much, but Killy's GBE's Level 1 shot has a recorded range of 70 kilometers. We don't know if that's the minimum, the average, or the maximum range. And Killy's fired GBE MAX shots several times, but we are not given any statistics on how destructive that is. We only SEE the results via the illustrations. Even if a lot of theory-crafting and implications are needed to wrap our heads around the manga, those theories and implications are terrifying, and no one will understand fully until they read the manga themselves.
Yeah, it resembles what came before but possesses none of the purpose, and now it lives in an uncanny valley of runaway replication. Eventually, it just starts replicating its earlier replications and it spirals down infinitely into a meaningless distortion that has no humanity to it
This series sounds terrifying purely because of the city itself. Like the thing that terrifies me the most is that room the size of one of Jupiter’s rings being where Jupiter used to be.
Even tearing all of sols planets down to nothing, thats no where near enough mass to build something so large. Im curious if the story accounts for that in some way. Planning to read it now though.
@@phftheebonidiot637 IIRC there's no direct explanation, but it is suggested that The City uses some lovecraftian clarketech to both not let the city to collapse into a black hole under its own weight (it is estimated that it extends out to the Oort cloud by now and outmasses half the galaxy) and to get all this building material, which also I think implied to be gathered from the _alternative timelines,_ Appertuse Science-style.
Holy shit thats a complete nightmare, now I'm more convinced by arguments that the strongest and biggest fictional armies would be unable to conquer this place. Its so big and automated that it undoes any amount of progress, slowly or with abrupt force. I watched the movie on Netflix and felt like I was missing something, now I understand the movie much better.
@@boppertron4929 do you think it's possible a human in the future is born with the gene to control the city within reason and become immune to the virus that renders this ability mute. Cause supposedly at one point humans were able to control the city but due to a plague it altered humanity's DNA and the city no longer registered them as legal citizens. It became hostile and here we are.
@@DarthBiomech The near a galaxy worth of mass calculation IIRC was if the city was made out of *air.* And the city is most definately not made up of only air. And also I think it only accounted for the layered parts of the city. Which is up to around Jupiter orbit.
The parallels of how the AI builders work and how AI works now is shocking. AI can talk to communicate with you, create images, songs, and mimic people’s voice by taking samples of what they’re trying to do and creating a sort of Frankenstein’s monster as a result
@@addison_v_ertisement1678 I was saying more like the idea of different parts being put together to make something since I couldn’t think of anything else to connect how AI works
The title made me think you were going to talk about Construct cancellation order. It’s film about robots trying desperately to build a city dispite the orders being terminated for months. It really dives into the complex ideology of following your instructions to the letter to your and everyone else’s detriment. This city is being built for no one.
For me it was reminiscent of the Iterators in Rain World. They're not empty (in fact full of evolved and deadly wildlife), but they've got such weird, alien layouts. Sky-high chimneys, ladders too tall for you to climb, industrial architecture with seemingly no purpose... It's definitely not a city built for you. Also the 2d medium probably helps.
It's always fun when another media analysis channel decides to do a video on Blame!, you never know what they'll focus on; the expansive architecture, immense implied and experienced time for the characters, foreboding future, character designs, Kili's gun, anything. For such a comparatively short series with so little dialog, it has so much to it.
This kinda reminds me of a thought I had about remote controlled aircraft carriers. Imagine how spooky it would be to infiltrate a carrier only to find that there are no doors, windows, or any human-centric interfaces. The formidable ship sending drones that have been wreaking havoc on your country, is in itself completely unmanned. I mean, it certainly makes your job of stopping it a little easier considering you're the only one there, but it would be a strange encounter to be sure.
Remote-controlled, or autonomous? There would almost certainly be passageways, for robots. Try designing passageways without the usual assumptions such as ventilation, lighting, safety, uniform size... Would there be anti-interloper systems? Write it.
@@VidkunQL honestly I was just thinking it works like other military drones. No place for people to really take control on it. Just a bunch of big slabs of metal with a whole lot of electronics and engines inside. But yeah the more I think about it, the more interesting it seems like it could be. I was thinking of writing some scifi for a while. Maybe that's something I can include :D
That message goes so hard. "We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is best shunned and uninhabited."
The city building reminds me of the "Paper Clip" AI theory. Where if you teach an AI robots to make paper clips and noting but paper clips. Eventually the robots will run out of steel wire, and will teach itself to use something else to fulfill its programming to make paper clips. First might be garbage and waste, then the iron and steal part of the factory, then any materials around the area, to even people would be turned into paper clips.
It reminded me of SCP-184, recommended read (or watch on TH-cam), it's basically an artifact that expands space around it, filling it with similar structures and objects, but left uncontained it keeps generating more and more space with objects and structures making less and less sense
Funny thing about it is that it considers EVERYTHING as a room, including the entire universe. This basically leads to SCP-184 becoming one of those potential SCP-001 entries, because its anomalous properties can create the very anomalies the Foundation is trying to contain.
to be honest, I think recommending this series by starting with the backstory kind of undercuts a lot of the power it has. It's so impactful just going on with no idea what's going on and seeing these mysterious structures and wondering how they fit together.
it's pronounced "blam" - Nihei just didn't know how English works. Anyway, the Jovian Void is about halfway from the sun to the surface, according to the infographic floating around, so the City's diameter is around 20.8 AU or 3 billion kilometers. The ENTIRE STRUCTURE is a whopping 64 AU.
This concept is definitely going to be a location in a Destiny themed dnd location for my campaign. A massive city that sprawls infinitely into the planet of Venus, with seemingly no creators in sight. It's clearly Vex, but none of them are in sight.
Blame!, Girls' Last Tour, and Yokohama Shopping Log are series that have profoundly impacted me. They masterfully balance a delicate line between despair and iyashikei. In these stories, the scale-whether in terms of time or space-emerges as a protagonist in its own right (special mention to Junk Head)
I had a dream with a somewhat similar setting before - the endless city of pipes and metal and rooms and corridors, with endless pits and strange architecture.... abandoned except for the rotting shells of robots and machines.... and anthro mice people barely surviving on the little scraps of wood and food they could find, but quickly running out. There were also weird chimera owl robot monster things that would chase them and turn them to stone. Wack
I read Blame! at a very important time in my creative development. The dense and lonely art impacted me and was a great introduction to Oppressive architecture. (Fun fact ‐ it was not intended to be called "Blame" but "Blam!" and was mistranslated." So nice to see this manga getting some attention.
Just did the back of the envelope math, and... anything spherical with a radius of Jupiter's orbit with approximately half the density of a city *should* exceed its own schwarzschild radius. i.e. it would collapse into a black hole instantly.
It would've collapsed if not for the gravity furnaces which regulates the gravity being produced by the megastructure (countless computer chips stacked on top of each other in higher n-dimensions). Gravity furnaces are the ones responsible for why the the countless layers of the city still feels earth-like gravity.
@@tforter actually, turns out if you replace the entire solar system with air, that means "get rid of the sun and the planets and fill an entire sphere the radius of the solar system with air", you will still end up with a black hole. Fun fact, the Schwarzschild radius of the observable universe is almost exactly the size of the observable universe. Another fun fact: The Hubble Constant, representing the red shift of the universe, can be expressed in Hertz, and the wavelength of that frequency is the size of the universe. 3rd fun fact: both of those are 100% coincidences. 5 billion years ago they weren't close, and in 5 billion years they won't be again.
@@OhhCrapGuyin reality, yes, in BLAME! theoratical gravity particles, gravitons are proven and is harnessed by technology. The self building city regulates its gravity and does not collapse into a black hole. There is also a possibility that in BLAME gravitons are really weak infinite energy sources, which then can be used to convert into more matter.
An anime you might be interested in, is "Girl's Last Tour" which features a pair of girls who are the only humans left in an enormous city, that has been completely abandoned, and left to what automation exists to construct and rebuild it... And, it's implied, they are the last humans anywhere in the world, period. It's just a mood piece, there's not really anything too malicious or thrilling. It just explores the world, and lets you soak it in with our two girls with their somewhat minimal dialogue.
The epitaph for the nuclear wasteland is strongly reminiscent of Shelley's Ozymandias poem: I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The only thing I'd contest is that Blame is neither dystopian nor oppressive. It's _posthumanist_ to it's deepest core. The City isn't a city anymore, nor is it dead, or a tomb, or a memorial to human hubris or some other vapid thing - it's an ecosystem of proportions that a human mind is just unable to comprehend, self-building for a purposes that just do not include humans in the scope anymore. Characters of the manga take years to walk up a staircase. Centuries to travel to another part of The City. But The City is both empty and bursting with life and activity on an unimaginable scale. The room the size of Jupiter looks incomprehensibly, impossibly vast, but then you need to remember that it in itself is just a tiny, absolutely insignificant part of The City.
Highly recommend Knights of Sidonia by the same author. He is able to make the horrifying beautiful, similar to Clive Barker. I also love the story of how he designed the mecha by buying pla-plate and locking himself away as he obsessed over making a model instead of actually working on the manga.
*Great video* As a long time fan of Blame!, I'm thrilled to see it become the subject of a Tale Foundry video. Much better than the Netflix adaptation.
At first I thought you were going to talk about "City", a work of art from Michael Heizer. It's an actual city, but empty and with some odd building choices. Less than 500 people are aloud to visit it every year. Jacob Geller has a very interesting video about it called "Art for No One". It's not just about City, but it takes up most of the video (that I can remember), and it's what stood out for me the most.
The intro reminded me of my thoughts about the design of what we’ve gotten to see of Celestia in the game Genshin Impact, the empty feeling, the strangely crumbling architecture despite supposedly being a sort of Heaven, the fact that we have lore about a bunch of gods above the gods among mortals, but we’ve only seen one character residing in Celestia, the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles, and the question of what exactly is she supposed to be sustaining?
Reading Blame was the worst mistake I've ever made because when I finished all the chapters (including the spin-off/au ones) I was just left with a Blame sized hole in my chest And I don't think there will ever be something that can fill it, short of a new chapter which I don't think will ever come
This gives me major Girls last tour vibes. Definitely not similar, but the focus on architecture and how humans destroyed themselves is common in both. Difference being it doesn't have a hopeful ending....
What's wild is, the tech bros will preach about how the AI is "improving", how it's getting better and better, good enough to replace real humans, and to an extent, this is "true", but it fails to account for something... Once AI has replaced humans, what do they think AI is going to base it's produce off? AI is only as good as it is due to human input. It isn't *truly* "intelligent, otherwise AI would be the one making suggestions to us, unprompted. The reality of "Blame!" doesn't feel so fictional after all.
in fairness, all art is based on other things. Thats simply how the human brain works. There are no ideas in a vacuum. Before a human becomes an artist, they learn through exposure to art, and knowledge about art. All Modern art is built upon the art of its predecesors. we look at art, take what we like, and add it to our own. The best we can get without doing that, is either Photorealism, or more likely, Stick figures. Which are both still based on other things. Ever realize that Cave Paintings Look Exactly like Kindergarten Art?
@candlestone5397 It does These things yes, but for what purpose. If left to its own devices without a directive, AI will do diddly squat. It also requires human beings to dictate if what it makes is any good. Its program allows it to replicate patterns, and mimic agency, but without humans to make its first references, it would have nothing. AI lacks agency, and that agency requires true sentience.
@@plaidhatter1674 why do we make art? For a lot of folk its because they are told to, and paid for it. who tells a human if their art is any good? Other humans give them validation because without it they might stop altogether. What does a brain do if the part of it that wants to create art doesn't do anything? All the brain does is replicate patterns. We only have as much agency as our brains can comprehend. If you can't imagine it, it can't be done. Period. The only thing separating brain from computer aside from what it is made of, is that the brain is more advanced by far. And considering how fast we are advancing on that front, it won't be true forever.
@@candlestone5397Yeah, but I'm pretty sure AI art programs (in their current state) can't make value judgements or actually recognise flaws in 'their own' work.
Tsutomu Nihei is a funny author, his first series was huge hit, universally praised, a true manga classic. But everything he has done since has yet to even come close to reach the heights of Blame!. I'd even argue he just keeps getting worse with the years.
Sidonia quite decent tho his Post-Post Apocalypse and "Industrial" setting and story are rehashed a lot and obviously feel repetitive but the art always the main course .
Talking about a city, you should pay a visit to The City of Project Moon universe. Each district has its own unique singularity, the disease of mind of its citizen, and let's not forget that there's Nothing There!
There is a story similar to this concept - "The dauther of the Looter" ("Córka Łupieżcy") by polish writer Jacek Dukaj, about a alien city mimicking every city that has ever existed, including previous universes. Allowing civilisations to gain knowledge and leading them to their doom
As you seem to be on a manga binge, might I suggest Girl's Last Tour and its follow up Shimeji Simulation by the author Tsukumizu. Both are some rather interesting and quite weird stories. Seems to deal quite a bit with ideas of absurdism.
Thank you for introducing me to another manga that I did not know about! I am so excited to get a copy of this to read it for myself! I’m curious, is there merchandise with the image of Talebot ? If not, there needs to be!
I love Blame! It's always been fascinating to me. And scary. The first time I read a few pages I was so confused by the artstile I felt physically sick, and yet I came back at it times and times again. Great analysis, really!
You should look into the game "NaissanceE". It's an exploration based platforming/puzzle game that takes heavy inspiration from the manga "Blame!" as it explores the idea of megastructures that seem to be built for nobody at all, or at least... nobody human.
It's always a dead giveaway that they're talking about Blame when "large raging abandoned cities that aren't cities and are built by creatures called Builders" are the topic. It's so nice to be able to guess
This reminded me of the work of Mateusz Skutnik, an ilustrator and game dev who also has studied architecture and has made worlds of strange architecture and machines, its specially similar to its saga "submachine" (Which I couldn't take off the head while watching the video)
I love being engage in a contolplativ analysis of the past, present and future of humanities mistakes and if we are doomed to destroy ourselves when a commercial for Airbnb interrupts it.
The Megastructure of BLAME!/BIOMECHA Edit: I KNEW IT. Edit 2: So, the Megastructure was, at some point, entirely practical. It was, for a whole millenium at least, entirely habitable and designed for logisitcal coherence, but... after such an unbelievable span of time, the building machines responsible for outward expansion themselves have simply gone senile. Years pass with every comic panel, and countless swathes of space are purposed as nuclear reactors, refrigeration, water storage, mining long since defunct, breeding grounds of silicon life and pockets of human civilization. It was not that it wasn't supposed to consume the solar system- the sun became an interior dyson sphere at some point, if it even still burns, but the Builder's memory and logic simply decayed as they ran ceaseless. Humanity did forget about them, but they were doing exactly as were designed. Additionally, the Net Gene is not, anymore, supposed to fix the builders. That ship has sailed by the time of BLAME!. The Net Gene allows transcendence from physicality, it is the only escape from the city and it's brutalist horrors. It is the only place grass still grows.
I kinda imaged that the sun is stil burning in the center of the solar system, while the 'city' has become a massive structure surrounding it, like a solid dyson-sphere. And the hollow sphere around the sun is used to collect both the releasing gases and sunlight from the star, converting it to building material (you know, e=mc2), because otherwise, where would the builders at that point even get building material from?
@@MTTT1234 Nah, the sun cannot possibly provide enough energy and material for the scale that the City operates at. There are running theories that suggest the City get building materials through alternate realities and mines dark matter for energy by using gravity furnaces. Gravity furnaces are also responsible for why the City hasn't collapsed into the biggest black hole the universe has ever seen despite massively outmassing the galaxy that it's currently in.
This somewhat reminds me of Phil Tippets, Mad God. Nowhere depicted in the movie seems actually habitable, there's a section of the land/city at one point that's having a perpetual nuclear war with bombs constantly exploding in the background. I also just forgot about the factory section. There's a factory creating humanoid beings who then get right to work in the factory, but they keep getting crushed by blocks or machines, or torn apart by creatures, then fed right back into the factory.
Im so glad to see Tsutomu Nihei's magnum opus get more recognition. I have a Toa Heavy Industries sticker on my car, waiting for the day someone recognizes it. I gave the manga another read recently, and found parallels with how the engineering is in Armored Core 6. Thought about making a comparison video.
Nihei is right there top of second tier, reaching for first tier but that's occupied by Shirow, Otomo, Ito, & Hara. EDIT: NOiSE and Biomega and Snikt! (a cyberpunk Wolverine story) and Beowulf (a cyberpunk retelling) are really REALLY good too. (it feels like NOiSE and Biomega and Blame! are all more or less the same dimension - or very closely related dimensions).
While the comments here are mostly about the world of Blame! which is one of most fantastic sci-fi universes I've ever seen (and I, who normally doesn't collect things for collecting sake, for a record, have two editions of Blame! in two different languages), what absolutely astonished me in this series is that Blame! wouldn't work as a movie or TV show or a game or a book. It only works as a comic book. Words cannot describe this world. Motion would make world loose its stillness, action would remove sense of solitude. City is perfectly captured by artist's pen. There were several attempts to adapt Blame! as a movie or a series of shorts. All proved to be either mediocre or failed projects altogether. Netflix adaptation is closest... but it's not the same. Beauty of Blame! is in the fact that only force that moves in the City is the Reader. As a reader, you can spend as much time on each page as you want. You can glance across several pages in seconds, or spend several minutes looking at a single page - it's all on you. And it's beautiful...
So happy to see a big channel cover this manga in the modern year. Blame! (and its short prequel, I'd say) is a hidden gem. Just don't watch the movie. I'd like to note, without much detail to avoid spoilers, that the furthest reaches of the City go beyond even nonsensical AI architecture. The City's edge incorporates biological imagery, despite having no reason to use materials that are any different from the rest of it. At some point, running on the same inputs for long enough caused the builder AI to completely lose the plot. It's surprisingly prescient for a 90's work, even if the story is mostly in service to the art.
The idea of a setting that is inhospitable or even aggressive towards people reminds me of the settings of the video game series, Little Nightmares. I love everything about LN, but by far my favourite parts of it are the gargantuan, atmospheric settings where the game takes place. Now, the settings in LN vary from this City because they definitely do have a set purpose. The "Maw", the massive submarine in which the original game takes place, is essentially a resort for the wealthy elite, albeit one which involves copious amounts of child murder. The settings in the sequel are even more mundane and down to earth, featuring places like schools, hospitals, and even plain old cities. They seem completely normal in appearance and function, but the difference is, these places are not intended for normal people. Now, one of the key themes in Little Nightmares is the struggle between children and adults. And as you explore more and more of the universe, it becomes clear that all the monsterous adults aren't some sort of exception or freak accident you must escape. They are the default of this world. All adults are like this in the series, and all children are their prey. There is no space for children to survive within the LN universe, and this is reflected in the setting. Everything in the LN series is huge compared to your character, far too huge to be properly used by anyone except the massive adults. In order to get around, your child protagonist needs to drag chairs around to open doors, throw things in order to trigger buttons, climb through vents and crawlspaces in the walls. The only way you can survive is by sneaking around, finding clever new ways to use things that aren't meant to be used by you. You are out of place, sneaking around in a world that treats you as vermin that must be exterminated, for the crime of existing in a space that wasn't built for you. The other thing about this setting is how it affects the characters. In the first game, our protagonist gains control of the Maw, and is implied to later grow into the adult that runs the entire facility. We win, but in the process, our protagonist commits some horrible betrayals and loses her sense of humanity. Similarly, our protagonist in the second game falls into the bowels of a huge, sentient building called the "Signal Tower", and we actually see him mutate into the creature that controls the mysterious, hypnotic signal, and by extent, several of the monsters in game. However, this same creature is defeated by his own younger self in the game, meaning that he himself has now become the big evil monster to defeat. In both cases, our protagonists do take control of the setting they're in, and they have great power over their surroundings due to this victory. The setting becomes their kingdom, but in the process of gaining control, they are permanently altered into monsters. They have not changed the world to make it anymore accepting of them, they have not found a safe place where they can be themselves, they have simply just been resourceful enough to survive the world for long enough to adapt into something better fit to thrive in that environment. The setting isn't made for people. It doesn't serve them in any way. The people are the ones who must change in order to better fit the world around them, not vice versa. It's a great metaphor for children growing up in a system that doesn't care for them. I love settings like these because they're so wonderfully Kafkaesque. They're systems that have become so complex, so abstract, that over time they have completely deviated from their original purpose. And stories like these are amazing to follow, because they reflect the real world, which is full of complexities that seem so nonsensical if you look at them from an outsider's perspective. Love the video! Can't wait to see more ❤
![เปิดบ้าน พี่ตูน Bodyslam หลังใหม่คนแรก ที่ภูเก็ต l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/flFwcmyDQSk/mqdefault.jpg)
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MAN , your videos are masterpeace , can you make videos about Concepts like oblivion , limbo and phantoms ? thank you again for this video
Go to eastern Europe or china with commie blocks then you will see a city that is built for nobody.
If you added the appearance of Megacities like New York, Tokyo, Delhi & shanghai as places that look artificial were no sane person would want to live you get Ex - Log.
I Life in London that is one of the world 1st great cities as both a metropolis & cosmopolitan city it rather immense to new comers but Mega cities are on a whole other scale with often no greens areas with vast portions that have barely any people with other portions that are so densely populated that no one would want to live in either area of a mega city.
You have the highest depression, mental illness & self harm rates in megacities as frankly humans are not meant to live like that.
Many want to make London a mega city or claim it is but it really isn't as we have few high rises but nothing like in USA, China, India's or Japans mega cities for comparison.
I am genuinely amazed that you have never been to a city as how do you manage that in the 21st century?
Have you considered covering The Void video game ? Its an fascinating existential puzzle. Pathologic 2 might also be worth examining, its rich in metaphor and symbolism, while also having a unique world and interaction with the player.
Literally was obsessing over this manga the past few days, and then you upload this. What are the odds, lol 😂
Ground News is a good step forward,
but you gotta remember that everyone has a bias, even folks trying to work to cut through it.
It's worth at least throwing that out there.
"This is what happens when humanity betrays itself." gold
If they're not human how can they have betrayed humanity?
@@Ebani Ultimately, all of BLAME! began with a faction creating Silicon Life, a faction setting the Safeguard to exterminate anyone without the Net Terminal Gene, and that first faction unleashing a pathogen that eliminated the Net Terminal Gene from the human genome. This is the betrayal in question.
that was Tale Foundry warning us that he and robots like him will take over because of our own failings
This is what happens... When an architecture student that can draw people discovers the nature of most of an architect's clients.
@@woongah
Architect boss: _"Your designs will never be published."_
Nihei: _"Hold my beer."_ +Draws "Blame!" manga+
i think the one thing that's been overlooked here is that the city isn't actually *dead*. throughout the manga we're shown cultures of who adapted to the city, organisms who feed on the structures, increasingly more variable builders built by builders built by builders all the way down, like a mutating von neumann cascade. some of the builders we meet are even aware; some builders are people now. it's an ecosystem. and the builders are at the top, while what they build is the raw materials upon which the ecosystem is built. the city isn't "for" anyone anymore. it just is. a big dynamic system with diverging clades and cultures and species, robotic and organic. the city truly became a jungle at last
I haven't read the manga, But based on what was shown and spoken about in the video, I feel like it was a disservice to the manga to compare it to nuclear weapons and burial sites.
To me, the foundation sounds like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy run through AI A few times tries to build a city and the result slowly gets more corrupted as it continues to grow.
The idea that the city is more populous than ever actually makes the setting much more intriguing to me then the idea of A simple eldritch city with A handful of people scurrying at the corners.
So nature, but instead of just plant cells and animals cells, they get metal and plastic as well.
Great ending to your comment✨
@@Bluedragon-iz3oo at the rate we’re going, soon we’ll have that irl if we don’t already lol
Also, there's the substrate for the Netsphere. I don't know the story well enough to know what minds it holds, but it's possible that the structure of the city could be more about the Netsphere's computing needs, with any resemblance to human architecture being a vestigial artifact of the building process.
The second i saw the thumbnail i immediately thought: "Oh, finally, a Tale Foundry BLAME! video".
The moment I saw the thumbnail, I knew it was going to be about Blame, can't wait to leave work so that I can see this video
(EDIT: I finally saw it, great video as always, and yeah, Blame has become unsettlingly relevant in today's AI emerging age)
Same! Instantly stoked!
Same, such an iconic setting
Same
It's been two hours. Have you left work yet?
@Leto85 getting home, the moment I have dinner ready I'm watching it XD
This reminded me of a 1968 Star Trek comic I had as a child: "Invasion of the City Builders" where the crew find a world covered in unpopulated city. The story has its flaws, but the tale of how aliens automated everything until their machines began to design themselves, resulting in unstoppable city-building machines, sounds rather familiar and ahead of its time.
I'm going to find that comic.
The algorithm is not new, but it has grown tetrationally.
My grandma actually gave me some old retro comics years ago, and one of them was that Star Trek story! I remember it really made me stop and think about the danger of humanity being so creative and curious, that we might accidentally end up making ourselves obsolete.
Blame and the Star trek Comic are both likely to be inspired by E.M Foresters 1909 Short Story "The Machine Stops"
@@handlesshouldntdefaulttonames A favorite of mine, and constantly on my mind since the quarantine.
The crazy part to remember is; in BLAME!, there are more humans alive than have ever been. By a factor of unimaginable proportion.
They just can't find each other. They're more than a lifetime's journey away from the next tribe, and unable to venture far from their food source.
In the Space Battle forums, people have even tried throwing different fictional universes and even several Warhammer 40K factions and races to try and control the City. Despite all the absurd coping and calculations, the results are almost always this:
"Lost, presumed eaten by locals."
And it is not even a joke. That is the MOST LIKELY OUTCOME.
JFC, I need to read Blame again
@@y.matocinos8448 So even 40k, THE #1 "Curb-Stomp practically everyone else" series when dropped in discussions...aren't able to conquer the place. Holy Jesus.
@@emperorgalaxian6573 As quoted by a user when someone asked if a billion Imperium of Man can control the City:
"To give an idea of the sheer size of the City. The spherical portion stretches out to the orbit of Jupiter, which is 744 million kilometres away from the Sun. This gives it a volume of 1.7e+27 cubic kilometres. If you want a single Guardsman per cubic kilometre, you would need 1.7e+27 Guardsmen. Dividing that by a billion, the Imperium of Man would need to have 1.7e+18 Guardsmen or 1.7 quintillion Guardsmen. I don't think they have that many.
Besides which, 1 Guardsmen per cubic kilometre is not going to let them win. It's still not enough force concentration to overwhelm the City."
The funny thing about it is that even if the forums would disregard the ridiculous mass and size of the structure (theoretically the size of Betelgeuse, theoretically the size of Jupiter's orbit, and with some parts theoretically reaching the Oort Cloud), what about the Megastructure?
Gravitational Beam Emitters are needed to destroy the material in the first place because of the gravity furnaces allowing it to be indestructible without the mass turning into a massive black hole. And if those very gravity furnaces can regenerate on their own, what's not to say the whole City can't regenerate by itself as well?
And even if you could meet a new person every couple of years, it could either be Safeguards or Silicon Life. Safeguards have GBEs of their own, as well as GBE shields to block said shots. Same goes for Silicon Life, who even have melee GBE weapons that have the same destructive output, like swordwaves.
And in terms of individual power-scaling, the characters of BLAME! are ABSURD. I won't spoil so much, but Killy's GBE's Level 1 shot has a recorded range of 70 kilometers. We don't know if that's the minimum, the average, or the maximum range. And Killy's fired GBE MAX shots several times, but we are not given any statistics on how destructive that is. We only SEE the results via the illustrations.
Even if a lot of theory-crafting and implications are needed to wrap our heads around the manga, those theories and implications are terrifying, and no one will understand fully until they read the manga themselves.
I didn't know that there were more humans in Blame. I only watched the anime tho. That changes things a lot.
The thing that replicates patterns without any understanding of it is truely terrifying
Yeah, it resembles what came before but possesses none of the purpose, and now it lives in an uncanny valley of runaway replication. Eventually, it just starts replicating its earlier replications and it spirals down infinitely into a meaningless distortion that has no humanity to it
Me watching sports be like:
So AI art?
@Cordelia Wagner: yeah, that's another good example
That’s just AI
This series sounds terrifying purely because of the city itself. Like the thing that terrifies me the most is that room the size of one of Jupiter’s rings being where Jupiter used to be.
Even tearing all of sols planets down to nothing, thats no where near enough mass to build something so large. Im curious if the story accounts for that in some way. Planning to read it now though.
@@phftheebonidiot637 IIRC there's no direct explanation, but it is suggested that The City uses some lovecraftian clarketech to both not let the city to collapse into a black hole under its own weight (it is estimated that it extends out to the Oort cloud by now and outmasses half the galaxy) and to get all this building material, which also I think implied to be gathered from the _alternative timelines,_ Appertuse Science-style.
Holy shit thats a complete nightmare, now I'm more convinced by arguments that the strongest and biggest fictional armies would be unable to conquer this place. Its so big and automated that it undoes any amount of progress, slowly or with abrupt force. I watched the movie on Netflix and felt like I was missing something, now I understand the movie much better.
@@boppertron4929 do you think it's possible a human in the future is born with the gene to control the city within reason and become immune to the virus that renders this ability mute. Cause supposedly at one point humans were able to control the city but due to a plague it altered humanity's DNA and the city no longer registered them as legal citizens. It became hostile and here we are.
@@DarthBiomech The near a galaxy worth of mass calculation IIRC was if the city was made out of *air.* And the city is most definately not made up of only air. And also I think it only accounted for the layered parts of the city. Which is up to around Jupiter orbit.
"This is no mine. It's a tomb."
That sounds familiar. Where's it from?
@@catbatrat1760Lord of the Rings series.
@@catbatrat1760The Mines of Moria, LotR
@@catbatrat1760 Boromir
Pretty much this.
The parallels of how the AI builders work and how AI works now is shocking. AI can talk to communicate with you, create images, songs, and mimic people’s voice by taking samples of what they’re trying to do and creating a sort of Frankenstein’s monster as a result
You guys are actually comparing this to Frankenstein? Really?
@@addison_v_ertisement1678 what’s wrong with that?
Generative AI taking the corpses of stolen art and sewing them together into a new form of soul less art. Naw there's no parallels there, nope, no.
@@DudeInADinoOnesie A song made by AI isn't going to slaughter townsfolk.
@@addison_v_ertisement1678 I was saying more like the idea of different parts being put together to make something since I couldn’t think of anything else to connect how AI works
The title made me think you were going to talk about Construct cancellation order. It’s film about robots trying desperately to build a city dispite the orders being terminated for months. It really dives into the complex ideology of following your instructions to the letter to your and everyone else’s detriment. This city is being built for no one.
Never heard of this, but now you gave me something interesting to look into. Thanks!
@@mme725 Your welcome. Its a really good short film.
Oooo I think I know that nice
For me it was reminiscent of the Iterators in Rain World. They're not empty (in fact full of evolved and deadly wildlife), but they've got such weird, alien layouts. Sky-high chimneys, ladders too tall for you to climb, industrial architecture with seemingly no purpose... It's definitely not a city built for you.
Also the 2d medium probably helps.
Sounds like the beginning of Wall-E - a robot desperately trying to build a city long after humanity is gone and all
It's always fun when another media analysis channel decides to do a video on Blame!, you never know what they'll focus on; the expansive architecture, immense implied and experienced time for the characters, foreboding future, character designs, Kili's gun, anything. For such a comparatively short series with so little dialog, it has so much to it.
Haven't read Blame but the tower with increasingly abstract architecture and uncanny emptiness remind me a lot of the city from Girl's Last Tour.
Oh my, yes! I've only seen the first few episodes. Thank for the reminder to pick it up again!
Girl's Last Tour draws inspiration from Blame and has a lot of little references to it.
This kinda reminds me of a thought I had about remote controlled aircraft carriers. Imagine how spooky it would be to infiltrate a carrier only to find that there are no doors, windows, or any human-centric interfaces. The formidable ship sending drones that have been wreaking havoc on your country, is in itself completely unmanned. I mean, it certainly makes your job of stopping it a little easier considering you're the only one there, but it would be a strange encounter to be sure.
Remote-controlled, or autonomous? There would almost certainly be passageways, for robots. Try designing passageways without the usual assumptions such as ventilation, lighting, safety, uniform size... Would there be anti-interloper systems?
Write it.
Kinda like the multipede weapon platforms in Appleseed, needing to shut down the ai controlling them and bypassing it's defence systems
@@VidkunQL honestly I was just thinking it works like other military drones. No place for people to really take control on it. Just a bunch of big slabs of metal with a whole lot of electronics and engines inside. But yeah the more I think about it, the more interesting it seems like it could be. I was thinking of writing some scifi for a while. Maybe that's something I can include :D
That message goes so hard.
"We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here. This place is best shunned and uninhabited."
The city building reminds me of the "Paper Clip" AI theory.
Where if you teach an AI robots to make paper clips and noting but paper clips. Eventually the robots will run out of steel wire, and will teach itself to use something else to fulfill its programming to make paper clips. First might be garbage and waste, then the iron and steal part of the factory, then any materials around the area, to even people would be turned into paper clips.
The universal paperclip game is soooo good
It may even cannibalize itself to make more paperclips...
And how will it teach itsrlf if it never learned to teach itself?
Theory busted, I would say.
It reminded me of SCP-184, recommended read (or watch on TH-cam), it's basically an artifact that expands space around it, filling it with similar structures and objects, but left uncontained it keeps generating more and more space with objects and structures making less and less sense
Funny thing about it is that it considers EVERYTHING as a room, including the entire universe. This basically leads to SCP-184 becoming one of those potential SCP-001 entries, because its anomalous properties can create the very anomalies the Foundation is trying to contain.
to be honest, I think recommending this series by starting with the backstory kind of undercuts a lot of the power it has. It's so impactful just going on with no idea what's going on and seeing these mysterious structures and wondering how they fit together.
well, then dont do that
it's pronounced "blam" - Nihei just didn't know how English works.
Anyway, the Jovian Void is about halfway from the sun to the surface, according to the infographic floating around, so the City's diameter is around 20.8 AU or 3 billion kilometers.
The ENTIRE STRUCTURE is a whopping 64 AU.
my brain cant brain because of the sheer size of the structure let alone have a whole room where a freaking gas giant use to be
This scenery painted by Blame is so unique and recognisable I really hope other interpretations of this or similar things pop up in other medias
This concept is definitely going to be a location in a Destiny themed dnd location for my campaign. A massive city that sprawls infinitely into the planet of Venus, with seemingly no creators in sight. It's clearly Vex, but none of them are in sight.
Fun fact: (at least as far as I've been able to find) it's supposed to be pronounced like Blam since it's onomatopoeia for the gun noise
Blame!, Girls' Last Tour, and Yokohama Shopping Log are series that have profoundly impacted me. They masterfully balance a delicate line between despair and iyashikei. In these stories, the scale-whether in terms of time or space-emerges as a protagonist in its own right (special mention to Junk Head)
The fact that you put this much effort on this video for a manga series that everyone barely know is amazing.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" springs to mind. Eerily, it's set in 2026, which sounded like the distant future when I first read it in the mid-60s.
50,000 people used to live here, and now it's a ghost town.
I had a dream with a somewhat similar setting before - the endless city of pipes and metal and rooms and corridors, with endless pits and strange architecture.... abandoned except for the rotting shells of robots and machines.... and anthro mice people barely surviving on the little scraps of wood and food they could find, but quickly running out. There were also weird chimera owl robot monster things that would chase them and turn them to stone. Wack
i understood this videos theme from the thumbnail. one of my favourite manga of all time. thanks as usual for your job.
I read Blame! at a very important time in my creative development. The dense and lonely art impacted me and was a great introduction to Oppressive architecture. (Fun fact ‐ it was not intended to be called "Blame" but "Blam!" and was mistranslated."
So nice to see this manga getting some attention.
5:25 my favourite concept idea is the dull block city that is built to allow the wind to create haunting howling sounds throughout
Just did the back of the envelope math, and... anything spherical with a radius of Jupiter's orbit with approximately half the density of a city *should* exceed its own schwarzschild radius.
i.e. it would collapse into a black hole instantly.
I believe they said it was empty
@@tforterthe gaping hole where Jupiter used to be is empty. The rest of space in our solar system isn't.
It would've collapsed if not for the gravity furnaces which regulates the gravity being produced by the megastructure (countless computer chips stacked on top of each other in higher n-dimensions). Gravity furnaces are the ones responsible for why the the countless layers of the city still feels earth-like gravity.
@@tforter actually, turns out if you replace the entire solar system with air, that means "get rid of the sun and the planets and fill an entire sphere the radius of the solar system with air", you will still end up with a black hole.
Fun fact, the Schwarzschild radius of the observable universe is almost exactly the size of the observable universe.
Another fun fact: The Hubble Constant, representing the red shift of the universe, can be expressed in Hertz, and the wavelength of that frequency is the size of the universe.
3rd fun fact: both of those are 100% coincidences. 5 billion years ago they weren't close, and in 5 billion years they won't be again.
@@OhhCrapGuyin reality, yes, in BLAME! theoratical gravity particles, gravitons are proven and is harnessed by technology. The self building city regulates its gravity and does not collapse into a black hole. There is also a possibility that in BLAME gravitons are really weak infinite energy sources, which then can be used to convert into more matter.
The thought of an ever growing building that makes itself like a living being has always been one of my favourite ideas
Check House of Leaves or Piranesi.
An anime you might be interested in, is "Girl's Last Tour" which features a pair of girls who are the only humans left in an enormous city, that has been completely abandoned, and left to what automation exists to construct and rebuild it... And, it's implied, they are the last humans anywhere in the world, period. It's just a mood piece, there's not really anything too malicious or thrilling. It just explores the world, and lets you soak it in with our two girls with their somewhat minimal dialogue.
0:56 they should really extend Talbots track so he can go places or give him cameras
Like a podcaster💀
@@buckethat7585 i mean maybe lol it would be interesting expand the story
The epitaph for the nuclear wasteland is strongly reminiscent of Shelley's Ozymandias poem:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said-“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The only thing I'd contest is that Blame is neither dystopian nor oppressive. It's _posthumanist_ to it's deepest core. The City isn't a city anymore, nor is it dead, or a tomb, or a memorial to human hubris or some other vapid thing - it's an ecosystem of proportions that a human mind is just unable to comprehend, self-building for a purposes that just do not include humans in the scope anymore. Characters of the manga take years to walk up a staircase. Centuries to travel to another part of The City. But The City is both empty and bursting with life and activity on an unimaginable scale. The room the size of Jupiter looks incomprehensibly, impossibly vast, but then you need to remember that it in itself is just a tiny, absolutely insignificant part of The City.
this^
If you ask me, it is pretty badass to have a solar system sized tomb for humanity
Highly recommend Knights of Sidonia by the same author. He is able to make the horrifying beautiful, similar to Clive Barker. I also love the story of how he designed the mecha by buying pla-plate and locking himself away as he obsessed over making a model instead of actually working on the manga.
*Great video*
As a long time fan of Blame!, I'm thrilled to see it become the subject of a Tale Foundry video.
Much better than the Netflix adaptation.
At first I thought you were going to talk about "City", a work of art from Michael Heizer. It's an actual city, but empty and with some odd building choices. Less than 500 people are aloud to visit it every year.
Jacob Geller has a very interesting video about it called "Art for No One". It's not just about City, but it takes up most of the video (that I can remember), and it's what stood out for me the most.
The intro reminded me of my thoughts about the design of what we’ve gotten to see of Celestia in the game Genshin Impact, the empty feeling, the strangely crumbling architecture despite supposedly being a sort of Heaven, the fact that we have lore about a bunch of gods above the gods among mortals, but we’ve only seen one character residing in Celestia, the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles, and the question of what exactly is she supposed to be sustaining?
As soon as I saw the thumbnail I knew "ITS ABOUT BLAME!!!!" ❤❤❤
My brain: Ooh! Naissance!
Everyone else: BLAME!
So we basically had the same thing
YES! Thank you so much for making a video about this. Blame has so little online coverage. It's insanely underrated.
Someone really needs to take this robot to see a city.
"I am ozymandias king of kings.
Look on my works, ye mighty and despair"
I mean, technically, the worksare still there 😂
Reading Blame was the worst mistake I've ever made because when I finished all the chapters (including the spin-off/au ones) I was just left with a Blame sized hole in my chest
And I don't think there will ever be something that can fill it, short of a new chapter which I don't think will ever come
Blame is a masterpiece. Glad you're covering it!
To borrow a phrase, it's a paper-clip factory.
This gives me major Girls last tour vibes. Definitely not similar, but the focus on architecture and how humans destroyed themselves is common in both. Difference being it doesn't have a hopeful ending....
yepp tkmz did said that Blame! was one of the inspiration
What's wild is, the tech bros will preach about how the AI is "improving", how it's getting better and better, good enough to replace real humans, and to an extent, this is "true", but it fails to account for something...
Once AI has replaced humans, what do they think AI is going to base it's produce off? AI is only as good as it is due to human input. It isn't *truly* "intelligent, otherwise AI would be the one making suggestions to us, unprompted. The reality of "Blame!" doesn't feel so fictional after all.
But humans too have to be prompted (birthed) in order to make suggestions.
in fairness, all art is based on other things. Thats simply how the human brain works.
There are no ideas in a vacuum.
Before a human becomes an artist, they learn through exposure to art, and knowledge about art.
All Modern art is built upon the art of its predecesors. we look at art, take what we like, and add it to our own.
The best we can get without doing that, is either Photorealism, or more likely, Stick figures.
Which are both still based on other things.
Ever realize that Cave Paintings Look Exactly like Kindergarten Art?
@candlestone5397 It does These things yes, but for what purpose. If left to its own devices without a directive, AI will do diddly squat. It also requires human beings to dictate if what it makes is any good. Its program allows it to replicate patterns, and mimic agency, but without humans to make its first references, it would have nothing. AI lacks agency, and that agency requires true sentience.
@@plaidhatter1674 why do we make art? For a lot of folk its because they are told to, and paid for it.
who tells a human if their art is any good? Other humans give them validation because without it they might stop altogether.
What does a brain do if the part of it that wants to create art doesn't do anything?
All the brain does is replicate patterns.
We only have as much agency as our brains can comprehend. If you can't imagine it, it can't be done. Period.
The only thing separating brain from computer aside from what it is made of, is that the brain is more advanced by far.
And considering how fast we are advancing on that front, it won't be true forever.
@@candlestone5397Yeah, but I'm pretty sure AI art programs (in their current state) can't make value judgements or actually recognise flaws in 'their own' work.
Tsutomu Nihei is a funny author, his first series was huge hit, universally praised, a true manga classic. But everything he has done since has yet to even come close to reach the heights of Blame!. I'd even argue he just keeps getting worse with the years.
Sidonia quite decent tho his Post-Post Apocalypse and "Industrial" setting and story are rehashed a lot and obviously feel repetitive but the art always the main course .
NEW TAKE FOUNDRY VIDEO!
I love you tale bot! You always draw attention to the coolest aspects of world building!!
Good to hear that Odysseus got an entire city, even if it does sound uninhabitable
This is the fastest I’ve ever gotten to see a Tale Foundry video. Nicely done and thank you for sharing this with us.
Talking about a city, you should pay a visit to The City of Project Moon universe. Each district has its own unique singularity, the disease of mind of its citizen, and let's not forget that there's Nothing There!
There is a story similar to this concept - "The dauther of the Looter" ("Córka Łupieżcy") by polish writer Jacek Dukaj, about a alien city mimicking every city that has ever existed, including previous universes. Allowing civilisations to gain knowledge and leading them to their doom
Blame! will always be peak 🙏🏽😭
"It's wear Jupiter used to be" is likely the confounding and intriguing phrase I've ever heard lolz
0:24 sort of looks like the Village Hidden in the Rain from Naruto.
Reminds me of the Solstice-5 short film. Machines keep on building, their purpose forgotten, ambivalent. It's on TH-cam, I highly recommend.
Tale Foundry doing a video on my favorite manga? How?!??
As you seem to be on a manga binge, might I suggest Girl's Last Tour and its follow up Shimeji Simulation by the author Tsukumizu.
Both are some rather interesting and quite weird stories. Seems to deal quite a bit with ideas of absurdism.
Thank you for introducing me to another manga that I did not know about! I am so excited to get a copy of this to read it for myself! I’m curious, is there merchandise with the image of Talebot ? If not, there needs to be!
I not sure of Talebot, but I remember seeing Tailoid (the little guys) keychains available.
Edit: correcting an auto-correct.
2 of my favorite youtubers talking about blame … this gotta be a dream
Whats crazy is the scale of it like theres an elevator ride that takes 800 hours
I love Blame! It's always been fascinating to me. And scary. The first time I read a few pages I was so confused by the artstile I felt physically sick, and yet I came back at it times and times again. Great analysis, really!
You should look into the game "NaissanceE". It's an exploration based platforming/puzzle game that takes heavy inspiration from the manga "Blame!" as it explores the idea of megastructures that seem to be built for nobody at all, or at least... nobody human.
It's always a dead giveaway that they're talking about Blame when "large raging abandoned cities that aren't cities and are built by creatures called Builders" are the topic. It's so nice to be able to guess
I Can't believe you just made a video about my favourite scifi story. Thank you xD amazing video.
man, i gotta thank you. just the title of this video essay gave me a freakin' sweet idea, and no it's not about an empty city, but it is pretty absurd
LOVE the long term nuclear waste warning messages. So happy you referenced them!!!
HOLY CRAP, TALE FOUNDRY IS TALKING ABOUT BLAME. PEAK HAS ENCOUNTERED PEAK
SO REAL OMG
When I saw the art style I was like "No way. Not a chance." Then when I saw the characters I was like "BLAME!?"
"What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us" is too alarming, ambiguous, and interesting to be one of them.
This reminded me of the work of Mateusz Skutnik, an ilustrator and game dev who also has studied architecture and has made worlds of strange architecture and machines, its specially similar to its saga "submachine" (Which I couldn't take off the head while watching the video)
I love being engage in a contolplativ analysis of the past, present and future of humanities mistakes and if we are doomed to destroy ourselves when a commercial for Airbnb interrupts it.
Tsutomu Nihei is visionary
My god I love his works
Thank you so much I've been looking for this story for a few months.❤
congrats on 1 million team, you really deserved it.
"Such gnats do not seem to notice they are buzzing on the brink of the abyss"
-Marguerite Yourcenar, "The Dark Brain of Piraseni"
The Megastructure of BLAME!/BIOMECHA
Edit: I KNEW IT.
Edit 2: So, the Megastructure was, at some point, entirely practical. It was, for a whole millenium at least, entirely habitable and designed for logisitcal coherence, but... after such an unbelievable span of time, the building machines responsible for outward expansion themselves have simply gone senile. Years pass with every comic panel, and countless swathes of space are purposed as nuclear reactors, refrigeration, water storage, mining long since defunct, breeding grounds of silicon life and pockets of human civilization. It was not that it wasn't supposed to consume the solar system- the sun became an interior dyson sphere at some point, if it even still burns, but the Builder's memory and logic simply decayed as they ran ceaseless. Humanity did forget about them, but they were doing exactly as were designed. Additionally, the Net Gene is not, anymore, supposed to fix the builders. That ship has sailed by the time of BLAME!. The Net Gene allows transcendence from physicality, it is the only escape from the city and it's brutalist horrors. It is the only place grass still grows.
I kinda imaged that the sun is stil burning in the center of the solar system, while the 'city' has become a massive structure surrounding it, like a solid dyson-sphere. And the hollow sphere around the sun is used to collect both the releasing gases and sunlight from the star, converting it to building material (you know, e=mc2), because otherwise, where would the builders at that point even get building material from?
@@MTTT1234 Nah, the sun cannot possibly provide enough energy and material for the scale that the City operates at. There are running theories that suggest the City get building materials through alternate realities and mines dark matter for energy by using gravity furnaces. Gravity furnaces are also responsible for why the City hasn't collapsed into the biggest black hole the universe has ever seen despite massively outmassing the galaxy that it's currently in.
Thanks. BTW: beautiful intro music. Top shelf! Worthy of a favorite movie or TV show. tavi.
Tsutomu Nihei is such a brilliant artist. I am so glad I found out about him.
This somewhat reminds me of Phil Tippets, Mad God. Nowhere depicted in the movie seems actually habitable, there's a section of the land/city at one point that's having a perpetual nuclear war with bombs constantly exploding in the background.
I also just forgot about the factory section. There's a factory creating humanoid beings who then get right to work in the factory, but they keep getting crushed by blocks or machines, or torn apart by creatures, then fed right back into the factory.
OH MY GOD I DIDNT KNOW YOU MADE A VIDEO FOR MY ALL TIME FAVE MANGA THANK YOU! I LOVE BLAME SO MUCH
The pre-prequel before Noise was Biomega. It lays some of the groundwork in Blame!.
A deserted Coruscant... fascinating.
Im so glad to see Tsutomu Nihei's magnum opus get more recognition. I have a Toa Heavy Industries sticker on my car, waiting for the day someone recognizes it.
I gave the manga another read recently, and found parallels with how the engineering is in Armored Core 6. Thought about making a comparison video.
I love BLAME! and all other works by Tsutomu Nihei. They are haunting, beautifully dark and cryptic.
Hehe i knew it from the title
Glad to see Blame get more recognition
Its not obscure but man
Its not as popular as it should be
I’m glad blame is getting more recognition
Nihei is right there top of second tier, reaching for first tier but that's occupied by Shirow, Otomo, Ito, & Hara.
EDIT: NOiSE and Biomega and Snikt! (a cyberpunk Wolverine story) and Beowulf (a cyberpunk retelling) are really REALLY good too. (it feels like NOiSE and Biomega and Blame! are all more or less the same dimension - or very closely related dimensions).
While the comments here are mostly about the world of Blame! which is one of most fantastic sci-fi universes I've ever seen (and I, who normally doesn't collect things for collecting sake, for a record, have two editions of Blame! in two different languages), what absolutely astonished me in this series is that Blame! wouldn't work as a movie or TV show or a game or a book. It only works as a comic book. Words cannot describe this world. Motion would make world loose its stillness, action would remove sense of solitude. City is perfectly captured by artist's pen.
There were several attempts to adapt Blame! as a movie or a series of shorts. All proved to be either mediocre or failed projects altogether. Netflix adaptation is closest... but it's not the same. Beauty of Blame! is in the fact that only force that moves in the City is the Reader. As a reader, you can spend as much time on each page as you want. You can glance across several pages in seconds, or spend several minutes looking at a single page - it's all on you. And it's beautiful...
Never heard of this sadly, but looks awesome, might check it out! Also, this reminds me of the Submachine flash game series.
Fun fact: BLAME is a tv series set in Knights of sidonia. Fun Easter egg
Yup, BLAME was the first thing that came to mind with the intro description.
So happy to see a big channel cover this manga in the modern year. Blame! (and its short prequel, I'd say) is a hidden gem. Just don't watch the movie.
I'd like to note, without much detail to avoid spoilers, that the furthest reaches of the City go beyond even nonsensical AI architecture. The City's edge incorporates biological imagery, despite having no reason to use materials that are any different from the rest of it. At some point, running on the same inputs for long enough caused the builder AI to completely lose the plot. It's surprisingly prescient for a 90's work, even if the story is mostly in service to the art.
The idea of a setting that is inhospitable or even aggressive towards people reminds me of the settings of the video game series, Little Nightmares. I love everything about LN, but by far my favourite parts of it are the gargantuan, atmospheric settings where the game takes place.
Now, the settings in LN vary from this City because they definitely do have a set purpose. The "Maw", the massive submarine in which the original game takes place, is essentially a resort for the wealthy elite, albeit one which involves copious amounts of child murder. The settings in the sequel are even more mundane and down to earth, featuring places like schools, hospitals, and even plain old cities. They seem completely normal in appearance and function, but the difference is, these places are not intended for normal people.
Now, one of the key themes in Little Nightmares is the struggle between children and adults. And as you explore more and more of the universe, it becomes clear that all the monsterous adults aren't some sort of exception or freak accident you must escape. They are the default of this world. All adults are like this in the series, and all children are their prey. There is no space for children to survive within the LN universe, and this is reflected in the setting.
Everything in the LN series is huge compared to your character, far too huge to be properly used by anyone except the massive adults. In order to get around, your child protagonist needs to drag chairs around to open doors, throw things in order to trigger buttons, climb through vents and crawlspaces in the walls. The only way you can survive is by sneaking around, finding clever new ways to use things that aren't meant to be used by you. You are out of place, sneaking around in a world that treats you as vermin that must be exterminated, for the crime of existing in a space that wasn't built for you.
The other thing about this setting is how it affects the characters. In the first game, our protagonist gains control of the Maw, and is implied to later grow into the adult that runs the entire facility. We win, but in the process, our protagonist commits some horrible betrayals and loses her sense of humanity. Similarly, our protagonist in the second game falls into the bowels of a huge, sentient building called the "Signal Tower", and we actually see him mutate into the creature that controls the mysterious, hypnotic signal, and by extent, several of the monsters in game. However, this same creature is defeated by his own younger self in the game, meaning that he himself has now become the big evil monster to defeat.
In both cases, our protagonists do take control of the setting they're in, and they have great power over their surroundings due to this victory. The setting becomes their kingdom, but in the process of gaining control, they are permanently altered into monsters. They have not changed the world to make it anymore accepting of them, they have not found a safe place where they can be themselves, they have simply just been resourceful enough to survive the world for long enough to adapt into something better fit to thrive in that environment. The setting isn't made for people. It doesn't serve them in any way. The people are the ones who must change in order to better fit the world around them, not vice versa.
It's a great metaphor for children growing up in a system that doesn't care for them. I love settings like these because they're so wonderfully Kafkaesque. They're systems that have become so complex, so abstract, that over time they have completely deviated from their original purpose. And stories like these are amazing to follow, because they reflect the real world, which is full of complexities that seem so nonsensical if you look at them from an outsider's perspective. Love the video! Can't wait to see more ❤