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That was an amazing retelling of the manga, and a perfect way to transmogrify it into a 2 hour movie. Loses some of the atmosphere and sense of scale but I found myself not really caring that much, even though those were the two things I like most about Blame. I was never really into the look of any kind of CG animation, but Cibo and Sanakan sold the gently caress out of it, it's the first time where I thought, 'yeah, they couldn't have done this better with traditional animation.' Also is it just me or did they reduce the framerate on everything else in the entire movie just so they could raise it just for those two for effect? Or did their fantastic animation just trick me into thinking that? I am gushing like a teenage fangirl but I 1000% expected a disjointed and mediocre direct adaptation that tries to rush through the entire manga's plot, but instead got a lovingly crafted reboot/alt universe/whatever that completely stands on its own while keeping much of the key imagery of the original. Every dollar I threw at Netflix over the years was totally worth it if it helped fund this. Some cons: teenage crush was stupid, and I agree Killy felt pretty off, he just seemed like a robotic/superquiet dude in the manga, here he's a lobotomized samurai, I don't think newcomers to Blame will understand or like his character at all. Sanakan slowly narrating herself was silly but the fact that I was making GBS threads my pants in terror distracted from that effectively
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May 20, 2017 11:28
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 17:06 |
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As far as I've been able to piece together from the various manga and terribly translated interviews, Silicon Life originated as net-criminals who thrived in the early netsphere due to the chaos resulting from its incredible complexity and half-thought out measures and protocols. As they faced growing pressure from the early Safeguards, they began to increasingly cyberize and eventually turned into a kind of techno-cult that sought to increase the chaos that they hid and thrived in, and ultimately developed a method by which they could abuse one of the variety of login methods (in this case, the one made for use by non-cybernetic humans with no net implant, which presumably had weaker security) to access high levels of the netsphere and steal Safeguard technology. This hack evidently required the use of non-cyberdized human children, who did not survive the process. Silicon Life then took the Safeguard technology and started incorporating it into themselves, essentially becoming cyborg-Safeguard hybrids. The Safeguards, being as poorly thought out as everything else about the netsphere, basically flipped the gently caress out at all this and began increasingly restricting access through two methods, the first being to disable the vulnerable login method, the second being to eliminate the vector for these attacks in the base reality, i.e. kill all the non-implanted humans. They also tried to physically destroy Silicon Life, but when that failed they resorted to initiating some kind of attack on them through the netsphere, which also failed and ended up seriously damaging it to some unknown extent. This 'attack' might actually be one and the same as the creation of the net terminal gene, which would be the ultimate way of restricting access to the netsphere, though that might have come later as just a natural escalation of the increasing restrictions. At any rate, that too was a poorly thought-out concept and Silicon Life ultimately developed some kind of virus to attack it for some reason, presumably killing everyone with the gene. My guess is that the 'virus' was actually along the same lines as their no net implant login hack and accidentally got used/released in an uncontrolled manner. The end result of all this was that the Safeguards remained in permanent flipped the gently caress out mode, the megastructure began expanding unendingly due to damage the netsphere suffered, and the now few people who could log in and try to fix things were all dead. Lose-lose for everybody! Killy was likely around for all this and knows what happened on an instinctual level, even if he's forgotten the particulars over 3000 years, and that's why he hates Silicon Life so much. My rather depressing theory is that he does a 180 on his opinion of them in Blame2 because he was forced to use their hack or something similar to gain deep enough access to the netsphere to shut it all down, as it seems doubtful that any Joe Schmoe with the gene gets unconditional power over the netsphere.
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May 23, 2017 14:51
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I remember a pretty in depth conversation about the Safeguards' sapience from either Nihei or his editor, apparently it is partly a function of how long they are active, and in Sanakan's specific case her ten year stint cohabitating a brain with Cibo accelerated this process with some of Cibo rubbing off on her, and when the Safeguards retrieved her consciousness they noticed it had gotten a little weird and boxed her away, allowing the Governing Agency to nab her without the Safeguards really caring. I don't recall reading anything giving more detail about Dhomo and Pcell though, which is a shame because there are so many interesting questions there. There really is an unusual and amazing density of concepts and background information that makes up Blame, yet it completely resists elaborating or sometimes even hinting at most of it. I think my favorite hands-down is that there is some kind of incredibly powerful system within the megastructure that maintains Earth-normal gravity throughout each layer and prevents the whole thing from instantly collapsing into itself under its own massive weight; Killy's gun works by blocking the effect of this device in a localized area, and everything within simply destroys itself. I am sure that is terrible science but it's okay because science will never be that cool. Also the level 9 Safeguard's attack is it literally teleporting a piece of the sun to its location. EDIT: Relevant to the movie, if anyone was wondering how Cibo's weird laser pointer barrier actually worked, it's a similar concept to Killy's gun, it's all done in 'software' so to speak - it temporarily causes the netsphere to mark that area of the megastructure as unpassable to Safeguard, with nothing actually physically preventing passage. Xy Hapu fucked around with this message at 17:55 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 17:40
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My take was that the transformation was the method by which they physically retrieved the stolen Safeguard technology, similar to how the level 9 was stolen. The Safeguard parts are downloaded onto the kids, then they are dissected to extract the parts. I think that's why it's significant that the girl in the epilogue/short story retrieved her hidden moth wing memento and used the DNA to metamorphasize into a flying silicon creature and escape, otherwise she would've been cattle like the endless row of other children waiting to get plugged in.
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May 23, 2017 21:11
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Ha, he kind of talks about that, about how gravitation is an extremely weak force and that a gun that shoots gravitons would do very little by itself, but the devastating aspect is that the gravitational beam it emits disrupts the tightly controlled environmental variables within the megastructure. Which is why the Safeguard's official name for it is the Type 1 Variable Critical Arms, an armament that creates a critical situation where all variables have failed. To be honest it kind of sounds like some crazy thing he made up after the fact, but there you have it  But it sort of makes sense that everyone just calls it a gravitational beam emitter, from their perspective that's observably all it does, and in their world of artificial variables it's unlikely they're able to gain a good enough understanding of the true laws of physics to realize there has to be something more going on.
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May 24, 2017 07:06
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Considering the gravitational pull of something like the megastructure, I assume nuclear fusion is a possibility, though don't check my math on that. Less metal answer is the energy released from a ton of material hitting a wall of artificially normalized space at some kind of insane speed, momentarily expanding in an explosion that fills up the cylinder of real space, then real space being normalized again, releasing the explosion in all directions. But the concept of a field of artificially normalized space is such a vague and hand wavy thing that you could probably make up any number of reasons why its disruption would lead to an explosion. It also just occurred to me that the GBE should theoretically get more and more powerful the higher up in the megastructure it is due to increasing gravity in real space, I wonder if this is borne out in the manga.
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May 24, 2017 11:53
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Megafunk posted:I had no idea Nihei gave so much extra background details in interviews. Any other sources/interesting tidbits that you guys know of? The balance of the stuff I've read comes from the interview section of Blame! And So On that no one except one guy ever bothered to translate, you can find it here: http://www.randomisgod.com/blame/btranslation.html Fair warning, it can be headache inducing to read due to the iffy translation, partly because of the complexity of the language and concepts it deals with. But you can kind of figure most of it out though context. Nihei also likes to talk in hypotheticals, as if he's analyzing the Blame universe as an outside observer, but usually it's relatively clear what his intentions were with any given concept, even if he acts coy about it. You get stuff like, "Hmm, the Level 9's weapon seems to be on a similar level to Mensab's teleportation. I wonder if its power comes from another world. It seems as hot as the sun" and other such silliness. Other cool tidbits that stick out: The megastructure is filled with nanomachines, which have eliminated all viruses and harmful bacteria, so survivability from wounds is greatly increased for everyone. They also provide some type of pain management, which I guess is why everyone is just like  when they get parts blown off and such.The megastructure as a whole extends to the edge of the solar system, but the regular city layers make up only a portion of that and extend only to Jupiter orbit. It functions similarly in concept to a dyson sphere with the sun providing power at the center, but actual transmission of this power throughout the vast structure relies on gravity furnaces, presumably using teleportation, because traditional power distribution would be incredibly inefficient across such huge distances, and unlike a regular dyson sphere it's completely filled with crap rather than being a contiguous hollow space. Consequently, rather than being spherical, the core of the megastructure is described as being a series of donut-shaped city layers stacked on top of one another, a shape that seems to facilitate the gravity furnace transmission system as the Toha colony ship is structured in a similar manner. Also, the reason Toha's gravity furnace started loving up and creating new dimensions/timelines is because a gravity furnace needs to be in a place that has 'space-time equilibrium', which I gather means there can't be a bunch of uncontrolled/uncalibrated mass around it distorting space-time, and that it's designed to function in deep space, or at least somewhere with a consistent and predictable level of space-time distortion. Unfortunately, the location in the megastructure Toha ended up in has heavy builder activity, and over thousands of years they've been creating and destroying an asston of stuff around it at random, some of which can be seen surrounding it in the manga. This meant the gravity furnace had to increasingly compensate for the external distortions to prevent its internal equilibrium from going out of whack, and by the time Killy and Cibo come across it, it had pretty much reached the limit. But Killy and Cibo's fuckery with the furnace then somehow temporarily stabilized it, and the central AI (which is just the surviving AIs of the other Caves who have merged their programming together in order to keep from going insane due to all the outside-their-programming poo poo they had to deal with) decided to take this opportunity to try to teleport away. The really interesting upshot of all this is that the entire megastructure is in an eerily similar situation, with its relatively ordered, cylindrical gravity furnace-containing city layer core being surrounded by the spiky and more random outer megastructure, reaching all the way to the edge of the solar system and continually expanding and changing. So it could be conjectured that the megastructure's own gravity furnace/furnaces are similarly being pushed to their limits, resulting in dimensional/temporal duplications encompassing the entire structure. And one such alternate dimension could be what we see in the Blame movie, and the characters from both could conceivably meet under the right circumstances.
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May 25, 2017 11:14
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I made an appropriately gigantic diagram of my best interpretation of what the megastructure looks like, based around true solar distances. Even with the sun scaled at half a pixel in size, I could still reasonably only fit 60% of the megastructure, which is kind of terrifying.
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May 25, 2017 19:02
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There is/was a pretty amazing looking exploration game in development which takes place in the Blame megastructure in all but name, which I desperately wish would get released; made by the same guy who did NaissancE, which is also partly Blame-inspired. Guy really put a lot of thought into it, including optional fast travel through kilometers-high staircases and such, no updates in a few years though. Maybe the movie will spark renewed interest.Pierson posted:Xy might know the answer but I just took it as early concepts later scrapped. It would still work though even if they were intended: The kid like you say could easily have had either the gene or the potential for the gene, and the girl could have been the last member of his support team to keep up with him, or from an organisation he met along the way that had a similar goal. We know he was wound up and let go by somebody (probably as a last resort), and volume one was so much earlier in the journey (those timescales again) it's possible he still had contact with them. This is pretty much exactly how I read it as well, and haven't seen anything to indicate otherwise. Definitely feels ever so slightly off from the rest of the manga. I think the best part of the early chapters is Killy just sitting there as the bugs rained down on him, I feel like it was a key character moment that could have been useful to include in the movie in some form. It seemed like a perfect encapsulation of the mental weariness that came from 3000 years of seeing all sorts of crazy/tragic poo poo.
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May 28, 2017 19:03
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 17:06 |
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A good number of Blame! movie concept art, production shots, CG models, etc. Winking Sanakan is doubleplus ungood 
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Jun 4, 2017 10:40
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