This post on Blame! is part 1 of a multi-part series of posts I hope to write on the value of obscurity and lack of information in writing. No plot spoilers are involved for Blame! as I probably couldn’t competently spoil it even if I wanted to.
The Virtues of a Story You Don’t Understand: Part I
As a writer, one may gather different benefits from reading stories on which they hold a wide range of opinions. Stories I find objectionable fuel my desire to refine my own ideas, while stories that impress me present new possibilities for how I can portray them. In this way, it makes sense that there would be something just as valuable to gather from a story I don’t understand as there would be from a story I do.
Time to Draw a Collective Groan
Blame! is the Dark Souls of manga. It might be something of a jarring statement to use as a transition, especially for those familiar with the Soulsborne franchise who would argue that Berserk is a more fitting analogue. Just by saying this, I also gave a games journalist somewhere a bad case of acid reflux, so let me explain.
Miyazaki and FromSoft clearly took a lot of inspiration from Berserk for the Souls franchise’s aesthetic, design, and tone. That being said, reading Berserk feels nothing like playing a Soulsborne game. Rather, my read-through of Blame! was the closest media experience I’ve had to something like the first 40 hours of Elden Ring.
In both, information is delivered piecemeal. If you miss a connection, clue, or scrap of world building, too bad. If you want to know why things are the way they are you have to put in the hard work. It’s a user-hostile pedagogy that somehow ends up even more motivating. Every slight revelation feels like a victory.
Killy Me Softly With His Song
It’s been ages since I read Blame! and I don’t think I could name more than three characters if I tried, let alone any of the locales, factions, or technologies. Killy’s gun plays a huge role in the story and I haven’t the foggiest idea what it was, or even if calling it a gun is accurate. Ivy has one of the coolest weapons I’ve seen in a sci-fi story, because it felt suited for the setting despite its anachronism. Who was Ivy? What were they doing? Why were they an antagonist? Beats me.
Blame! obfuscated its content because there were more important things to pay attention to. What happens if you look at the hero’s journey through a really grimy window? How can a setting be a direct and imposing character in the story? What if you write science fiction in a way where there is no possible option to explain everything? Can a dystopia be so past the point of recognition that it shaves away all relatable features of society for 90% of the plot? Is it even dystopia if there’s no society? Can we even call this an apocalypse?
The whole story might make sense in the context of Nihei’s work (and his education in design and architecture). But, with this being the first story of his I’ve read, it shocked me that I had never considered those questions. Blame! gave me something infinitely more valuable than memorable characters and plot points. It taught me that writing doesn’t have to be a tool to provide answers.
National Grovel Fighting Month
As a quick anecdote, a few years ago I tried participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I was interested in developing a fantasy story which had been swirling around in the ether for a significant time prior. As I prepared I came across a disheartening trend: all of the materials I could find that NaNoWriMo pushed as resources for preparing writers were oriented towards using a classical three act structure. I hadn’t once conceived of my story as something with a defined beginning, middle, and end. Rather, I generated it as a collage of important concepts and images scattered in time.
In the face of such a streamlined approach to writing, I ended up abandoning the draft before the halfway point. Is this really all it means to write a novel? Am I doomed forever to ape methods that are oil to my water?
No Further Question From The Truth
Later, I had the good fortune to be in the audience for a reading and Q&A with William Gibson, one of the writers whose work incited my love for speculative fiction. I asked him during the Q&A if he had advice for what sorts of processes he might use to write a story. He flatly declined to answer, and instead told me that it is different for every individual writer, and to copy someone else would be doing oneself a disservice.
This advice refreshed me so deeply since there seems to be an entire industry fueled by writers telling other writers how to write. I had to learn for myself that my writing only works if the process itself is a collage. Because of this, I hold very little interest in planning using the hero’s journey and other vaunted formulae, which is not to say I think I’m above them. I tried repeatedly to give them the full respect they’re due in my own process, but the ideas I try to express can’t fit neatly in those vessels, and they rebel, invariably. If they do appear, they’ll have to show up as an organic end product.
Blame! I Wanna Live Forever
To bring this back to Blame!, I can’t even begin to imagine Tsutomu Nihei’s process in creating and developing this work. Everything about it is so alien to me that I feel as though I am stargazing. When I try to envision how he knew to tie the story elements together, I come up blank. And yet I can’t help but feel it’s coherent, that it somehow makes perfect sense to him.
Blame! taught me to trust the unfamiliar if the writer deems it trustworthy. Sit with it. Patience is a virtue, after all.
If you think patience isn’t a virtue, waste no time and shoot me a message, or comment down below to tell me you think I’m wrong and I’m to Blame! for all of the evils in society (Eh? Eh? *nudge nudge*).
(I apologize. But do feel free to comment.)