POST-HUMAN SCI-FI DONE CORRECTLY

I have finished BLAME!, and let it be thrust plainly: this is not a manga that tells you a story. This is a manga that abandons you inside one. Tsutomu Nihei does not hold your hand. He does not pause to check if you’re comfortable. He builds an infinite, brutalist megastructure, pushes you off the edge, all while the story keeps going. The silence is deafening. Dialogue is rationed like oxygen, perhaps where its charm lie too. Pages stretch wide with steel, void, scale so obscene, its utterly gorgeous. You don’t read BLAME! without confusion. And that’s the genius. The story is fragmented, hostile, almost indifferent. Information arrives late, if at all. Cause and effect exist, but they don’t announce themselves. You are forced to think, to infer, to feel dread without explanation. A true brain-fuck, not because it’s confusing, it just refuses to simplify. Kyrri is not a hero in the traditional sense. A force moving through an uncaring system. He merely survives long enough to pass through it. The atmosphere is absolutely brutalist: concrete, steel, repetition, scale. Every panel feels like architecture designed by a god that hates humanity. The city is endless, recursive, decaying and expanding at the same time. It feels almost post-human. Its not all dark!!! Hope exists, but only in microscopic doses. There is nothing else like BLAME!. Not in manga. Not in sci-fi. Not anywhere. IT IS ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE OF A THRUST. WITH THRUSTITUDE NOWHERE ELSE SEEN. Yes, i might have shed some hair in the process of reading it. fun fact: Its pronouced : "BLAM!" Like the sound effect.