Shibo is the secondary protagonist of Blame and as I said she is the much more compelling character. We are first introduced to her when Kiri is thrown into the nondescript bowels of a level of the megastructure and finds a twisted, desiccated skeleton fused to the walls. It’s about as pathetic a way to introduce a main character as I’ve ever seen. She hitched a ride with Kiri (literally) because she claims to be able to help him in some vague way to find the humans he’s looking for. Every motivation and potential solution in Blame is really vague and honestly fairly inconsequential. I don’t think you’re ever supposed to have any concept of how the madness of the world the characters are in could be fixed. It’s kind of like when you try to wrap your head around the problems associated with climate change and what we could do to fix it. The problem is so grand and unknowable in its totality that your mind kind of balks at the thought. It’s probably why so many people choose to outright reject the idea altogether. Anyway, it’s eventually revealed that Shibo was a scientist studying the intersections where the floors of the megastructure meet. To anyone besides Kiri they are essentially impassable so she was desperately trying to find a way through and it is kind of hinted that it’s because of a certain level of hubris and unchecked curiosity. She fails and a lot of people are killed in the process so as punishment she is discarded and left to rot in a kind of undying, Brendon Fraser’s The Mummy kind of way. Kiri rescues her and she manages to transfer her whole being into a new body which is one of the reasons Shibo is so awesome: transhumanism. And it’s not the in your face, obvious transhumanism of Adam Jensen’s “I didn’t ask for this” but rather an essential kind that is just an inherent aspect of the world. Shibo never waxes intellectual about her discarded flesh or how her true self is in some sort of Ghost in the Shell-esque limbo, she just jumps from body to body and perseveres, sacrificing literally everything to help Kiri maybe kinda hopefully save humanity but who knows because he doesn’t even know who he is or what Earth is.

Throughout the story Shibo switched bodies at least three times and at one point inhabits the body of a murderous enemy and then spends a full decade in it waiting in one place when Kiri is flung off into a different dimensional timeline. It’s…it’s kinda just like that. That was one of the first moments in the story that really made me ponder for days after reading it. As I age I’ve become more and more sensitive to the passage of time and how my perception of it is telescoping with increasing speed. To spend ten years of your life waiting patiently for a completely uncertain return crushes me when I compare it to my own Bukowski-like lost decade that I spent wallowing and waiting for something to happen to me. Shibo sacrifices her body and unexplained amounts of her lifetime to help someone who shows her basically no human compassion or understanding. Granted she doesn’t really need any kind of protection but Kiri’s treatment of her feels almost like an abusive relationship, even though their ultimate goal is of paramount importance within the world of the manga,

Shibo is also infinitely more compassionate of a person than Kiri and when encountering other human characters she is the one to stop and offer some kind of aid or support. She’s also absurdly tall which is adorable. The humans of the megastructure are so disconnected that they’ve evolved completely differently and some of them are almost hobbits. There is one moment of brief levity when Shibo and Kiri encounter a group called the Kingfishers and they are fascinated with Shibo being almost twice their height. The levity doesn’t last though as through some more vague and dire happenings the fishers are almost wiped out by machines and Kiri and Shibo get roundly served a beat down. She genuinely seems to care for the fishers and wants to get them to some relative type of safety. Kiri on the other hand seems to help only as a means to shoot more of his enemies. In the terrible anime it ends with the descendants of the fishers talking about Kiri like he’s some kind of beatified saint when in the canon story of the manga Shibo is the one who really preserves their lineage. Next time I’ll get into the adaptation a little bit more