I think the reason I like "Blame!" so much is like this: Even though the world it brings you into is very much not "good" from the start, potentially not even survivable or redeemable in a recognizably human way, and even though the near-nihilism in this setting is vertigo-inducing in its depth and austerity, even for all that intense dehumanization of everything, everyone left alive in the world is willing to do some craziness on a level that meets the insanity of the world they're in—to rampage around with an overpowered weapon, or teleport chaotically to random locations, or die and be reborn repeatedly, or just go on with their fellow folks fighting against wild odds, getting thrashed off cliffs by giant worms and shit, and they're just simply doin it. For most of the story, they're not "saving the day" in a day-to-day sense or even fighting for freedom on the scale of a lifespan, not expecting any measure of power or validation that their lives mean anything, and there's no insistence that anyone should "do the right thing" or anything like that, we aren't pandered to on that level, but nevertheless it's very engaging in the way it depicts a constant struggle to exist. Even when the person struggling to exist is a posthuman leather-gun-devil whose existence is directly threatened by the only available route toward hope for everyone else. The scope of all this, and what the architecture does for it, is actually not any more fantastic than the reality of our tinyness, but since it so dramatically defines itself in its hellish terms, it's more stark. And so each character, even minor ones, are extremely here and now and real, saying, overpoweringly, "I exist" even when they're just shuffling around. It's incredibly grim but weirdly satisfying. Feels a lot like the impulse to draw a sad, cool, anime OC staring back at you from the pages of your school notebook—the most appropriately over the top, overwrought, extended to its most extreme conclusions, most hyperfixated possible version of that. A really genuinely optimistic and validating application of being a stoic gun guy.
Existing in as much as you are firing an incredibly powerful laser beam wildly into an endless ruin surrounded by an endless void