ty for asking, i’m just gonna write a few long lists lol

97 anime likes:

• the animation, including the like, yk the more detailed stills they pan over in place of action or to punctuate important moments, i love it
• the gorgeous backgrounds
• most of the colour choices. red eclipse, femto’s blue eyes, casca’s skintone, griffith’s mauve clothes, etc.
• how close it is to the manga. like, it’s a solid adaption just by virtue of making very few changes.
• so like, most of it really, because i like the manga
• special mention to the entire lead up to the eclipse from griffith’s reality break to the sacrifice tho, because i think that was all pretty damn perfect. it’s the most important scene and they did it right.
• actually also shout out to casca’s flashback to griffith and the dead kid, gennon, the river scene, all that. another difficult v emotional sequence that they nailed imo.
• griffith thinking about how he “loves” guts during the monologue
• skipped most of the griffith/charlotte sex scene iirc which i approve of
• the glimpse of black swordsman guts in ep 1. it’s not perfect but it’s way better than the ovas starting w/ 15 yr old guts
• the opening and closing themes. fucking love both songs ngl
• also the opening monologue. never get tired of hearing it
• the score
• the portrayal of griffith was honestly pretty solid imo. i have very few issues there. and lbr that’s important lol

97 anime dislikes:

• not a big fan of griffith or guts’ character designs.
• just about everything that isn’t identical to the manga is a change for the worse
• turned griffith’s scratch marks into that giant unexplained scar
• adding extra scenes where casca is secretly impressed with guts’ skills in battle in an attempt to build up their relationship better, which instead just made casca look unfair for still being a dick to him for 3 years and made guts stupidly gary stu-ish
• obviously the straightforwardly romantic portrayal of guts and casca’s relationship
• through several seemingly minor changes (eg, skipping guts’ night of self-doubt after he leaves, giving guts’ stay with godo its own half-episode, making guts inviting casca along super romantic rather than the incredibly casual and assholish way he does it in the manga, etc) it makes Guts’ dream seem legitimately noble and worthwhile, with none of the like… implicit critique the manga has. like honestly it completely fucks up what i consider one of the central themes of the story lol
• the pre eclipse stuff also fails to sell guts’ sense of regret – through things like playing guts’ theme while judeau is telling guts to leave, not repeating guts’ statement of regret after casca tells him to leave again, the tone remains consistently in favour of guts’ dream. wrong and bad.
• like it really reads like the suggested tragedy is that guts doesn’t get the chance to ditch griffith with judeau and take off with casca and the raiders lol
• also fucks it up by never directly mentioning guts’ csa trauma
• also fucks it up by losing guts’ self-destructive single-minded urge to fight monsters that we saw thru the wyald stuff. i’m not gonna say that losing wyald was a bad decision, but they should’ve at least moved erika suggesting that guts just wants to fight zodd again to the fucking waterfall scene in question, which they portrayed completely sans zodd discussion, completely sans implication of the self-destructiveness of guts’ dream
• like in the manga he nearly gets killed by the falling logs and just laughs it off like a dumbass while erika is concerned and suggests that guts is driven by something irrational and not actually a ~noble~ dream, ie, wanting to fight zodd again (ie, going deeper, his csa trauma), while in the anime we get a 2nd scene where he successfully slices through the logs as a super basic symbol of growth and a narrative pat on guts’ back that shouldn’t be there!
• honestly just fucking everything about the portrayal of guts’ dream lol it just takes it at face value in a way the manga consistently never did and always undermined and critiqued, and it bugs the hell out of me.
• guts is just drawn in a way that makes him look angry way too often and he often feels ooc to me bc of it. like he lacks a lot of the warmth he has in the manga imo
• showing that griffith is awake when guts says “i’ll stay too” even tho in the manga those words are placed over a panel of him asleep for a reason like, ffs
• lots of other random nitpicky details that only i give a fuck about because my opinions and feelings about the story are too strong lol. like not showing griffith’s face when he asks if guts thinks he’s cruel
• oh huge one: moving the scene where the torturer rips off griffith’s behelit from about a day after he was imprisoned to right before his rescue. completely trivializes griffith’s torture because it still looks like he’s been in there for a day at most
• why on earth did it end where it ended????????????? who’s bright idea was that? the perfect ending is skull knight riding tf out with guts and casca and femto not killing them, but then they also cut out skull knight’s first appearance so idfk man.
• oh some downplaying of griffguts, like i can’t complain too much about this because it was still p homoerotic, but things like omitting guts assuming griffith wants to fuck him right before their first duel. boo.

ultimately at the end of the day as much as i do genuinely like the anime, it’s not telling quite the same story the manga was – the story it’s telling is more boring and basic. but because it sticks so close to the manga the good story still shines through? it just means there’s inconsistent tone choices and stuff, like the aforementioned grievances.

it’s like, they kept casca’s diatribe at guts line for line while she’s screaming that griffith needed him and a man can’t live on dreams alone, but they don’t extend that train of thought to guts going off to pursue his dream, while the manga does.

anyway despite that giant list of dislikes i still think the anime is pretty fantastic overall. i just also like, blame it for a lot of wrong fandom takes lol.

movie likes:

• character designs! honestly imo everyone looked pretty great.
• they played up the homoeroticism and i appreciate that
• illustrating griffith being torn between guts and his dream through that lovely moment when he catches guts when he nearly falls off the stairs right before he catches charlotte, and in a more romantically suggestive way
• the whole scene where griffith shows up at charlotte’s window thoroughly improved on the manga, so hats off there. loved how completely out of it he was to the point where he barely realized where he was and immediately turned to leave when charlotte was like ‘woah dude wtf,’ love that charlotte was the one to ask him to stay and then physically move his hand back to her tit, love how emphatically griffith was thinking about guts during that sex scene, etc. like it’s still not perfect, but it is a vast improvement.
• griffith showing up in person after the hundred man fight was a nice touch
• it was cool that they got a lot of the same english vas from the anime dub back, and they all did a gr8 job. like it’s a pretty good dub imo.
• i liked that they moved ‘the crystalization of your last tear shed’ to after guts’ post-eclipse breakdown
• compared to the anime at least gtsca was more low-key and chill rather than dramatically romantic. still don’t want it there, and still not as… unromantic as the manga, but i’ll take what i can get
• the animation during griffith’s transformation into femto, yk that whole sequence, was cool
• slan’s english voice was super sexy
• ummmmm i feel like they conveyed the whole dreams are stupid theme, and guts’ decision to leave being a mistake, better than the anime? like i got the sense that the ova ppl recognized that was a theme, at least. i’d have to watch them again to really be sure of that tho

movie dislikes:

• GRIFFITH’S. NARRATIVE.
• like holy fuck they completely destroyed his character lmao
• i cannot believe
• no backstory! no tombstone of flame! no ‘do you think i’m cruel?’ THAT WAS THE REASON HE MADE THE SACRIFICE FFS HOW DO YOU SKIP IT????
• no dead kid angst, gennon only in vague implication, no self harm – oh no wait we saw self inflicted scratches, they were just completely contextless and meaningless to the point where we could assume charlotte’s nails made them
• no torture chamber monologue
• no guts monologue in the tavern either for that matter
• no rooftop scene
• again barely the implication of guts’ childhood trauma, both the sexual abuse and the general parental abuse. one vague flashbacky nightmare doesn’t cut it, it’s the cornerstone of the story
• like i get it, it’s a movie trilogy, you have to cut some things, but goddamn, cut out gtsca. trim the hundred man fight. add 20 minutes to the first ova and take the insanely long rape scene out of the third. trim down the whole eclipse sequence. don’t cut out like… the story. like they cut out SO MANY emotionally relevant scenes and kept so many much less relevant scenes, idek.
• and like let’s be real here, they turned griffith from an immensely interesting and complex character into a 1 dimensional dude who is torn between a vaguely evil ambition and being in vaguely evil love with guts, just for the sake of streamlining the least interesting aspects of the story
• they don’t even try to pretend otherwise lol, look at his fucking hilarious evil smile here

• also while i’m looking at it, in general i think they failed at the whole eclipse sequence. looks, lighting, colour, build up of tension… there are a few minor improvements here and there (eg casca’s point of view shot of femto, femto telekinesising guts back a la the black swordsman arc which emphasizes his failure to act when he escapes), but overall it doesn’t work for me at all. like imo the anime has the exact same highs and lows as the manga, but while the ova avoids some lows it never reaches those highs.
• they also had griffith overhear guts saying he wants to stay. i really don’t get why this happened twice lol, like… ok his face is kind of shadowed here but he’s still very clearly asleep? this is an important detail, guts’ interrupted words are even on that very panel, so why would you go out of your way to show that he’s awake and listening at that point.

• the pacing sucked. 3rd movie was too long, 1st was too short, and they skipped waaaaaay too many significant scenes that should’ve been there as emotional beats
• honestly the movies are pretty, they’re nicely fanservicey in ways, they capture some good subtleties and nuances at times, but they’re a husk of the story
• oh did i mention the music during the eclipse rape? incredible.

also i am actually generally positive about the movies too despite what it seems like here lmao. i’ve watched them all like, 3 or more times and i find them v enjoyable.

i just have a way easier time listing nitpicky flaws than positives honestly. the flaws stand out to me, the virtues pass me by because i’m just enjoying them and not dwelling on them

and lbr here at the end of the day no adaption will ever really satisfy me unless i somehow find several million dollars lying around and make my own lol. and that would probably be a flop anyway.