hmm yeah it is kind of inconsistent with the whole schierke calling on spirits thing, the rituals, etc. good point!
maybe she will have a surprise backstory, like only being half human or something. or at least it’s a worthwhile headcanon, if we never learn anything more about her.
Enh, to be fair some warlock dude in Elfhelm kinda suggested this.
Though I definitely think this is just, like, his opinion, man.
I think we’re getting two sides to this whole Falconia thing, and we’re meant to draw our own conclusions. Like, yeah Griffith’s country is the only chill place now, which is shitty, but on the other hand it’s also 50x better than the world was even before he flooded it with monsters, and it seems that his plan is to keep expanding it into an inclusive empire.
It’s not that NeoGriff is a con man or w/e, forcing people to buy his world peace, it’s that flooding the world with monsters is the only way to make people stop being shitty and work together in a nice utopia that values equality over social status, and it’s up to the reader whether the ends justify the means or not.
Plus it’s worth noting that this is what humanity wants. The Conviction arc was largely dedicated to showing us how shitty the world is. Nobles torture and torment peasants, outcasts are miserable, the holy see sucks, the heathens suck, plague everywhere, people starving, pretty much everyone except the richies is unhappy. Griffith’s new world order is essentially a response to all the bullshit we see up close and personal in the Conviction arc, a world where outcasts are welcomed, people are valued for what they can do rather than what family they were born to, apostles no longer eat people, no inquisitions, no discrimination that we see – like it’s fitting that the prostitutes from the Conviction arc return in Falconia as tour guides/organizers.
Griffith, as “the desired” of humanity, presumably fulfills humanity’s desires. Of his own free will and for his own maybe shifty reasons, but free will and fate are not mutually exclusive in Berserk – people’s choices always play into fate’s hands. The Idea of Evil told him he’d either save or doom humanity by doing whatever the hell he wants. I kind of assume this means less saving/dooming the world and more a metaphysical Jesus-y saving/dooming people’s souls – or quite possibly saving humanity from themselves or dooming them to more of their own subconsciousness dicking with them. You know, either getting rid of the Idea of Evil by shaping humanity’s point of view, or dooming them to continue having their mass subconscious manifest in a malicious entity who controls fate.
That’s just a theory tho, we don’t really know what the Idea of Evil means afaik, and even if I’m right I have no idea if what NeoGriffith is doing is more likely to save or doom humanity lol. Or hell maybe he’s on the road to “dooming” humanity but, similar to how letting Guts go kicked off the series of events leading to his rebirth as NeoGriffith, something in his faulty, Guts-obsessed demon soul is going to cause him to do something unexpected and better/freeing for humanity. /more theorizing
ANYWAY all that said I actually fully expect Miura to come down more on Guts’ side, since he is the protagonist and all. Personally I’m into Falconia, I like the whole ‘can’t make a utopia without breaking a few eggs’ thing, but since Guts, on a more philosophical level, represents free will and raging against fate and struggling against your situation while Griffith more represents being saved by someone who comes along and makes your life easier (i think), and Berserk is all about The Struggle, I think there’s an undertone of it being better to suffer in an uncaring world than to have a happy easy life in a utopia.
hey fun fact, theresias timeline p directly follows guts’s by my closest age estimations. her mom dies when she’s 3 leading her dad to become an increasingly bigger asshole, then her dad is killed when she’s 12, traumatizing the hell out of her. catch me outlining my butch lesbian theresia side story titled “Berserk But Better”
You know, that’s never actually occurred to me as something that needs an origin story. I kind of just assume she’s like a naturally talented witch, like maybe some people have more innate ability to see the astral plane than others.
The fact that she’s kind of weird and off-beat probably helps tho, since the more like, boring and conservative you are the more blind you are to magic and stuff lol. She talks about feeling alone all her life I think so I figure she was never formally trained by a professional witch or anything, it seems like something she was born with.
Do you (or anyone else reading this) have any theories about her?
griffith/guts: *sees a smudge the vague shape of a person in the distance* thats my lover 🙂
one more for the road:
they got a telescopic zoom lens where the other is concerned
you know what doesn’t get enough attention in fandom?
they’re literally across a huge ass ballroom from each other, and guts is outside and barely visible when they exchange tender smiles.
it’s like this:
but this is what he actually saw:
like
I love this as an introduction to Griffith so, so much.
It establishes the bare bones of his philosophy and his motivation in the first two pages, in a way that’s not untrue, but also exists to start the audience off with an assumption that Miura then complicates as we learn more about Griffith. We start off thinking of him as driven by grandiose thoughts of destiny, and wanting to be part of this true elite, beyond nobility. Again, not untrue, but as we learn more about him, we learn how much of a driving role guilt plays in this philosophy. “Martyrdom for a merciless God. What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth even a single piece of silver.” We see later how much this weighs on him, how driven he is to make that martyrdom not wasteful.
But even better than that, this brief scene starts with philosophical questions, but the real point, the real establishing character moment, is, “you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” It’s such an effective contrast that sums up Griffith’s entire narrative arc throughout the Golden Age. The dream vs Guts. We establish the dream here, but even more important than that, we establish that Guts is singular to Griffith.
The keys speech builds to that final statement, it practically serves as a handy preamble to our first direct depiction of what Guts is to Griffith, and I love it.
oh yea i assume the same bc of guts central role but also i think people are definitely unwilling to extend understanding towards griffith that isnt one dimensional…
yeah and it’s absolutely not only because Griffith’s narrative is shown in less intimate detail. people go out of their way to avoid sympathizing with him.
also. ot to tangent here but HOW do people work around that guts clearly
gave more of a fuck about griffith and saving him during the eclipse he
didnt even think once about casca until she showed up for the plot
trauma convenience. wow what an epic romance.
i’m so baffled by it. it’s even weird in the manga, like, you’d think if miura hooked guts and casca up solely to make the eclipse more dramatic he would like, show that guts gives a shit and have him prioritize her at some point during the Eclipse before being literally forced to watch her suffer, and yet.
“guts had a harder life than griffith” uuuuuuuuuu why cant people read lmfao
ikr
idk i think it boils down to the fact that we’re with Guts more, we see his traumas and hard times in detail, while we’re generally told about Griffith’s rather than shown, and with him we only see the after effects.
but like any way you slice it i feel like a year of constant torture and permanent loss of the use of your limbs and ability to speak is worse than Guts’ eclipse trauma, which largely revolves around stuff that happens to other people (dead friends, traumatized girlfriend). Yeah Guts lost a limb but he got a canon to replace it, and it’s his choice to go out and shoot monsters with that canon instead of taking Godo’s sage advice and chilling out with the friends he has left.
tbh I agree that this is part of why people respond more positively to Guts and negatively to Griffith. Griffith’s narrative ended in succumbing to despair and becoming a monster, while Guts’ nickname is “struggler” lol. People absolutely respond more positively to a narrative about fighting and persisting against all odds than a narrative about losing everything and essentially selling your soul because you feel like you’re out of options.
However, that said, I think this misses a few important points.
Like for one, to describe Griffith as embracing Femto while Guts resists the Beast of Darkness is kind of, well, loaded and not entirely correct. Griffith didn’t embrace Femto, he embraced his dream and the guilt it caused and seized the one chance he had to make tens of thousands of deaths that weigh on him meaningful.
Like, one thing I love about Griffith’s narrative is that his motivation – to ensure that thousands of people didn’t die for nothing – is heroic. In most stories that would be considered noble. Berserk twists that, because Miura likes to play with morality this way. Griffith’s noble, quite respectable goal, and his relatable and sympathetic emotional motivation (guilt) are what lead him to darkness.
Miura isn’t showing us a character who cheerfully embraces his own inner darkness, he’s showing us a character who becomes a demon ironically because of his desire to be a good person. What ultimately convinces him to make the sacrifice isn’t the promise of power, or rejuvination – it’s to ensure that so many people didn’t die for no reason.
Griffith and Guts’ narratives are different. They exist to pose different questions about what it means to be evil/human/good. But they aren’t comparable on a characterization level.
Guts hasn’t had a moment of pure despair where he’s given a choice to live out his life wholly dependant on others, mute and helpless, wracked with irreconcilable guilt and about to lose the last thing that matters to him, or sacrifice people for the sake of a goal they, among thousands of others, chose to die for, to make those deaths meaningful.
Instead, Guts has a sinister jiminy cricket telling him to murder and rape people. And Griffith doesn’t have a particularly vocal and belligerent hawk taunting him, he has a moment of despair, ordained by causality, orchestrated by the Idea of Evil for the sole purpose of having him choose to make the sacrifice.
Guts and Griffith are different people, but Guts is not inherently better or more moral than Griffith. Griffith frets about killing people for his dream, Guts tells him murder is nbd. Griffith prioritizes Guts over his dream several times before that final moment of pure despair during the Eclipse, and Guts prioritizes revenge over Casca several times before finally giving up on revenge after NeoGriffith blows him off. Griffith prostitutes himself to a pedophile at a young age to prevent as many deaths in the line of duty as he can, while Guts doesn’t really give a fuck about people dying unless he personally knows and cares about them (or if they’re children). Guts describes his dream to Casca as “I just did my own thing,” while Griffith describes his dream to Casca as, “for the sake of the dead… if there’s something I can do… that thing is to win.”
Ultimately, Griffith’s narrative illustrates a man succumbing to evil in the pursuit of good, while Guts’ narrative illustrates a man struggling to balance the good and evil within himself. The only relevant personality difference between them is that Griffith is driven towards a goal by guilt, essentially living for the dead, and Guts is living for himself and the people he personally cares about.
And to address another of your points, Guts has not had a harder life than Griffith. Maybe he’s had a harder childhood – we don’t see much of Griffith’s but it’s a fairly safe assumption – but after killing Gambino?
The narrative takes the position that during the Golden Age, Guts actually had it fairly easy compared to Griffith. Guts’ years with the Hawks are his happy place. Griffith on the other hand had a huge emotional burden on his shoulders, his guilt caused him to self harm, he had the aforementioned encounter with a pedophile bc he was driven by guilt, he had to hone himself to his limits to achieve his goal. Constantly dealing with nobles, constantly fighting at the head of his army, figuring out battle plans, carrying out assassinations that added to his guilt, maintaining an immaculate image of himself, and emotionally closed to everyone except, rarely, Guts. I mean like, the stakes of the climactic battle of the Golden Age is the risk of Griffith being captured as a sex slave lol, and he not only knows it, he incorporates it into his battle plan, like, dude is under a lot of pressure.
And of course, that’s nothing compared to a year of constant torture. Even after the Eclipse, Guts has never experienced anything on that level. Griffith was only barely sane at the end of it, totally physically helpless, mute, he’d lost everything he valued including, he thought at the end, Guts. He tried to kill himself right before the behelit opened.
Like, sorry, Guts has had a hard life, but it doesn’t compare to Griffith’s year of hell. Especially considering that, post-Eclipse, Guts had the option to bow out any time and live in relative peace and comfort with Rickert and Erika (which everyone and their dog points out to him), and now has the option to hang out in peace and comfort in Elfhelm that he probably also won’t take.
Idk basically this is a long way of saying that yeah, thanks to the thematic purposes of their narratives Griffith’s is about succumbing to evil in pursuit of good and Guts’ is about trying to find a balance between good and evil, and at a shallow glance that makes Guts look more respectable than Griffith, but that doesn’t actually reflect on their personalities, their morals, or their personal struggles.
Hey there! I’m always happy to get asks and I’m so glad you enjoy the blog :”)
** rape mentions below, obviously.
I think what you’re proposing is a really safe guess as for what the phallic monsters are supposed to represent. Her rape by Femto is definitely supposed to be the “capstone” to what lead to her regression, and so the phallic monsters being a reference to that experience is more than likely. However, I personally (am hoping, really) that it’s not such a narrow reason. There’s the obvious fact that she was raped by multiple apostles before Femto during the Eclipse, but there’s also how being treated as a sexual object by men has resulted in her molestation throughout her entire character arc.
I tried to compile a list of men who have tried/succeeded in assaulting her throughout Berserk off the top of my head, but I think I’m missing too many instances to even post it, LOL. I’d try to go through and do a definitive count, but that’s… so depressing. I don’t think I need to explicitly count and name every man to harm Casca for anyone who’s read Berserk to understand that Casca has endured endless abuse at their hands. Men have regularly viewed Casca as a sexual object, at whether she be young or old, mentally “there” or not, shitty background characters, villains, and protagonist alike. While the Eclipse is the most likely and perhaps largest contributor to these phallic visions that haunt her subconscious, it would be unfair to call that her only instance of major trauma. GOD would I love for a callback to wow, that one time when regressed!Casca killed three men who tried to assault her, just to be held down and touched (cough and bit cough) against her will by Guts? Her expressions once he “comes out of it” are genuinely heartbreaking.
Casca has been through a LOT of bullshit at the hands of specifically men* and so I really hope the dick monsters are representing that as a whole (and that said “coverage” is a topic broached in upcoming chapters). We’ll see whether or not Miura will take that route, or act like it never happened like he did with Guts’s CSA trauma post-Eclipse.
Disclaimer because admin isn’t cis: yeah a dick doesn’t determine manhood but I don’t expect anything woke from Berserk when we can’t even get basic feminism, so I’m leaving it on the assumption that all of the individuals depicted to have assaulted Casca thus far are cis men and have dicks
I’m not the most eloquent writer without half a dozen drafts first, so I’d like to direct this ask at @bthump as well, in case she has a different take or any extra input! ❤
I 100% agree and tbh this is probably a better, more thoughtful response than I would’ve given. Casca’s entire narrative existence is defined by rape, rape attempts, and rape threats, and honestly it’s kind of fucked up how utterly fitting the damn subconscious dick monsters are.
I would be very glad if they represent not just Femto’s attack, and not just the apostles during the Eclipse, but the way her entire life revolves around sexual violence, from her first kill to her current mental state to her fear of Guts. I mean the dick monsters are a helluva crass way of showing it, but this is Berserk. The most I hope for is acknowledgement lol, to ask that it be treated with care and respect is way too high a bar to clear lol.
And at the very least Miura definitely knowingly used Casca as his commentary on misogyny and how hard it is to be a woman surrounded by rapey men, so I don’t think it’s unlikely that all her other experiences with assault will be taken into account. I thought some of those phallic monsters might’ve been purposefully based on Wyald, eg.
I often feel fans of righteous characters are more problematic and scary than fans of villains. They have this tendency to see villains in the worst possible light because it makes the good characters look even better. And some of them just prefer villains that’re totally evil, they find such good vs evil narrative more satisfying, it’s simple, black and white, no debate, no ambiguity, pure feel good story.
lol i completely agree.
under a cut bc i went on a long barely relevant rant about The Discourse lmao
Holy fuck, the thing about “discourse” being a result of women being expected to be the arbiters of morality (presumably in the only area that their woman brains can handle, art) drives me batshit crazy.
Women as artists and consumers are expected to accommodate for everyone in their tastes or even just their ideas about the thing they’re consuming. I certainly am critical of things that I enjoy all the time so this is no evocation of the “P.C. Police” or whatever the fuck. But “discourse” isn’t really about analysis.
It’s bizarre to me that something like engaging with a piece of fiction in a through way is seen as blanket approval or that it ought to be. It is no surprise to me that a lot of the more pernicious moralizing has to do specifically with sexual and queer content given that a lot of the emotional labor in our sexual culture is done by women, femmes, and queer people.
It often comes out as nothing more than a repackaging of victim blaming in the case of “problematic ship discourse”; that wanting to understand sexual trauma through fiction makes one as “perverse” as an offender.
I often feel fans of righteous characters are more problematic and scary than fans of villains. They have this tendency to see villains in the worst possible light because it makes the good characters look even better. And some of them just prefer villains that’re totally evil, they find such good vs evil narrative more satisfying, it’s simple, black and white, no debate, no ambiguity, pure feel good story.
lol i completely agree.
under a cut bc i went on a long barely relevant rant about The Discourse lmao
i keep trying to turn this into an organized essay about how much i hate tumblr discourse, villaincourse in this case, but tbh i just don’t have the stamina to dig into that subject properly lol. so just like, suffice to say, hating obviously flawed and/or villainous characters and their fans while loving less obviously flawed and/or heroic characters, and calling that a moral position to take, is really fucked up and just demonstrates such a total inability to actually engage critically with fiction that idk how ppl take fans like that seriously.
and when i say “inability to engage with fiction critically” i mean they take things at such face value it’s ridiculous. The narrative says this character is good, therefore they’re good. The narrative says this character is bad, therefore they’re bad. This generally fails to take into account things like rampant gay coding of villains, heroes demonstrating mainstream conservative ideals, “loveable misogynist” protags who often still get the pure cinnamon roll treatment, the fact that pretty much all mainstream media is going to be unprogressive at its core because it’s literally “mainstream,” american exceptionalism propaganda everywhere, women reduced to love interest roles, women objectified by the camera, lack of diversity, assumption of a straight white man as the audience, assumption that anyone other than a straight white man is harder to identify with, villains who are “evil” because they take resistance against the privileged class too far, stories where the heroes and villains do the same thing but when the heroes do it it’s justified or excusable and when the villains do it it’s a sign that they’re evil, stories where ugly = bad and beauty = good, stories where ugliness is foreignness (to britain/north america/majority white countries) and beauty is white, the way there hasn’t been a blockbuster film with a textually non-straight main character ever, mental illness symptoms as signs of evil, monsters as unknowable other, etc etc etc etc
anyway all that shit has v little to do with berserk (tho some def applies), i just had to get some of it out of my system lol.
my basic point is just that, to bring this back and use an example from Berserk, if someone can’t see that eg it’s fucked up that Griffith is not only a gay coded and textually feminine antagonist, but gets even more gender non conforming looking when he becomes Femto, and it’s fucked up that the protagonist sexually assaults his girlfriend and we’re still meant to root for him, etc, then they absolutely do not have the necessary skill set to call other people out for problematic taste in fictional characters with any authority.
If you can’t or refuse to see the ways the thing you like is problematic, the last thing you should be doing is calling fans of other things problematic. Log, eye, etc. Tbh even if you can critique your own faves you shouldn’t be pointing fingers imo – you can’t know exactly why someone likes the thing they like, whether they’re aware it’s problematic (maybe more aware than you), whether they’re able to compartmentalize that fact and why, and those are all things you need to know before declaring a group of fans Bad for what fictional entertainment they like.
tl;dr
everything is problematic. golden retriever cinnamon roll characters are problematic, your favourite blockbuster is problematic, hollywood is problematic, anime is problematic, cartoons are problematic, magic fantasy oppression parallels are problematic, guts is problematic, griffith is problematic, casca is problematic, tumblr demanding that women be arbiters of morality is ironically problematic (misogynist) as fuck, etc etc. at least ime villain fans tend to be a little more aware on average that what they like is problematic, as opposed to people who think it’s intrinsically more moral to like heroes.
I wrote what basically amounts to a response to this a little while ago (focused on why ppl hate Griffith more than Guts), so rather than just re-writing that I’ll link it. (tw for discussion of rape)
But like, in addition to that, ikr?
I mean one of the central premises of Berserk is that everyone is capable of great evil and humanity is kind of a hot mess, and that’s exemplified in both Guts and Griffith. Like just like Griffith always had the potential for Femto in him, Guts has the Beast of Darkness, and both manifest in violence and rape. Guts is absolutely no better than Griffith, and I’d personally say he’s worse considering that he assaults his traumatized, infantalized, sort-of-girlfriend twice without transforming into an embodiment of evil first.
like look at this
In Berserk the behelit helps certain chosen ones gain power, but you don’t exactly need it to be evil, and part of the point of Guts’ narrative is that at times he’s getting pretty close to indistinguishable from a monster, behelit or no, magic armour or no.
But he’s the protag, fans identify with him, and while Griffith’s fucked up acts lead up to a magical transformation into a monster, Guts’ fucked up acts seem likely to be leading to redemption and growth. There’s nothing intrinsic in Guts and Griffith’s characters that leads one to monsterism and one to self improvement, it’s not like one has more good qualities and the other has more evil qualities – it’s literally just circumstance and the fact that Berserk’s God chose Griffith as his jesus figure, not Guts. But it affects how readers see them and respond to them.
I mean ffs we see Guts do worse things than several apostles. Right now, based on what we see them do in the manga, fuckin Zodd is a “purer” character than Guts lmao. The idea of mixing fandom purity politics and Berserk of all things, which at the end of the day amounts to getting judgy based on which sexually abusive character someone likes more, is incredible to me.
I’m doing an essay in my Comp class and I chose to argue that people shouldn’t say “Griffith did nothing wrong”
I’d like to get a little survey done, so could you reply to this post saying “Griffith did everything wrong”, “Griffith did some things wrong”, or “Griffith did everything wrong”?
I won’t judge any answers and you don’t have to explain your viewpoint, just please help me out with this?
tl;dr: I need feedback to see how split the fandom is over Griffith and his actions for an essay
(please help, I’m begging you)
It’s a redundant topic since Berserk is about grey morality and Griffith definitely did wrong and bad things, so I guess my answer would be “Griffith did some things wrong”.
Griffith did some things wrong.
i feel like ‘griffith did nothing wrong’ is a purposefully inflammatory meme more than anyone’s earnest argument. like i hang out with a lot of griffith fans and i’ve personally never seen anyone genuinely argue that griffith did nothing wrong, even if you don’t include femto in that.
until now!
griffith did nothing wrong – because in the world of berserk he has divine right, his choices and actions have been predetermined by the world’s god, which fulfills humanity’s subconscious desires. griffith is the chosen saviour or doomer of humanity, chosen by humanity’s god, which is a manifestation of the collective will of humanity, and therefore everything griffith and femto and neogriffith does is humanity’s will.
nothing he can do is therefore wrong within the context of Berserk’s reality, because everything he does is what must happen according to God.
I mean from this perspective you can argue he did some things wrong from a moral standpoint bc he’s basically the avatar of humanity and humanity is kind of fucked up. but yk from a purely fictional theological standpoint, griffith/femto/neogriffith is doing everything exactly right.
(disclaimer: griffith did some things wrong, femto is an evil monster, and neogriffith is mysterious but also kind of a dick by any standard of logic or morality.
my 100% earnest answer for your survey is Griffith did some things wrong.)
griffiths heart started beating on the hill of swords bc it dawned on him just how much taller guts got since the eclipse when zodd was near him for an easy comparison, actually
you're the only one 