Way back when Guts first joins the band of the Hawk, he notices that the gang has certain training rituals. Sometimes for fun, almost they gather around and see who can do the most push-ups with someone on their back. It’s Also a bit of a competition to see who can lift the biggest person.
They mostly just use Rickert but sometimes Griffith does it with Casca, Casca can lift Judeau, and Pippin is usually the winner because he generally lifts Griffith.
When Guts is invited to join in and chose someone to lift as a challenge,( fresh from some slight jealousy of Pippin), he chooses to lift Griffith. But it’s over- ambitious and he can’t actually do it and it makes Griffith laugh a lot.
A couple of years later, the now infinitely more Buff Guts and Gang are sitting around the campfire and teasing each other. And Corkus reminds Guts of the incident. Griffith chuckles and says- “Hey he tried.”
Now remember Guts doesn’t like being laughed at by Griffith. So gets up. Effectively scoops him up with one arm like a baby. Literally throws him up and catches him with the full intention of not letting him down until he takes back his words.
Except he looks down into his arms and Griffith’s face is completely flushed and Guts can’t look at it too long. So he just puts him down and awkwardly sits back down.
And everyone chews on their snacks in silence, looking at the ground until Griffith has the time to get himself to look not obviously turned on.
berserk but neogriffs emotionless facade is busted the fuck up by his thinking that guts has found a new prettyboy twink that can hold a sword (serpico)
Like Guts is already mad about Griffith finding a new big-strong- muscly beastman with Berserk sword (Zodd) , so this is only fitting.
Also dear God. These two are actually doing this. Like it’s not even the slightest bit subtle at this point.
@bthump Very true. For some reason I imagined Shisu being fragile before she lost her baby but I’m not sure that really makes much sense given the life she was living. With Miura it’s hard to tell if he expected us to imagine she recovered. Most of us seem to not have and that’s definitely more on him than on us as readers.
yeah absolutely. tbh i doubt miura ever thought of the answer to this question lol. i definitely also got the impression that shisu never recovered, but i guess that’s bc there’s nothing to go on and all we see of shisu is her not mentally well and then dying, so yeah. logically maybe it makes sense if she recovered but the writing tells us nada.
since Shisu was not in her right mind…who really took care of Guts as a baby?? cus that boy need to learn to talk, walk, eat…i know damn well it wasn’t shisu. i mean she probably played and talked to him but didn’t teach him to walk and all the other stuff. i think it was the handmaidens…now all i want is a chapter dedicated to them taking care of guts
I never thought about this, good question. Yeah the handmaidens or whoever they were seems like a reasonable explanation. Guts probably learned a lot through imitation too, even without direct instruction, but yeah I’d fall back on the women with Shisu probably pitching in.
And I guess we don’t really know how out of it Shisu was – could be that between finding Guts and dying 3 years later she recovered mentally. It would make more sense for her to be in a depressed dissociative state for a few days rather than totally driven insane by a miscarriage imo, though Miura is kind of weird about trauma and mental regression with his female characters.
berserk but neogriffs emotionless facade is busted the fuck up by his thinking that guts has found a new prettyboy twink that can hold a sword (serpico)
I’d like for Griff to sacrifice himself for Guts, throwback to him being reckless when Guts is in danger like when he was human. It’ll break my heart but I’ll be happy too
yeaaah totally, this would be the ideal. especially since now that i think about it we already saw femto hesitating and failing to kill guts, so repeating that won’t have quite the same oomph
Good points. As much as I like Griffith character, I think he will die in the end. But will remembered as a hero nonetheless.
ty! and yeah tbh this seems likely to me. A hero in the eyes of the world at least. Maybe not the audience so much, but if we see a glimpse of humanity first I’ll be satisfied. (tbh I want to see him hesitate while fighting Guts or something.)
I feel like it’s a pretty sure bet that at least his feelings for Guts survived the various transitions, but yeah I’m still waiting to find out how much of a relation NeoGriffith has to human Griffith. I don’t really think he’ll be technically redeemed either way, especially since his narrative seems kind of outside conventional morality what with Berserk’s take on God and religion and Griffith being the saviour of humanity etc etc, but the more of human Griffith, his feelings and character etc that remains, the better and more cathartic an emotional climax to the Guts and Griffith story is going to be, so yeah. I need that.
Like if he’s totally inhuman and all human Griffith’s feelings are dead and buried and it’s just fetus feelings left, the emotional catharsis can only be one-sided on Guts’ side, and meh. I’m seriously invested in NeoGriffith revealing some remaining emotional depth, and if he does it’s going to be amazing.
But lines like “my blood should have been frozen” and “this is the crystalization of your last tear shed” seem to hint at Griffith’s lingering emotions with the potential to be reawoken imo, so I’m assuming eventually that’ll get some good payoff.
I just thought it was Miura’s art progression,
but nope, those were real child soldiers alright
yeeep. tbh guts’ age progression is actually rly laid out in detail so i think while reading it doesn’t strike you as much bc you see him grow up progressively, but going back after seeing 24 year old guts is jarring.
they look so smol here! I didn’t really notice that reading the manga for the first time, but it really cements the fact that they are all so young
yeah that really struck me while re-reading it after getting used to adult guts lol, they really do look 15ish at the start of the golden age. like they’re barely older than isidro, lol, it’s kind of wild.
Yeah ikwym I wish there was some hard and fast canon on Griffith’s age like there is for Guts. But yeah I’m pretty sure the source for that is just behind the scenes adaptation material, so I wouldn’t call it canon. I like to think of Griffith as close to the same age as Guts myself.
tbh I don’t remember any other mention of Griffith’s age (or Casca’s for that matter) except Guts thinking Griffith is about the same age as him. But I def don’t remember everything, so I could definitely be wrong about that.
And yeah ia I don’t really like that implication either. But lol I think that’s mostly bc I like to think that Griffith’s feelings/personality/etc has the potential to be unfrozen, and “dead” sounds disappointingly final to me.
serpico himself admits that hes usually one dissociated from strong emotions but guts frequently brings just those out in him. the first examples are when it concerns farnese’s chaotic obsession and serpico is pissy, but in the chapters i was skimming this afternoon for panels, serpico leaps in an attempt to save guts from the wreckage of some sinking ship and guts straight up calls him out on being dumb – even w wind elementals serpico cant lift guts. like nice try buddy but its not happening. guts had to hammer that in + say he’d be fine to get serpico to leave and even then, when zodd like ends up falling into the water + dragging guts w him serpicos reaction is the most dramatic. i need to reread berserk in its entirety bc i think im just reading into it but holy shit 🤔
the only source I’ve ever seen for Griffith’s age is the film book. the only indication of his age we get in canon is Guts saying “he’s about the same age as me,” after Griffith’s naked speech, as far as I remember, so idk if we really do “know” that Griffith is older than them.
Of course I could be misremembering. Do you mind telling me where you got your information on their ages? I’ve been curious for a while if there’s actual canon somewhere telling us or if it’s just supplementary material from the behind-the-scenes of the adaptions.
If it is from the behind the scenes info, then it seems likely that the ppl who adapted it consider Griffith the character to have died when he transformed into Femto, if they cut his age off then. But that’s not necessarily canon.
Especially since even if you consider Griffith “dead” after going through a thorough magical transformation that destroyed most of his personality, he still experiences time so it’s kind of weird to cut his age off at 24 imo. I guess you could restart the count and call Femto 2 years old, and NeoGriffith one year old lol, since he goes through a magical “rebirth” every time, but that seems pedantic.
Under a cut because I don’t like to be rly critical of Berserk out in the open lol.
iirc the context of me using that specific phrase was both the Eclipse rape and Griffith’s night with Charlotte.
I think the Eclipse rape was absolutely terrible writing (well, storytelling, let’s say, because a lot of what’s bad about it is in the art) for several reasons:
1. destroys Casca as a character to make Guts feel bad and motivate him.
2. objectifies and eroticizes Casca during the rape (v sexualized angles, lots of t+a, overlong and overly graphic, etc), either to titilate the straight dude audience or bc Miura doesn’t know how else to depict the sexual assault of women.
3. totally overwrites Guts’ own childhood trauma – now his worst memories, the stuff that makes him feel the “worst he ever feels” is something that happened to someone else, who doesn’t even get a reaction to her own pain because her mind is basically wiped. I find this really unfortunate because I liked that Guts had actual personal trauma instead of the more typical for dude protagonists trauma-by-proxy. And it’s not realistic that he would get over it after one flashback and confession to Casca, but that is what we’re shown happened – because after that his childhood trauma is never referred to again, except in one flashback chapter featuring teenager Guts. It’s lazy writing imo, and it ruins an interesting and personal traumatic backstory that manly dude protagonists almost never get by replacing it with a dime-a-dozen misogynist fridged girlfriend backstory.
4. tbh it is really jarring and fucked up how you spend 2 emotional chapters with Casca, in her head from her point of view, as she fights and runs with Judeau, and then the 2nd chapter ends with a bunch of tentacles ripping her clothes off and suddenly you’re back with Guts and you never get Casca’s perspective again. tonally it’s a mess – heartfelt tragedy to pornographic objectification within a page – and it’s just so emblematic of how Miura treats Casca as a character. Her main function in the story is to be objectified and assaulted and saved by men, and when she gets good, relatable and empathetic character moments they’re short-lived before she becomes a damsel again.
4.5. and speaking of perspective, it’s fucked up that this horrible experience that breaks Casca’s mind is shown from Guts’ perspective. We’re meant to be relating to his horror at seeing his former best friend raping his girlfriend, we’re not meant to be relating to Casca in this moment. During her previous rape attempts we at least got her perspective on it, we were shown her fear, we heard her thoughts. But not here – here she’s just a violated body existing to traumatize Guts.
5. Based on Miura saying he had Guts and Casca get together just to make the Eclipse more dramatic it strongly suggests to me that not only was her rape solely there to make Guts feel bad and give Femto something to do to make everyone hate him, he wrote her out as a character afterwards because he didn’t know what to do with her – she wasn’t around during the Black Swordsman arc so he had to throw her away for a while, then turn her into nothing more than a symbol of Guts’ humanity, with no character of her own. (Actually tbh Miura didn’t even need to say he threw Guts and Casca together for drama, that comes across pretty clear to me in the writing lol. When I read that my reaction was pretty much just a sense of validation.)
6. Also regressing into a walking infant is not a realistic reaction to trauma, it’s just storytelling convenience, and Casca’s current character as basically a child with an often still sexualized adult body skeeves me out.
Okay that’s enough about the Eclipse rape. I really, really hate it tbh lol.
I also mentioned the scene where Griffith and Charlotte fuck, and more briefly I think that’s bad writing because Miura literally wrote a rape scene – Charlotte said “no” – and then he treated it as consensual sex narratively because Charlotte got into it partway through. Which is very typical male writer bad writing, it’s something you see a LOT – prim virgin has to protest to show that she’s pure and proper, but the dude is good at sex so she soon realizes how great it is and everything’s okay – and it’s really misogynist and fucked up. It’s offensive writing, and it’s just plain bad writing because what we see depicted (rape) isn’t what we’re told happened (consensual sex that Charlotte enjoyed and has no misgivings about and the negative part is that Griffith is a self-destructive idiot who seduced her too soon and ended up in a dungeon for it, not that she said no).
If there was even a hint that Miura recognizes it as rape, some context showing that Charlotte’s feelings about it are complicated, anything like that, I’d be more okay with it, but there’s really nothing. Charlotte adores him to pieces afterwards and the king is angry because he’s a rapist creep, not because he’s protective or anything. Tbh I wholeheartedly approved of the film version’s choice to give Charlotte more agency and have her ask Griffith to stay and move his hand to her chest herself. It seems more in keeping with the spirit of the scene and Charlotte’s feelings about it.
In a more general sense, basically I think Miura as a storyteller has a lot of strengths, but he also has a lot of flaws. Like overall I find Miura’s strengths as a writer are enough to keep me going through the bad stuff, but sometimes it’s a struggle lol and I like to complain about it occasionally. Not all his flaws revolve around rape or offensive writing choices (like eg I think he walks a fine line with tone and sometimes his lighthearted moments come across as jarring, interrupting the flow of action, or awkward), but those are the ones that really stand out and that I’m most likely to describe as shitty writing lol.
you're the only one 