jillresia:

dragonslayer is like significantly larger than casca. poor casca stuck dragging thst shit

this keeps tripping me up when i think too hard about this au lol. like does casca just work out a lot more, does she graduate up to the dragonslayer when the brand imbues her with enough super-strength, does she have a different, just as awesome but less gigantic weapon instead ???

w/ guts he has his whole thing about using an overly large sword since he was like 4 yrs old. casca should get an equivalent cool weapon backstory.

Maybe this sound weird but what do you think of the people who say “I love Griffith because he’s super evil >:)” ?? Like I get why people hate Griffith but I think those Griffith “fans” miss out the whole point..

I think I pretty much agree – idk if I’ve really seen Griffith fans like this myself, but yk I’m sure they’re around.

tbh I feel like a lot of villain fans do this to avoid The Discourse about the ~evils of woobifying~ etc and I understand that. Fandom is fucking weird about moral purity rn and treating fictional characters as if they’re real people, and it’s hard in a lot of fandoms to talk about liking a villain without constantly putting a “BTW I’M NOT APOLOGIZING FOR THEM THEY’RE VERY EVIL AND BAD I JUST ENJOY VILLAINS” disclaimer up every time. So I sympathize w/ that urge. Fandom makes it hard to just enjoy characters without holding them up as either pure as the driven snow or irredeemably evil from birth.

But if they’re genuine about loving Griffith entirely because he’s oh so evil, then of all the antagonists to love Griffith makes v little sense to me bc before he becomes a demon he’s like… fine. He’s not a great person but he’s not a bad person, he has noble intentions, flaws and virtues, he’s a v good well-rounded character. I know a lot of people think Griffith was moustache-twirling evil all along but yk, they’re objectively wrong so lol.

Then after he becomes a demon he’s a petty evil dick for all of two appearances, one of which is a gratuitously depicted, grimdark-drama-for-the-sake-of-drama rape scene, and if that scene is what makes you love Griffith/Femto I’m definitely like gonna side-eye you. And I mean I don’t see anything wrong with liking Femto – I like Femto lol bc his pettiness mixed with inability to kill Guts is extremely amusing to me, plus his makeup is on point (and I love all gnc villains out of spite), but it’s very much despite the rape, not because of it.

And then as NeoGriff he comes back seemingly neutral, fulfilling the subconscious desires of humanity and committing no great acts of evil again. So yeah if you like super evil dark villains Griffith/Femto/NeoGriff is an odd choice to me.

Oh and as an aside I could kind of get liking him for his evil villainry if you liked him as Griffith and then felt personally betrayed when he sacrificed everyone. Like that was gr8 writing and feeling rly pissed off and then impressed by how mad you are, making you like him as a character bc of the emotional ride he took you on, makes sense to me. But I feel like that’s not really what you’re referring to.

So I guess tl;dr my answer boils down to it sounds p silly to me but I guess it depends on their exact reasons lol.

mmmm the idea of guts getting so fucked up by the eclipse (in casca is the berserker au) hes out of it is… like a)interesting and b)horrible and heartwrenching and :(.. also i love this au w badass casca

Yeah like I’m all about the badass Casca in this AU but regressed Guts has its own uniquely depressing vibe. I think we’re exchanging demon rape for mind-breaking psychic magic bc if the end result is an insane character with no agency it’s just a better method to get them there (I have a lot of issues with Casca’s story let me tell you but w/e) but there’s a lot of aspects to explore w/ Guts all fucked up instead of Casca.

(Like consider: NeoGriff moving involuntarily to save Guts from rocks and feeling uneasy about seeing him as an empty shell.)

Also check out the ask I’m about to post by @tfan2013 for more, she’s got you covered for sad details lol.

i’m rly feeling like warm and fuzzy and super appreciative of everyone who reads my blog, likes my posts, replies and chats w/ me about berserk and sends asks etc etc.

i suck at expressing affection lol but ilu all and it’s been good times here with u guys so ty for that <333

What beast/monster disturbs you the most?

This is tough tbh. I was thinking Wyald at first bc he has so much screen time and all of it is gratuitously repulsive, but tbh his awfulness is so mundane in a grimdark fantasy way that I can’t go with him.

I think maybe Rosine and her army of “elf” children. There’s a lot of fucked up stuff going on there. And I’m kind of disturbed by her on two levels – there’s the fact that she’s meant to be on the cusp of adolescence/adulthood but her worldview and method of villainy is more childlike while she’s drawn in a sexualized way and makes overtures at Guts, which is a bit disturbing on a meta level. I like to think she’s around 16 but honestly who tf knows.

But despite that I think she’s still a really effective character in a more emotionally disturbing way – the fact that she was an abused kid and sacrificed her parents as a child, and then she tried to go home while on the verge of death, knowing despite everything that she was never an elf for real, and all her villainy was basically just playing pretend and like… in a way hiding from the cruelty of the world by turning it into a game – it genuinely makes me feel sad for her ngl.

Also she’s got that defensive army of corpses possessed by bugs and that’s disturbing to me as someone very grossed out by most insects lol.

ngl when it comes to replacing guts with casca i’m torn between something epic and badass like the first time guts puts on the armour and starts mowing apostles down like grass, or the ganeshka fight at the docks complete with bickering with zodd, or even the angel fight during the mock eclipse with cynical quips about religion and the crowd below terrified of her and farnese in horrified awe etc.

and like the scene with intestine-slan trying to get stabbed, or farnese possessed and grinding on her sword – ooh or the ridic opening scene: Casca fucking the female apostle with one hand while the other’s about to reveal a canon.

craigslost
replied to your post

“so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

talking like total flip au here? def black swordsman because 1.) theresia probably wouldnt be traumatized for life 2.) reaction to femto and the associated bullshit

ngl i’m kind of into vengeful casca wandering around traumatizing kids and using them as bait and hostages but i could rly see her being way colder than guts and just straightforwardly killing count slug instead of taunting him in front of his daughter first so either way you might be right

and man i’d love to see her reaction to femto. I think it’d def be less complicated by lingering feelings than guts’ bc she was already trying to move on before the Eclipse happened, and she’s just more pragmatic than Guts in general, plus she’s used to thinking of Griffith as a lost cause, so I think she’d be better at writing him off as a jerkass demon. So like she’d still try to kill him, but with less of the pay attention to me vibe mb?

craigslost replied to your post  “so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

OK DOES CASCA STILL GO THRU A LIKE? TRAUMATIC
LOSS OF BABY?  demon fetus still around?  because the burning babies in
lost children would be Murderous on the emotions

oh shit i forgot she’s pregnant. so maybe she’d be less inclined to traumatize kids when you consider that, good point. But man the Lost Children arc would be so much more fucked up, ouch. Also I could see her identifying with Rosine a little tbh – escaping a fucked up situation in childhood by joining something that seems like a fairytale…?

tho if the eclipse still caused the miscarriage but without weird magic demon corruption (fighting apostles is not that easy on the body so sure) she probably wouldn’t’ve known she was pregnant at all, so there’s a way to ignore it too if u want. choose your own preferred level of trauma lol.

tfan2013
replied to your post “so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

@bthump​ i would actually like to see her fight a hundred men buut considering her period was on at the time it’s unlikely but it still would be cool

that would be so cool and epic

anyway we could swap more stuff around. say casca’s fine but guts is sick and running a fever and falls off a cliff, bam. casca the hundred man slayer, damn i’m so into that.

oh and the more they delve into guts mind, they find memories of Griffith and feel Guts emotions during said memories and they see everything and i do mean everything including his childhood :(

Man I would love to see all the griffguts golden age drama replayed with a running commentary lol.

actually if in this au casca was the main character the whole time dealing with her own shit so we only saw all the griffguts mutual pining from an outside perspective as just an annoying additional complication to casca’s life, it would be ridiculously fun to get an up-close and personal chapter-long revisitation with all of guts’ emotions at the forefront. I mean idt i’d trade it for the story we actually got, but this is kind of a delightful idea.

god every time i remember that black swordswoman casca au i replay the entire manga from the eclipse on in my head with a bitter, pissed off, one-armed casca in place of guts and sigh wistfully

seisans
replied to your post “yk one thing i can say for the berserk ovas is that, even though they…”

god agreed the reason i love those films so much (apart from the fact that griffith looks gorgeous in them) is bc you can just TELL the people who made them get it

ooh and speaking of griffith looking gorgeous i adore all the character design, especially griffith (that lovingly animated curly hair, man) but everyone looks fantastic. it’s rly too bad they didn’t go past the golden age and we just got a few glimpses of their take on the later characters in the credits and a couple cameos. more ovas >>>>>> berserk 2016/7

chaoticgaygriffith:

buhserk:

chaoticgaygriffith:

bthump:

buhserk:

keep in mind i only read berserk the once and i don’t remember a lot, but hasn’t griffith like…achieved his dream already? does that mean he’s bored now and doesn’t know where to go from here? is he in his shining tower like an ass just all ‘okay. now what’ ???

I think it’s implied that now he’s just gonna keep on keeping on and start taking over the world bc why not. Something about soaring to ever greater heights when Guts is chatting with Elfhelm dudes.

I’d still like to think he’s bored tho, at least insofar as he has the capcity to feel boredom lol. I mean we saw how easily he kicked ganeshka’s ass, p sure building an empire is going to be about as exciting as mowing the lawn.

Though I’d like to point out that while Griffith just wanted to be king, he also wanted to change the world for the better. And things are happening on a much larger scale now, where he can make an even bigger impact on the world. But he is bored out of his mind, you can tell, and I’m honestly really enjoying that, ngl.

once again correct me if i’m remembering this wrong, but isn’t griff making his city (can’t remember the name rn. falconia? griffith land? whatev) a ‘perfect shining beacon of goodness’ or whatev by making everywhere else miserable? like live here or suffer? god i need to reread the manga. in the meantime yall think they got them adult coloring books for mr. i’m-so-great over in this universe? maybe some ‘how to come to terms with your sexuality’ self help books?

More or less, but I’m not saying that he’s doing a good job of making the world a better place, just that it used to be one of his goals. And if it still is, whether he’s actually doing it or not is irrelevant as long as he thinks he is.

I’m screaming at the thought of Griffith using adult colouring books though. Maybe Charlotte can teach him how to embroider.

I wonder if his ‘make the world a better place and rearrange the social hierarchy to be more equal-opportunity’ motivation is intrinsically tied to why he got the behelit, became a godhand, and then got reincarnated again as a messiah to fulfill humanity’s subconscious desires. Because I feel like it’s strongly suggested, esp during the conviction arc, that one of humanity’s desires is less asshole noblemen terrorizing them and more peace and equality.

also i personally believe that humanity created falconia when ngriff cracked
open the world and let humanity’s unconscious desires flood into
reality, hence why it suddenly appeared at the same time all the
monsters etc did. Which doesn’t change the fact that falconia is the only place in the world not overrun by monsters or w/e but it does make me wonder where that concept’s going

yk one thing i can say for the berserk ovas is that, even though they cut stuff out and didn’t make all the same adaptation choices i would’ve *cough griffith’s narrative cough*, i feel like they were made by people who genuinely get berserk, for the most part

eg they cut out griffith’s backstory but they still alluded to it in what I felt were very clever and understanding ways? like we didn’t see griffith self harm in the river after sleeping with gennon, but i know that the writers/director/whoever knew griffith was lying when he said he didn’t care one way or the other about gennon bc of how he backed his horse away from him to avoid his touch. Like technically in that exchange with Gennon I can get all the information I got from the scene in the river, or most of it, re: Griffith’s guilt, it’s just not very accessible unless you’re already looking for it.

it didn’t work to get the point of his character across to an audience not already familiar with the manga, but i feel like cutting his backstory is less a result of not understanding griffith as a character or why it’s important, and just choosing to cut out depth for the sake of simplifying the story and focusing mainly on griffith’s feelings towards guts moreso than his guilt issues.

which is a choice i disagree with, but i can’t say it was made out of a lack of understanding of the actual story, basically.

buhserk:

keep in mind i only read berserk the once and i don’t remember a lot, but hasn’t griffith like…achieved his dream already? does that mean he’s bored now and doesn’t know where to go from here? is he in his shining tower like an ass just all ‘okay. now what’ ???

I think it’s implied that now he’s just gonna keep on keeping on and start taking over the world bc why not. Something about soaring to ever greater heights when Guts is chatting with Elfhelm dudes.

I’d still like to think he’s bored tho, at least insofar as he has the capcity to feel boredom lol. I mean we saw how easily he kicked ganeshka’s ass, p sure building an empire is going to be about as exciting as mowing the lawn.

chaoticgaygriffith:

bthump:

chaoticgaygriffith:

Guts leaves because Griffith can’t express how he feels. Griffith has sex with Charlotte in an attempt to seize his dream, having lost Guts, (of course this act of striving for his dream is represented by heterosexual sex) and ends up trapped in a dungeon.

@bthump Didn’t wanna do this on your post but this part caught my eyes … To be honest I’ve never thought of Griffith having sex with Charlotte as him trying to quickly seize his dream because, surely he must have known what the consequences would be? He didn’t do a good job sneaking in or sneaking out, he didn’t even try to make sure they’re not caught together. Had he impregnated her he probably would have had to marry her, but the king would still hate his guts, which goes against what he was initially trying to do, that is, charm his way into the royal family. When he was caught, he didn’t seem particularly perturbed. It almost seemed like an act of defiance because he got discovered so easily and didn’t even care. That led me to believe that the sex with Charlotte was more an act of self-harm and self-sabotage than anything else. Thoughts?

Oh yeah my thoughts on Griffith sleeping with Charlotte are that it’s way more complex than I went into here. But I do think that Griffith’s like, conscious intention is pursuing his dream. I definitely think he’s subconsciously self-sabotaging, but I think a lot of his surface-level motivation is like, he cares about 2 things in the world: Guts and becoming king, and Guts just abandoned him, so he’s throwing himself into the other like he’s trying to prove it’s more important to him.

Tho btw I went into mainly the self-sabotage/self-harm aspect pretty in depth here if you’re interested. obvious warning for het applies but there aren’t any pics at least lol. though i didn’t even really say anything about Griffith’s behaviour, it’s mostly drawing parallels, so good points about how careless he is, and his non-reaction to getting caught.

Also I’ve never actually thought about the possibility of Griffith impregnating her actually tbh, that’s an interesting thought. Idk what would happen realistically in a medieval setting but I feel like it would make sense if they found out Charlotte was pregnant without knowing who (assuming she didn’t say it was Griffith) the King might theoretically be more willing to marry her off to anyone who’d keep quiet about it and raise the kid as his own, giving Griffith an in. So I could maybe see that being a possibility in his mind going in.

Tbh that does make a lot of sense. The reason my mind never quite went there, though, is because even though in that scene Griffith is in no state of mind to be strategising, the fact that having sex with the princess is a bad idea should be simple enough to occur even to someone who’s going through what he is. So my line of thought was less along the lines of, Guts left so he’s trying to quickly seize the other thing he cares about, and more like, Guts left so he’s throwing everything into the fire. Because, I get Griffith is pretty cool in a pinch, and probably, you know, didn’t want to give those guards the satisfaction of seeing him break down or whatever, but like I mentioned his reaction to getting caught was so ……… almost nonexistent. In a way, it looked like he’d given up. And of course that can be explained quite well in your scenario, but I just can’t help but feel like, even though everything is crumbling around him, his reaction to his last chance of achieving his dream being crushed right in front of him should have been a tad more explosive. (And as I’m typing this I keep thinking, but he cares about Guts more so now that he’s gone who the fuck gives a shit, but that keeps bringing me back to my original theory of him destroying everything while he’s on a roll.)

Though, having read your post on Heterosexuality as the Main Villain of Berserk, I can’t stop thinking about this one thing you said along the lines of, “sex with Charlotte represents his dream.” This is where I feel my theory falls apart because, you’re so right about that, and with that fact in my mind him having sex with Charlotte to ruin the prospects of achieving his dream seems contradictory. Just in a writing sense.

But yeah, I haven’t read the post you linked me to yet (I’m about to), so I’m super sorry if you’ve answered some of my questions there.

Nah I’m like, almost completely on board with you. I think the only way I might see it differently is that I see Griffith as like… very intellectually detached from his own emotions? He feels emotions very strongly but I don’t think he’s very capable of identifying them, maybe bc he’s so emotionally repressed. So I think he absolutely is directly sabotaging himself, he just wouldn’t think to frame his actions that way, and instead hides behind a veneer of “this totally makes sense as a thing I should be doing” to himself, even though it’s a clear lie that wouldn’t hold up to a second of self-examination.

I often see Griffith as operating under like, a duality of lying to himself to justify emotional outbursts, thinking one thing and feeling another. Like when he ripped up his arms in the river, I don’t think he was only lying to Casca, I think he genuinely believed that he didn’t feel guilt and was instead acting on pure logic lol, and he genuinely believed he was totally fine when he forced himself back under control and put a hand on Casca’s shoulder. Or like, when he saved Guts from Zodd, I don’t think he was thinking at all, and because he had no possible logical justification he just refused to think about it, or come up with any answer better than “um no reason.”

So like eg if instead of guards he’d run into Casca the next morning, a la the morning after Gennon, she could say something like, “holy shit are you so fucked up that Guts left that you’re trying to get yourself killed?” and Griffith’s response would be, “um no winning Charlotte’s affection is part of the path to my dream, I don’t care at all that Guts left, the dead kid Guts leaving right before this was just a coincidence obviously, I’m fine nbd.” But at this point his justification is so weak it’s more along the lines of his “no reason” to Guts.

So I think like, his non reaction to the guards, plus the way he goaded the king into whipping him shortly after, is because emotionally he’s past the point of despair and this is what he wanted to happen, even if he didn’t consciously recognize it.

Idk I guess I just can’t rly see him admitting to himself, at least not until later when he’s doing some soul searching in that dungeon, that fucking Charlotte is self-destruction I guess, even if that’s clearly what it is. It strikes me as too self aware and honest for him lol.

But like, idk this is basically just my headcanon lol, not rly meta or anything, and I kinda just took the opportunity you provided to talk about it. I don’t think there’s any objectively right answer bc there’s no real way to know what he’s thinking, and based on his behaviour it does make sense for him to be aware of the consequences and accepting of them. So your take also makes sense and is also less convoluted than mine. I’m just rly into Griffith’s ability to deny shit to himself lol.

mastermistressofdesire:

danz99:

▪️ベルセルク

Mmm…yeah I agree, it was a very sweet kind of irony that while Guts and Casca are the ones who are wondering if Griffith is alright, it’s Griffith who actually says the words.

It’s almost like Griffith read the words in Guts mind, but the object he applies to it is changed from his personal context, because his concern is for Guts.

And in a way it’s also about how exactly on page they are about each other. It’s almost a screaming depiction of how mutual their feelings are, imo.

But again it’s also a little about the kind of person Griffith is . He has this, in my opinion, incredible ability to put other’s (mostly just Guts and Casca as far as we have seen) emotional needs above his own in times of emotional turmoil. In honesty it could simply be a defense mechanism ( and i know repressing your pain isn’t healthy) but idk the fact that he can numb himself to his own pain while still being able to sense and respond to others’ is really really incredible to me.

Like I know I’ve at this point, written thousands of words about Griffith, discussing many many things. But I still think the one panel, that one thing about him which stood out to me , became my defining reference point for him and which i’ll never ever get over was this.

like dear god. DEAR FREAKING GOD.

  “it’s nothing” while there’s literally blood gushing down your arms. When the comforting hand you put on her shoulder is stained with the blood you drew from yourself and there’s your own flesh under your fingernails.

mastermistressofdesire:

bthump:

yesgabsstuff:

bthump:

Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how compulsory heterosexuality is the True Villain of Berserk, but then I was like, shit this actually works surprisingly well and is kind of depressing. So now I’m doing it more seriously. This isn’t meant to be some grand unifying theory of Berserk lol, it’s not even close to airtight or anything, the story just happens to lend itself weirdly well to this particular reading.

So here’s how Griffith’s narrative works as an almost certainly accidental, yet imo somewhat relatable, metaphor for being closeted and repressed:

Keep reading

I always thought that it’s interesting that he seems to be on the precipice between childhood and adolescence (10/11) when he revived the Egg of the King in the first place.
Like you said, this is hardly a perfect metaphor but that would be around the time where he might start to notice that a) he had some kind of feelings for men b) be old enough to understand that they are not compatible with his goals/not accepted by the culture he lives it.

The situation for Guts, for example, is absolutely complicated by his experience as a CSA survivor in that I’m not sure he has a way to think of these kinds of things outside of acts of violence. The kind of implicit homophobia of this culture does nothing to dissuade him from this. Griffith has at least grown up in a similar environment and am;has probably “seen some shit”; if not suffered in a similar way by the time he has the Behelit, as well as his later experience with Gennon. What better pressure cooker to make someone utterly terrified of themselves and be willing to go to extreme lengths to repress those feelings?

I feel like there’s a really interesting character analysis waiting to happen w/ both Guts and Griffith and their relationships to same-sex desire (especially taking the official translation as a source, not one of the scanlations where Guts throws around homophobic slurs every other page. Which I mention bc those scanlations seem to be the reason a lot of Berserk fans think Guts is canonically a giant homophobe lmao).

It could be way more rooted in the actual text and authorial intention than this was bc the fact is that both Guts and Griff had non-consensual same-sex experiences at young ages that explicitly took a severe emotional toll on them, neither of them read as straight as far as I’m concerned, and you cannot tell me that it’s an accident that both of them were raped by men, they’re introduced to each other through Guts directly asking Griffith if he’s gay and wants to fuck him, and then the rest of the story is about their incredibly homoerotic relationship and how emotional repression ruins everything.

So anyway yeah you have some good points worth expanding on imo.

All of this was pretty damn excellent.

Thankyou for writing this.

I think the reading with being closeted is awfully fitting and tbh I feel that even if at age 20, Kentaro Miura wasn’t aware he was writing very gay-coded characters, after every single interviewer asked him about it and in the year 2017, he cannot still be unaware. And he’s made absolutely no tonal changes to accommodate for the fact? ( I think. Honestly i’ve been a little bummed out by the lack of griffguts feels in the most recent, post style- change chapters).

That’s just supposition though. Like I do feel that some of the inherent sexism has greatly improved over the years. And most of those issues which saw in Casca’s treatment have become slightly better with the newer characters. Just like giving credit where credit is due.

I mean it would be a greeeeat stretch to expect the same from the inherent homophobia. Like I don’t expect i AT ALL. But I think there may be at least some awareness about it.

But inspite of this the reading really makes sense.

Also you know -from how nightmarish that brief domestic dream felt, despite it seeming so superficially pleasant and ‘normal’. There was this deafening sense of -This in not you. This is not her. This is uncomfortable.

And actually for the longest time, I’d read a lot of theories about how the way Griffith saw  Casca in his dream showed that he’d actually always viewed her as this hetero-normative, submissive, potential wife figure. But I don’t think so. I think the entire sequence was about how wrong it all felt. Inclusive of Casca.

It wasn’t a dream at all. I think it was always supposed to be a nightmare, his final attempt to revert from accepting his reality a la his undeniable love for Guts with what should have been the heteronormative ideal, and the knowledge that this wasn’t his reality which forced him back into a space where he had no option but acceptance.

And then being faced with the consequences he has had to face for that reality. His body, the broken arm.

And like there’s also the added fact that immediately post this realisation he attempts to commit suicide. which is sadly a pretty common consequence.

Oh nooo man I kind of glossed over a lot of stuff so that post is a bit disjointed and one of the things I glossed over was how the domestic nightmare vision actually fits into the whole narrative I plucked out beyond being disturbing and feeling relevant, but the way you have it framed here, as Griffith trying to deny his feelings for Guts and insinuate himself into the heternormative ideal (again: “this peace and quiet… isn’t so bad”), failing, and then trying to kill himself… ouch. That’s painful, but it works.

Especially with the fact that his godhand-summoning despair is brought on by Guts’ touch soon after.

also there’s at least one GriffGuts moment in recent chapters that I dug, even though it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, which was that while Farnese and Schierke are checking out Casca’s memory of the cave with Guts Farnese says straight up that she senses “jealousy…?” I mean sure we already knew that but it’s nice to reiterate it.

chaoticgaygriffith:

Guts leaves because Griffith can’t express how he feels. Griffith has sex with Charlotte in an attempt to seize his dream, having lost Guts, (of course this act of striving for his dream is represented by heterosexual sex) and ends up trapped in a dungeon.

@bthump Didn’t wanna do this on your post but this part caught my eyes … To be honest I’ve never thought of Griffith having sex with Charlotte as him trying to quickly seize his dream because, surely he must have known what the consequences would be? He didn’t do a good job sneaking in or sneaking out, he didn’t even try to make sure they’re not caught together. Had he impregnated her he probably would have had to marry her, but the king would still hate his guts, which goes against what he was initially trying to do, that is, charm his way into the royal family. When he was caught, he didn’t seem particularly perturbed. It almost seemed like an act of defiance because he got discovered so easily and didn’t even care. That led me to believe that the sex with Charlotte was more an act of self-harm and self-sabotage than anything else. Thoughts?

Oh yeah my thoughts on Griffith sleeping with Charlotte are that it’s way more complex than I went into here. But I do think that Griffith’s like, conscious intention is pursuing his dream. I definitely think he’s subconsciously self-sabotaging, but I think a lot of his surface-level motivation is like, he cares about 2 things in the world: Guts and becoming king, and Guts just abandoned him, so he’s throwing himself into the other like he’s trying to prove it’s more important to him.

Tho btw I went into mainly the self-sabotage/self-harm aspect pretty in depth here if you’re interested. obvious warning for het applies but there aren’t any pics at least lol. though i didn’t even really say anything about Griffith’s behaviour, it’s mostly drawing parallels, so good points about how careless he is, and his non-reaction to getting caught.

Also I’ve never actually thought about the possibility of Griffith impregnating her actually tbh, that’s an interesting thought. Idk what would happen realistically in a medieval setting but I feel like it would make sense if they found out Charlotte was pregnant without knowing who (assuming she didn’t say it was Griffith) the King might theoretically be more willing to marry her off to anyone who’d keep quiet about it and raise the kid as his own, giving Griffith an in. So I could maybe see that being a possibility in his mind going in.