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:
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.
it’s so simple yet so important at the same time 🙂
There are honestly SOOOO many scenes like this… I remember a while back I was rereading a few select chapters for a specific scene but? The background of nearly every single panel included Farnese and Casca just clinging to each other? It was seriously astounding. I desperately need to go through and cap them all so I can make a masterpost of cute Farnesca moments. Realistically it would take multiple posts… but that’s like, the opposite of a problem 😉
Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how 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:
The only way for him to realize his dream is to marry the princess. War, battles, glory, promotions, even the Eclipse, those are all stepping stones that enable him to one day marry Charlotte. Marriage is the only door to his dream. Even when he becomes saviour of the world, he’s still gotta marry a woman to make it official.
Griffith’s all-encompassing, all-important dream is embodied by heterosexual marriage.
Set up in perfect opposition to that dream, the only one who makes him forget about it, and the one he has to sacrifice to attain his dream, is Guts, the man he’s in love with.
So it should be pretty apparent how that central conflict lends itself to a closeted gay man torn between obligation and desire kinda reading, right?
The details don’t do much to counter it either. It’s Charlotte’s presence that creates the rift between Guts and Griffith – she’s there, refocusing Griffith’s attention from Guts to his heteronormative goal during their significant, romanticized staircase conversation when Guts asked why Griffith would risk his life for him and Griffith failed to give him a reason. And she’s the one Griffith directs the speech to, inadvertantly convincing Guts that he doesn’t care about him and making Guts decide to leave.
The dream is also defined by emotional repression. To achieve it Griffith has to project a perfect image of himself to everyone – the nobles, Charlotte, the hawks, everyone. When Casca catches him in a moment of vulnerability and watches him injure himself in a river he snaps out of it, represses, and acts like nothing happened afterwards. Guts is the only person he willingly allows to see him less than perfect – when he’s conducting assassinations, for instance. He opens up to him in emotional vulnerability when he asks “do you think I’m cruel?” In that moment, Guts suggests that Griffith’s emotional expression of vulnerability is incompatible with achieving his dream – “Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?”
Guts is able to walk away and abandon Griffith because Griffith can’t tell him how he feels, he can’t tell Guts why he risked his life for him and he can’t tell him that he wants him to stay. Casca even points out that they should stop and talk things out, and we the reader know that their rift is based entirely on a misunderstanding that could be cleared up so talking things through would actually achieve something – but she’s dismissed, and they duel instead.
So a dichotemy is set up between the dream/Charlotte/heteronormativity, and emotional repression vs Guts the man Griffith loves, and expressing his feelings for him.
The tragedy of Berserk is that repression wins.
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. There he both finally admits to himself that Guts is more important to him than his dream and fittingly loses the ability to communicate at all. He’s also, to top it off, locked away behind a mask modeled after the helmet he wore while pursuing his dream. After losing Guts and having sex with Charlotte he’s not just choosing not to express his emotions, he’s forced to remain silent and hidden.
After he’s rescued the mask stays on and words remain unspoken. A lot of shit happens and eventually he has a breakdown. And interestingly, it’s not just the prospect of Guts leaving again that causes him to finally break from reality. It’s also the thought of Casca staying.
After overhearing Guts and Casca he envisions himself chasing his dream again (and isn’t it fitting that it’s described as playing? ie not real, a make-believe expression of himself), and then he sees himself – and here it gets really depressing – seemingly married to Casca. He’s still helpless and unable to communicate, as though he’s caged inside of himself. In his vision Casca wears a dress, has hung up her sword, and is raising a son with him, named after the man Griffith is in love with. Griffith is dressed up and attractive again. It’s terribly picturesque in a idealistic heternormative way. Casca leans down to kiss him and then spoonfeeds him, all the while he’s silent and motionless and seems lost as all he thinks to himself is that the peace and quiet isn’t so bad.
Tbh if you’re reading Griffith as a gay man this dream comes across as a nightmarish metaphor for being trapped in repression, trapped in a heterosexual marriage and societal expectations, his voice, body, and even his own mind lost. It’s disturbing.
And in the soup made by Casca is the behelit.
The thing is that the behelit isn’t the escape from that nightmarish vision it seems to be at first – it’s an embodiment of it. What happens when Griffith summons the Godhand, sacrifices the Band and most notably Guts, and becomes a demon?
His heart is frozen. He’s later reborn with the sole purpose of becoming a wholly emotionless, utterly perfect image of himself – the image he’d tried to project as a human: a perfect saviour, a perfect leader, and a perfect fiancee, straight out of a fairytale. One half of a perfect heterosexual couple, ruling a perfect kingdom.
Femto’s new body incorporates the mask he was forced to wear in the torture chamber. The transformation doesn’t fix the problem caused by his broken body or his lost tongue, it doesn’t return his ability to express his feelings to him, it rips them out from the source – it destroys his emotions so he has nothing left to express. “This peace and quiet… isn’t so bad.”
When Griffith chose to sacrifice Guts he didn’t choose freedom or personal empowerment – he chose to remain a voiceless, tortured man in a locked cell, he just removed his ability to feel pain or long for more.
(Or tried to at least. Time will tell how his newly bthumping heart figures into everything.)
Disclaimer: I don’t think this works as like… a great, sensitive and thoughtful depiction of the effects of internalized homophobia on a gay man lol. Berserk is offensive and homophobic af and choosing to read it like this doesn’t fix that problem at all. I just kind of dodged some of the worse stuff but yk, there’s no way around the fact that griffith/femto/ngriff is a gay-coded antagonist and most of his villainy revolves around that coding.
Also I’m mostly closeted myself so there’s definitely some projection going on here. That’s partially the point of this. I don’t relate fully to this narrative but some aspects of what I wrote do hit home, and hopefully that comes across and this doesn’t feel exploitative.
I see the kama sutra thing a lot actually tbh…like…its an awful foreshadowing in itself lmao
lmao it rly is isn’t it. but i’m glad it’s there so i can hc that griffith hasn’t slept with a woman b4 charlotte ngl.
@yesgabsstuff said:
@bthump *Shameless plug for Anna*
honestly if a gay guy who’s dissociating and thinking about a dude at the time gets charlotte going that easily i hope anna likes her women ear-shatteringly loud in bed.
I mean one thing I def like about Berserk is that het sex scenes are extremely few and far between (not counting rape scenes here ofc :/) and in like, 1.5 out of 3 the point is Guts and Griff’s feelings for each other.
(the 3 i’m thinking of are opening scene w/ guts fucking the apostle, griffith and charlotte, and guts and casca, which gets the 0.5. I… literally can’t think of any other sex scenes in berserk lmao.
oh no wait, there’s also two orgies – nina’s pagan bash and the count’s wife’s cheating escapade. and yk what, one of those was about guts/griff too, in the form of an emotional parallel, so l m a o)
There’s like this guy on YouTube who did a manga review after the first four volumes and is pretty explicit about the fact that he’s only reading this for the art and potential romance between Guts and Griffith.
And damn that guy is so into it.
He just kept saying ‘look at that!’ pointing at every panel of their interaction. It was sort of hilarious. Because.
Man. Same.
do u have a link? this sounds like fun entertainment when i’m bored
Legit they didn’t even need to talk proper. If Griffith had simply said “don’t go.” as Guts was walking past or hell even just “Guts…” I think Guts would have stayed.
Because the scene with Charlotte it’s implied that he definitely knew what he was doing, that too pretty much on autopilot.
Like listen there was a lot of foreplay and like there was ‘higher level stuff? *Cough* eating out *cough*
I mean idk it could be another one of Miura’s ‘griffith is naturally good at everything except emotions ’ things.
But I ve wondered if there was more between gennon and Charlotte.
I could see either Griffith going out and unemotionally getting experience bc being good at sex and seduction is useful, or I could see him getting all the info he needs from his porn collection and only looking like he’s experienced bc Charlotte is just really, really vocal and easily impressed lmao.
#nsfw while griffiths s*xing charlotte theres a 2 panel scene of just casca? sittin around? before the maid peeps thru the key hole and ssees the het crime. How At All is that related. whats she sensing? what r u on to girl? is this when casca was like “aw i get it, they’re fucking gay”? did griff and casca catch on at the same time???
earlier during the sex scene (right b4 griff starts thinking bout guts) we also see her holding guts’ old broken sword and looking sad, and then here she’s sitting pining, ergo it’s totally a parallel illustrating that they’re both hung tf up on guts rn.
i just really, really love that the most direct parallel we ever see to guts’ more typically badass attributes (refusal to die despite everything like when guts stood back up and fought the wolves, and rage fueled vow of revenge) is theresia
even if we never see her again i know for a fact that she’s out there becoming a more stone cold badass than guts could ever hope to be
I actually don’t know lol. It’s a tough question because I’m not sure how much Miura thinks we should condemn Guts for it – on one hand he’s getting consequences for his actions in the form of Casca hating him and I don’t think it’s likely that she’ll forgive and forget and everything will go swimmingly. On the other I think we’re supposed to feel like he should get a pat on the back for stopping, and we’re definitely not supposed to hate him for it, we’re probably more meant to empathize with him and his loss of control and his regret, and admire the steps he’s taken to protect her from himself by travelling with people, and his willpower in keeping the hound on a leash.
So I guess ideally I’d like their idealized and infatuated images of Guts to be shattered as they realize that he’s capable of some fucked up shit even without the armour. Farnese could get protective of Casca and take off with her and Serpico and whoever in the party wants to follow, quite possibly all of them, give or take Puck and Isidro. Because she’d definitely choose Casca over Guts and that would be nice to see.
But I think it’s more likely that some of them, like Farnese and Serpico, would maybe get a bit warier of him and he might lose some of his shine in Farnese’s eyes, but overall consider it a past mistake he’s overcome and atoned for, and just another signifier of how much of a struggle it is to be Guts akin to how they feel about how Guts + Berserker armour = trying to murder them all. Yk like it makes Serpico anxious but no one blames him for it even though it’s his own inability to control his rage that leads to the armour taking over without magical hand-holding to save everyone from him.
Idk that’s at my most cynical. Don’t get me wrong I love Guts and his narrative for the most part, I just think aspects of it and the magical fantasy metaphor of the Berserk armour, hound, etc aren’t handled as well as they could be lol.
Anyway it’d probably be something between those two extremes tbf.
I mean one thing I def like about Berserk is that het sex scenes are extremely few and far between (not counting rape scenes here ofc :/) and in like, 1.5 out of 3 the point is Guts and Griff’s feelings for each other.
(the 3 i’m thinking of are opening scene w/ guts fucking the apostle, griffith and charlotte, and guts and casca, which gets the 0.5. I… literally can’t think of any other sex scenes in berserk lmao.
oh no wait, there’s also two orgies – nina’s pagan bash and the count’s wife’s cheating escapade. and yk what, one of those was about guts/griff too, in the form of an emotional parallel, so l m a o)
you're the only one 