mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
this is honestly hilarious tho like, dude. he’s a kid, griffith’s a god, griffith can take care of himself
otoh maybe griffith did send raksas after rickert and locus is cracking stone in a rage upon seeing griffith with charlotte down there. i wouldn’t put it past him.
i love this shit. it’s so blatantly griffith feeling things and hiding them
what kind of things? well it’s hidden from us as well as charlotte and co for a reason so it’s probably not murderous tendencies since we see the results of someone’s (cough locus cough) urge to kill rising very soon. If it’s Griffith’s, there’s not much point in hiding that.
idk but i’m gonna sail on this neogriffith’s self doubt and emotional weakness boat til it either carries me to a good place or capsizes tbqh
Also related to that last ask but my response was getting way too long so I’ll mention this separately:
I feel like part of my problem with the current lighter tone is that a lot of the darkness, specifically the emotional angst, of Berserk so far was based on the fact that all the main characters are traumatized and have shitty coping mechanisms. Guts Casca and Griffith sure, and also Farnese and Serpico (neglected throughout childhood and coped by burning people alive and terrorizing ppl, and abused by peers and Farnese + weird expectations from his mother and coped by becoming an unfeeling doormat). And none of them have really dealt with it?
Griff transformed into a monster so fine his story has a conclusion, and Casca’s is maybe coming to fruition soon, but Guts’ trauma just transferred from rape and abuse to feeling manpain about Casca’s trauma, which is a huge disservice to both characters if it’s never brought up again and dealt with.
And while Farnese is bettering herself we’ve never really seen her actual issues addressed, and her whole sadism burning ppl alive thing just kind of easily melted away in favour of a new helping someone philosophy. I wished for more internal conflict there, basically, and I hope it’s addressed in the future but for now it seems like a pretty abrupt change and a missed opportunity. And Serpico is still Serpico. He hasn’t changed a whole lot but his issues haven’t negatively impacted anything either.
In the Golden Age all the psychological baggage these characters had contributed to its absolute disaster of a climax. And I’d love, love to see that happen again, esp with Farnese and Serpico adding more shit to the pile, or I’d love to see their issues flare up but have them manage to overcome them now that they’ve grown in a happier, healthier contrast to the Golden Age.
But throughout the Millenium Empire arc all these issues the characters have never really affected them adversely. I’m hoping that now that we’re delving into Casca’s psyche things will start to snowball and we’ll see that these traumas haven’t just been forgotten but only put on hold for a while so this group can be happy and hopeful.
But for now I do miss reading about fucked up characters and the internal and external challenges posed by their issues.
The weird part is actually, that sometimes I think, objectively, the manga hasn’t become lighter since the Golden age. The Lost Children and Tower of Conviction arc were pretty fucked up and even now we’ve had troll rapes, the daka demons ripping out uterus es, people being eaten alive, a lot of really weird ass and perverted monstrosities.
But it’s simply that the fucked up Ness isn’t viscerally gripping anymore.
In the Golden age we we’re first introduced to characters, made to care about them by slowly revealing both their strengths and flaws and slowly, insidiously piling on the foreshadowing and layers of emotional as well as external fuckery.
It felt so dark because we cared about the people it was happening to.
In recent chapters the characters are introduced along with the ‘darkness’ bringing it forward as a part of their plotlines. Even Farnese was introduced as a sadistic pyromaniac first . Along with the horror which was the heretic related prosecution.
And only much later were we given a glimpse into the character and learnt to retroactively care about her.
I mean ultimately that worked as far as characterisation is concerned. As in I definitely care about Farnese now.
But it does reduce the emotional impact of the should have been traumatic scenes.
These are really good points. I totally agree about the grimdarkness – like I care when the protagonist has a traumatic backstory and it leads to him making unfortunate decisions, I’m less affected emotionally when random npcs are being tortured in two-page spreads for shock value.
+ tbh i don’t think it’s necessarily a mistake to introduce Farnese’s dark side first and then reveal her better nature, bc I do like when writers make you love a former antagonist and I love that about Farnese, but it definitely adds to the differing tones.
And I mean it does make sense to reverse the Golden Age format this way – now instead of beloved characters going dark, we can have dark characters learning to be better. But it really boils down for me to feeling like it’s been too easy I guess. Guts made new friends and now his hound is on a leash and now it’s the Berserk armour’s fault when he tries to murder everyone. Farnese dropped the pyromania and became a protector. And yeah for Farnese it’s been an ongoing journey as she gets braver and more competent and learns new things, and I love that journey, but since deciding to join Guts she’s never had second thoughts or felt sadistic or masochistic urges and more internal conflict for her would’ve been sweet.
But again, that’s assuming that this Guts and Friends story has all been a journey of personal growth and a brighter future, and not just the calm before the storm. So we’ll have to wait and see.
agreed & i just wanna add like not only did the golden age arc end with the Eclipse, which is just about the best way to wrap up an arc that i can personally imagine, but also, it really wasn’t that long, and it was incredibly well paced. now you’re right about things seeming way more off when you’re reading an ongoing manga that frequently goes on hiatus, but i remember during my last re-read everything felt too drawn-out and frankly i couldn’t give a shit about guts-
-and his new party, even though i liked farnese and serpico. my own
fault for liking griffith way too much but i’m bored! and this all had
better be heading somewhere or i swear to god
Yeeeaaah. Like honestly if Berserk ended with Guts’ war declaration, like, I’d desperately want more ofc but I feel like it would work as a self-contained story. The Black Swordsman arc has this v blatant subtext of Guts becoming similar to Griffith, including picking up the behelit, that gets clear after reading the Golden Age so it would feel like a depressing cycle.
Tbh the first time I read the post-eclipse stuff it felt like a slog, but the second time it actually seemed better paced to me. Still long, but i enjoyed the fights more – maybe bc I was picking up on and thinking about a lot of details. Aside from the whole Sea God thing, that was just too much lol. But yeah the Golden Age was really tight – it was long for a flashback but as a story it does feel perfectly paced to me.
Idk I think part of my problem here is that the Golden Age is just so fantastic and so perfectly suited to my specific tastes in fiction that nothing could possibly compare lol. Again, not perfect, like I could write a long list of various ways it offends me lol, but despite that it’s like my ideal story.
I’m still enjoying Berserk after it, but not to the same extent, and a lot of my enjoyment does come from the foundation of the Golden Age informing the characters, and like, searching for hints about how Guts and Griffith’s story is going to be resolved (and whether or not Casca will finally become her own person).
i really loved and now its p much gone. the only thing i really look
forward to anymore is an emotional resolve/final confrontation between
griffith and guts and just to see how they’ll both end up (basically the
ending) and it looks like that will take god knows how many years to
get to.
Yeah that’s fair.
tbh I never really considered how Berserk would feel without the Idea of Evil chapter, but you have a good point. Though I feel like either way, that sense of looming darkness is kind of canceled out by learning so much about the positive/good aspects of like, the spirit world – good witches, guardian spirits, Elfhelm, etc. And ia I do miss that aspect of earlier Berserk. Mystery and looming darkness is a really good way of describing it. I can’t say I regret having the IoE chapter out there myself because I’m greedy for spoilers lol, but I can see how it diminishes the sense of intrigue we’d otherwise have about Griffith’s narrative and the Godhand.
I’m still invested in enough of the characters that I’m definitely hooked – Casca coming back, whatever Rickert and Silat are doing, Griffith’s emotional ambiguity, Guts’ hound trying to break free, hopefully some interesting conflict for Farnese and/or Serpico that doesn’t involve Farnese dying, Schierke and Sonia meeting again, and ofc the GriffGuts confrontation… but yeah it’s like, less about the atmospheric and emotionally intense journey now and more about waiting for something to happen lol.
Also related to that last ask but my response was getting way too long so I’ll mention this separately:
I feel like part of my problem with the current lighter tone is that a lot of the darkness, specifically the emotional angst, of Berserk so far was based on the fact that all the main characters are traumatized and have shitty coping mechanisms. Guts Casca and Griffith sure, and also Farnese and Serpico (neglected throughout childhood and coped by burning people alive and terrorizing ppl, and abused by peers and Farnese + weird expectations from his mother and coped by becoming an unfeeling doormat). And none of them have really dealt with it?
Griff transformed into a monster so fine his story has a conclusion, and Casca’s is maybe coming to fruition soon, but Guts’ trauma just transferred from rape and abuse to feeling manpain about Casca’s trauma, which is a huge disservice to both characters if it’s never brought up again and dealt with.
And while Farnese is bettering herself we’ve never really seen her actual issues addressed, and her whole sadism burning ppl alive thing just kind of easily melted away in favour of a new helping someone philosophy. I wished for more internal conflict there, basically, and I hope it’s addressed in the future but for now it seems like a pretty abrupt change and a missed opportunity. And Serpico is still Serpico. He hasn’t changed a whole lot but his issues haven’t negatively impacted anything either.
In the Golden Age all the psychological baggage these characters had contributed to its absolute disaster of a climax. And I’d love, love to see that happen again, esp with Farnese and Serpico adding more shit to the pile, or I’d love to see their issues flare up but have them manage to overcome them now that they’ve grown in a happier, healthier contrast to the Golden Age.
But throughout the Millenium Empire arc all these issues the characters have never really affected them adversely. I’m hoping that now that we’re delving into Casca’s psyche things will start to snowball and we’ll see that these traumas haven’t just been forgotten but only put on hold for a while so this group can be happy and hopeful.
But for now I do miss reading about fucked up characters and the internal and external challenges posed by their issues.
(cont’d) characters that have seem to multiplied since the aftermath of
the eclipse. the comic bits with isidro and puck are especially
tiring. idk i just miss griffith/guts interactions and the golden
age/black swordsman arc.
Yk I mostly agree. I love Farnese and Serpico, and I find NeoGriff’s side of the story rly engaging, but overall I’m also not super invested in most of Guts’ posse and I feel like I’m kind of just waiting for half of them to die lol. Like Magnifico, you’re just not necessary man, your cute subplot with Puck adds nothing.
When it comes to tone I also mostly agree? Like I recognize that this is personal opinion and I totally get why people would enjoy lighter, less angsty Berserk just as much if not more, but I’m a big fan
of dark stuff, I got into Berserk in part bc it was dark and tragic, and
my favourite kind of light fluffy stuff is when it’s bittersweet
because of what’s to come (eg the whole golden age), or when it’s a stark contrast to the darkness
surrounding (eg when Jill falls asleep on Guts’ lap – great sweet
moment, all the sweeter because it’s surrounded by darkness in and around Guts).
So yeah, it’s subjective, but also… tbh I think the way the change of tone has been executed is lacking. Liiike, idk eg the Golden Age had a lot of light, good, funny moments, and the tone of it definitely wasn’t grimdark until everything went to pieces. But the humour was more balanced and natural and plot-based, I felt, rather than the current digressions for Puck to be cutesy and Isidro to be a little brat. Like, Puck also had gr8 funny moments during the Black Swordsman and Lost Children arcs, to balance out the rly dark tone, but they felt better integrated to me then in general, character-revealing and part of the plot, rather than asides that distract from the focus of the moment.
Maybe it’s part of the difficulty of making your core cast larger – like there are a lot of panels now that are just a series of reactions from the side characters to the main action, and it interrupts the flow imo. The secondary Hawks in the Golden Age didn’t get that amount of time dedicated to their reactions to stuff bc they weren’t important except insofar as their reactions added to the tone or to our understanding of the main characters (eg the abject horror when they run into the eclipse, the raiders crying when Guts returns, etc). Now it feels like an obligation to include 8 characters in everything even when they’re not particularly important to the scene.
Also there’s a bit of tonal whiplash with that bc it’s still just as gorey and violent, and there’s still gratuitous rape w/ trolls and ganeshka eg (though way fewer rape threats and attempts at least, which is one blessing for sure). It’s just that there’s more children and elves and their wacky antics too, which makes it a little whiplashy at times.
And this isn’t really related to anything you said but for my part there’s also the way that the first two arcs feel like a self contained story. The Black Swordsman arc shows Guts being a depressed anti-hero, the Golden Age arc shows how that came to be. The rest of it is very open-ended, which isn’t a bad thing obviously because we’re all excited to see where it’s going and that’s the nature of an ongoing series, but it does make it harder for me personally to enjoy some of it because I don’t know what the payoff is yet. A lot of the post-eclipse stuff feels like seed-sowing for later drama to me, and until we get to that drama I’m unable to react to the seeds with anything more concrete than anticipation.
TBH tho that’s just my personal thing. I almost never get into ongoing stuff lol, most of the shows I watch I wait until they’re over because this is how I feel about ongoing works. For lots of other people I’m sure the sense of anticipation and not knowing what’s to come adds to their enjoyment, rather than diminishing it, but for me I feel like I can never truly appreciate something until it’s over. So looking back I might find all this a nice change of pace between dark angsty and emotional arcs, but at the moment I do miss the angst lol.
lol sorry I kind of took this as an opportunity to share my own less positive thoughts on current Berserk. Don’t get me wrong though everyone reading this, I still love it, and it still has a lot of breathtaking sequences and moments, and a lot of great characters. And earlier Berserk wasn’t perfect either by a longshot. But yk, just when it comes to tone and style of comedy and cast of characters I get why people would have a preference.
@chaoticgaygriffith said:
Actually, now that you mention it, I never really paid close attention
to how Casca and Guts acted around each other bc I didn’t care for it,
but if Casca really did get Griffith’s eroticised panels once she and
Guts started being a thing, then I have to laugh because that’s just
further proof (as if further proof was necessary) that she was Guts’
replacement for Griffith. As he was hers, although I don’t see her crush
on Griffith as genuine but more of a misidentified emotion of
admiration and gratitude.
I’m just replying to this instead of reblogging bc that thread is long and full of pictures. feel free to skip this if you don’t feel like reading My Thoughts on Guts’ Attraction to Casca lol, tho it’s v negative.
ngl… after a brief check of some key scenes, ie the ball, the sex scene, guts feeling kind of jealous during the rescue mission, and the huddling in the cave scene, I can say that we got Guts leering at her once when he first sees her in the dress with a cutesy blushy pov shot of her from his perspective, and one (1) panel of her looking sexy from guts’ pov at the very end of the sex scene.
So she doesn’t get nearly the bombshell treatment Griffith does. When Guts looks at her when she’s naked she almost always looks small and vulnerable, rather than erotic. (And I mean unfortunately small and vulnerable can = eroticized, but these shots are mostly Guts empathizing with her so I don’t feel that’s the case). In normal circumstances I’d be like, ok fine gj Miura that’s not a bad thing, but unforch what Guts lacks in finding her a sexy object the “camera” more than makes up for, compartmentalizing her into tits and ass and thighs etc, objectifying her, etc, for the audience’s sake.
I mean I think the most eroticized moment of Guts looking at her, other than the one shot I mentioned from the sex scene, is when he’s picturing her with the hound biting her neck. Which is fucked up but tbh it fits right in with Casca’s narrative treatment. Like she’s more likely to be objectified and made “sexy” for the audience during a rape scene than any other time.
So I mean, I can’t say kudos to miura for not having Guts get a long lingering look at her being sexy, because the audience does all the damn time in absolutely awful circumstances. But I am gonna say that signs point to Guts being gay.
(I know there’s one scene much later where Guts remembers having sex with her and might picture her splayed out on display, but I didn’t have any pics from that saved bc why would I so I have no idea when it was to find it and check.)
(also totally agree about Casca’s crush on Griff not being genuine.)
The sex scene between Casca and Gut seemed to be a form of comforting each other. Strangely I think it has less to do with being sexually attracted.
Maybe Casca looking vurnerable was a necessity of being intimidate with her. She was not so dangerous for Guts like other people (especially men after his trauma), even if I agree that Guts really is at least bi, maybe entirely gay.
Bi…since I kind of had the impression that he thought of her as sexually attractive like you described above. But that doesn t necessarily equate to being in love.
And there was the case that both Casca and Guts perceived Griffith as somebody out of their reach, while Casca was far more present for Guts and vice versa.
Still I envision their being together more as a form of camaraderie and helping each other than just a pure romantic outcome.
Like you told above…Griffith plays a far to much predominant role in both minds.
yeah ia!
Guts and Casca hooking up never felt romantic to me, or like it was even about Guts and Casca. Casca had just tried to kill herself, Guts had just let Casca stab him as a reaction to learning Griffith was in love with him.
But to me it reads like Casca giving up on Griffith (giving him to Guts actually w/ that “I’m so tired… you do the rest” bit) and moving right to Guts bc she doesn’t know how to live for herself, and Guts repressing the revelation that he broke Griffith’s heart by refocusing on Casca.
Whether Miura intended for it to be mildly fucked up idk (I get the feeling that Casca moving from Griffith to Guts IS supposed to be her act of independence lol but if so it definitely doesn’t work for me) but yeah, either way there’s definitely more of a two ppl comforting each other vibe than a True Love vibe.
Really during the entire scene I could feel Griffith’s palpable presence between them.
It’s strange how everything that happens seems to have this hanging reference to Griffith in there.
And really they’re using each other as springboards in a way. Infact the manga itself draws visual comparisons here. I don’t think it is coincidental that the way Casca hugs Guts after hearing his story is exactly how she hugs Griffith in the lake all those chapters ago.
Except Guts actually lets her comfort him. It’s like Casca’s second chance to do the one thing she’d desperately once wanted to do and had been unable to. I think there’s a line somewhat like- “but for once I want to be able to give something too and not just receive, and maybe I can have that with this man”
Similarly with Guts. He’s reeling from the shock of learning that he’d been unable to do anything about Griffith’s sense of identity and resolve crumbling, so he focuses on fixing Casca, another person whose sense of identity and resolve is crumbling, conveniently right in front of him and as an actual attainable end. Comforting Casca is a more accessible way of doing what he now wants to do.
See the thing about G*tsca, it seems to me, is that them getting together wasn’t about realising that they needed each other or suddenly realised that they were in love.
It was about them recognising their own emotional needs at that point and recognising that the other had a chance of being able to fullfill those needs at that moment.
The chapter name even is licking wounds. It’s literally about two very stressed out people, comforting each other. It isn’t about passion, and honestly I don’t think is portrayed to be so even in the canon.
Tbh whatever else I may have beef with Miura about, he isn’t actually guilty of projecting G*tsca as an OTP as far as I remember. He purposely draws parallels to each of their relationships to griffith during the scene, has Casca and Guts both secretly doubt their feelings and get all-around jealous less than 12 hours later, has them kiss or make out zero times after that. Has Guts repeatedly prioritise Griffith during post rescue as well as Eclipse chapters and once again kinda restructures up some of the Early Golden age dynamic between Guts and Griffith with Casca a little off the side once again immediatly post the rescue.
Good point about Casca hugging Guts from behind in an echo of Griffith in the river. It’s obvious imo that Guts is replacing Griffith to her (she p much says that lol) but that’s a gr8 visual parallel that adds to it.
And yeah same, like, it’s part of what keeps me reading Berserk – the fact that I don’t think G*tsca was ever or will ever be a grand true love romantic thing. It definitely feels downplayed to me – like Miura said, added for extra Eclipse drama but not intended from the beginning.
god ikr. i always remember it as more subtle than it is lol. but i mean i feel i can write a Serious Analysis that includes the phrase “this is Guts repressing the realization that Griffith is in love with him” for example and it’s just like, yeah, true, that’s not reachy or wishful thinking at all.
Also grif orginal design was female and as the manga grows older we seem to be getting back to that lol
i’ve heard his design was based on oscar from rose of versailles, is that what you mean by his original design being female? bc yeah he def gets prettier and prettier as miura’s art shifts
Oh I think I was the one who brought the RoV thing up. But also in the fact that Griffith’s original design was literally female even within the Berserk universe.
In the Berserk prototype that is. At least I’m assuming that’s Griffith- because it’s the same character design. It’s only one chapter so finding character parallels is a bit more difficult. But I found some tbh.
oh yeah you mean the girl guts saves with griffith hair (and like, face, but that’s all of miura’s early feminine faces tbf)?
tbh i do have to wonder why miura was like, hmm i need a design for guts’ bff turned enemy… let’s just re-do this damsel in distress.
i think we might’ve actually chatted about parallels between them before, that’s ringing a bell. she does a self-sacrificial, i’ll be taken to the evil monster dude so no one else has to die, thing, which feels kind of like it could’ve been repurposed for Griff’s backstory. Throw more parallels at me if you have some plz.
he mentions it in like. some like “interview with a mangaka!!” piece. its on a manga viewing site somewhere and is like in comic form and written by someone who i guess does it as a series but he mightve mentioned it in that intervoew from 2004 that i think a lot of ppl have read by now (the one where he compares himself to the green ranger, etc) http://www.mangahere.co/manga/challenging_the_manga_dojos/c001/ found it lol
tyvm! i’m terrible at tracking stuff down on my own lol this is gr8
the ROV thing was from afaik an interview w/ him in manga format by a younger mangaka?? im not sure if it was their conclusion or s/t miura explicitly said
oh awesome, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. i might have to try to track it down
Also grif orginal design was female and as the manga grows older we seem to be getting back to that lol
i’ve heard his design was based on oscar from rose of versailles, is that what you mean by his original design being female? bc yeah he def gets prettier and prettier as miura’s art shifts
i got a lot of bones to pick with miura but tbh one that’s really bugging me right now is how tf was griffith even alive after the year of torture. do germs not exist in berserk?? he had literally chunks of skin gone, muscles just visible and waving hi, while spending a year in a dank hole that’s p far from sterile
like ok im no doctor and idk shit about infections so correct me if i’m wrong but i just don’t believe you can survive very long in low fantasy middle ages without skin
plus when your tendons are cut your fingers don’t just get weak and unable to make a fist, you can’t bend them at all. miura why
Ty Anon this is super nice ❤ No worries, fandomy arguments don’t really faze me much.
tbh it does kind of suck that Berserk is so utterly polarizing that it makes it hard to like, lightly talk about it without 50 disclaimers and clarifications, but c’est la vie. I’ve done pretty well by staying out of tags and being upfront about what I’m about lol, so it’s not a big deal to me. tbh I blame Miura for making it super extra edgy more than fans who have a strong negative reaction to Griffith bc of the Eclipse, though I do wish ppl could chill at fans who have different reactions to a flawed story and redirect that ire at the writer.
Also tbf tone is hard on the internet so my op probably came across as more serious than intended. I’m used to preaching to the choir so I didn’t expect anyone to take it as a serious complaint or accusation tbh, though that was probably naive of me.
@chaoticgaygriffith said:
Actually, now that you mention it, I never really paid close attention
to how Casca and Guts acted around each other bc I didn’t care for it,
but if Casca really did get Griffith’s eroticised panels once she and
Guts started being a thing, then I have to laugh because that’s just
further proof (as if further proof was necessary) that she was Guts’
replacement for Griffith. As he was hers, although I don’t see her crush
on Griffith as genuine but more of a misidentified emotion of
admiration and gratitude.
I’m just replying to this instead of reblogging bc that thread is long and full of pictures. feel free to skip this if you don’t feel like reading My Thoughts on Guts’ Attraction to Casca lol, tho it’s v negative.
ngl… after a brief check of some key scenes, ie the ball, the sex scene, guts feeling kind of jealous during the rescue mission, and the huddling in the cave scene, I can say that we got Guts leering at her once when he first sees her in the dress with a cutesy blushy pov shot of her from his perspective, and one (1) panel of her looking sexy from guts’ pov at the very end of the sex scene.
So she doesn’t get nearly the bombshell treatment Griffith does. When Guts looks at her when she’s naked she almost always looks small and vulnerable, rather than erotic. (And I mean unfortunately small and vulnerable can = eroticized, but these shots are mostly Guts empathizing with her so I don’t feel that’s the case). In normal circumstances I’d be like, ok fine gj Miura that’s not a bad thing, but unforch what Guts lacks in finding her a sexy object the “camera” more than makes up for, compartmentalizing her into tits and ass and thighs etc, objectifying her, etc, for the audience’s sake.
I mean I think the most eroticized moment of Guts looking at her, other than the one shot I mentioned from the sex scene, is when he’s picturing her with the hound biting her neck. Which is fucked up but tbh it fits right in with Casca’s narrative treatment. Like she’s more likely to be objectified and made “sexy” for the audience during a rape scene than any other time.
So I mean, I can’t say kudos to miura for not having Guts get a long lingering look at her being sexy, because the audience does all the damn time in absolutely awful circumstances. But I am gonna say that signs point to Guts being gay.
(I know there’s one scene much later where Guts remembers having sex with her and might picture her splayed out on display, but I didn’t have any pics from that saved bc why would I so I have no idea when it was to find it and check.)
(also totally agree about Casca’s crush on Griff not being genuine.)
The sex scene between Casca and Gut seemed to be a form of comforting each other. Strangely I think it has less to do with being sexually attracted.
Maybe Casca looking vurnerable was a necessity of being intimidate with her. She was not so dangerous for Guts like other people (especially men after his trauma), even if I agree that Guts really is at least bi, maybe entirely gay.
Bi…since I kind of had the impression that he thought of her as sexually attractive like you described above. But that doesn t necessarily equate to being in love.
And there was the case that both Casca and Guts perceived Griffith as somebody out of their reach, while Casca was far more present for Guts and vice versa.
Still I envision their being together more as a form of camaraderie and helping each other than just a pure romantic outcome.
Like you told above…Griffith plays a far to much predominant role in both minds.
yeah ia!
Guts and Casca hooking up never felt romantic to me, or like it was even about Guts and Casca. Casca had just tried to kill herself, Guts had just let Casca stab him as a reaction to learning Griffith was in love with him.
But to me it reads like Casca giving up on Griffith (giving him to Guts actually w/ that “I’m so tired… you do the rest” bit) and moving right to Guts bc she doesn’t know how to live for herself, and Guts repressing the revelation that he broke Griffith’s heart by refocusing on Casca.
Whether Miura intended for it to be mildly fucked up idk (I get the feeling that Casca moving from Griffith to Guts IS supposed to be her act of independence lol but if so it definitely doesn’t work for me) but yeah, either way there’s definitely more of a two ppl comforting each other vibe than a True Love vibe.
hair and makeup done, waiting to get into costume!
after set date! (drawing guts like this felt…wrong)
@mastermistressofdesire mentioned a au where all the characters of berserk were actually actors on the set of a movie, and i fell in love instantly……maybe one day i can flesh it out more but this is all my stamina would let me finish
i honestly can’t comprehend the concept of sitting down to read berserk and not coming out of it shipping guts/griffith, at least in the sense of being heavily invested in their intense, eroticized relationship
i mean yeah ok it takes all kinds, there are people out there who watched xena and thought her and gabrielle had a sisterly bond, apparently there are people who watched hannibal and thought hannibal being head over heels in love with will was an elaborate fakeout bc they think he’s incapable of emotions or smthn, but like, man, idk
idk how that works. idk how you read a story that’s like:
– these two dudes hate each other. the reason is because one sacrificed the other in a ceremony where to escape unbearable emotional pain you have to sacrifice a person you love so much it’s like they’re a part of you, and your illustrative example for this concept is a husband and wife. – let’s introduce their relationship with the textual suggestion that one is sexually attracted to the other. and just to make it even the other can mention how pretty and beautiful he is multiple times. – oh now here’s 70 chapters to demonstrate the fact that these dudes care more about each other than anything else in the world. we’ll state that outright too. – 90% of the purpose of this arc is to show how meaningful and deep and intense and life-altering this relationship is. – now one guy is supposed to be emotionless but oops turns out when he looks at the dude he loved more than anything his heart starts fluttering. – now this other guy is supposed to be consumed by hate but oops the dude he hates looks just like the dude he loved more than anything again and his resolve crumbles. – now they’ll have totally separate narratives for a while but just look at this foundation of solid bedrock their relationship is built on, informing every pointed moment of emotional ambiguity, every reminder of the past, and every hint of potential foreshadowing.
and come away from it thinking ‘man i can’t wait til guts cuts off griffith’s head and rides off into the sunset with casca as his narrative reward’
UM??? IDK MAN
Maybe people dont come out of Berserk shipping Griffith and Guts because Griffith literally betrayed Guts and CURSED him. Remember that? Maybe some people don’t ship Griffith and Guts together because Griffith is a rapist. Maybe they don’t because he is a sociopathic war criminal. Maybe they don’t do it because he isn’t a fucking???? Good person???? Like come on your metas are usually good don’t come on here playin dumb and actin fuckin stupid because what you are saying is stupid. I personally do not even have the slightest problem with griffguts. But why can’t ya’ll have the fuckin decency to keep this shit in the golden age???? Why do you have to bring this mess into post-eclipse arcs?
Golden age????? You could honestly make that shit as HOMOEROTIC as you fucking want bro. But Post-Eclipse??? oH the fucking nerve. Like. I swear to fucking God some of you Berserk fans really have your fucking nerve. It takes Zodd’s huge, sweaty, hairy bowling balls to look at eclipse and post-eclipse content and still find a way to write a whole ass essay about why you think Griffith and Guts belong together, unwittingly using casca’s plight as your source.
If you wanna sit there and ship a toxic as fuck ship then that’s on you do you. Nobody’s judging you for that whatever. But don’t sit up here and question why people don’t agree with your toxic ship. Don’t play dumb. Like????? You already KNOW why ??????????? You should already KNOOOOOW whhhhhhy somebody would NOT be okay with griffguts??????????? It should be obvious?????????? Every reason why people WOULDNT dig it is lit staring you right in your face???? and has been for a WHILE??? this little bullshit list you composed is not ONLY missing PIVOTAL details in regards to the reasons why Griffith and Guts’ friendship fell out in the first place, but EVERYTHING in that list became meaningless once Griffith went left and decided to do what the fuck he did.
Again idk man, maybe a nigga wanna see Guts chop this inbred piegon’s head off and run away with Casca in the sunset because that’d be the perfect revenge against the feather duster motherfucker that tried to take everything away from him and his family. Peace.
ok look
this was tongue in cheek and off-the-cuff and purposefully exaggerated for the sake of humour, and in the post directly after i clarified that i don’t mean “want them to live happily ever after” by “ship”, i mean be invested in their gay dynamic bc it’s the basis of the story. I mean I actually kinda stated that in the beginning of this post too, but not quite as clearly so w/e. The only point of this post was to point out that Guts and Griffith’s relationship is the basis for 90% of the complexity and emotional investment in both characters, yeah even after the Eclipse, and it IS weird and unrelatable to me to enjoy Berserk while dismissing that. Like I know there are other things to like about it, I like other aspects too, but the emotional complex friends to enemies relationship is still the whole point so yeah it’s strange to me that a lot of Berserk fans ignore it.
and tbh I actually don’t know why someone would hate Guts/Griff but ship Guts/Casca. like I actually think it’s downright bizarre to call griffguts toxic but want guts to ride off into the sunset with the woman who is terrified of him bc he tried to rape her.
And I don’t know why someone would want an unemotional action climax between Guts and Griff where Guts kills Griffith instead of an emotional climax as payoff to their intense relationship, because I don’t get why you wouldn’t drop the manga after it became clear that Miura is still invested in keeping the relationship between Guts and Griff complicated and interesting (and has directly stated that he intends NeoGriffith to be morally ambiguous like lol jfc dude) despite turning one of them into an evil demon rapist and the other into a human attempted rapist, if badly written sexual assault is a dealbreaker. Like, yeah, it’s a mess, both characters are terrible, Miura is a pos for throwing rape in as a lazy way of demonstrating a character’s “dark side,” and wanting the reader to still give a shit about those rapey characters, but that’s the story we’re stuck with and that story is still about Guts and Griffith’s relationship.
A story about a guy turning into an evil demon rapist and becoming a two dimensional moustache twirling villain with no depth and another guy sexually assaulting his traumatized girlfriend and becoming a loathesome piece of shit you’re supposed to hate would be a very different, less offensive but also more boring, story, and it’s just not the story we’re reading. We’re stuck with the story where the author made his two main characters sexually assault the same woman and yet continues to write them as interesting complicated characters. So you can ignore the complexity or you can ignore the rape or you can put down the book or you can throw up your hands and go ‘miura is an offensive dick’ and doublethink your way through the story. And tl;dr it’s weird to me that so many Berserk fans go with the first option.
Finally, again, Miura is the one writing the story about how Casca gets fucked over repeatedly bc Guts and Griffith are obsessed with each other and take it out on her, not me. Casca’s story sucks and offends on every level but don’t blame GriffGuts shippers for that, that’s on the author. Like personally as a GriffGuts shipper I want those two to kill each other in an emotionally climactic way and Casca to live happily ever after far away from both of them.
Ok so see I really hate when people blame guts himself for trying to rape casca because it literally wasn’t him WHY DOESN’T ANYONE FUCKING REMEMBER THAT it was a literal ghost or demon or whatever but point is it possessed him and made him do that
I disagree. from what I can tell the hound is a manifestation of his dark-side given more form than most ppl’s dark sides by the brand. it first appeared in godo’s cave which repels evil spirits, and it’s directly compared to femto, so i’m confident that it’s a part of guts, not a separate entity. he lost control and gave into his dark-side when he assaulted casca (the second time, the first time was when he tried to kiss her in godo’s cave, with no hound in sight, and scared her), and bc of the brand’s reality-bending powers, that loss of control manifests as the hound.
i honestly can’t comprehend the concept of sitting down to read berserk and not coming out of it shipping guts/griffith, at least in the sense of being heavily invested in their intense, eroticized relationship
i mean yeah ok it takes all kinds, there are people out there who watched xena and thought her and gabrielle had a sisterly bond, apparently there are people who watched hannibal and thought hannibal being head over heels in love with will was an elaborate fakeout bc they think he’s incapable of emotions or smthn, but like, man, idk
idk how that works. idk how you read a story that’s like:
– these two dudes hate each other. the reason is because one sacrificed the other in a ceremony where to escape unbearable emotional pain you have to sacrifice a person you love so much it’s like they’re a part of you, and your illustrative example for this concept is a husband and wife. – let’s introduce their relationship with the textual suggestion that one is sexually attracted to the other. and just to make it even the other can mention how pretty and beautiful he is multiple times. – oh now here’s 70 chapters to demonstrate the fact that these dudes care more about each other than anything else in the world. we’ll state that outright too. – 90% of the purpose of this arc is to show how meaningful and deep and intense and life-altering this relationship is. – now one guy is supposed to be emotionless but oops turns out when he looks at the dude he loved more than anything his heart starts fluttering. – now this other guy is supposed to be consumed by hate but oops the dude he hates looks just like the dude he loved more than anything again and his resolve crumbles. – now they’ll have totally separate narratives for a while but just look at this foundation of solid bedrock their relationship is built on, informing every pointed moment of emotional ambiguity, every reminder of the past, and every hint of potential foreshadowing.
and come away from it thinking ‘man i can’t wait til guts cuts off griffith’s head and rides off into the sunset with casca as his narrative reward’
UM??? IDK MAN
Maybe people dont come out of Berserk shipping Griffith and Guts because Griffith literally betrayed Guts and CURSED him. Remember that? Maybe some people don’t ship Griffith and Guts together because Griffith is a rapist. Maybe they don’t because he is a sociopathic war criminal. Maybe they don’t do it because he isn’t a fucking???? Good person???? Like come on your metas are usually good don’t come on here playin dumb and actin fuckin stupid because what you are saying is stupid. I personally do not even have the slightest problem with griffguts. But why can’t ya’ll have the fuckin decency to keep this shit in the golden age???? Why do you have to bring this mess into post-eclipse arcs?
Golden age????? You could honestly make that shit as HOMOEROTIC as you fucking want bro. But Post-Eclipse??? oH the fucking nerve. Like. I swear to fucking God some of you Berserk fans really have your fucking nerve. It takes Zodd’s huge, sweaty, hairy bowling balls to look at eclipse and post-eclipse content and still find a way to write a whole ass essay about why you think Griffith and Guts belong together, unwittingly using casca’s plight as your source.
If you wanna sit there and ship a toxic as fuck ship then that’s on you do you. Nobody’s judging you for that whatever. But don’t sit up here and question why people don’t agree with your toxic ship. Don’t play dumb. Like????? You already KNOW why ??????????? You should already KNOOOOOW whhhhhhy somebody would NOT be okay with griffguts??????????? It should be obvious?????????? Every reason why people WOULDNT dig it is lit staring you right in your face???? and has been for a WHILE??? this little bullshit list you composed is not ONLY missing PIVOTAL details in regards to the reasons why Griffith and Guts’ friendship fell out in the first place, but EVERYTHING in that list became meaningless once Griffith went left and decided to do what the fuck he did.
Again idk man, maybe a nigga wanna see Guts chop this inbred piegon’s head off and run away with Casca in the sunset because that’d be the perfect revenge against the feather duster motherfucker that tried to take everything away from him and his family. Peace.
ok look
this was tongue in cheek and off-the-cuff and purposefully exaggerated for the sake of humour, and in the post directly after i clarified that i don’t mean “want them to live happily ever after” by “ship”, i mean be invested in their gay dynamic bc it’s the basis of the story. I mean I actually kinda stated that in the beginning of this post too, but not quite as clearly so w/e. The only point of this post was to point out that Guts and Griffith’s relationship is the basis for 90% of the complexity and emotional investment in both characters, yeah even after the Eclipse, and it IS weird and unrelatable to me to enjoy Berserk while dismissing that. Like I know there are other things to like about it, I like other aspects too, but the emotional complex friends to enemies relationship is still the whole point so yeah it’s strange to me that a lot of Berserk fans ignore it.
and tbh I actually don’t know why someone would hate Guts/Griff but ship Guts/Casca. like I actually think it’s downright bizarre to call griffguts toxic but want guts to ride off into the sunset with the woman who is terrified of him bc he tried to rape her.
And I don’t know why someone would want an unemotional action climax between Guts and Griff where Guts kills Griffith instead of an emotional climax as payoff to their intense relationship, because I don’t get why you wouldn’t drop the manga after it became clear that Miura is still invested in keeping the relationship between Guts and Griff complicated and interesting (and has directly stated that he intends NeoGriffith to be morally ambiguous like lol jfc dude) despite turning one of them into an evil demon rapist and the other into a human attempted rapist, if badly written sexual assault is a dealbreaker. Like, yeah, it’s a mess, both characters are terrible, Miura is a pos for throwing rape in as a lazy way of demonstrating a character’s “dark side,” and wanting the reader to still give a shit about those rapey characters, but that’s the story we’re stuck with and that story is still about Guts and Griffith’s relationship.
A story about a guy turning into an evil demon rapist and becoming a two dimensional moustache twirling villain with no depth and another guy sexually assaulting his traumatized girlfriend and becoming a loathesome piece of shit you’re supposed to hate would be a very different, less offensive but also more boring, story, and it’s just not the story we’re reading. We’re stuck with the story where the author made his two main characters sexually assault the same woman and yet continues to write them as interesting complicated characters. So you can ignore the complexity or you can ignore the rape or you can put down the book or you can throw up your hands and go ‘miura is an offensive dick’ and doublethink your way through the story. And tl;dr it’s weird to me that so many Berserk fans go with the first option.
Finally, again, Miura is the one writing the story about how Casca gets fucked over repeatedly bc Guts and Griffith are obsessed with each other and take it out on her, not me. Casca’s story sucks and offends on every level but don’t blame GriffGuts shippers for that, that’s on the author. Like personally as a GriffGuts shipper I want those two to kill each other in an emotionally climactic way and Casca to live happily ever after far away from both of them.
you're the only one 