idk if I can really make a case for it, other than the fact that like… that sex scene was super basic lol.
also i like the idea of griffith thinking he needs to be good at hetero sex so he can seduce charlotte properly for the sake of his dream when the time comes, and then convincing himself that reading the books he canonically has totally covers it and there’s no need to actually have sex with a woman
hope you get your gay griffith thoughts watered bc i always want to read more of them
realizing the kid in griffiths hesterosexual nightmare is his and cascas gave me hives cool how this whole situation is
realized in gruesome reverse, with griffith off “pursuing his dream” and
casca and guts “kid” being a literal part/reminder of griffiths absence
ooh good point. and also that is a reason i can get behind for guts being freaked out by the fetus in the black swordsman arc. obviously not authorially intended at that point and i don’t think it actually works wrt symbolism, but emotionally i dig it
also yeah lol that scene is like 3 pages of quiet domesticity and i think it disturbs me more than anything else in berserk
course a lot of that is what i bring to the table with my berserk is about heteronormativity and repression hot takes but yk, still
Sorry I ran out of characters in the last post so I’ll continue from
here: And in the dream sequence where Griffith imagined Casca was his
wife and Guts was there child? Did you think that what happened in the
wagon was Griffith attempting to rape Casca and was the dream sequence
suppose to reveal ANY sort of feeling he had for her? What do you think
is the case and why?
I definitely don’t think the wagon scene or the dream sequence (I call
it a nightmare lol) suggest that Griffith has feelings for Casca. And I
don’t think the scene in the wagon was a rape attempt, because I mean
for one Griffith stopped when Casca told him to stop, so yk, qed lol,
but also because I think it’s meant to be a huge contrast to the Eclipse
rape, rather than like, a sneak preview. It’s an offer, the only way he can make that offer without the ability to speak.
Griffith is at his absolute lowest point here. He’s lost everything that he perceives gives him worth, and Wyald’s just literally and metaphorically stripped away his last lingering ability to deny this. He overheard Casca tell Guts she wants to be held right before the wagon scene, and as Casca is bandaging his hand she reflects on how Griffith could always comfort her with just a hand on her shoulder – but now it’s her turn to do that.
So imo Griffith is offering himself to Casca for two reasons:
1. He desperately wants to be this person again:
She’s shaking, she wants comfort, and Griffith wants to be the strong leader who can ease her trembling.
It’s a way he’s denied his vulnerability in the past:
But he’s simply no longer able to be this person.
It’s a humiliating, and depressing reversal of their roles, emphasizing how far Griffith’s fallen.
2. It’s sexual for one or both of these reasons:
Guts and Casca just had comfort sex. As a failed attempt at initiating comfort sex, the contrast highlights Griffith’s removal from their new dynamic. Also, since Griffith knows they’ve hooked up, this could be an attempt to insert himself into that dynamic and redress the balance because he’s afraid of being left behind.
What may be a harder sell depending on your reading of Griffith but makes the most sense to me is that frankly, Griffith is desperate. Wyald just gave the Hawks a run-down of how fucked he is for life – he can no longer be the Hawks’ hope for the future, and he can’t even live on his own. He’s been hiding behind that hawk mask, clinging to the last vestiges of his image (like when he asked Guts for his armour), and now that’s gone. If someone doesn’t take care of him, he’s dead. Griffith is someone who judges his worth by what he can be to other people, and now in his eyes he’s nothing but a burden with tens of thousands of corpses worth of guilt hanging over him.
And kind of hammering this point home for the reader, outside the wagon Judeau is backing up Griffith’s own depressing image of himself too – he’s telling Guts to take Casca and run because otherwise she’ll basically end up stuck taking care of Griffith, while he himself offers to take Griffith with him because he feels like he owes Griffith. And after this scene, Casca cries because she feels like she can’t leave Griffith behind, even though she wants to leave with Guts.
Ironically, considering what Griffith overhears right after, Guts is the only person who actually wants to stay with Griffith now, as he keeps trying to tell the people who keep telling him to leave lol:
So, imo Griffith’s offering sex to Casca mostly because it’s something he can offer that still
potentially has worth – it’s something he can give in exchange for being
taken care of.
Casca was in love with him, and lbr Griffith knows that, so this is theoretically something she might want.
And Griffith like, sees sex as transactional. It’s something he can trade to those with more power than him, who can give him something he needs. Money, with Gennon. A kingdom, with Charlotte. And here it’s Casca, for security – plus maybe Guts. So imo trading sexual favours absolutely seems like something Griffith would fall back on if he’s desperate.
And this leads right to Griffith’s hallucinatory nightmare after he overhears Casca telling Guts to leave – he’s envisioning the life he just asked for, believing Guts intends to leave, and it’s fucking horrific.
Griffith is living in what seems like a state of permanent dissociation. Guts is out there, still pursuing his own dream, totally out of their lives.
You mentioned the child being Guts, as in a surreal nightmare, but I think he’s just intended to be named after him. The “he” swinging his sword out there somewhere who Casca mentions would be the actual Guts, and this – blondish – kid is presumably Griffith and Cacsa’s.
imo a p disturbing way of underscoring that Guts is gone but far from forgotten.
Anyway yeah to me this whole sequence reads like Griffith grasping at the last straws available to him.
So to basically just sum up My Take on all this:
Griffith offers himself to Casca in the wagon both to try to reclaim a piece of his past self, and in an attempt to secure his future by offering Casca something she wants. And imagining that future, sans Guts, drives him to suicide.
So like, I don’t think it’s indicative of Griffith having any romantic feelings for Casca. It’s more a painful illustration of Griffith’s current powerlessness and desperation.
In case you want to read more lol, I talk about these scenes more thoroughly and with more context and build up in like the first half of the fourth part of this Griffith analysis.
i always say guts doesn’t know how to work a phone but i love the idea of him taking candid pics of griff and looking at them lovingly later
has so many sleeping/napping griff pics
yesss
and like if griffith was looking thru guts’ phone and stumbled across the folder of pics of himself sleeping he would completely love it, like it wouldn’t even occur to him to be creeped out lol, it’d just be evidence that guts is super into him even at his most un-put-together
And then guts have sex wt casca and that stops. Now hes just a strong
character,never defeated, afraid only of himself bc ooh theres a scary
monster inside him teehee,like every shonen.He wants to defeat his evil
former bff with lingering sentiments (naruto?). His vulnerabilities, his
dependance on smo else opinion,his loneliness and lack of meaning of
his existence,which were rare traits in protag?disappeared. GA was how
life conditions impacted real ppl,now bersek is just a shonen wt rape
2/2
Yeaaaaah I agree with a lot of this. I’ve ranted about it before but I can always go on more about how much it bugs me that Guts’ personal trauma is basically ignored during and after the Eclipse in favour of switching to being angry about someone else’s trauma (someone who didn’t even get her own reaction to it, at least not for 20 years).
Cause yeah like ia, Guts’ trauma – and not just the csa trauma but also the more overarching abuse from Gambino as he was growing up – is so vital to his entire character in the first two arcs. It informs everything about him from his insecurities, to the way he fights, to the reason he stayed with the Hawks and the reason he left the Hawks, etc. In the Black Swordsman arc, the reason he’s so angry is because Griffith sacrificing him wasn’t just a betrayal, but a replay of that childhood trauma. The ghosts haunting him and claiming him are an echo of Gambino calling him cursed and selling him to someone else. It all fits together perfectly and it’s so good.
And it is a relatively unique backstory when it comes to badass manly man action hero protagonists. I mean to be nitpicky Berserk is a seinen, not a shonen, but the csa backstories seem to be more inspired by classic shojo, based on some of the influences Miura cites (like Kaze to Ki no Uta), and combining those elements with typical seinen action stuff, especially since imo Miura did it very thoughtfully and very well up til the end of the Golden Age, does create a unique and v interesting story.
And then during and after the Eclipse Guts’ trauma is basically dropped, and he does feel more generic to me – more typically cool and badass, much less interestingly vulnerable. Like eg, his very personal, actual fear-for-himself during the Black Swordsman arc was a really compelling element! And the only post-Eclipse instance I can think of where he was shown to be genuinely afraid for his own life and well-being, rather than afraid of his own potential to do harm or afraid for the people he’s trying to protect, is when Slan shows up in the troll cave. And because there was a sexualized threat there I do think that was a deliberate reference to Guts’ own trauma. But it was one scene over a hundred chapters ago that didn’t really have any emotional resonance (unlike, say, the early Golden Age Zodd encounter which changed everything, or the Wyald encounter which imo shed a lot of light on Guts’ dream), and was far from overt.
So like I unfortunately also get the impression that Miura has largely dropped Guts’ personal trauma as a significant factor of his character and story in favour of the far more common and boring fridged girlfriend backstory.
But! I also still have hope that that’s not the case. I feel like Guts’ post Eclipse monster hunting rampage was largely a way to avoid dealing with his complicated feelings, and I feel the same way about Guts’ fix Casca quest. Like, maybe it’s not Miura dropping Guts’ personal trauma to focus on manpain – maybe it’s Guts deliberately cultivating rage to avoid confronting his more difficult feelings like fear and loneliness and longing etc.
Avoidance is kind of his thing, after all.
This may be (is probably) wishful thinking, but it does give me hope
that if the fix Casca quest goes pear shaped (eg Casca uses the behelit,
or something), Guts’ issues – his childhood, guilt, all his mixed feelings regarding Griffith, etc – will come back front and centre. We
have all the ominous foreshadowing about the Beast of Darkness and the
armour,
and if something makes him go wild and succumb to it it would be nice if it wasn’t just like a one-off bad event but rather a cumulation of everything he’s (I hope) been spending the last 3 years trying to distract himself from.
And then at some point after that he can be pulled back from the armour and yk, actually grow as a person by confronting his issues rather than hitting stuff with a sword, now armed with the knowledge that avoiding stuff just makes them fuck you up harder when your avoidance strategies fail you.
ofc that said, even if that is the case I think Miura’s fucked up w/ pacing. It’s been 250 chapters since the Eclipse, there’s a reason I feel like this is a vain hope even if it does make perfect sense to me as an explanation lol. Plus like… some details do seem to not be pointing in that direction. Like:
Are we meant to regard his choice to take Casca to Elfhelm to be immersing himself in sorrow? Because that is absolutely not the vibe I’m getting, but the dichotemy between chase Griffith for revenge = avoidance vs stick with Casca = positive healing is so explicitly drawn here that maybe Miura’s just half-assing the positive healing to the point where it looks like avoidance lmao. Like that is my genuine fear, is that everything from chapter 130 on is actually meant to be seen as Guts dealing with his shit lol.
But idk like there are still intriguing elements that may be evocative of Guts’ deeper issues, back even to his childhood, that pop up now and then, that I can point to as evidence that they may still be actually dealt with in the future. Like the aforementioned Slan scene, the way he’s still drawn to Griffith as his “true light,” the fact that the Beast of Darkness is personified as a dog
uhhh the self-destructiveness of the armour (the way he doesn’t feel pain and it knits his broken bones together etc) as a metaphor for the way fighting is basically a form of self-harm for him… idk like none of these things are addressed, but they’re there to be picked up on and therefore will hopefully cumulate in something more interesting eventually.
I like this analysis. I agree that this potential is unfortunately most likely not going to get explored, at least not any time soon – especially the way the manga is heading right now. But who knows, I’ve been wrong about predictions before… guess we still have fanfiction though if anything.
thank you!
Yeah my hopes aren’t high but I think there’s a chance Miura might explore some aspects once we get back to Guts’ side of the narrative. After all we’re at the culmination of his journey of the last 150ish chapters, so it’s the perfect time to bring those themes home and make a statement about Guts’ relationships etc. Like, if things go wrong w/ Casca’s mind coming back (thinking of omnious foreshadowing featuring the berserk armour and behelit), will his new friendships help prevent the worst from happening? Or will Guts’ emotional distance from them have negative consequences? That kinda thing.
But yeah it could also be that we’re just supposed to take it at face value that they’re a happy found family and it won’t really be examined in more depth than that. But I have my fingers crossed at least.
you mentioning guts wants to lay his claim on griffith got me thinking about how absolutely enthusiastic and proud he would be in modern au of griff when they get married. like look at my beautiful smart sweet perfect husband. he’s mine and we have matt hung rings and everything. my husband 🙂
this is a dicey topic so I’m putting it under a cut, cw for somewhat casual discussion of rape
tbh yeah it probably would’ve been more tastefully depicted, both the scene and the aftermath/trauma (not that that’s a hard bar to clear, but Miura does care more about realistic depictions of men with trauma than women with trauma lbr). I mean obviously it would’ve been extra fucked up and offensive w/ that predatory gay villain shit, but it’s not like the canon version is great on that score either. And you’re right that at least the misogynist fridging of a female character + subsequent manpain wouldn’t be a factor. Idk it’s a hypothetical so it doesn’t really matter whether it’d be more or less or the same amount of offensive anyway, and it’s all subjective when it comes to comparing misogyny vs homophobia lol.
and honestly I kinda asked myself the same thing while writing my long Griffith meta, particularly the third part where, yk, I got into parallels w/ the King and his feelings for Charlotte and Griffith’s self-loathing and potentially seeing his feelings as intrinsically predatory wrt the second duel, yadda yadda yadda. Like, I could see it as an alternate version of the Eclipse. I don’t think it would necessarily be ooc for a potential personification of Griffith’s inner evil.
It would be ooc for the Femto we got though imo. Bc Femto and NeoGriffith re-enforce Griffith’s denial, they’re all about denying that they give a single fuck. If raping Guts = Femto taking what he wants, then he’s admitting to himself that he wants him, and one of his main reasons for making the sacrifice was to stop wanting him. Like while I doubt this was Miura’s reasoning lol, I do think it makes sense for him to assault Casca rather than Guts (yk assuming an Eclipse rape has to happen). It fits the pattern of how they both use her as an intermediary to repress their feelings for each other.
And I mean obviously we can talk about how rape isn’t about sex or sexual desire but rather about power and degradation, but wrt a fictional depiction where the evil version of a dude who was in love with the protag sexually assaults him, you can’t really divorce that from the human version’s feelings. Tho I suppose it could be framed as like a version of the Hill of Swords scene, ie Femto testing himself in a grotesque way, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be an admittance of lingering, now twisted and evil feelings from his pov. Idk, whatever.
Anyway it would’ve wildly changed everything post Eclipse. tbh I think it would totally destroy Guts – not like drive him insane like Casca bc honestly that’s just Miura’s cop-out to avoid writing a realistically traumatized woman, but I mean like… it’s the opposite of what his deal is now, in a way.
If post-Eclipse Guts was largely motivated by this continued need for Griffith/Femto’s attention, that connection between them, to be hated as an enemy if he couldn’t be loved as a friend, etc, and I definitely think that’s the case, then like, sexual assault during the Eclipse is a way of hurting him while giving him that attention. A corrupted + weaponized aspect of something he wants.
Like idk I can’t even rly picture what his reaction would be if suddenly Femto’s attention/that “true light” bond between them was a terrifying source of trauma rather than something to pursue. Maybe he would still try to lash out and kill him, but less a genuine attempt and more suicide by monster? Like with how much more powerful Femto is, Guts would know he’s not actually a match for him, but he’s also so driven to kill as his number one reaction to everything that scares him. I feel like he’d have much less self-preservation (and BS Guts did not have much in the first place lbr) bc he doesn’t genuinely want to find and face Femto again in this version of events, and he’d be dead 1 or 2 apostles into his revenge spree.
I suppose there’s also room to explore more complicated feelings, like how would Guts feel about human Griffith in this circumstance – still regret and guilt, or would that be overwritten? Would this reach back and ruin his memories of the old days? Basically, does he still miss human Griffith? Is there any part of him that still wants Griffith’s attention despite everything? I mean you have canon lines like “is she not precious because she’s the wound Griffith left, because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you,” after all. Like, what would the Beast of Darkness say to him now? If this AU version of the Eclipse rape was yk, the same as canon with the same focus on unwilling arousal + orgasm, how does that aspect fuck Guts up? etc etc.
But lbr those are questions more suited to darkfic than meta.
It’s funny how weird and almost “bad” his anatomy is but how much better it’s gotten
yeah the Black Swordsman and v early Golden Age could get dodgy wrt anatomy imo but from Mid golden age on it seems pretty spot on to my untrained eye.
But even back then I still think his emotions were spot on – even if the expressions were a little less realistic/nuanced, he still conveyed all the right feelings imo.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that, rather than being
depicted as burgeoning true love ruined by the Eclipse for the
sake of extra tragedy, Guts and Casca getting together is depicted as a mistake from the start.
This is really cool and all but, if Guts didn’t love Casca in the true sense of the word, why did he travel half the world to rehabilitate her?
Well canonically there are a few alternative motives suggested:
That’s the darkest one. Incidentally it’s also the reason Miura gave for not killing Casca off – because Casca keeps Guts angry and prevents him from fully moving on – so it’s not just the Hound spinning his wheels, it’s a legit factor.
There’s also making up for past mistakes:
Longing for a piece of the good old days:
Which I suggest because almost every time Guts thinks of the old Casca it’s as a Hawk commander, rather than as a lover. Plus his insistence on “forcing” Casca’s sanity back despite warnings suggests to me it’s not really selfless on Guts’ part.
And honestly I think partially it’s because:
Prior to NGriff’s dismissal Guts still planned to go after him:
Erika suggests making the cave homier and staying with Casca, so Casca will be content and won’t run off again. Guts is like, yeah that’s true, and then:
Then he goes into his “the instant I saw him, I’d forgotten my urge to kill” internal monologue, raging at himself for his lack of desire to kill Griffith (”and that can’t be!”)
He’s still planning to go after him again, but then NGriff completely refuses to even give him the time of day, mysteriously saves Casca, and fucks off, and that’s when Guts decides to stick with Casca this time.
So imo it’s also partially because “I’d forgotten my urge to kill” + NGriff “deserting” him = losing his drive for revenge. Now he’s emotionally capable of trying to move on, so he’s seizing on that because revenge was a big self-destructive mess and he totally failed in his goal of either killing Femto or getting his attention, and Godo + Rickert etc all kept hammering it into his head that he’s better off taking care of the last remnant of the Hawks.
And bc Griffith’s apparently successfully moved on from him, so he wants to move on from Griffith and he’s focusing on Casca to do so.
I mean if you ship Guts and Casca and think love is Guts’ strongest motivator then go for it, it’s also one potential explanation, and maybe it’ll end up unambiguously confirmed as true love, but I honestly don’t get the impression that Guts is in love with her at any point myself. I think Guts’ actions make perfect sense even if romantic love isn’t a genuine factor, and some of his actions make very little sense if he’s truly in love with her (like leaving her in a cave for two years and then needing to debate with himself before he actually decides to take a time out from revenge and rescue her in the conviction arc.)
Like I think he’d make the same choice to go to Elfhelm if his relationship with her had remained platonic the whole time, or if it was Judeau who survived but lost his sanity, etc.
you're the only one 