@madchen said:
oh also griffith wants
guts to bridal style carry him when he’s real drunk and refuses to move
at all until guts picks him up he holds his arms outstretched
expectantly and everything
wwww god i forgot how protective guts is of griffith. its so good and griff secretly loves it sm.
also yea to the wall lifting and arm wrestling
branching off of kink
whatever but it’s much easier to let yourself be taken care of when the
other person is much stronger and bigger than you and can basically wrap
himself all around you. big hugs.
yeah v true and like i think there’s def a part of griffith that’s v repressed that wants to just be taken care of and wrapped in big trustworthy arms
i’m sure i’ve said this b4 but honestly i think a big part of their relationship is about both of them wanting like the support/protection of the other. it’s more obvious w/ guts since griffith leaping into danger for him is a huge important plot thread, but it’s super true for griffith too and his need to have guts by his side “to the end.”
lol i’m actually writing a thing right now that gets into that a little, tho it’ll be a while b4 i can post it
but yeah like femto specifically I would argue is essentially griffith’s guilt and self-loathing personified, just as the beast of darkness is guts’, and those feelings relate back to trauma for both of them.
For Guts it’s Gambino selling him and later telling him he’s cursed and evil and deserved it + the guilt of killing Gambino. This is v strongly visually suggested during his sewer nightmare right before he overhears Griffith’s promrose hall speech. Watches a monster kill gambino, then child!guts, then turns out the monster is himself. Voila. (also the trauma of the eclipse, buried guilt + self loathing wrt abandoning griffith leading to the eclipse, and his black swordsman sadism, traumatizing and killing children, etc, all makes the beast of darkness grow)
For Griffith it’s the guilt of the deaths of everyone who follows him and tbqh the deaths of people he kills too, and his self-loathing wrt “dirtying” himself in pursuit of his dream, so yk there’s trauma there too with Gennon. Also I think there’s a case to be made that the year of torture had a significant contribution to Femto’s existence, even if the psychological trauma of it isn’t rly discussed like the physical trauma is – I mean the mask he was forced to wear is incorporated into Femto’s design, that’s a big sign at least, plus the talk of darkness and feeling numb at the start of his torture chamber monologue which is echoed during his transformation into Femto.
idk basically strong yes imo, and i’m probably gonna come back and revisit this topic in greater detail eventually
ty! God I really, really want Guts to be shown as Griffith’s equal at some point. I feel like it’s the only way to satisfactorily conclude their whole… thing. Guts letting go of the desire to be Griffith’s equal just isn’t satisfying to me.
But that said I don’t think becoming an apostle is the way to do it. For that literal equality Guts would have to become a Godhand, and unless there’s a 200+ year timeskip after Elfhelm that’s not possible according to the rules of the world. An apostle is a follower of NeoGriff so becoming one wouldn’t make him Griffith’s equal, it would put him back in that position of looking up at him/feeling looked down on.
Ofc one could say that those technical details don’t really matter, what matters is that Griffith succumbed to his superpowered dark side so if Guts does then that’s still equality in a sense, even if he’s a “lesser” monster. But then, he has the armour to represent his dark side, which makes the behelit kind of superfluous now, and it’s been foreshadowed a lot that he’s going to lose himself to the armour at some point.
And since it’s suggested that Skull Knight became a walking skeleton because he succumbed to the amour himself, I think it’s a lot more likely that we’ll get more Skull Knight comparisons and there will at least be a danger of Guts becoming like him – powerful but… lacking humanity I guess, if he doesn’t overcome the armour. And that could potentially lead to ~the beast of darkness~ and ~the hawk of light~ regarding each other as equals in a confrontation.
BUT! What I want more than that is acknowledgement that all these standards of literal equality are essentially a smokescreen obscuring what actually made them equal from the beginning, which is the fact that they both loved each other and they were both emotionally vulnerable w/ the other. So honestly acknowledgement that they’re still hung up on each other despite everything is what would work best here imho.
Guts learns that NGriff failed his test on the Hill of Swords and started getting emotional about Guts again, and NGriff learns that in addition to hate Guts still feels residual love, and guilt and regret etc. Followed by an emotionally charged third duel, their strengths (magic superpower, inner darknesses, fate vs not being beholden to fate, whatever) and weaknesses (emotions, love and regret) equally matched.
so i checked the “dreadful” thing and, no, it was an accurate translation–if you’re not nitpicky. here’s the original japanese:
しかし 恐ろしい男ですな あ・れ・は
But still … A most dreadful man he is.
末恐ろしい･･････
Truly dreadful …
この男だ･･･！！ この男が恐ろしいだから！！！
It’s him …!! It’s that this man is dreadful!!!
as you can see, they both use the word 恐ろしい, which means dreadful, terrifying, terrible, frightening, but also startling, surprising, amazing
but in the first scene they also use 末恐ろしい, a word that i wasn’t familiar with until now. the dictionary definition is “ominous; portentous; likely to grow worse,” which is kind of oddly specific, but if you google it you get a definition that basically means 恐ろしい + thinking about how that person, thing, whatever will evolve, what will become of them, and now it’s still too specific but it makes sense
the official translation chose to translate 末恐ろしい as “truly dreadful” which … while not accurate, was a good decision i feel? how else are you going to translate it succinctly, you know? sometimes you just have to let go of the subtext and move on. and like @bthump pointed out while we were chatting about this, that whole scene already had an ominous, foreboding feeling to it anyway
lmao yk how last time I said Griffith’s hair was basically the main focus of Guts’ first impression of him? Same is true of Guts’ strength for Griffith.
so yk this is like the perfect complement to that ask.
Griffith can say it’s “interesting” and makes Guts “a valuable soldier” all he wants but l b r here there’s a reason Guts is the first person Griffith has ever said something like this to
and it’s not because Guts is a good soldier.
This is the face of a dude who has spent a lot of time “fondly reminiscing” about that fight.
also
and of course, the piece de resistance
Also like we’ve talked about this a bit when we were talking about kinky headcanons but Griffith is definitely super into the fact that Guts is stronger than him. There’s that Griffith kinking on the idea of being held down bc of the whole relinquishing control thing aspect, and I think there’s also a Guts as protector aspect?
Like yk Griffith can take care of himself, but it’s better with someone you can trust at your side, that’s both one of the major points of Berserk and Griffith and Guts’ relationship specifically. So I think there’s an endearing aspect of Griffith appreciating Guts’ strength because he trusts him w/ it. And you see that in canon w/ yk Griffith asking him to assassinate people and moments like Guts not letting any of Gennon’s men through to Griffith during the Battle of Doldrey, but it also fits so neatly into a potential sexual relationship lol.
Like admiring Guts’ strength goes hand in hand with appreciating how Guts like, cares for him and uses it to help him and in his defense etc, and idk it’s got a sweet sort of bodyguard dynamic feel to it? Anyway the point is Griffith would be into Guts demonstrating his strength during sex in non-kinky ways too, like holding him up and fucking him against a wall.
Also they arm wrestle once while drinking at a tavern or smthn, Guts wins, and they both awkwardly get hard.
this is one of those grand thematic statements that applies to a lot of berserk, like guts’ nearly obsessive need to fight monsters, or like, well, most sacrifices imo. But I’m thinking about how it applies to Griffith – the reverse, I mean. Griffith doesn’t really express fear, like he doesn’t really express most of his feelings, but what does he strike out?
Well, here he’s assassinated a bunch of would-be assassins, including the Queen. Gennon. Tyranny/the natural order of things in general lol.
And Guts.
Or maybe more accurately, his feelings for Guts.
tbh one of my major criticisms of Berserk is that as far as I can tell the theme of fear has been mostly dropped, like, i’m pretty sure the last time we saw a suggestion of Guts being afraid for himself rather than of himself was 150 chapters ago with Slan, and that was like the only time post-Eclipse at all lol.
So I can’t exactly say that Guts surviving the Eclipse and then Femto/NeoGriffith pointedly failing to strike Guts out suggests his narrative is gonna end with falling under the wing of what he fears, but screw it that’s what I want and I’m using that panel up there to justify it.
wait this isn’t a big stretch, i basically said this exact same thing in my griffith analysis with thousands of words of justification behind it, the only difference is that here i’m tying it to griffith’s take on fear in his own words, which absolutely is relevant
i half-assed this post probably bc i just wanted to post something but i’m not wrong 😡 smh @ past me
im gonna be 100% real….. in any good canon guts and casca would never be friends again. hes fucked up way too much and treated her like shit, even before the eclipse. im tired of casca being treated as a sexual object or an outlet for Man Pain. at this point, the best option is for casca to leave him and go do her own thing, whatever that may be. call me pessimistic but even a friendship isnt salvageable for them imo. if guts could do one good thing for her, it would be to change his mindset about her (thinking of her as a burden or responsibility, using her as a guilt-trippy reminder of the past or as a memory trigger for “the good ol days”) and let her go.
plus, having casca leave him and having the guts travelling party split up would serve an important narrative function. having guts see his “distraction” broken up would force him back on to the revenge path, and thus force the story to move forward. to me, the party only ever really seemed like a sort of detour from guts desperate reaching towards griffith. (also i like dark stories and ill be real i dont think the “found family” trope works in the context of berserk AT ALL). but thats just my opinion.
Aw I hope you get better soon, and thank you so much, I appreciate you telling me so ❤ I’m glad my blog can keep you a bit entertained while you’re sick.
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