to the anon who sent an ask yesterday i think re: g*tsca shippers

i’m just kind of bypassing answering your ask bc it’s discoursey in a way i don’t want to deal with lol, sorry.

i cant believe berserk fandom is real sometimes. they use eclipse rape as a gotcha to anyone who complains about griffith hate and think femto is just griffith+power. but hound is just a random spirit possessing guts apparently. even ones who think hound is a part of guts think guts cant be really blamed cuz he blacked out or feels bad about it i guess. like you feel this strongly about a fictional characters crime but make excuses for another for doing the same thing.

cutting this for kind of graphic descriptions of sexual assault

I’d argue he didn’t even black out, he was clearly aware when he forcibly kissed her after pointedly noticing she’d been assaulted (we get a closeup from Guts’ perspective of blood dripping from her vag, ffs), we get like literally five whole pages of sexual assault depicted completely without any kind of possession or beast-y imagery, and the subsequent beast of darkness imagery in Guts’ mind that we see after that isn’t indicative of “possession,” it’s an illustration of what’s going on in his subconscious – his own inner darkness gaining strength.

Like it happens in broad daylight for a reason, in contrast to the chapter earlier when he strangled her while actually briefly possessed during a night-time ghost fight, and that reason is so that the readers can’t absolve Guts of blame. There’s nothing but Guts in this scene.

And anyway, at the end of the day the whole point of the Beast of Darkness is to show that Guts’ inner darkness is no better than Griffith’s. According to Berserk practically every dude has an evil rapist lurking in their subconscious, it’s not a great nuanced examination of male entitlement or anything lol, it’s just using rape as a lazy shorthand for inner darkness.

Like imo the only valid reaction to have to this dumb story is to recognize the misogyny on the part of the author, and honestly both excusing Guts and reacting with ott hatred towards Griffith is the exact opposite of that. Like I can’t blame anyone for hating Griffith, everyone’s entitled to their emotional reactions to a rape scene, especially one as offensively depicted as the Eclipse rape, but when that’s your reaction instead of recognizing the author’s horrendous writing, or while praising the author’s writing because he made you feel that angry, that’s an issue, yk?

And people blaming Griffith/Femto for Casca’s character being destroyed, for Casca’s gratuitious and sexualized victimization, etc, lets Miura off the hook. Like, Femto is ink on paper, Miura is the one with actual agency who chose to write Casca out of the story in the most misogynist way possible for the sake of making his protagonist feel bad.

tl;dr berserk is an offensive story about two dudes who both have rapist alter-egos, we all gotta acknowledge that.

how do griff and guts react when the other is sick:(?

ok modern au style because i can’t imagine either of them fussing over the other over a cold as mercenaries in the middle ages lol

griffith goes full doting husband, makes chicken soup, buys three kinds of cold medicine and the extra soft kleenex, and actively tries to catch his cold thru cuddling and making out so guts can either reciprocate or he can have a minor crisis over loving guts more than guts loves him.

guts has learned to dote on griffith too tho it’s not his first instinct, and he does it while rolling his eyes and calling him a giant baby. griffith doesn’t care if he makes him soup and tucks him into bed sardonically as long as he demonstrates that he’s willing to shower him with attention.

it eventually becomes a thing they can joke about.

OR

griffith refuses to acknowledge that he’s sick, and probably works even harder doing whatever modern au griffith does just to prove he can, and guts is like, here I made you chicken noodle soup, eat it, while griffith is like, i told you i’m not sick, and guts is like, eat it anyway, and griffith does while feeling very warm and fuzzy inside.

(this griffith would still drop everything and lavish guts with attention when he’s sick.)

depending on which aspects of griffith’s personality are more prominent in a hypothetical modern au lol.

Hi! I haven’t been here in a while but I hope you’re doing well :D I wanted to ask, what’s your take on the last couple of chapters? People speculate that it’s supposed to be a whole chapter divided in two parts, but do you think it is relevant somehow? I just can’t see the point of it and I’m wracking my brains trying to get Miuras intentions. because drawing the entire battle is no easy fit and he wouldn’t do it unless he had a reason. Sorry if this has been answered before btw!

lmao this is very timely because last night i re-read those chapters and it just kind of hit me how completely and utterly fucking weird it is for ngriff to be personally out there leading a giant-killing army

like

it’s baffling

he
has a huge army of monsters and humans with perfectly competent leaders
among them. he no longer has to prove himself with fancy heroics,
considering he’s now the saviour of the world. he’s in charge of an
enormous city-state, which must keep him fairly busy.

why is he out leading an army from the
front to kill a random group of fantasy monsters? why is he the one
leaping off a horse off a staircase-dragon so he can stab the giant leader in the
eye? he has flying monsters on his side! grunbeld breathes fire!

like
either miura is really letting himself go, ignoring all logic just so
he can draw griffith doing mildly cool fight-y shit, or this has to be
like, a thing. like griffith is avoiding charlotte, or he’s incredibly
bored, or restless, or there is a real plot related reason for this fight and for griffith being there personally.

but idk it has the feeling of being routine to me, and it feels mostly like place setting for the state of the current world/what griffith and co are doing now. I hope there’s a good reason for this scene but idk what it could be.

(sonia mentioned that there’s something dark lurking to beware of or w/e, but then the next chapter started with that hydra so it seems that might’ve been what she was referring to? idk it all feels very pointless so far.)

I remember during the Wyald fight, Griffith was trying to pick up his sword to fight but couldn’t. It was the last time he was willing to help the original band of the hawk.

Oh man, I love those moments so much, they’re absolutely heartwrenching to me.

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And yeah it kind of helps hammer home the contrast after Griffith makes the sacrifice, by reminding us that Griffith was the kind of guy who would grab a sword and run to fight a monster to help the people he cares about, who still tried to even when it was completely impossible.

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It’s such a good touch for the lead-up to the eclipse imo.

i’ve been thinking a lot about griffith in place of guts during the whole black swordsman thing, how the beast of darkness is guts’ inner darkness while femto is griffith’s, and how femto would manifest if griffith never made a sacrifice but instead got a heap of eclipse trauma piled on him and then got magic armour

and i just really like the idea of the contrast to guts’ black swordsman thing. like where guts ran hot and angry and vocally bitter as fuck and his modus operandi while all armoured up is to kill everything in sight, griffith would get extremely cold and distant, and he wouldn’t be about raw power but precision. he would maybe be polite, or at least not actively antagonistic towards everyone, unlike guts’ rude asshole style, but like, unreachable.

yk if guts’ rage is hellfire, griffith’s is ice.

also while in armour he’d seem to be nearly untouchable, able to avoid strikes without even looking like he has to dodge, a la neogriffith but without the help of fate. if armour guts is all just attack everything with everything u have, armour griffith is more like the terminator with instant cold analysis.

i could see him and guts matching styles tho when it comes to black swordsman stuff like guts’ ultra cynical “if you’re afraid of crushing the ants beneath you you won’t be able to walk” and the weaklings might as well die anyway attitude, that kind of thing. griffith being a walking curse w/ the brand would completely fuck him up and i could easily see his reaction to that being to lean as hard as he can in the opposite direction.

also black swordsman era femto’s hilarious pettiness should be seen sometimes too.

man i just love inner darkness shit in fiction, it’s such a tragedy that berserk had to go as edgy and misogynist with it as possible, for both characters. anyway imo the idea of griffith edging towards femto while fucked up from someone else’s eclipse is cool and fun af once you ignore the canon baggage.

ok here’s the main reason i’d lay down money that casca is going to not just open the behelit but also become an apostle:

it’s a quick and easy way for miura to avoid either offensively downplaying casca’s extreme sanity-destroying trauma or spending the time and effort realistically depicting her trauma and recovery well.

apostle casca both gives her trauma an important plot-related reason for existing and also neatly underscores the extremity of it while bypassing an actual grounded and believable depiction.