cutting for devilman spoilers just in case, i know it’s 40 yrs old but the anime is still relatively new and ppl are still getting into it so
Depends which aspect. I don’t think a full on everyone dies apocalypse would suit Berserk, and if Casca wakes up only to die horribly to piss Guts off again a la Miki I would absolutely hate it.
But ngl the ryokira ending would be perfect for me. Griffith killing Guts and then having a breakdown is one of my ideal endings lol. Especially if, like Ryo, he acknowledges he’s in love with Guts first and doesn’t want to kill him. And that aspect is probably what you meant, so yeah, I’m all for that ending.
Hmm, like if the toy soldier was a symbol of the boy’s dream, the magnetic knight that goes with the female figure is a symbol of Griffith’s, and leaving it with Charlotte is symbolic of the immediate loss of his dream?
Bc I could definitely see it. I actually rly like the idea of that pendant being a symbol of Griffith’s dream bc it’s another way it’s intrinsically tied to heterosexuality in opposition to his feelings for Guts, a theme I both enjoy and am depressed by.
Plus it’s fitting since after he leaves the pendant with Charlotte and gets caught he’s able to acknowledge his feelings for Guts.
cut bc i’m just whining about current berserk again lol
like berserk has been an optimistic story since chapter 130
355-130=225
it’s been optimistic almost twice as long as it’s been bleak
guts chose to rescue casca.
skull knight warned him about the mock eclipse, guts and casca survived it thanks to guts making friends with isidro i guess.
guts chooses to stay with casca and take her somewhere safe instead of pursuing griffith
guts has his beast of darkness taunting him and sexually assaults casca, but then immediately gets a babysitter, then meets a witch who depowers the brand and helps solve that problem.
guts is assaulted by slan and gets the metaphysical chest wound, but it hasn’t really been a problem for him.
skull knight tells him he can fix casca but first he has to defeat the temptation to pursue griffith again which is implied to be the fight w/ ganeshka on the docks. with serpico helping him not be a suicidal dumbass, he ignores griffith and gets on a boat, passing that test
oh also skull knight warns him about the armour; guts never fully succumbs to it thanks to schierke and moonlight boy
farnese sacrifices her happiness for guts and co, but then gets to have her cake and eat it too
the world goes full fantasy; guts defeats some evil sea god nbd and they reach elfhelm which is a damn paradise
casca’s mind is healed
like??? can something please go wrong at some point for longer than a couple chapters before it’s solved? Hopefully now? All the ominous foreshadowing around Casca getting her mind back and the beast breaking out of Guts’ subconscious again and the armour taking over and the behelit and skull knight/elfhelm possibly using guts has got to have some real payoff and not just another two chapters in the danger zone followed by solving the problem with the help of your friends, right?
right????
like ordinarily I’d consider it a foregone conclusion, but again, everything in guts’ narrative has gone swimmingly with no long-term negative consequences for anything for twice as long as it’s been grim, so like… maybe it’s just a light and fluffy story about how you can do anything with the power of friendship now
how long will i have to creep in darkness… until him? but femto, depicted at peak inhuman here, is just more fucking darkness.
because this is still guts scrabbling for whatever’s left of the “dazzling” griffith, the griffith who shone and chased away the darkness of loneliness. like i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again, but his revenge quest isn’t (solely) about revenge, it’s about missing griffith and desperately wanting that connection again. the rage is a convenient reason to chase him that’s more justifiable to himself than “I still want him to look at me.”
the visual metaphor of light and dark, companionship and isolation, and how constant it’s been in guts and griffith’s relationship in particular is just so fucking good
I don’t really think this is an either/or option and tbh I really really hope neither of these things happen. Unless you mean find Griffith to kill him, that would be great.
“Knows that it’s not Guts’ fault” that what isn’t Guts’ fault? The Eclipse? Sure, I feel like the ship of Casca blaming Guts for Griffith’s breakdown has pretty much sailed and we’re probably not returning to that so I don’t think she’s going to be blaming Guts for Griffith sacrificing the Hawks. Though tbh I’d love to see her angry with him for fucking off up on the giant hand and not being there with her and Judeau and everyone else, whether that’s blame-worthy or not, but I doubt very much we’ll see that.
And even if she did blame him for something Eclipse related she’s still presumably about to remember Griffith and Femto’s actions which, if Miura has even the tiniest shred of decency, will mean she’s not going to go join NeoGriffith. She was a lot more pissed off than Guts was about Griffith sacrificing them before Femto even made an appearance too, on the off-chance people might think NeoGriffith not looking like Femto or maybe being distinct from Femto makes a difference. Like while Guts is just kinda sad and guilty Casca expresses some rage and betrayal while fleeing with Judeau.
On the other hand, there are plenty of things that she should by rights blame Guts for, like sexually assaulting her, like abandoning her for two years, like treating her as a symbol of his lost past with the Hawks rather than a person in her own right, like “forcing” her sanity back rather letting her deal with the trauma in her own time, so there are lots of good reasons she wouldn’t want to stay by his side either.
Whether Miura remembers those reasons or thinks they’re valid is up in the air but personally I’ve got my fingers crossed so hard in the hopes that we’re not heading towards romance that it’s gonna give me arthritis in a few decades.
I’ve assumed that it referred to wanting guts’ attention and regard, wanting guts to be focused on him, jealously guarding his relationship with guts, essentially.
but jealousy is kind of a weird word bc yk it can be synonymous with envy but also not necessarily, it can also be more possessive (like quickly double checking tells me that jealousy is more desiring to keep what you already have whereas envy is wanting what you don’t have, when they’re not used as synonyms), and context doesn’t really help here, so idk.
cause like if it is meant here as synonymous with envy then that could be interesting – he might be jealous of the way guts isn’t tied to a dream, ironically. the lack of guilt and the weight of death on his shoulders, etc.
but I guess without any additional information about the original japanese I’d still err on the side of jealous as in possessive of his relationship with guts and insecure about it, particularly considering guts and casca’s fling soon becomes an issue.
i just want to know if berserk is gonna get dark again or not
like miura said he doesn’t want to let a dark story end on a downer but berserk hasn’t been dark for a million years so does that even still apply lol
Also if this is a response to the last thing I posted, please don’t take me saying “griffith has a fucked up attitude towards sex due to trauma” as “griffith is asexual” because those are absolutely not equivalent statements.
under a cut because a) this is largely about the hot button issue of griffith + sexual assault and b) it’s pretty off the cuff rather than carefully thought out so i want to reserve control over it lol
i’m gonna be honest, my biggest issue with the theme of griffith + beauty + sexual victimization is that it’s both very loud and clear, like it’s absolutely an intrinsic part of griffith’s narrative, but for some unknown reason it’s also more subtle than every other instance of sexual victimization we see? and i have no idea why miura was so coy about it but it makes it difficult and a little awkward to just take it as read
like even at the start w/ gennon. guts’ csa trauma is unambiguous – it’s violent, guts struggles and fights, etc. casca’s is also unambiguous attempted rape. she tries to run, and then is able to kill her attacker. but griffith’s is “voluntary” enough that like a majority of berserk fans don’t even see it as rape, despite gennon literally being a pedophile with a harem of child sex slaves, and griffith being a child, “who could still be called a boy in his innocence,” according to casca. the next morning griffith himself frames it as seducing gennon. also, unlike the other two instances, we don’t see what happened. All we have is Casca’s glimpse of Gennon’s hand on his shoulder and Griffith’s explanation the next morning.
And I actually have no issue at all with how it’s portrayed in canon, like anyone who isn’t a rape apologist and has an iota of reading comprehension should be able to figure out that it is rape and griffith was traumatized by it. I definitely don’t think Miura thinks Griffith freely consented or intended it to be read as ambiguous either. Griffith saying he seduced Gennon says way more about Griffith than about what actually happened. But compared to our other two protagonists and their formative traumas, it’s not nearly as in your face.
Then you have Griffith and the torturer, which is all left in creepy innuendo. Like it’s blatant enough that it seems willfully blind to assume there was no sexual assault going on, but again, it’s not like Miura shies away from depicting rape everywhere else in Berserk, so why is it only left in innuendo?
And yk what I think there’s a throughline from those – Gennon and the torturer as sexual predators obsessing over Griffith’s beauty – and both Griffith offering himself to Casca in the wagon and then Griffith’s vision of his future with Casca, t b q h. In that nightmare he’s attractive again, he’s virtually immobile, and again there’s the implication that Casca is having sex with him.
like I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to take all this together and say Griffith has some serious issues with sex even if Miura doesn’t come right out and say it like he does for everyone else.
like terrible, terrible depiction aside, this is probably the best set up for the eclipse rape we have. sex to griffith being a show of power or lack of power, and with griffith it’s always been the lack of it. with gennon, and charlotte, and casca in the wagon it’s been a trade – griffith giving them the only thing he has to offer in exchange for something they, with their greater power can give him. money, a kingdom, and… idk my reading of the wagon scene changes with the winds, but in this context i suppose it would be security, possibly griffith thinking if casca stays then guts will stay too after seeing them together.
and then this vision depicting a life like that. like the wagon scene and this nightmare seem to exist mainly to set up why the dark negative evil side of griffith would take this out on casca specifically, because griffith had just been projecting these issues onto her and when he gains power and loses his “goodness” he spitefully reverses their perceived roles.
BUT AGAIN this is both unnecessarily subtle and also a huge fucking mess thanks to how terribly written and depicted the eclipse rape was (and also the depction of the charlotte scene doesn’t help lbr) so I feel like i’m making shit up to make griffith more sympathetic lol. even though i’m like 90% sure it’s purposeful and also it doesn’t rly make griffith more sympathetic because i wholeheartedly sympathize with him even without all this lol, and femto is a literal demon made of evil so it doesn’t make him more sympathetic either. it just kind of ties a lot of themes together.
My thoughts very much line up with yours. I tend to think being raised in an environment that was probably physically dangerous as well as living through periods of involuntary starvation probably cultivated his detachment. Also I’m not sure he thought of himself as attractive? Like he might see his looks as a vulnerability since the folks that have given him attention for it have hurt him.
yeah ia with this.
i’m sure he knows he’s attractive and probably cultivates it since yk he’s trying to marry a princess, but i don’t think it’s something he’d like, be proud of or that would feed his ego or anything. i think he’d deliberately try to see it in a utilitarian way rather than having any feelings about his looks, positive or negative, bc the less rational feelings he does have would probably be negative – beauty is an asset to achieving his dream (not just in marrying charlotte but also looking the part of the hero of midland and gaining general acceptance), but it’s also something he associates with being preyed on by gennon, so he focuses on the first part.
No idea, and tbh I kind of like the fact that we never see them. It gives Griffith kind of a force of nature feel, where his actions and personality are based more in themes than in like, a more down to earth kind of characterization – all we really know is that he’s a street kid with a childish dream who never let that dream go.
I know I’ve had some fun conversations about who Griffith’s parents might’ve been and how they might’ve affected him for whatever amount of his childhood they were there for, and I think there are a lot of great headcanons and stuff. The one I generally default to is that he never knew his dad and his mother was a prostitute, because I feel like that kind of backstory could inform how he feels about sex as a transaction and bodies/lives being bought and sold, which is something his dream is kind of based on changing.
But ultimately I’m glad that canon never gives us an answer lol.
ive been trying to rationalize this in my mind for a while like okay for example my hair looks very blonde but my eyebrows and lashes are dark blonde and therefore look almost black THEREFORE griffiths fave situation might be realistic bc he is the only physical weirdo in berserk but then i remembered schierke has green hair i hate anime.
yeah while replying i was also like, is it realistic for a dude with platinum blond hair to not have super blond eyelashes/brows? but like, w/e it looks good and yeah lol it still makes more sense than schierke’s design.
i think hes meant to look more feminine/pretty/awe inspiring now but you can just say miura exaggerates these features a lot now. like look at casca?
yeah it’s def true that everyone looks like… softer in a way i really dislike. a bunch of people have been pointing it out and it’s super true. tho tbf i think griffith has actually suffered from this the least, he looks the same amount of feminine to me lol. tbh my personal biggest problem with the fantasia art wrt griffith is that he looks half assed and generic now, like a collection of his “pretty” features thown together rather than yk, an interesting drawing of a person
but this is true of everyone, it’s like the backgrounds keep getting more and more detailed while the faces/expressions get more generic. or like… the features are detailed, like look at how he draws eyes in closeups, they just don’t come together in an interesting way anymore
tbh I’ve noticed this in most manga…
In Rurouni Kenshin, the art was theoretically less “good” at first as far as proportions and realism, however, there was a lot more detail, and the style was a lot more lively. By the like idk… second story arc after Shishio was defeated, things get a lot more consistent but also a lot more boring and simplified looking.
I feel it’s the same in Naruto and to some degree in One Piece after the time skips.
I think maybe mangaka start out kind of outdoing themselves trying to make their art the best because they want to make an impression and also are still trying to feel out their style and how to make art look good, then once they get stability, over time they figure out shortcuts and tricks to make the art just look good enough.
I think it also changed a lot I think around elfheim? because I noticed it looks like he switched from using traditional media to digital media, and honestly, if you started out as a traditional artist imo it’s really really really difficult to breathe the same level of life and passion into digital art. For me, at least, it’s like there’s always this extra layer between my brain and the computer that doesn’t exist when I’m using paper. Just my personal theory.
I know next to nothing about art but this all makes sense. I’ve heard some speculation that switching to digital may be hindering him and taking a while to adjust to, and what you said about finding it way more difficult to make digital art feel lively and passionate does rly fit.
ty this is informative tbh
:O I’m glad you liked my thoughts.
To comment also on everyone looking more feminine thing… I think in large part that has to do with the overall trend in anime/manga art or even in fashion.
In the 80s and early 90s buff people were really in, and over time it’s become less and less so. If you look even at what was considered “moe” back in the 90s vs what is “moe” now you can see a pretty vast difference between how feminine or child-like the characters look.
I’d cite Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure for example at how massively almost comically buff and chiselled his characters looked in the first story arc, but by the sixth or seventh, the men and women became almost indistinguishable. (this is kind of an extreme example, but Araki-sensei does take an unusual amount of inspiration from fashion I think)
One Piece is also a good example of how “rugged” the characters looked at the beginning vs now.
I think right now, compared to the past 20 years, androgyny and femininity are very in fashion, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing in of itself, but it influences different artists differently.
I personally thought Griffith changed the least because he was already weirdly fem looking compared to all the other characters. Miura even stated that Griffith was intentionally based on Shoujo art and story lines (which have always featured androgyny and femininity) whereas Guts was meant to be a typical Shounen/Seinen character. He wanted to combine the charm of the two different styles.
I guess I can’t speak about Casca….but I personally also just lumped her differences into the overall shift in art style…. maybe because she was given less development in general, it feels more jarring?…….
i think hes meant to look more feminine/pretty/awe inspiring now but you can just say miura exaggerates these features a lot now. like look at casca?
yeah it’s def true that everyone looks like… softer in a way i really dislike. a bunch of people have been pointing it out and it’s super true. tho tbf i think griffith has actually suffered from this the least, he looks the same amount of feminine to me lol. tbh my personal biggest problem with the fantasia art wrt griffith is that he looks half assed and generic now, like a collection of his “pretty” features thown together rather than yk, an interesting drawing of a person
but this is true of everyone, it’s like the backgrounds keep getting more and more detailed while the faces/expressions get more generic. or like… the features are detailed, like look at how he draws eyes in closeups, they just don’t come together in an interesting way anymore
tbh I’ve noticed this in most manga…
In Rurouni Kenshin, the art was theoretically less “good” at first as far as proportions and realism, however, there was a lot more detail, and the style was a lot more lively. By the like idk… second story arc after Shishio was defeated, things get a lot more consistent but also a lot more boring and simplified looking.
I feel it’s the same in Naruto and to some degree in One Piece after the time skips.
I think maybe mangaka start out kind of outdoing themselves trying to make their art the best because they want to make an impression and also are still trying to feel out their style and how to make art look good, then once they get stability, over time they figure out shortcuts and tricks to make the art just look good enough.
I think it also changed a lot I think around elfheim? because I noticed it looks like he switched from using traditional media to digital media, and honestly, if you started out as a traditional artist imo it’s really really really difficult to breathe the same level of life and passion into digital art. For me, at least, it’s like there’s always this extra layer between my brain and the computer that doesn’t exist when I’m using paper. Just my personal theory.
I know next to nothing about art but this all makes sense. I’ve heard some speculation that switching to digital may be hindering him and taking a while to adjust to, and what you said about finding it way more difficult to make digital art feel lively and passionate does rly fit.
Thank you so much! never say never lol, it’s entirely possible I might post some fic at some point, but I can’t promise anything either because like, ngl I am way more insecure about fiction writing than meta. like I have a ton of respect and admiration for people who write fic and headcanons and stuff like that because that is what I find super nervewracking lol.
anyway thanks again and i’m glad you’re enjoying my blog 🙂
if he does he pencils in his eyebrows and wears mascara
dreamscape kid griffith also has darker eyebrows and eyelashes.
I don’t think there’s any explanation beyond white haired anime dudes being a thing tbh, and it’s a character design that helps him stand out from the rest of the cast. also makes a great contrast to guts and femto.
huh, this isn’t rly something I’ve ever thought about, interesting question.
I’d say that in general he’d think about it in a utilitarian way – he knows what he’s capable of with it and he’d work to keep it that way. that includes fighting and being able to seduce a princess, or whoever else may be necessary. it’s a tool.
you could probably make a good argument for him having some issues with it/detachment from it though, that could feed into him thinking about his body as a tool rather than a part of him. like, looking at the way griffith said he seduced gennon eg, it seems like a way of removing himself from what actually took place – rather than thinking of it as gennon using him, griffith used a tool (his body) to get what he wanted, that kind of thing. a way of granting himself a sense of autonomy and detaching himself from the body which he’s washing in the river and thinking of as dirty now.
plus i feel like that attitude would make for some interesting character study-ish thought processes during his torture, with both the pain inarguably tying his body to him (also possibly related – his self harming habit?), and the torturer’s fetishization of his physical beauty, and afterwards when his body is no longer useful as a tool and he’s grown so used to the pain he feels numb and “like [his body is] floating in mid air.”
and ngl neogriffith’s feelings towards his body could also be interesting. femto was like, on the astral plane, his body was arguably not even real, but then neogriffith incarnates in flesh and blood again. he’s probably more concerned about his feelings lol, but he’d likely be like, super detached from his physical form, due to having lived on another plane of existence and being a pseudo god or w/e, and also literally untouchable. now it truly is nothing more than a tool, and one that can’t be broken or forcibly tied to him because no one can even inflict pain on him.
and therefore his thought processes could be extremely interesting if/when he is touched. though for me interesting is basically griffith lying badly to himself about not caring/not feeling/etc.
i think hes meant to look more feminine/pretty/awe inspiring now but you can just say miura exaggerates these features a lot now. like look at casca?
yeah it’s def true that everyone looks like… softer in a way i really dislike. a bunch of people have been pointing it out and it’s super true. tho tbf i think griffith has actually suffered from this the least, he looks the same amount of feminine to me lol. tbh my personal biggest problem with the fantasia art wrt griffith is that he looks half assed and generic now, like a collection of his “pretty” features thown together rather than yk, an interesting drawing of a person
but this is true of everyone, it’s like the backgrounds keep getting more and more detailed while the faces/expressions get more generic. or like… the features are detailed, like look at how he draws eyes in closeups, they just don’t come together in an interesting way anymore
reasonable people: berserk sucks now
me: but what if… what if everything that has sucked about berserk for 200 chapters is all set up for a twist that will make it not suck?
Thank you so much! I’m both sorry and glad it made you emotional lol, Griffith’s narrative is just the saddest thing to me ngl and I’m glad other people can see it too.
you're the only one 