oh yeah it totally is, nice. i’ll have to listen to more marina and the diamonds
lol i was just glancing at the lyrics before and now i’ve gotten a chance to listen to it. damn those griffith feels are even stronger with the music. the lower i get the higher i’ll climb, i got dark only to shine, ouch.
Guts echoes NeoGriffith’s “nothing has changed. This is the man I am.”
Has Guts come this far, letting go of his “obsession” with Griffith, by letting himself buy Griffith’s own hype?
Like I’m not sure about this but I don’t remember any moments where Guts reminisces about human Griffith after this:
Is there an underpinning of Guts letting himself forget and downplay how much Griffith loved him, in order to let go of his fruitless obsession?
Guts’ obsession with killing Griffith has ultimately been about wanting his attention, which Femto/NGriff has consistently refused to give him, at least overtly. (lbr the fact that he goes to see guts to test his capacity to feel, and the constant eye contact and needling taunting as femto belies the shit out of that)
Like to lay this out real quick, “you of all people,” is Griffith asserting that he was always a monster, and Guts knew it. Part of the reason Griffith was devastated when Guts left is because he saw it as a rejection of him, based on everything he hates about himself. He let Guts in to see those things he hates, and he thinks Guts left him because of it.
Of course we know that Guts left entirely because he loved and respected Griffith. He “shone before [him] as beautiful, noble, and larger than life.”
The last 30ish chapters before the Eclipse revolve around Guts slowly realizing that he already had Griffith’s love and respect, and therefore leaving was a mistake. Even he knew that Griffith ended up in that dungeon because of him.
Guts knew Griffith loved him.
But does he still know it, after being “deserted” by him? After NeoGriffith’s assertion that “it seems I am free,” “nothing has changed,” “this is the man I am,” “you of all people,”?
And if he’s let himself forget, what happens if Griffith finally does start paying attention to him again?
ngl my taste is pretty basic and there are like a million classic things i haven’t seen or read but here’s some of what I’ve enjoyed:
manga:
claymore – recently read it and thoroughly loved it. even the terrible het was so downplayed i wouldn’t’ve known it was there if it wasn’t for one (1) terrible line. probably my second favourite manga after berserk.
gunjo – dark, fucked up f/f, which i always need more of
devilman – everyone’s reading it now thanks to the anime but i beat the rush. anyway i’d rec the original manga and v little else in the universe lol, unless you have a v high tolerance for a range of bad writing from offensive to ridic.
pet shop of horrors – i mean i p much read it just so i could read fic lol, but it was pretty delightful despite the kind of shitty tokyopop translation. luv a ship that smoothly transitions from investigating someone for murder to co-parenting a child together.
anime:
utena – I can see why it’s a classic and I got really into it. also juri/shiori is one of v v v few f/f ships i’ve seen that perfectly hits my specific power dynamic buttons lol
samurai flamenco – came for the gay, stayed for how endearing it was. it kind of toes the line between text and subtext and the whole genre bending thing was v weird but v fun when you get into it imo
yuri on ice – obviously lol, everyone’s watched it
devilman crybaby – also obviously, tho i wouldn’t really rec it unless you have a v high tolerance for gratuitous everything and even then I’d only consider like the last 4 episodes genuinely great.
honestly everything else i’ve seen are also things everyone has seen like death note and cowboy bebop
and stuff I haven’t finished and therefore can’t rec but am enjoying so far:
SCREAMS this is only half edited and im the queen of typos so theres probably a few, but i got it done bitch!!! ill clean it up tomorrow i guess whatever. its way longer than i wanted to write but thats just me being me ig.
also apologies because this PROBABLY… wasn’t what the prompter had in mind but this is what i came up with lmao.
Guts had moved in with Griffith a week and a half before Griffith told him that they were going to spend the day at a reptile convention for an unspecified amount of time.
that and the fact that he sold his body so less of his men (or children ..) would have to die, and then comforted casca when she was trying to comfort him
those are the two things that stand out in my mind and cement his personality as very giving, though it may not seem like it to some because he tries to cover it up with varying levels of success
“a dream is something a man must achieve for no one else’s sake but his own” or w/e
five chapters later: “if there’s something i can do for their sake, for the sake of the dead, that thing is to win.”
he so does try to cover it up lol, i was just writing about this earlier too (because I actually didn’t even think to address Griffith’s dream speech in my meta about Griffith’s dream… and had to go back and add it in. yeah)
but yeah I mean like NGriff becoming “the desired,” the achiever of humanity’s dream is such a good encapsulation of his human life. (also the fact that he became a monster first is a gr8 encapsulation of griffith’s distorted by self-loathing perception of his life.)
i love these kinds of questions! but please prepare yourself because this is going to be long and incoherent
so, to be perfectly honest, i know this is a cop out but all griffith scenes are my favourite scenes?
if i had to pick a few that stand out the most, however, i love griffith & guts’ first and last duels so much
these panels especially, but also:
i also LOVE:
this whole entire thing. all of it, every panel, every word, i love it.
then there’s the entire sequence starting with him overhearing casca telling guts to leave again and ending with him sacrificing everyone. love all of that, especially: his suicide attempt which breaks my heart whenever i re-read it, the moment when guts is approaching him and he’s thinking “stay away!!!” and his thoughts leading up to the sacrifice, about how guts outshone his dream.
this obvious parallel
also, needless to say, i have a complicated relationship with his nightmare wherein he is in a lifesucking heterosexual marriage with casca .. lol.
another big scene for me is, obviously, the bthump scene. i love it so much. i love how he came to guts to check if he still had feelings. very subtle. and then he was like “ok sweet i don’t have feelings bye” and then he had a feeling. I LOVE IT.
OH and allllllll of those femto + black swordsman interactions from the nonnumerical chapters. kisses fingers like a chef.
those are the first few scenes that come to mind, honestly. but there’s a lot of other gems too, like his and guts’ very first meeting when he tells guts that he wants him, that moment when he shows guts the behelit smiling like a little kid, that time he was talking to guts about their duel and how fun it was and just looked really fond, every time he risked his life for guts and every time he lied about his reasons, that time he gave julius a dangerous smile (and every time he talked shit about the nobles), when he asked guts to do him the favour of killing julius, these two scenes god
the scene with casca in the lake, that moment when guts’ sword broke in the middle of their important fight and he looked like … idk what that emotion even was, probably fear? that moment he told gennon he meant nothing to him, god that scene when he sets the room with the queen inside on fire and takes off the ribbon tying his hair …… all of his little smiles and glances @ guts. all of his little 😮 moments.
i’m not fond of the fuck scene with charlotte for obvious reasons, but i do like how he was thinking about guts and also afterwards when he just … curls in on himself and starts crying. that destroyed me.
this isn’t a scene people talk about a lot but i love when he tells charlotte’s gross father off? he just knows … exactly which buttons to push. and we didn’t even know he had all this dirt on the king until that scene, i just love it so much
i love that moment when they find him in the torture chamber and he wakes up and sees guts. puts his hand on his neck, but then guts starts crying, and his hand slides down to guts’ instead. fuck me.
AND ok you already know about this ‘cause we’ve talked about it but:
this moment of clear, undeniable jealousy. love.
obviously i love his little private moment with guts in the carriage. i love neo-griffith’s mind-numbingly boring tea parties, and his talk with rickert. … like i said, i love pretty much any scene where griffith showed up in the manga lol.
if you ask me why … i apologise ’cause this isn’t going to be anything profound, really, but i just love him as a character, literally everything about him. looking at this array, i seem to prefer scenes where he loses control and shows some kind of intense emotion, generally directed towards guts. but i also love the scenes of clear emotional repression, be it him telling guts he doesn’t really have a reason for risking his life to save him, or him telling himself and everyone else that he doesn’t feel guilty for all the lives that were lost for his cause. i love his messy emotions, whether he tries to hide them or they take over him completely and cause him to make his disastrous decisions. i love his impulsivity, i love his jealousy, i love his guilt. i just love him so much.
i feel like i already know a few of your favourite scenes but still wbu? feel free to ramble @ me like i just did @ you
I drafted this for when I’m less busy, hoping I would have a reply that isn’t just “yes @ everything you said,” but I have all the time in the world now and I’m still like … yep that’s pretty much it, I have nothing good to add.
The tragedy of Griffith (or one of, I guess, lol) was that he had to be selfish in order to achieve his completely selfless dream (though, like you pointed out, he still tried to make it as fair as possible by pulling his own weight and more), and people misinterpret his character and his motives (sometimes intentionally) to make it easier to make sense of his actions … at least for themselves lol. The problem is not only does that do him injustice, but it also does the story of Berserk injustice, making it boring and one-dimensional.
I’m genuinely hoping that Miura isn’t going with Falconia where everyone but a handful of us seems to think he’s going. For me personally, that would kill nearly everything that I think makes Berserk interesting and unique. But I guess we’ll see.
AU where Farnese works at Flora’s Flower Shop and has a “healthy appreciation” for a particular girl who always comes in to idle after her daily run.
i finally feel motivated to sit down and spend a night writing a bunch of meta and stuff, and instead i have to go to bartend at my boss’ birthday party
i mean granted that’s probably why i feel motivated, i always want to do things as soon as i can’t, but still 😡
I can always console myself that if Guts’ narrative is going to continue being about letting go of his Griffith obsession right up until the very end, Griffith’s narrative is going to be about his Guts obsession coming back to haunt him.
It’s only half of the story I want, but I’m still down for that half.
(ftr these 2 statements are separated only by one full page panel of Guts walking away with Casca)
in 30 years when berserk is finally over ppl are gonna go ‘omg can you believe that the creepy demon thing that we saw all the way back in chapter one turned out to be the key to everything all along and guts and casca’s child, wow miura is a genius, he really thought everything through blah blah blah blah’
and i’m still gonna be like, the creepy demon feus was 500x better when it was just an abstract symbol of guts’ potential to lose himself to revenge, miura played himself.
lol i didn’t even predict the fetus showing up in casca’s mind, idk.
i think it’s still possible that casca’s going to wake up and lose it? what with the whole thing about shoving her metaphorical heart in her metaphorical chest while it’s covered in metaphorical thorns. actually i’m pretty stoked about that because farnese had her line about wanting to help casca overcome her darkness the same way casca helped her, so either we’re going to get some good farnese and casca interaction or that’s going to turn out to be a pipe dream and casca’s going to do something dark, and either way i’m super intrigued.
whatever guts does would depend on what casca does, i figure. i’m thinking they’re not getting back together immediately, if at all. worst case scenario that i could easily see happening is that miura teases a reconciliation for most of the rest of the manga and i have to live with that sword of damocles hanging over my head indefinitely.
so like, if casca is chill and recovers with farnese’s help, the plot has to get going somehow. maybe we end guts’ narrative on a high note, farnese helping casca recover and guts having achieved a goal without ruining everything for once, return to griffith’s in a flash forward, and he’s about to attack elfhelm logically because it’s the last remaining threat to him but actually because he’s bored and misses guts. honestly i would mostly hate this scenario for many reasons, like guts’ narrative being passive and boring and ngriff having a more unambiguously villainous role, like it would just feel shallow thematically imo, but i could maybe see it happening. I’ve been mostly bored by Guts’ narrative for like 200 chapters now so it wouldn’t be out of place lol.
or something else entirely could kick start the plot. maybe the flower king encourages guts to go fight griffith and we start getting into skellig moral ambiguity. maybe magic deus ex machina happens. maybe casca learns of a way she can use magic to siphon her stupid kid out of griffith and that’s the new objective lol. I was gonna suggest that maybe guts takes off on his own for revenge spurred on by some unforseen event, but the fact that he’s on an island makes that unlikely I guess.
god tho i still think that the neatest and most efficient way to kick start things into gear, fulfill a lot of foreshadowy promises, re-motivate guts into doing something, and shake things up in an interesting way is for casca to use the behelit. this is the hill i’m going to die on, at least until it becomes impossible. and yk what, casca’s last remaining and most important piece of herself, her heart, being the kid could be solid set up for sacrificing it. “Someone so close to you it’s almost like they’re a part of you,” and “bury your human heart,” after all.
I mean the way we revisited the Eclipse and Casca’s trauma, ie, we didn’t, kinda makes me less inclined to think Miura’s going to do anything with it/make it a real motivation, but, yk. thorns and whatnot. ~i want to believe~
i just want something dark and permanent with real consequences to happen, guts’ story has been progressively lighter and happier for over 200 chapters by now, come on.
I wish I could understand an iota of what Miura is going for with the fetus tbh.
Idk, idk if it’s so much that the fetus being the last piece means the whole demonization thing was what drove her insane, the vibe I got was more like, it’s the most important part of her and everything around it “guarding” it (the monsters, the femto-pterodactyl) was what drove her insane. Which at least fits with the fact that she’s immensely traumatized.
This is a bit of an optimistic take tho, because I could absolutely believe Miura writing that it was the corruption of the fetus that mostly drove her insane and she just innately sensed it or something.
The fetus was always looking out for Guts and Casca, so I interpreted it as her subconscious placing the demon child as a final defender of her heart against the demons.
This seems as reasonable an interpretation as any and makes sense to me.
I wish I could understand an iota of what Miura is going for with the fetus tbh.
Idk, idk if it’s so much that the fetus being the last piece means the whole demonization thing was what drove her insane, the vibe I got was more like, it’s the most important part of her and everything around it “guarding” it (the monsters, the femto-pterodactyl) was what drove her insane. Which at least fits with the fact that she’s immensely traumatized.
This is a bit of an optimistic take tho, because I could absolutely believe Miura writing that it was the corruption of the fetus that mostly drove her insane and she just innately sensed it or something.
I’m doing some light re-reading today in search of panels to edit and, well… this exchange really got me. “If you were able to find a place for yourself somewhere…” Farnese’s meeting with her mother comes only two chapters after Farnese remarks that it’s been a long time since she’s taken a bath alone. She thinks about Casca and wonders if she’s being properly cared for…
I wonder where that place is? The place that Farnese belongs? 🤔
this is in no way an objective or meaningful fact but i’m gonna throw an idea out there:
Miura drew Griffith at his most attractive/sultriest in the period when Guts and Casca were fighting over him, ie between when they first meet and the Promrose Hall speech
and yk what Miura drew Guts at his most attractive in the period where Griffith and Casca were low-key competing for him
i hate berserk 😦
what if farnesca like, actually happened
i hate saying i’ve been spoiled because of a few things i’ve seen in the last few years with surprise double gay, but man like five years ago my highest hopes would be ‘man I sure hope when the endgame het inevitably happens it doesn’t take up too much page time’ and now i’m like ‘but what if farnesca actually happened and then guts and griffith talk about their feelings before dying together’
like even crybaby-esque subtext w/ no het endgame would be… incredible
ugh i hate the current media landscape for both setting the bar this high and for the fact that ‘gay subtext/mmmmmaybe confirmation for two ships but with the sexual aspect downplayed + v little het’ is a high bar at all lol
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