(same anon) on second thought maybe the nose treatment allusion after
sex could refer to him being comforted, but not wrt Griffith but his
childhood trauma? Like of course Casca can’t help him there but she
alleviated the pain for a bit. This still doesn’t let me glimpse at
Miura’s intentions. I truly agree w your meta I am just getting mixed
signals. No disrespect or anything, feel free to ignore/delete since I’m
basically rambling in your inbox!
no worries, i always love getting messages and I have no problem clarifying my thoughts!
lol
sorry this took a while to answer, first I almost wrote an essay in
response but then I decided to clean up a post I already had in my
drafts that addresses some of this instead.
But to address
your message in more detail than that post does, tbh I think it’s kind
of meant to be a little contradictory. Miura tends to write in a way
where he presents the positive and negative aspects of something and
trusts the audience to make up their own minds. The narrative could def
lean one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean a decision/an event/a
character/etc is wholly negative or wholly positive. It’s usually some of both.
When
it comes to Guts and Casca hooking up I think there are positive
aspects. Guts opening up and telling her about his past is a good thing.
Casca deciding to try to move on from her obsession with Griffith is a
good thing. Despite the violent flashback and the virginal fumbling both
of them consider sex together to be a positive experience.
But
despite that, I think the narrative itself depicts Guts and Casca
hooking up to be ultimately a mistake. Not a mistake you can blame Guts
or Casca for because they should’ve known better or smthn like that, but a mistake in the
sense that it lead to a lot more bad than good happening, the same way
Guts leaving the Hawks was ultimately the wrong call even though he had
the best of intentions and it arguably seemed to have a positive affect on him as an individual.
And like, tbh I don’t think Miura really
gives much of a fuck about Guts/Casca as a romantic relationship lol. I
think what happened is he went with it as a way to make the Eclipse more
dramatic/give Guts a stronger reason to want revenge bc frankly
Griffith just sacrificing the Band isn’t nearly enough to make Guts that
angry lol – but he’s actually a pretty good writer when he wants to be
so rather than pushing it as a more generic and pasted on True Love Ruined By Tragedy thing he
added it as a two people on the rebound thing and incorporated it into
part of the pile-up of bad decisions and things going wrong in the lead
in to the Eclipse.
It has to be a little sweet, a little positive,
the audience has to believe Guts genuinely cares for her and they had
potential in order for the Eclipse bullshit to have the effect he
wanted, but at the same time the main thing Guts and Casca’s short lived
relationship adds to the story, other than set-up for a prolonged rape
scene, is reinforcement of Guts’ stupid dream 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.
Let’s look at Guts’ conversation with Judeau, where he seems to consider the possibility of Casca as a romantic interest for the first time.
“The one who has her eye… is Griffith. That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this.”
I see two possible ways of interpreting this statement. Either the narrative and Guts just reframed Guts entire raison d’etre, his whole motivation for leaving and the reason he wants to be Griffith’s equal, thanks to a few leading statements from Judeau, or Guts is framing a potential relationship with Casca as another step on the journey of becoming Griffith’s equal.
The former defies belief. We just spent 22 chapters knowing exactly why Guts wants to leave and become Griffith’s equal. There’s no mystery there, there’s no detail left to be uncovered. Suddenly doing a 180 and saying actually, he wants to leave so he can be worthy of Casca, even though he never considered Casca a romantic possibility until approximately 30 seconds earlier, would just be impossibly bad writing from an otherwise extremely solid story.
But the latter, well, that fits right in.
After they have sex, Casca symbolically becomes Guts’ sword instead of Griffith’s:
To Casca, Guts is a more open, emotionally available replacement for Griffith, as I’ve discussed in detail in this post. Guts is in fact coming closer to his goal of becoming Griffith’s equal by sleeping with Casca, because after this Casca begins to transfer her obsession with Griffith and his dream to him.
And Casca isn’t an endgame for Guts. She’s not the goal, she’s not the motivation – she’s an addition to his overarching desire to have Griffith see him as an equal. He still plans to leave to continue fighting stronger and stronger enemies after they hook up. He invites her along – just so long as she doesn’t get in the way of his more important dream:
Non-committally inviting her along mollifies her, but it doesn’t address her point lol – he’s still selfishly prioritizing his dream. She’s become support for that, just the way she supported Griffith’s dream as his “sword.” Eventually that is exactly what leads to everything crashing down around them – Casca telling Guts to leave, because his dream is all-important.
And while we then leave Guts and Casca on a sweet moment where they kiss, that very same page shifts to pure ominousness to end both the chapter and Guts and Casca’s newly changed relationship on:
Cue snake man walking around and the Behelit floating down a river on its way to a date with Griffith.
And then the next chapter returns us to Griffith, a year since the last time we saw him, and his monologue about how his feelings for Guts are so strong and bright they make even the dream fade into dullness.
Guts is trying to “unbind” himself from Griffith. In his dream speech to Casca he says he can’t stay with the Hawks because he refuses to ever swing his sword in service to another again. And Casca tells Guts that she can’t continue defending the almost broken dream of someone who may not even be alive. Both he and Casca are trying to move on from Griffith in their own ways, and they try to do this through a connection with each other.
But the thing is, if you’re writing the kind of relationship triangle where two people help each other get over a third, if you want it to really feel satisfying and right, wouldn’t you want to establish that they both should be getting over Griffith, and that a relationship with each other is a more positive step for them?
The problem is that Guts’ whole thing, his whole desire to leave to become Griffith’s equal, is motivated by wanting to be closer to Griffith lol. He wants to be someone Griffith can call a friend. And it’s based on a falsehood: he thinks Griffith looks down on him.
When this is how Griffith feels about him:
Guts trying to unbind himself from Griffith doesn’t feel satisfying when we’re immediately reminded through a passionate monologue that Griffith is just as bound to Guts as Guts is to him, and that Guts only wants to become independent of Griffith because he doesn’t know that.
As for Casca, her obsession with Griffith came at the expense of
herself. Spending a year fighting for Griffith’s dream
and leading the Hawks while he was in a dungeon drove her to the point
of suicide.
But her encounter here with Guts doesn’t solve any of
that, she just transfers her obsession and her dedication to someone
else’s dream to Guts, as we see clearly through that sword metaphor,
through the parallels I linked to earlier, and through Casca telling
Guts he has to leave because his dream is the most important thing.
Casca trying to get over Griffith and move on doesn’t feel satisfying when she immediately falls into the same self-destructive patterns with a new person at the centre of her obsession.
Guts and Casca’s romance has
its postive aspects – Guts opens up to her about his childhood trauma,
eg, and is comforted. But there’s
dissonance beneath the surface. They have sex right after Guts let Casca
stab him because a part of him realized she was right about Griffith needing him. Casca had just tried to kill herself after telling Guts that Griffith doesn’t need her, as though she can only live in relation to someone else. In
deciding to leave the Hawks together, Guts continues suppressing his
eventual revelation that leaving in the first place was a mistake.
And
Guts recalls
Gambino giving him medicine – the one act of kindness from him which
Guts latches onto to help him deny the rest of Gambino’s abuse – while Casca is compared to a sword, which to me seems like a strong, not all that positive statement on their relationship: it doesn’t fix their underlying issues, it doesn’t change anything, it just helps them live in denial of those issues – Casca’s lack of independence, Guts’ dream being a mistake*** – for a while longer.
Basically, rather than moving forward and truly healing with each other, they’re revisiting the past, repeating negative patterns, maintaining denial, and essentially, well, licking wounds.
And by trying to move on from
Griffith by taking solace in each other, they only add to Guts’ original
mistake, which is failing to realize that there was no reason for him to move on in the first
place. Guts couldn’t stand the thought of Griffith looking down on him,
but this is who he is to Griffith, as we are told immediately before and
after he has sex with Casca:
And this is when Guts finally acknowledges his mistake, about 10 seconds after Griffith overheard Casca telling him to leave:
We know that Miura didn’t
intend Guts and Casca to get together from the start, let alone for it
to be a grand true love style romance. He’s said that he hooked them up
for the sake of more Eclipse drama. And I think that the way he framed
their relationship, from its placement in the narrative to the details of the scene itself to the way it goes hand in hand with Guts’ dream, makes it feel like it’s contributing to the series of unfortunate fuck ups that lead to the Eclipse, rather than just being an incidental casualty of it.
It’s a mistake the
way Miura writes mistakes – not obviously so, with no ill intent or
obviously misguided motives behind it. Their relationship isn’t meant to
be unpleasant, it’s shown as sweet and maybe not epic, maybe not
lasting, but overall more positive than negative for them. But so was
Guts’ year long sabbatical, and we’ve seen how much he regrets that:
In Berserk characters can make the wrong decisions despite having the best of intentions, despite some good coming out of those decisions, despite doing the best they can based on what they know. And I think Guts and Casca’s relationship is shown to be one of them.
*** I think both Casca’s lack of independence and Guts’ focus on his own dream of fighting stronger and stronger enemies are at least in part poor coping mechanisms for their respective childhood traumas, which makes the sword and medicine metaphors even more apt. But to get fully into that would take its own post, and it’s not necessary to my point here, so this is just a minor aside lol.
okay so I found this note re: griffith on my phone:
griffith’s “o blessed king of longing” thing is interesting, because it was guts’s hand on his shoulder that caused his despair to be deep enough to be able to use the behelit. it’s not pride, which I imagine some people read that as (particularly people who don’t subscribe to the griffguts subtext/text), but really, the thing that brings him lowest is, essentially, his longing for guts. so his rebirth/godly curse/irony/benefit even, is now everyone longs for him (even more than before, as people have longed for him through his life anyway) in whatever way, and after the eclipse, he doesn’t have to FEEL it anymore, feel for them or long for anyone else himself: so how absolutely painful is it that guts made his heart beat even as neogriffith. he can’t escape it. king of longing indeed.
man fa (now gsw, also known as b) and i were talking about this just a few days ago wrt the original japanese, because the anime sub team translated it as .. i can’t remember the exact words, i think it was “the long awaited” …? but basically the blessed king who is /longed for/, and the official manga translation translated it as the blessed king of longing, so, /the one who longs/. but really he’s both, and the flip from being the one who desires to the one who is desired is such an interesting plot point or whatever you might call it and i’m so glad someone brought it up
When the Eclipse happened in the edge era of the 90s, I get the need for Guts’ revenge thing or whatever. But into the 2000s and beyond for TWENTY YEARS? Casca was a really cool and interesting character, and there was so much that coulda been focused on after Griffith’s betrayal. It’s all just disappointing in an otherwise great character-heavy story
yeah ia p much. and the story feels so dragged out and a lot thinner than it did during the golden age, imo, like I don’t feel like there’s any reason it had to take this long.
also will i ever get over this irony
guts: i threw away my relationship with griffith because i’m in love with him but i think he looks down on me for not pursuing a dream
griffith: i threw away my dream because i’m in love with guts but i think he looks down on me for the way i’ve pursued my dream
guts comes back: hey i have a dream now… oh. guess that doesn’t actually matter now.
griffith like, hey i’ve got nothing but you to live for now… oh you’re leaving for your dream.
and like the 2 monologues are perfect counterparts to each other this way. guts explaining how dazzling griffith is and how he needs to get himself a dream so griffith will see him the same way. griffith thinking about how bright and shining guts is and how unimportant his dream is next to him.
Also speaking of the monologue I want to take a sec to just gush about how it’s structured. The way it begins with two pages of Griffith reminiscing about his dream. “It was the brightest thing I had ever seen.” Shining. The next page is Griffith with that light shining before him.
Then into darkness, deep darkness without even a trace of light. The darkness of the torture chamber, the darkness, one assumes, of having his dream ripped away from him. Only one thing is vivid.
And it’s Guts.
I just love how it’s set up as a bait and switch to really drive in the point that Guts has overtaken his dream. You turn the page, expecting to see Griffith consumed with longing for his lost dream, for the castle, the thing he just described as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, but nope, it’s Guts, like lightning blazing within him.
And then the monologue ends with Griffith returning to the subject of the dream only to say it’s dull compared to Guts.
Like this is straightforward but I still love how it’s set up to play with expectation, and to compare Griffith before and Griffith after Guts. The dream shining within him, replaced by Guts shining within him.
okay so I found this note re: griffith on my phone:
griffith’s “o blessed king of longing” thing is interesting, because it was guts’s hand on his shoulder that caused his despair to be deep enough to be able to use the behelit. it’s not pride, which I imagine some people read that as (particularly people who don’t subscribe to the griffguts subtext/text), but really, the thing that brings him lowest is, essentially, his longing for guts. so his rebirth/godly curse/irony/benefit even, is now everyone longs for him (even more than before, as people have longed for him through his life anyway) in whatever way, and after the eclipse, he doesn’t have to FEEL it anymore, feel for them or long for anyone else himself: so how absolutely painful is it that guts made his heart beat even as neogriffith. he can’t escape it. king of longing indeed.
he’s padding it out so they can sell more volumes is my guess. same thing happened with naruto. but yeah when it starts being like this, hiatus after hiatus, the author’s usually bored. which makes me really sad because i’m still attached to this story and its characters. but yeah tbh nothing would make me happier than learning that miura also pretty much only cares about griffguts (would be nice if he cared about casca too but that’s clearly asking too much)
damn that makes me sad too, bc yeah i love most of these characters and i need to see what happens. i guess i’ll hope that the fantasia arc is getting the half assed treatment bc it’s just set up for the eventual good stuff and he’ll switch on when he needs to, and he isn’t just sick of berserk in general.
like miura’s story choices genuinely baffle me sometimes … i guess he’s been writing this manga for like 20 years, he must have changed as a person or the editors are pressuring him to make Fun Relatable Content but like genuinely what the fuck happened to his ability to write interesting, compelling, grimy and realistic stories with appropriately timed humour … wtf is this whole dream sequence … i don’t know i’m tired like it all feels very shallow. not
counting falconia & neo griffith bc i think that’s on purpose.
half-assed is a good word, and it’s too idk literal? i can’t put it into
words but it does not compare to the masterpiece that was the golden
age on ANY level lol
yeaaaaaah, just yeah. it kinda feels like he’s bored of the story right now and going through the motions. though if that’s the case i can’t begin to guess why he’s also padding it tf out so much. i can only hope the quality goes back up when the narrative brings griffith and guts back together bc lbr that’s what we’re all waiting for, hopefully including miura.
and yeah i’m finding the current fix casca dream sequence really disappointing? like it’s a re-tread of the golden age, we’re not really learning anything new about casca at all, what could’ve been a thoughtful take on how casca has dealt with misogyny her whole life is instead a hoarde of dick monsters… like again, thank god for farnese bc her reactions and interactions with stick figure casca are the only parts i’m really enjoying. (tbf i haven’t read the latest chapter yet, so this doesn’t take that into account if something happens in it)
@kissing-monsters said: My friend who was reading Berserk and I
basically agree most strongly on Casca, we have been shouting about her
narrative being an awful waste of a potentially amazing character since
he started reading it because ugh it’s so true. She’s ruined by the
narrative choices.
yeah it’s so unfortunate because imo as a character she had so much potential to grow in interesting ways, and she was often so awesome and fun despite the narrative shorting her even in the golden age, and then boom, disintegrated for 20 literal years of writing time.
So I think that he is trying to push those two together because he is
projecting his feelings on Casca. He wants to get them together because
he can’t insert himself in that situation. Casca is possibly a stand-in
for himself without him realizing it. That’s why he wouldn’t feel
jealous too imo. What do you think and what’s your take?
My probably-gayer-than-Miura-intended take is basically the same as yours, with the addition of Guts thinking that Casca is worthier of Griffith than he is.
From his silent and sullen reaction shots to Casca talking about him in the cave that definitely strike me as identifying with Casca’s feelings
to Casca directly telling him she’s jealous of him
to Guts feeling like all he’s good for is swinging his sword while insisting Casca has to live for something more important
to
this all seems like set-up for Guts throwing Casca at Griffith. He starts doing it after he decides to leave like he’s setting Casca up to take the place she wants, his place, at Griffith’s side, but Casca gets the addition of romance that Guts can’t begin to envision for himself thanks to repression and heteronormativity.
Also, good point about the bit where they’re both looking at him from a distance and Guts decides to take Casca down to bridge that gap for her, while he plans to leave. ia that seems like another moment of identification.
Idk basically yeah I totally agree, I think Guts is hardcore projecting, and the fact that the way he sets Casca up to take his place as Griffith’s confidante and “sword” involves shoving her into his arms, telling her to ask him to dance, telling Griffith she’s quite a sight in her dress, etc, is pretty telling.
Idk if it’s purposeful on Miura’s part, but it’s a really solid reading imo.
I originally had this as a second part of my last response but tbh it’s not actually all that related and it seemed silly to reply with a giant wall of text explaining an opinion that the person never asked for lol. So I’m just throwing it out separately.
Like I complained that Casca’s reaction to the Eclipse trauma is unrealistic but that doesn’t actually have much of anything to do with why I hate it.
Bc the
thing is, even if I assume that it is totally possible for
someone to regress to a state of infanthood due to trauma, or if I just
assume that Casca’s mental state is a result of fantasy magic, the way
Miura portrays it is still uncomfortable and worth criticizing, imo,
and he certainly doesn’t seem to care about making it feel grounded in
reality or depicting her trauma with care and respect.
For
instance, the way we don’t get to experience Casca’s point of view ever
again (even now we see her mind through Schierke and Farnese’s points of
view), the babyish mentality combined with Miura’s art still
sexualizing her adult body a whole lot, the way her current mental state
(the result of horrific rape) is often used as comic relief (eg
grabbing Puck and sticking him in her mouth in the background), the way
it totally strips Casca of agency as a character and turns her into a
plot device, the way Miura has said that he had her survive the Eclipse only to keep her around as a reminder to Guts that he wants revenge, etc.
It
seems much, much less like a genuine and thoughtful exploration of
Casca as a traumatized individual and much more like a convenient way of
reducing her to an object for Guts to protect and project on.
Even
now that we’re in her mind doing some magical therapy it seems really
half assed to me. We see Schierke and Farnese fighting dick monsters in
her mind, they’re collecting shards of her and sticking them back
together… I mean, when you compare it to, say, the absolutely
heartwrenching portrayal of Guts’ ptsd flashback during sex and his
subsequent panicky breakdown, it just doesn’t seem like Miura really
cares about selling Casca’s trauma as realistic and making sure the
audience empathizes with her. It really seems like he just wanted to
make her a cute and helpless non-entity for the sake of furthering Guts’
narrative.
It’s such a shame to me because I really like
Casca as a character but she gets such a raw treatment
from the narrative pretty much consistently, and it sucks.
I mean, if you want my two cents on the regression, I don’t buy it? Like she would have been 100% entitled to lose her shit but I don’t think she would have I guess? I was talking to @berserkerlover221 and I was just thinking that if that was the response women had every time a man they trusted raped them there would be a hell of a lot more completely regressed people.
like i’m no psychiatrist but i’m pretty damn sure casca’s reaction is 100% unrealistic fictional bullshit miura threw in to remove her from the narrative. you could argue that no one irl has ever been gangraped by monsters and an immortal demon god with powers of evil so maybe it’s fantasy magic at work, but then again miura also did the exact same thing when guts’ mother had a miscarriage so…
idk how one dude can write some traumatized characters so well and others so badly lol. like there is such a world of difference between guts griffith casca farnese and serpico’s reactions to their childhood traumas, and current casca’s generically ~wacky and childish insanity that it floors me that one guy wrote it all. i mean casca is a funny cartoonish background event throughout most of the last couple arcs. it’s just incredible.
All of that being
said, that seems to be something that he’s returning to thematically so
it might not be 100% sexisim and not knowing what to do with her. Maybe
just 90%
yeah i’m hoping he plans to do something with her after she gets magical elfhelm therapy, and hopefully that something is awesome and epic and relevant enough to justify even a fraction of how she’s been reduced for 20 years. idk, cross my fingers I guess.
Idk I feel like Casca’s response to the trauma was realistic in my opinion.
I’ve spoken to my sister who has a degree in psychology as well as my cousin about it and they both agreed that a situation where a person experiences severe trauma would have very damaging results.
Ignoring the fantasy element of the manga, let’s focus on the part of her witnessing the brutal massacre of the people she loved along with being raped while it was happening, something like that would mess up someone’s mind. She would have developed extreme anxiety, paranoia, night terrors, or repression or regression amongst other psychological responses.
Her mind regressed as to protect her from the memory of the trauma. And her developing a mental scar to something that horrific is a very realistic response.
But that’s just my personal viewpoint.
I definitely don’t mean to suggest that Casca wouldn’t’ve been severely traumatized by the events of the Eclipse, just that as far as I’m aware trauma doesn’t manifest this way in real life.
To be fair calling it 100% unrealistic bullshit was fairly harsh of me because the closest real life equivalent would probably be a dissociative fugue state. Based on only casual research those don’t seem to go along with regression to an infantile state – people who’ve experienced fugue states seem to retain things like language skills and generalized knowledge of how the world works despite the amnesia – and regression as a reaction to trauma is more along the lines of returning to comforting childish habits, and things like wetting the bed and more child-like speech patterns in more extreme cases, rather than literally regressing to the mentality of a child.
But you could maybe argue that Casca’s reaction is extra extreme because of the extra extreme fantastical nature of her trauma.
So yeah, you have a fair point, and that’s just based on my half assed google research lol so I’m more than happy to defer to the greater knowledge of your sister and cousin if it seems possible to them.
I mean, if you want my two cents on the regression, I don’t buy it? Like she would have been 100% entitled to lose her shit but I don’t think she would have I guess? I was talking to @berserkerlover221 and I was just thinking that if that was the response women had every time a man they trusted raped them there would be a hell of a lot more completely regressed people.
like i’m no psychiatrist but i’m pretty damn sure casca’s reaction is 100% unrealistic fictional bullshit miura threw in to remove her from the narrative. you could argue that no one irl has ever been gangraped by monsters and an immortal demon god with powers of evil so maybe it’s fantasy magic at work, but then again miura also did the exact same thing when guts’ mother had a miscarriage so…
idk how one dude can write some traumatized characters so well and others so badly lol. like there is such a world of difference between guts griffith casca farnese and serpico’s reactions to their childhood traumas, and current casca’s generically ~wacky and childish insanity that it floors me that one guy wrote it all. i mean casca is a funny cartoonish background event throughout most of the last couple arcs. it’s just incredible.
All of that being
said, that seems to be something that he’s returning to thematically so
it might not be 100% sexisim and not knowing what to do with her. Maybe
just 90%
yeah i’m hoping he plans to do something with her after she gets magical elfhelm therapy, and hopefully that something is awesome and epic and relevant enough to justify even a fraction of how she’s been reduced for 20 years. idk, cross my fingers I guess.
Like even the idea of “childishness” being a shared trait between them is a weird area of analysis and I’m not sure if Casca, outside of the choices that Miura made for her would be this way you know?
I feel like I need to take a hard look
at the later cannon at the children and see what I can gleam from them
in regards to both Griffith and Casca as well as Guts. I mean if you’re
looking at cosmic forces that play specifically on childish feelings
frozen by trauma I feel like it kind of links all of the story arcs
together more strongly
oops replied too soon
but yeah i was actually about to say in response to the first part that while comparing griffith and casca’s childishness seems like a stretch bc griffith was just a 15 yr old who was emotionally immature in some ways and casca is mentally regressed, both casca’s regression and griffith’s immaturity stem from coping with traumatic experiences so even if one’s subtle and realistic and the other is over the top and ridiculous you could draw similarities mb. even if it’s just because miura likes writing about traumatized people.
and then you added the second comment and i’m like welp mte.
tho idk if the current children have much to do with it, none of them seem to have any real issues, they’re just annoying window dressing imho.
Yeah. I don’t really have anything smart to add beyond that but I noticed that and was anxious.
well while farnese and guts’ reactions were pretty different iirc both incidences lead to greater understanding and some form of bonding (farnese apologizing). so i could see it.
The symbolism of Utena adapts to everything not only with Guts and Griffith. Even Farnese and Casca (this is long and I can not explain it here because I can not write much) but there is enough subtext … but I must say that it is strange that Miura has put many parallels of the love triangle of Griffith-Guts-Casca in the current one that is Guts-Farnese-Casca but it goes beyond that, it feels as if Miura is really going to develop something big between them two.
by the way I really
like your blog, you make good posts and finally someone who does not say
bullshit that Griffith is super cruel and did not feel anything for
Guts.
If you ever feel like writing a longer post about Farnese and Casca and Utena symbolism plz @ me because I’m v intrigued!
Also yeah the parallels are very interesting, like there are so many between post-Eclipse Guts and golden age Griffith. And lol since the first triangle lead to Guts and Casca hooking up I want to believe that means Casca and Farnese are going to hook up but tragically that’s probably wishful thinking. Guess we’ll find out where it’s all leading eventually.
And tyvm! Yeah ikwym it can be hard to find people who don’t completely diminish Griffith’s character in the Berserk fandom.
Oh yeah I see what you mean. And you could probably argue that Guts is doing the same thing with Casca right now too, idealizing the concept of her as healed and exactly the way she was before as a Hawk commander.
Also yeah while I’d say Utena was mostly about examining misogyny and patriarchy, I think you could apply a lot of the same conceptual stuff to homophobia and heteronormativity. Like ngl I only watched Utena for the first time fairly recently and I know this would be p much blasphemy to a lot of fans lol, but afterwards I immediately wanted to compare Griffith’s castle dream to the floating upside-down castle. I mean Griffith’s dream is kind of intwined with an ideal heteronormative relationship with Charlotte, noble storybook knight and princess, which is at odds with his genuine love for Guts, except he ends up choosing the dream.
I tend to err on the side of thinking that it’s not purposeful on Miura’s part, and being able to read Griffith’s narrative as about internalized homophobia and heternormativity is just a side effect of him being emotionally repressed, in love with Guts, and needing to marry a princess, but it’s still fun to think about, and imo it’s really not much of a stretch.
I’m sorry anon I’m having a hard time parsing this so apologies if I read your point wrong.
Like do you mean is Berserk a subversion of traditional romance similarly to Utena? bc I wouldn’t really say that, though I do think Miura is definitely not aiming for a traditional romance anywhere in Berserk, I don’t think he’s really deconstructing the concept of hetero romance either. But yeah I do think that regardless of whether it can be compared to Utena, Miura is still very unlikely to write a straightforward happy romantic ending between Guts and Casca.
griffith’s moment of ultimate despair was guts touching his shoulder, like jesus fucking christ
void appeals to reason, logic, the thing griffith falls back on to hide from his emotions. you are special, this is your destiny, everything you’ve done has been right all along and you’ve been preparing for this all your life
and then immediately after, the way he looks at Guts. like holy shit look at that expression. that is pure love.
“You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.”
That’s what he’s desperate to escape from, that’s the real reason for his despair, for burying his human heart. His ambition collapsed, his body was fucked up to the point of helplessness, he spent a year being tortured, but the despair that opens the Behelit is Guts touching his shoulder. We get two chapters of the Godhand laying out their argument but the final moments of Griffith’s decision are given to Guts’ appearance and his statement of all-encompassing, life-ruining love.
like ik i’ve already written actual posts about the count and griffith and griffith’s moment of despair etc i just suddenly felt compelled to throw all these bits together and ramble about them incoherently
you're the only one 