mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
anyway speaking of moments where Griffith desperately needs someone to reassure him.
also now i’m doubling down on my theory that Griffith’s scratch marks here came shortly after “do you think I’m cruel?” rather than the day of Guts’ departure.
I’ve heard someone try to argue that he got captured on purpose to endure the year of torture so on and so forth. My brain melted a little bit. I think it’s fair to argue that at the moment he climbed up to Charlotte’s window that he perhaps meant to die; but there is zero evidence that Griffith had a fucking clue that the Behelit was anything more than a good luck charm with some mild magic, if he even believed in that sort of thing.
lmao incredible. i can’t even deal with this lol, the idea that he let himself be tortured for a year on purpose just so he’d feel enough despair to trigger the behelit or w/e is so nonsenical and contradictory to everything we see that i’m in awe
anyway ia with you, griffith semi-purposefully/subconsciously self immolated when he slept with charlotte but that’s not even in the same ballpark as calculatingly destroying himself on the off-chance it would work out and end with him turning into a god lol
I spend months talking about this damn manga and Griffith and his need for validation and self loathing etc etc and I only just fucking noticed that Casca doesn’t actually say no here. She starts to say “no” automatically, then cuts herself off and asks what he was doing with Gennon. Like damn that’s actually a pretty clear “yes.”
Not that I think Casca meant it that way ofc, her heart’s in the right place and she’s a kid who’s totally out of her depth, but still, ouch. That’s like, “no! wait were you sleeping with him? bc actually my answer is dependant on your answer to that question.”
Like add this to the list of reasons Griffith sucks at opening up to people.
I kinda debated writing a long response to this and just going ‘yeah i p much agree’ and tbh I’m going with the latter bc to really dig into morality and how morality is reflected in fiction and how fiction reflects or affects reality etc etc takes a lot of effort and nuance, plus I know v little about actual psychology lol so I can’t say anything useful about psychopathy either as a myth or as a misleading synonym for antisocial personality disorder.
Plus I don’t want to accidentally metamorph into a discourse blog lol
But yeah like I said, I pretty much agree. Any theory of morality that includes the idea that some people are just evil is stupid af and mainly serves to shift responsibility away from society, making it antithetical to progressivity. When it comes to fiction, in general (tho certainly with exceptions) I find pure evil villains pretty offputting.
I really like charismatic villains with relatable qualities and have ruthless yet affective morality. I find their dark sides quite fantasting for me to explore, and discover more potential and good sides to them while still enjoying their whole characterization.
but seeing people throw around terms
like “seicopath”, “psychopath”, “pure evil”, “born evil” and tons of
hate, really pisses me off and make feel insecure. They made many great
antagonists seem nothing more than an irredeemable insane piece of shit
the moment they were born who’s just danger and deserve to die.
yeah same, most of my favourite characters have done terrible things lol, and if they’re my faves it’s usually because I find their motives or their thought processes when they do those things sympathetic and/or understandable. Part of the point of fiction is that you can explore dark stuff you can’t explore in real life. There is no safer space to engage w/ some of the darker aspects of the world/humanity because it’s not real, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with sympathizing with people who’ve done terrible things in fiction, because it’s fiction and no one was actually harmed.
It sucks that people make you feel insecure about it when there’s nothing wrong with that, and most of these villains are meant to be complex and interesting and compelling and even likeable. The ppl who flatten those characters are the ones misinterpreting the story, usually.
further thoughts/clarification under cut bc I feel like leaving this reply on “it’s fiction so who cares” opens me up to discourse I might as well nip in the bud
People like to argue this point by saying that fiction can affect reality and perpetuate harmful concepts and ideas. And this is true.
fiction can be harmful when it replicates damaging tropes and when it pushes problematic messages either accidentally or purposefully, and frankly fiction that pushes the message that some people are born irredeemably evil and some people are born good and can do no wrong is imo much more harmful than fiction that explores, say, what would drive a sympathetic person to sacrifice a bunch of his friends. (not that Berserk has no harmful tropes/messages lol, but imo the exploration of morality in Griffith’s narrative isn’t one of them)
like, to use a very well-known and v blatant example lol, harry potter with its kind of badly written black and white morality and oppression metaphors is probably more damaging than a lot of stories with moral greys.
harry potter has its offensive werewolf aids metaphor ft a metaphorical pedophile who deliberately infects children (thx jk), its pure evil villain who is evil because his mother didn’t love him enough to die for him, its magical fantasy racism parallels used to make death eaters irredeemable but also used as a source of cute humour when, eg, it comes to Arthur Weasley’s patronizing attitude towards the fictional oppressed class, its house elf slavery thing that is just weird as fuck, its pure good protagonist who can use the same “unforgiveable” torture curse as the villains and get a shoulder pat for it, etc etc.
People who uncritically sympathize with the good characters in Harry Potter and uncritically hate the bad guys and expect everyone else to do the same are buying into these offensive aspects of the story and not even realizing it.
And basically I think a lot of people just find it easier to say that sympathizing with villains is bad because they do bad things, and to flatten their characters in an attempt to ignore any complexity that leads to sympathy/relatability/empathy/etc, than it is to actually analyze fiction and figure out where the actual problematic messages are coming from.
Like this is how you get people saying Griffith fans are rape apologists in the same breath they use to excuse Guts sexually assaulting Casca. It’s easier to say the problem lies with the fans who sympathize with the antagonist, rather than the story itself, or their own flat conceptions of the characters that don’t allow for sympathy when it comes to Griffith and, conversely and kind of disturbingly, condemnation when it comes to Guts.
Boiling it down to the idea that bad people sympathize with Voldemort or Draco or Griffith or whoever and good people sympathize with Harry or Guts is idiotic. “Bad” people (this is a uselessly vague phrase but w/e) are just as capable of sympathizing with the protagonists, and in fact I think are probably much more likely to relate to the hero rather than the villain because they’d tend to lack the self awareness necessary to see themselves as the villain.
Yeah I’ve seen that reading and based on what little I know about BPD it makes sense to me. I tend to avoid adding it to my own Griffith meta etc just because I don’t know a whole lot about psychology and I don’t really have any personal experience with borderline personality disorder so I feel like I’d get stuff wrong if I started factoring it in to my conception of Griffith and drawing conclusions from that, but it seems to be a much more accurate assessment than psychopathy.
lmao @ people claiming to be psychiatrists and then using the word ‘psychopath’ instead of what they really mean, which is ASPD, the criteria of which griffith does not fit. like at all. he is some flavour of mentally ill though so congrats for picking up on that!!
lmao yeah i was kind of wondering bc i thought “psychopath” isn’t an actual diagnosis.
honestly i think to a lot of people character does a bad thing + behaviour i personally can’t relate to/possible mental illness symptoms = psychopath.
plus if it lets them deny the character’s capacity to feel love for a member of the same sex, they’ll leap on it. also see: hannibal, even though it’s been stated in the show that he’s not a psychopath lol.
tbh there’s a really good takedown of this argument here, by alovelyburn. I’m no psychologist and I’m too lazy to do my research when someone else has been so thorough already. It’s a good read!
In addition to that post though, I also want to add that I have a feeling anyone applying the psychopath label to Griffith probably willfully ignores/downplays the moments where he sacrifices himself for Guts, where he prostitutes himself to save some of his soldiers, where he saves a random stranger from a rapist, where he ditches an important meeting just to see Guts and Casca, where his internal self is a child on a mountain of corpses screaming apologies, etc.
tho i am curious where they got the idea that Griffith has a poor sense of others’ emotions. His own, for sure, but he’s really good at reading people, and there are plenty of examples of things like eg putting a hand on Casca’s shoulder when she seems quietly upset.
I think on a character level it was wishful thinking on Griffith’s part. He saw that Charlotte was still enamoured of him when she took that poison dart for him, and he seized on that fact p desperately, but deep down he knew his plan to be king was fucked and he probably wasn’t going to see her again. It’s perfectly consistent with Griffith’s characterization, he fuckin loves his denial.
Plus it tells us that he hasn’t given up. He’s still him. That moment comes right before he saves them all from an explosion by pointing out the thin wall to Pippin, and it works with that to show us that Griffith is still tenacious, still smart and ambitious and sane, and he still wants to be king even if it’s an impossible dream now. And it also sets us up for his later desperation and despair after Wyald makes his helplessness impossible to deny.
On a narrative level it’s v useful foreshadowing.
In no way does it make sense that he was planning the Hawk’s sacrifice lol, he didn’t even have the behelit at that point, even if some people for some reason believe that he knew how it worked and intended to use it.
Like… I’ve seen people take a lot of little character moments like that and twist them into “proof” that Griffith is diabolically planning to make the sacrifice, and none of them ever make sense because the idea that Griffith has been planning to sacrifice them at any point before he says “I sacrifice” undermines the entire emotional thrust of the story.
Plus it contradicts many, many stated facts, like eg you can only sacrifice people you love so much it’s like they’re a part of you, the Godhand’s explanation to Griffith, Griffith prioritizing Guts over his dream several times, Griffith’s confusion when he starts seeing demons and Eclipse references, the fact that the behelit only opens in a moment of pure despair (why would he feel despair if he knew he was about to become a God), the fact that he tried to kill himself immediately prior to the Eclipse, Griffith desperately trying to catch Guts as he falls from the big hand, and Griffith’s clearly explained motivation for making the sacrifice – like the entire sequence leading up to the sacrifice where the Godhand are talking to bb Griffith in his head makes no sense if he’s been planning it all along. How do people manage to ignore that????
Anyway tl;dr that theory’s dumb, hope this helped lol.
Fandom: Berserk Title: The Thought Remains Author: SwordofRebecca, Divinesong, Dark Seraphim Rating: Teen Pairing(s)/Character(s): Griffith/Guts Summary: When Guts leaves on his mission, Griffith dreams. Set during the episodes involving Julius and infamous book. Word Count (for fic): 906 Author’s Notes: FINALLY! A Berserk fic! I’ve had this idea rolling around for quite some time! Written in poem/stream of conscious style, so I can ignore, well, everything. Enjoy!
tbh I’ve never seen Ladyhawke so I’m afraid I got nothing.
I’m going to watch it at some point so when I do I’ll reblog this again with My Thoughts. maybe it’ll be soon bc I want to be able to answer this question lol and that’s p good motivation.
Of the current core cast of apostles I think he’d be fairly indifferent to Grunbeld, Locus and Irvine. They’re honourable killer types just doing their thing. He’d hate them only as much as he hates any given apostle, and less than most I think.
Raksas I think he’d hate a bit more, because Raksas is a gleeful dick who likes to fuck with people before killing them and if Guts had to fight him I think he’d get annoyed with his hiding in the shadows being creepy thing. Also if he ever found out somehow that Raksas promised to kill Griffith he’d hate him more because I think Guts would feel proprietary towards Griffith’s death lol. I can see Guts as the type of in-love-deep-down-enemy who’s like, “the only one allowed to kill you is me.” Maybe not at this point in the narrative while he’s trying to shake those feelings, but if he ever backslid, yk.
I think Zodd wins though because they have a history. I actually think he respects Zodd as an enemy, but Zodd’s gotten between him and NeoGriff a few times and is the apostle Guts has seen carrying him around, and Zodd gave him the cryptic Eclipse prophecy multiple times, and Zodd saved his ass a few times too so that he’d be around for the Eclipse and I could see Guts resenting that. Plus they’re sort of designated counterparts and Zodd is his NeoBand replacement which I could also see him resenting. Especially if he sees his own potential to become a monster reflected in Zodd.
Though the bantering familiarity they kinda sorta had when they fought Ganeshka is a point against that actually…
So idk, either Zodd or Raksas I guess lol.
lmao i was going back and doing some tag organizing and realized i read this question from 3 months ago backwards
this is actually a very easy question and the answer is locus. a mortal enemy of griffith’s who has a mutually obsessive love/hate relationship with him sounds like his actual worst nightmare.
you're the only one 