Yeah I think his heart was in the right place, it seems like he genuinely just wanted what was best for everyone even if his methods were a little… underhanded and dishonest. Like towards the end eg, he probably thought Griffith would be better off with him and his thieves than with Guts and Casca as well as vice versa (and if Guts and Casca stayed together while taking care of Griffith he might’ve even been right, bc lbr that would’ve been a shitshow lol.) He’s likeable, and fun, and he has some great moments, like telling Guts he’s sure he’ll find what he’s looking for with the Hawks. Ngl his death scene always makes me cry lol, I do def like him overall, in part because he makes mistakes too.
Also I wonder if there isn’t a subtle indication from Miura that Judeau and Casca should’ve gotten together instead of Guts and Casca, and it’s its own little sub-tragedy based on stupid self-esteem issues that they didn’t. The way during the Eclipse Judeau does his best to save her and defends her with his own life while Guts is up on the hand still trying to “save” Griffith lol feels kind of starkly telling. I don’t ship them myself, I like their friendship and I kind of wish Judeau hadn’t had a crush the whole time lol, but it fits into the whole missed opportunity vibe of the Golden Age.
It is kind of a shame that the Golden Age side characters got way less backstory and development than the current RPG group, but the current group has so much more time. Like 200+ chapters vs 70. I did love the little enriching hints we got about the Hawks though, like Judeau feeling inadequate as a jack of all trades, the hints that Corkus is bitter about his own lost dreams. I’d say ‘etc’ but actually that’s about it really. Wish we got more on Pippin too.
Holy moly, what have we even been doing for the last 200+ chapters?? As much as I love the rpg group, nothing beats the original Hawks for me.
I definitely think that the Golden Age was all about people missing what was right in front of them, and losing their chances, or screwing them up on purpose. I mean, it can’t just be Guts and Griffith in this crapsack world that do it.
You mentioned how during the eclipse Guts was focusing of Griffith while Judeau was focused on Casca. Got me thinking about how his final acts were to be a literal shield over her body, and how he fell from her arm as he died. I don’t have the scans, but it reminded me of how Guts and Casca always compare themselves to swords. A sword and shield go mighty well together.
Lmao right? It really puts it into perspective when you realize the Golden Age was less than 100 chapters and we’re on 354 now.
Yeah that really sums up the Golden Age in a nutshell lol. And Judeau’s thoughts at the end do include, “I missed my chance to say it,” which fits.
tbh good call with the sword/shield imagery. Like yeah he does literally use himself as a human shield against that one weird apostle, and then Casca leaps up and kills it with her sword. I could def see that being purposeful. Also like… Judeau is Casca’s last real human interaction with someone before she’s driven insane. I’d love to see that acknowledged when she wakes up tbh.
You found the image I was talking about! I already put it on the post itself, but the way he fell off her arm reminds me of how shields are worn on the arm and get dropped when they’re broken!
This chapter was pure badassery on so many levels. I really hate that basically every female character is subjected to assault tho. All of them. (Sadly, I guess it’s not so different from the world we live in.)
On a GriffGuts note, I wonder if the reason Guts focuses so much on casca’s assault is because it drives home for him what Griffith has become. Griffith being his singular focus and all.
Whereas in the last chapter that got released, Casca’s memories encapsulate the whole Eclipse.
Yeah it’s genuinely fantastic, badass and touching and emotional and then it ends… like that
tbh ia. It’s like the way Guts wasn’t angry at Griffith, just sad and regretful, even while all his friends were dying and he was being attacked by a hoard of monsters, up until the rape scene. In a way it makes sense for Guts to focus on that since it’s like, the source of his violent rage that keeps him going and keeps him wanting to kill Griffith/Femto, as opposed to the rest of the Eclipse which is probably more a source of guilt (”was I the one who drove you…?”)
the beast of darkness pretty much suggests that this is why Guts was keeping Casca with him, basically so he could brood. (As did Miura in one interview :/)
Idk I wish it wasn’t so utterly manpain-y, with Guts being so focused on something that didn’t even happen to him, to the detriment of the person it actually did happen to, just so he can stay angry. You’d think his missing arm would be enough of a reminder. But it is what it is, and at least it’s not really portrayed in a positive light I guess.
Yeah I think his heart was in the right place, it seems like he genuinely just wanted what was best for everyone even if his methods were a little… underhanded and dishonest. Like towards the end eg, he probably thought Griffith would be better off with him and his thieves than with Guts and Casca as well as vice versa (and if Guts and Casca stayed together while taking care of Griffith he might’ve even been right, bc lbr that would’ve been a shitshow lol.) He’s likeable, and fun, and he has some great moments, like telling Guts he’s sure he’ll find what he’s looking for with the Hawks. Ngl his death scene always makes me cry lol, I do def like him overall, in part because he makes mistakes too.
Also I wonder if there isn’t a subtle indication from Miura that Judeau and Casca should’ve gotten together instead of Guts and Casca, and it’s its own little sub-tragedy based on stupid self-esteem issues that they didn’t. The way during the Eclipse Judeau does his best to save her and defends her with his own life while Guts is up on the hand still trying to “save” Griffith lol feels kind of starkly telling. I don’t ship them myself, I like their friendship and I kind of wish Judeau hadn’t had a crush the whole time lol, but it fits into the whole missed opportunity vibe of the Golden Age.
It is kind of a shame that the Golden Age side characters got way less backstory and development than the current RPG group, but the current group has so much more time. Like 200+ chapters vs 70. I did love the little enriching hints we got about the Hawks though, like Judeau feeling inadequate as a jack of all trades, the hints that Corkus is bitter about his own lost dreams. I’d say ‘etc’ but actually that’s about it really. Wish we got more on Pippin too.
now i can’t stop looking for hands on shoulders but these are devastating ‘cause griffith is tiny
the fact that griffith is accepting guts’ comforting touch thoooooo
like there’s no special attention drawn to these panels or guts’ hand, but considering the emphasis on touches, particularly shoulder touches, i don’t think it’s an accident
same in the dungeon, with more emphasis:
resisting Guts’ comforting hand on his shoulder – his own vulnerability to his feelings for Guts – because Guts abandoned him, that vulnerability is why he’s been tortured for a year
immediately switching to acceptance when Guts expresses his feelings for Griffith in turn
Griffith lets himself love Guts even with all the vulnerability that brings, until he’s lead to believe it’s one sided and he’s about to be abandoned again
it’s because he’s weak and he couldn’t resist it if he tried
idk he couldn’t strangle guts but that didn’t stop him from placing his hand on his throat.
like the panels you posted aren’t exactly spotlighted as meaningful but if we were meant to see that Griffith was uncomfortable in Guts’ arms we’d probably see it in his expression or in some action. the fact that it’s so casual and matter-of-fact and not a moment of discomfort feels telling to me i guess.
ia that if griffith could resist he might (tho he pointedly didn’t resist the shoulder touch in Tombstone of Flame so idk) but if so then i’d say he’s using his own weakness as a convenient excuse to accept Guts’ comfort.
my overanalytical brain that sees meaning everywhere even when it’s a big stretch: patches of light surrounded by darkness for casca and charlotte’s side of the panel, a la isolation, indicating that they are on the outside looking in while guts and griffith (and judeau but who cares) are against the lit wall.
now i can’t stop looking for hands on shoulders but these are devastating ‘cause griffith is tiny
the fact that griffith is accepting guts’ comforting touch thoooooo
like there’s no special attention drawn to these panels or guts’ hand, but considering the emphasis on touches, particularly shoulder touches, i don’t think it’s an accident
same in the dungeon, with more emphasis:
resisting Guts’ comforting hand on his shoulder – his own vulnerability to his feelings for Guts – because Guts abandoned him, that vulnerability is why he’s been tortured for a year
immediately switching to acceptance when Guts expresses his feelings for Griffith in turn
Griffith lets himself love Guts even with all the vulnerability that brings, until he’s lead to believe it’s one sided and he’s about to be abandoned again
still wondering what’s judeau’s agenda tbh. like did he want guts to take casca away for her to be safe? this is completely true tho and one of the reasons why i dislike judeau is that he’s a gtsca shipper lol
There’s that hint before he dies that he’s in love with her, and there’s an indication that he has like… self-worth issues lol, with his “if I couldn’t be the best I’d fly in the wake of someone who was” reasoning for following Griffith, and comparing himself to Guts negatively when they were running from monsters in the Eclipse. I think it’s basically Judeau thinking he isn’t good enough for Casca and Guts would be, and seeing how hard leading the Hawks while they’re being hunted has been on her and wanting her to get away from that responsibility.
Which tbh is another indication that gtsca was a misguided mistake from the start, since Judeau’s reasoning for arranging their hookup in the first place is stupid and based on low self esteem.
There’s also shades of a parallel between Judeau trying to get Guts and Casca together and Guts trying to get Casca and Griffith together, and I will personally argue forever that Guts throwing Casca at Griffith was because he didn’t feel like he was good enough for Griffith, rather than not good enough for Casca. I mean, that is his entire reasoning behind his decision making at that point in the story, after all.
Thinking he’ll be worthy of Casca when he’s Griffith’s equal is a random quick aside spurred on by Judeau right before he leaves and imo framed as though Casca being in love with him would be a sign that he’s made it as Griffith’s friend and equal, rather than wanting to be Griffith’s friend and equal to get with Casca lol, which has never been a factor.
griffith thinks he’s cruel for letting someone – guts – in and hence dragging him through the dirt with him; guts thinks he’s cruel for /only/ letting guts in… i don’t have a conclusion but hmmmm
that’s a really good observation tbh
my guess is that it highlights how much they see what griffith is doing as dirty? guts like, let’s be honest, doesn’t really at all. griffith asks him to kill a man and he’s like pshh just order me like you always do 😉 hey why don’t you tell the rest of our pals about this?? meanwhile griffith thinks he’s a filthy monster
Yeah it shows how non judgemental Guts is about it, and that he expects everyone else to be similarly non-judgemental. Maybe indicates that Guts thinks Griffith is only keeping them in the dark for… convenience or whatever, and subtly shows that he doesn’t realize it’s because of shame. Griffith explains afterwards, sort of, in his prevaricating way (”they need only feel as though they’re rising up”). Idk but it’s another sign of the gulf of misunderstanding between them for sure.
reflected fire light helping out w/ the metaphor too
i will never be over how damn suggestive it is that judeau, the resident dude who won’t stop throwing guts and casca together and who dictates the entirety of the guts/casca relationship based on whispering in guts’ ear, doesn’t want rickert to tell guts how fucked up griffith was over him.
i’m vaguely musing rn on touch, guts’ early and post-eclipse aversion to it, griffith always initiating, never willingly receptive (except to guts), guts starting the eclipse by touching griffith’s shoulder and then being the one to let go of griffith’s hand the final time they ever physically connect, hands on shoulders and emotional vulnerability and power dynamics, guts growing more comfortable again with his rpg group while neogriffith is “one who is beyond the reach of man,” femto almost pointedly refusing to allow physical contact between them even thru a sword w/ his telekinesis, zodd standing between guts and neogriffith
the only solid conclusion i have so far is that guts needs to physically touch neogriffith at some point
i honestly can’t believe that we’re not supposed to see griffith as both in love with guts and unable to easily come to terms with it because his frame of reference for same-sex attraction was gennon
and vice versa for guts and his formative trauma w/ donovan
it’s just all there, laid out so neatly. like i feel like it’s not a stretch to call it the essential point/theme/plot of the golden age. two dudes love each other and completely fuck it up because they’re traumatized. like yah i’ve written an essay about this b4 but man sometimes it just hits you. like right now.
ugh it just kills me how griffith comforted casca here, even though he must have been sick to his stomach as well
and then later. you know
agh a while ago I was going to post about how the fact that Griffith’s hand on Casca’s shoulder bookends this chapter, except the second time he is very clearly repressing his feelings to seem like a strong perfect person and reassure Casca, sheds a whole lot of light on how he was probably feeling the first time he put his hand on Casca’s shoulder in chapter 17 here.
and then I forgot and this reminded me and now I’m sad again.
also i think guts’s sword fixation has a lot to do with how much he humanizes the sword and dehumanizes himself. iirc miura makes a point about guts using the sword to protect others instead of fighting for its own sake, at which the sword is no longer a meaningful subject in itself but a means of protecting bonds he’s forged. the unhealthy part of it is, again, the way he objectifies himself through it (and one of berserk’s themes is human objectification)
it’s sort of a coping mechanism
backfiring on him. the sword is just an object; the unhealthy aspect of
it is that guts has been using it as a means of self-actualization for
his entire life. part of his development in the golden age is to derive
meaning and significance from his relationships with others, but he
never really addressed his issues so once the eclipse happens and
casca’s mental state is revealed he almost instantly reverts back to
that coping mechansim
Hmmm I think I pretty much agree with you. By objectifies himself through his sword do you mean like, when the Berserk armour takes over, when he becomes monstrous and consumed by rage even without it, etc? Because I definitely think there’s a strong theme of Guts becoming dehumanized through his sword, and the way you put it in contrast to Guts humanizing his sword (like considering it an extension of himself I assume?) is something I’ve never really thought of but it makes a lot of sense to me.
(lol I guess dehumanization is actually kind of a loaded term in Berserk where everything from monsters to gods are expressions of aspects of humanity, but ikwym and it’s definitely a theme regardless of semantics.)
like ok this visual reference doesn’t really bring anything new to the table since we already know that Casca’s heart is full of dark negativity but yk
i still like it
also i’m still on my casca using the behelit bullshit ftr
I JUST SAW UR OTHER POST LOL FUCK!!!! IF THE FALLING AND SHATTERING ISN’T A DIRECT REFERENCE ILL SHIT… holy fuck. i never really got the “gave away too much of the plot too early” reasoning behind the removal of the chapter but like THAT COMPARISON really puts it in new light and makes me genuinely hopeful
I’m so torn between being like lol this would never happen miura is not that good to me and being like, but what if tho
I mean ok I don’t think a fix Griffith quest is likely, that would be a little too impossibly good a thing to happen for Berserk lol. And Casca was traumatized while Griffith was like, literally and willingly transformed by magic and evil so it probably doesn’t work exactly the same way. (Someone should write this fic though omg, anything’s technically possible since it’s all magic anyway.) But exploring Griffith’s mental landscape? mayhaps? and again, tiny Griffith? theoretical potential to fix Griffith giving Guts some devastating Hope™ and ruining his stop obsessing over Griffith resolution?
i’ve always assumed the ‘gave away too much of the plot too early’ thing referred to griffith being essentially the avatar of humanity, but honestly knowing that in advance only improves everything.
ALSO
like ok this visual reference doesn’t really bring anything new to the table since we already know that Casca’s heart is full of dark negativity but yk
i still like it
cut for controversial theorizing and also lost chapter spoilers
I want this to be purposeful for two reasons:
1. what if there’s a tiny griffith living somewhere in neogriffith
2. i fucking hate the visual metaphor of casca being a ~broken doll~ and the only thing that could even come close to salvaging it for me is if it’s a deliberate griffith parallel because at least then it seems less grossly gendered
omg I didn’t even think of this possible connection, nice!
I remember a little while ago I discussed scars and wounds etc with @therainykitty as a somewhat sexual thing with comparing the Casca scene to a few things including “the wound Griffith left, because you want to keep feeling that pain he caused you,” here, but this is another potential application of that, and tbh it makes a lot of sense to me.
Thank you!
friendly reminder to myself: licking wounds
guts and casca were never about healing each other or bettering each other, it’s in the damn chapter title
yk whose relationship is about mutual betterment and support? casca and farnese t b q h
also wrt relationships being generally healthier than other coping mechanisms in berserk, i think i might actually be selling miura short on that bc i think his take is more nuanced. look at serpico and farnese – they had an extremely intense relationship that wasn’t… bad necessarily, but it is absolutely a good thing that they’re both forging other relationships and not just relying on each other for comfort and protection from the world. so it’s not like all relationships are automatically great, and saying one of the major themes of berserk is that relationships are better than swords is still true, but maybe overly simplified
i still think the entire point of griffith and guts’ story though is that they could’ve been perfect for each other but they fucked it up
ALSO! Speaking of swords as ways of shielding your heart and refusing to deal with your issues, and relationships as ways of opening your heart and helping one another heal, and related sword imagery, how about the way Guts and Griffith both lose their swords during their first duel and finish it with bare hands?
Especially compared to the second duel where only their swords collide, and Guts’ stops before it even touches Griffith’s shoulder.
fuck and i wrote that bit about shoulder touching as a sign of Griffith’s emotional weakness bc he’s in love with Guts and didn’t connect it to where Guts’ sword pointedly didn’t land (or… possibly did gently land actually, but either way it’s important that it’s his sword, not his hand).
but there, now i’m connecting it.
ALSO! Speaking of swords as ways of shielding your heart and refusing to deal with your issues, and relationships as ways of opening your heart and helping one another heal, and related sword imagery, how about the way Guts and Griffith both lose their swords during their first duel and finish it with bare hands?
Especially compared to the second duel where only their swords collide, and Guts’ stops before it even touches Griffith’s shoulder.
i was thinking in line of “swinging his sword is an u healthy coping mechanism and way to avoid confronting his true feelings and casca being called one here incites comparison to that, casca weaponizing herself aside”
yeah i think ultimately that’s what it is for the most part. even now, his journey to take casca to elfhelm and get her healed has had ominious forboding overtones and imo guts like… metaphorically chaining the beast up in his subconscious is reminiscent of avoiding his issues thru this side quest, rather than confronting and dealing with them.
like his rpg group is a positive influence and this is undoubtedly better than his black swordsman rampage, but like… he’s still closed off from them, still doesn’t talk about his past or only v dispassionately when questioned by warlocks lol, etc. saving casca (and sleeping with her way back when) isn’t so much helping him deal with his problems as it’s helping him avoid them.
just like telling casca about gambino and donovan was a positive thing and a step in the right direction, but not an instant fix.
and yea swords have always represented male power to a phallic degree even pre freudian analysis framework (broken swords symbolize impotence on the flip side) but the visualzzzz in berserk especially in the golden age is good. like griffs sword breaking and then guts shattering later at the eclipse. or the uh unfortunate realization that guts symbolically “castrating griffith” is both metaphorical and probably literal foreshadowing to what happens to griff a few chapters later.
yeah v v true, and ngl along the same lines i have a few (less than positive) Thoughts on Guts holding a broken sword while Femto rapes Casca.
@griff-guts said: oh mannnnn there’s a lot to say about
the broken sword thing lmao i might write a post about it….. same with
guts and griff symbols being a hawk (or white bird in general lol) and a
dog because there’s a LOT of medieval shit to do with that too…..
anyway for the sword thing a sword being broken basically amounts to an
“oh shit” moment where the person loses all ability to control their
situation, and acts of desperation ensue. it has a lot to do with fate
and human control being
ultimately helpless up against fate.
ohhh man I’d love to read a whole post on this sometime! this all seems extremely in line with Berserk and lol I kind of regret never taking any literature classes more advanced than 101 in uni.
oh i like this take i think its something ive and most readers have been aware of but no ones said it yet. brings another perspective to the “boy and an oversized sword” thing at the end of the gutsca chapter ouch.
ooh good point.
lol for a sec i was like, ‘uh oh wait does that mean miura was actually trying to say that a relationship with casca could replace guts’ emotional reliance on his sword?’ then i remembered the context of their relationship, the fact that casca becoming a sword for other people is a negative way of dealing with her own shit, the way guts emphatically does not start prioritizing casca over swinging his sword as we soon see when he shoos her away to fight wyald by himself, etc, and yeah.
the sword comparison overall feels more in line with saying a relationship casca is a form of emotional support, like swinging his sword, rather than better or more fulfilling than swinging his sword.
i want to like, write a longish meta about how guts’ “dream” ie his attachment to fighting/his sword is a coping mechanism to deal with his traumatic childhood and then every traumatic event since then but like
is that really something that requires an argument behind it
In the fourth and final part of this exploration of the tug of war between Griffith’s dream and his love for Guts, I’m going to look at how Griffith ultimately ends up choosing the dream over Guts despite the fact that Guts is more important to him – or, more accurately, because Guts is more important.
I’m starting by diving right into what is, hands down, my favourite part of Berserk.
The small battles we fought on the cobblestone when we were still young. The small victories we achieved. The many sparkling junk spoils we plundered.
In the evening… staring up from the back alley of brothels and taverns, where the sun never shines, I saw something. Shimmering against the setting sun, it was the brightest thing I had ever seen.
I made up my mind. The junk I would get for myself… would be that thing.
Darkness.
Deep darkness without even a trace of light.
How much time has passed since I was cast into this darkness…?
An eternity… but it also seems like an instant… All my senses are numbed and I can’t feel a thing. What of my body? It’s like it’s floating in mid-air. Have I retained my sanity? Did I go insane long ago?
Only him.
Like lightning on a dark night, he rises up within me, blazing. And again and again like a tidal wave, an infinite number of feelings surge upon me. Malice, friendship, jealousy, futility, regret, tenderness, sorrow, pain, hunger… So many recurring, yearning feelings. That giant swirl of violent emotions in which none are definite but all are implied. That alone is the bond which keeps my consciousness from vanishing amidst the numbness.
I know that I’m different from other people. Those I’ve met can by no means disregard me. They always view me with either a look of good will or animosity. I know that the good will forms into trust or fellowship and the animosity into awe or possibly dread. Thereby have I grasped… the hearts of so many in these hands.
…But why is it when it comes to him I always lose my composure?
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive. Out of so many thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies, why just him…?
How long ago did someone I was supposed to have in hand… instead gain such a strong hold on me?
Because you’re in love with him, oh my god.
At the end of the day, that’s what it boils down to. That’s the difference between Griffith shutting Casca out and letting Guts in. That’s why Casca has been jealous of Guts. Casca wanted to be Griffith’s emotional support, something indispensible to his dream – she wanted to be the one to “change him that way” – and learning that her feelings for Griffith were romantic all along points pretty conclusively imo to envying Guts for being the person Griffith loves, rather than her.
I’m going to be honest here: as much as I’ve been taking it as read that Griffith is in love with Guts (and, tbqh, vice versa) I wasn’t actually planning to make it a central point of this meta. I genuinely thought, going in, that I could focus on Guts as an emotional crutch and shield against his self loathing, as I’ve been doing so far. Yk, Griffith allows himself to become dependant on him because he loves him, but the point is the emotional dependency, not the love, right?
Fuckin wrong.
The climax of Griffith’s narrative can’t be understood without not just acknowledging that Griffith is in love with Guts, but recognizing it as the whole point and his central motivation.
This is going to be important later, but for now I’m stating that up front and I figure this is a good place to do so because, between Casca’s confession to Guts and Griffith’s monologue, it’s basically Miura spelling out the fact that this love is Griffith’s strongest motivating factor.
(And, just as an aside, despite the fact that it’s never explicitly defined, I’m calling it romantic love because a) it is, b) like, it just fucking is lol. I feel like you have to jump through hoops and twist yourself in knots to call it platonic. Without assuming that straightness is the default, saying Griffith is in love with Guts is genuinely the most straightforward, clear and concise way of reading this relationship to me. All my points hold true if you call it platonic love so ultimately you do you, but if I called it that I’d be being disingenuous.)
This monologue is our re-introduction to Griffith after a year of nothing but torture, darkness, and self-reflection. It’s the definitive statement on his relationship to Guts and how it compares to the dream now, after he’s lost both.
And the dream barely rates a mention. The matching visual of the shining/vivid thing, and the way Griffith opens the monologue by describing the dream as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, prime the reader to expect that the one vivid thing is the dream. That after losing Guts, Griffith has returned to obsessing over the dream in deluded desperation, or is maybe lamenting its demise.
But it’s a pure bait and switch because Guts is all-important to him now. Despite Guts’ rejection, despite the loss, despite the fact that he’s partially blaming Guts for having been tortured for a year, next to him the dream grows dull.
A core point of this meta was basically to show how this has been true from the very start. It’s not that Guts only outshines the dream when the dream has been lost to him, it’s that, after losing both the dream and Guts and being forced to confront himself, stripped of all those defenses that help keep him in denial, Griffith is finally able to understand, too late, what has been most important to him all along.
And this remains true. From Guts rescuing him to Griffith choosing to sacrifice him for the dream, Guts is still more important.
But if Griffith’s story up until Guts leaves has been about how his relationship with Guts had begun to replace his dream as the thing he turns to in order to shield himself from his weaknesses – guilt, self-loathing, the weight of lives on his shoulders, etc – then his story when Guts returns follows the opposite trajectory:
it’s about how he returns to his dream as his armour against his feelings for Guts.
And the place we’re starting from is Griffith letting go of his dream.
Back near the beginning Zodd gave Guts a prophecy:
If you can be said to be a true friend of this man… then take heed… When his ambition collapses… death will pay you a visit! A death you can never escape!
Because Zodd is a dramatic asshole. But the thing is, Griffith’s ambition has collapsed. His dream’s dead. The closest he can get to it before literal magic intercedes in his life is in moments of self-delusion, like when he told Charlotte he’d return to her, and when he snapped and chased a hallucination. But in the cold light of day, aware and relatively sane, he knows his dream is gone. Charlotte could still be over the moon for him and it’s not going to help him gain her kingdom without a tongue or working limbs, and he does know it.
And when Griffith watches the castle disappear over the horizon and lets the flowers in his hands go as his symbolic child self runs away from the brightest thing he’d ever seen rather than towards, when Griffith lets go of his dream, he’s… okay.
The Godhand don’t make an appearance. The behelit doesn’t come back and start screaming. Griffith is continuing on. This is acceptance. We’ve already seen the monologue about how the dream barely matters to him in comparison to Guts after all, so this isn’t too surprising either.
And then fucking Wyald shows up.
This fight’s significance to Griffith’s narrative is in his distance from the others, his alienation in being the only one who can’t pick up a sword to fight, and his helplessness as he desperately tries to do something to help Casca and Guts and can’t even manage to tear himself away from his minders, particularly in contrast to the fight against Zodd.
Eg:
Guts compares this fight to the Zodd fight a lot. When he’s briefly knocked out we see a flashback to a discussion with Erica where he talks about Zodd and Erica suspects he wants to fight him again. We see Guts thinking about Zodd as his only other frame of reference for a real live monster. And we see him think about Zodd when it comes to his and Griffith’s partnership specifically.
This emphasizes the difference between that fight and this current fight. Namely:
Whereas when Griffith tried to rescue Guts from Zodd they then squared off and faced him together, when Guts saves Casca he tells her to get lost and insists on taking Wyald one on one, because he’s got a score to settle.
Compared to the fight with Zodd, which led to the most positive and hopeful moment of their relationship – Griffith admitting he had no rational reason to leap into danger and save Guts, and Guts realizing he may have found what he’s been looking for ever since he killed Gambino – this fight with Wyald is a showcase of Griffith’s enforced distance and isolation from everyone, especially Guts.
If Griffith saving Guts from Zodd was the pinnacle of their relationship, the truest and most revealing moment of how Griffith feels, leading to Guts’ subsequent acceptance of those feelings and dedication to him in turn, then Guts pointedly fighting Wyald alone highlights the low point they’ve entered where they’re forcibly separated by Griffith’s broken body and voicelessness. They’ll never be a team again.
The chapter right after the fight is a heartbreaking mix of hope and despair. It begins, very appropriately, with Charlotte telling Anna that Griffith said he’d come back to her. Logically, like I’ve said, Griffith was deluding himself at that point. He accepts that his dream is gone a few hours later when they make it out of the sewer tunnels.
But by bringing it up and explaining that moment here, at the beginning of this chapter, it serves handily as ominous foreshadowing, and, even better, it’s a reminder that Griffith has always clung to his dream as emotional self-defense, and it still “smoulders from the bottom of [his] heart.”
The thing is, the comparison between Wyald and Zodd isn’t solely for the sake of contrast. It’s also a reminder of that pinnacle of their relationship, of
Griffith risking his life and dream for Guts, of Guts feeling like he’d found that indefinable thing he’d been searching for ever since he killed Gambino. It’s a sign of hope that the potential for their relationship isn’t lost. They’ve lost their ability to fight side by side, but their relationship isn’t predicated on just being able to fight together, or Griffith’s leadership, or the structure of the Hawks. It’s based on genuine love and mutual respect, and that isn’t gone.
Despite everything, they can still smile at each other. This scene demonstrates the potential they have just as two people who love each other, and gives readers vain hope for their future as it simultaneously sows the seeds for the destruction of their relationship.
The mask/helmet is a symbol of his former role as the leader of the Hawks, and hence, a symbol of everything that entails: the dream, repression, isolation, the image of perfection, everything I’ve been talking about for way too high a wordcount now. All those defense mechanisms.
Guts saying it’s okay for Griffith to take off the mask since it’s just the two of them is, therefore, an extremely loaded statement. Guts is offering Griffith the opportunity to be vulnerable, to be himself, no image, no mask, no leadership position, just the two of them, as equals, in each other’s company. He’s offering acceptance of Griffith, weakness and vulnerability and physical damage and all.
Instead of accepting, Griffith asks for his armour. It’s a way of reinforcing the barrier between them, and hiding his vulnerability.
The great thing about this chapter is that I don’t have to work to justify any of this because it’s literally called, “Armor to the Heart,” lol. Telling Charlotte he’d return was denial for the sake of guarding his heart against the reality of having lost everything he’d once strived for, and asking for his armour is a more literal version of that. Once Guts puts it on him he starts awkwardly denying reality too – such as telling Griffith he’ll be able to swing a sword soon.
Rather than Griffith being able to accept the truth of what’s happened – that he’s vulnerable, he’s helpless, he can no longer win for the sake of the dead, everything he’s worked for is lost – and maybe find consolation in Guts’ acceptance of him and love for him despite that, he tries to keep hiding behind the old image of perfection, the way he used to. This is basically a futile version of Griffith smiling and telling Casca, “it’s nothing.”
When Wyald returns like a bad penny, he really gets to the heart of what it means for Griffith to manufacture this image of himself to hide his vulnerability behind, and boy is it devastating:
Griffith is a symbol. He has deliberately cultivated that ideal image of himself as the perfect leader, a knight in shining armour. It keeps him distanced and detached from everyone except Guts, who has been allowed to see through it. His allies see him as a symbol of hope and change for the better, his enemies see him as a symbol of corruption in the system and change for the worse, Gennon sees him as a symbol of perfect beauty, Charlotte sees him as a symbol of a perfect relationship, and his Hawks see him as a symbol of their rise to glory.
And, of course, it all leads back to Griffith’s dream. It’s the reason it’s necessary to become this idealized image, rather than a real person. It’s an intrinsic part of his ascent to the throne.
And it’s part of how he convinces himself that he’s all right, “it’s nothing.” It helps him deny his emotions and bury them. If he can convince everyone else he’s perfect, he can convince himself. That mask of perfection is an intrinsic part of his defense against his self-loathing.
This is what he tried to hide behind when he asked Guts to dress him in his armour, and this is what Wyald strips away from him now.
He’s lost nearly every defense he has against his own self-hatred. His dream is dead in the water and he failed to prove that everything he’s done and all the lives lost in his wake were worthwhile sacrifices. He’s not one of the mover shakers of the world, he’s just an ordinary person who wanted to be special and couldn’t stand the weight of guilt on his shoulders.
Now he’s helpless and dependent; not only did he wholly fail the people who follow him, he is now reliant on them, without anything even to offer in exchange. Wyald pretty much takes away his last lingering ability to deny this.
To Griffith, this is as close to hell as you get without dying first. He didn’t keep winning for the sake of the dead, he lost, for good. He failed everyone, dead and alive, and his very existence is worse than worthless, it’s a burden on others (from his point of view).
I’d say that this couldn’t be a more perfectly tailored hell for Griffith if someone designed it that way, but, well, someone did design it that way.
Then the next scene just doubles down.
Honestly there are a shitload of possible readings of this scene, many of them not even mutually exclusive, and I think there are a number of complex factors that feed into it, but I’m landing on one for the purposes of this meta.
Based on what I perceive of Griffith’s own feelings of self-worth and his current headspace, and particularly the way the scene with Wyald right before serves as a literal and metaphorical stripping away of everything that gives Griffith a sense of worth, I think one solid reading is that he’s offering himself to Casca here because it’s the only thing left of himself that potentially has worth to someone.
Like I’ve seen other Berserk fans call this an attempted rape as a matter of course, which couldn’t be further from the truth, and not only because he literally stops when Casca says stop, and is physically incapable of even taking his clothes off. It’s not a sneak preview of the Eclipse rape, it’s a huge, pointed contrast.
This is Griffith at his lowest. He’s broken, desperate, and he feels worthless. He’s not trying to fuck Casca because he wants to, it’s because at one point that’s what she wanted.
He moves on her right after overhearing her tell Guts that she just wants to be held, after she contemplates her shaking hands and remembers how Griffith had once been able to comfort her with just a hand on her shoulder. Contextually the set-up of this scene points to Griffith desperately wanting to be that person who could comfort Casca once again, instead of being the person who needs comfort.
I also think there’s a precedent that sets this scene up with Casca comforting Guts sexually and thinking, “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.” The difference between giving and being given to is a recurrent theme, and I think this scene draws on it.
But he is the one who needs to be comforted. He no longer has the power or the position to be the one offering comfort. Casca refuses his sexual offer, and as he trembles above her, she lays her hand on him, in a role-reversal that just highlights everything of his past self that he’s lost.
If Griffith’s ability to once put on the mask of perfection and comfort Casca even in the midst of his own despair was a demonstration of strength, this is a humiliating demonstration of complete and utter weakness and uselessness. It seems that now he’s nothing to Casca, once his most devoted follower and admirer, except a victim who needs to be taken care of.
Guts’ hand on his shoulder in Tombstone was a sign of his emotional vulnerability to Guts specifically, because of the unique nature of their relationship. It was a symbol of Guts’ hold on him and Griffith’s weakness in loving him. Casca’s hand on Griffith’s back now is a sign of Griffith’s vulnerability in general. His armour’s been stripped off, his dream is gone, everything he once relied on to help him repress his self loathing has been ripped away, and now he can’t offer Casca anything; he can only accept her comforting hand.
Griffith has one thing left: Guts, and the possibility of absolution to be found in his love, if Guts does still love him. If Griffith needed to hear that he wasn’t cruel back in Tombstone of Flame, now he desperately, desperately needs to hear that he’s worth something to someone. That he isn’t just a cruel monster who piled up a mountain of corpses and then couldn’t even climb it all the way, who is now just a useless inconvenience to everyone with the weight of thousands of bodies on his shoulders.
And I believe, despite everything, that Guts would’ve been enough. Narratively, we’re told that he could’ve been enough. Griffith’s torture chamber monologue, Griffith letting his dream go, the way “I’ll st-” is placed on a panel of Griffith sleeping through it, conveying a sense of missed opportunity perfectly:
And the way Guts realized he fucked up by leaving only seconds after Griffith has overheard them.
Note that this line is a conclusive call-back to Guts musing on this statement a few pages earlier, making it clear that it refers to his regret over leaving, and how by leaving he threw away the thing he wished for in the first place:
If there wasn’t at least the possibility for Griffith to find some kind of happiness in a life with Guts at his side despite losing everything else, none of this would matter. Guts finally making the right choice by deciding to stay just as Griffith thinks he’s going to leave again would be dramatically pointless.
And this is a tragedy, so despite all these hope spots, this happens:
And Griffith just fucking breaks.
What do you fear in this place? asks the version of Griffith who still has a dream, and then he points to another place, a place where Griffith could leave his fears behind.
Like this is literally right after he overhears Casca telling Guts to leave. This was the part I struggled with until I just went with my gut, backed up, and realized that this isn’t actually about Griffith’s self-loathing, or his fears of being worthless or a burden. It’s not about being stripped of his coping mechanisms.
This is about being in love with Guts. This is about the visceral fear of Guts leaving him again, not because of how it might reflect on Griffith as a person with or without worth, but because he loves Guts so much he can’t bear the thought of a life without him.
Griffith’s dream is a coping mechanism. This page conveys that concept as clearly as anything. “What do you fear in this place?” Run away from it, towards your dream, your kingdom, the safe place you’ve fantasized about all your life, the place where you have the power to make things better.
He desperately chases his hallucinatory vision of his dream, and then he has a vision of a potential future:
And, true to form, the defining aspect of this short, three-page sequence isn’t the loss of Griffith’s dream or his helplessness and dependency. It’s not about his self-loathing or being unable to hide his weakness behind armour and a mask of perfection. It’s Guts’ absence. The point is that Griffith is here, with Casca, and Guts is elsewhere.
“With you and the boy… just the three of us.” Like their kid is even named after Guts, just to highlight the actual Guts’ absence as emphatically, and depressingly, as possible. The first image is Griffith surrounded by Miura’s patented black panel of symbolic isolation, Casca brings up Guts and wonders where he is, then reiterates that it’s “just” the three of them. In a total of three pages containing almost no other information what we’re given is Griffith with Casca and a nightmare kid named after the man he loves, Guts gone, and Griffith’s total mental and emotional detachment from the world.
And then he wakes up and immediately tries to kill himself.
What does Griffith fear in this place?
The first time Guts left him he ran to Charlotte, the means of achieving his dream, for comfort, denial, escape from reality, and self-destruction.
This time he tries to turn to his dream again, but it’s nothing more than a hallucination that segues into a nightmare in which Guts has left him behind, and with no dream to escape to, no armour or mask bury his heart under, no coping mechanisms left, he loses himself. “This peace and quiet isn’t so bad,” he thinks, barely even aware, his life stretching out ahead of him, without Guts.
That is, after all, the one difference between now and the torture chamber. He’d lost his dream, his tongue, the use of his limbs, his self-worth, ability to hide behind an image, and Guts then, too, and the Godhand never showed. But Griffith thought he would eventually die in the torture chamber – even if the King specified that he live through a year, that’s a lot less than a lifetime. Now he’s faced with a full life in this state, apart from Guts.
And I want to make this distinction clear. The prospect of losing Guts is what sends him into suicidal despair. It’s not the loss of his dream or the stripping away of the persona he hid under – in other words, it’s not the loss of the coping mechanisms he used to rely on that drives him to despair. Losing those is likely what makes suicide, and then sacrifice, seem like the only possible escape from his despair, hence the set-up with Wyald and Casca hammering home the fact that he’s lost all his ways of guarding his heart, but it’s not the source of that despair. The source is Guts.
Guts was replacing the dream as Griffith’s defense against self loathing. But that does not make Guts just one more coping mechanism to lose. He’s not the final straw that broke the camel’s back, he’s the whole bundle of hay.
The premise of the first three parts of this meta was that his relationship with Guts helps Griffith deal with the immense weight of everything he’s done on the path to his dream, and had the potential to fully replace achieving the dream as Griffith’s way of not hating himself.
Well the premise of this part is that the reason Guts could’ve replaced the dream is because Griffith is in love with Guts, incredibly, all-consumingly in love with him, and now that is what he needs help coping with. There’s no getting around this lol, and no way of downplaying it either.
We know this because of how his nightmarish vision of a life with Casca highlights Guts’ absence instead of, eg, his self loathing, or his lack of an image to hide behind, or his guilt, or being a burden to Casca (hell, in his imagination she’s explicitly content.) We know it because it’s the words, “even if it’s alone, you have to go,” that make Griffith snap. We know it because the entire narrative of the Golden Age has largely been devoted to establishing that Griffith feels unprecedented, incredibly powerful feelings for Guts, and this is the payoff.
We know it because Berserk thoroughly foreshadowed the Eclipse during the Black Swordsman arc, and it was absolutely not subtle about about love as a motivation:
I’ve written a post fully explaining this already so I’m not going to be that thorough here, but suffice to say, through images like Femto there on “so that you could bury your fragile human heart,” through Puck’s direct questions and statements, through the entire point of this scene being to hint at Guts’ backstory, etc, it’s made very clear that the Count and Griffith/Femto are parallels.
And we know it because of what drives Griffith past that final point of despair that opens the behelit.
Sorry for posting practically the whole scene, but damn, don’t you just want to bask in it?
After everything – the loss of his dream, the torture, the loss of his voice and working limbs, the loss of his image, of his escape, of his denial, of his pride, and the loss of Guts – what finally plunges him into the kind of despair that creates a demonic demigod is the touch of Guts’ hand. Specifically his hand on Griffith’s shoulder.
What does Griffith fear in this place? What drives Griffith into despair?
Love.
It’s the understanding how utterly fucking gone he is for Guts. That hand on his shoulder signifies Griffith’s vulnerability to Guts because of his feelings, and it’s that touch that finally opens the behelit.
To split hairs, what drives him to despair is not believing that Guts will leave him, it’s knowing that if Guts leaves him, the loss will destroy him.
After all, it already happened once.
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive.
And Griffith’s vision of the future shows us a version of what he believes will happen: if the first time Guts left his body was destroyed, the second time the rest of him will follow. We saw him existing in a seemingly permanent state of semi-dissociation, maybe living entirely in daydreams (”daydreaming again…”), barely aware of the present.
Love is the source of Griffith’s despair – the overwhelming, horrifying, life-destroying vulnerability of love.
So Griffith turns back to his first defense mechanism to escape it.
Now, I don’t want to downplay the role Griffith’s guilt plays in the sacrifice. I didn’t write three posts about Griffith’s issues only to completely ignore them at the climax of his arc just because love happens to take centre stage.
So let’s briefly recap.
Griffith is filled with guilt and self-loathing; his dream was a way of repressing those feelings with the belief that one day his very existence, and everything he’s done during that existence, would be justified. One day Guts came along and instead of continuing to live in repression and emotional denial he fell in love and started opening up. This made him vulnerable and “weak,” so when Guts seemingly rejected him because of everything Griffith hates about himself, his dream was no longer enough for him to retreat to. So he crashed and burned. Now he’s stripped of all his defenses and the horror of that vulnerability to love has sent him into pure despair.
And now some cenobite looking assholes have joined the party and they’re telling Griffith ex-fucking-zactly what he’s spent most of his life desperately hoping to one day hear, in some form or another:
And despite being plunged into crimson-behelit-opening despair by his love for Guts, despite already being told everything he wants and needs to know – that he’s been chosen by God, all is not lost, he has another chance, and to take it what he has to do is sacrifice the Band – he still irrationally, desperately prioritizes Guts when his life is in danger yet again:
This is such a tragic moment, because this is the last time Griffith chooses Guts over the dream. And, once again because he loves Griffith, Guts is the one who lets go of his hand, falling away from Griffith into darkness like a lost beacon.
So, separated from Guts, the Godhand bring Griffith up to the palm of the hand and then they proceed to play him like a fiddle, knowing exactly which buttons to push, in their exploration of his self-loathing and guilt.
Like, they’re not lying to Griffith, technically. What Ubik and Conrad are doing is playing to Griffith’s shame and guilt. They are showing Griffith his own image of himself:
Griffith sees himself as a stupid kid scaling a mountain of corpses to get to a castle. He’s consumed by guilt, which is why he can’t stop – because if he does, if he apologizes, if he repents, everything will come to an end, and that mountain of people will have died for nothing.
We already know this, of course.
The Godhand show Griffith his own perception of himself, and tell him that it’s completely accurate.
So of course, of course we have to revist the moment Griffith asked someone if they see him the same way he does, in the hopes of getting a different answer:
With Guts, Griffith could’ve taken a different route. He could’ve learned not to see himself as a monster. In showing Guts the worst of himself and being accepted, he could’ve accepted his own self-worth, independent of achieving a dream.
I mean, let’s be real here: Griffith has no real reason to feel as guilty as he does, or as driven for the sake of the dead as he does. He’s right when he says that the Hawks chose to follow him. The only people whose deaths he forced were enemies trying to kill him, give or take a pedophile who wanted to capture him as a sex slave rather than kill him, and a kid whose death was an accident and not on his orders, even if it did work out great for him. He’s a military leader, but so is Guts, so is Casca, hell so is Rickert technically, and none of them feel any guilt about the people they kill in battle, or the men they send to their deaths.
It’s heavily suggested that Griffith wants a kingdom in order to create a place of equality, where people’s lives and bodies aren’t bought and sold. (”What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth even a single piece of silver.”) When he eventually does get a kingdom that’s exactly what it is, and it exists to grant the deep desire of humanity as a collective – in other words, the people who fought and died for it considered it worth fighting and risking their lives for. It’s not just Griffith who wants this kingdom, according to the narrative, it’s humanity – certainly the non-elite majority of humanity.
Griffith thinking of himself as a monster, and the Godhand calling him one, is Griffith’s own personal self-loathing bullshit talking, not an objective moral judgement, or Miura’s moral judgement.
Like, Miura deliberately shows us that the Godhand are fucking with him, telling us that chapter 77′s magical mystery tour through “the reality within his conscious realm” is highly manipulative and far from objective:
If Guts – any close, intimate, revealing, and genuine relationship really, but Griffith’s with Guts is the one this is about – was Griffith’s potential to see himself differently, to judge himself less harshly through the eyes of another, then the Godhand is a reinforcement of Griffith’s self-loathing.
Guts could’ve told Griffith he wasn’t cruel, wasn’t a monster, that he genuinely loved and admired him even while knowing all those things Griffith is ashamed of, and left so he could be more like him and become a friend to him. But he didn’t, and now the Godhand are using his words to tell Griffith that he is cruel, he is a monster – and that it’s necessary to be.
(And, just to be clear, this isn’t a judgement of Guts. He has his own giant pile of issues contributing to this world-destroying misunderstanding, and I feel like I fully understand his reasons for every mistake he made, and I love him for them lol, just like I love Griffith for his contribution of issues to this enormous fuck up. But this is about Griffith’s side of things, not Guts’.)
So, if Guts could’ve been a healthier way for Griffith to be absolved of guilt by altering his perspective of himself, the Godhand absolves Griffith of guilt through the method I described way back in part one of this thing:
by giving him a divine seal of approval.
If it be reason that destiny transcend human intellect and make playthings of children… it is cause and effect that a child bear his evil and confront destiny.
This is your destiny, kid. You’re not responsible for anything, you have no reason to feel guilty. You’re a horrible monstrous person piling up corpses to reach a castle, but hey, it’s okay – that’s your predetermined role in life. So you’re absolved, just as long as you roll with fate, add some more bodies to the pile, and double-down on that whole monster thing.
This is everything Griffith has always wanted.
Turns out he’s special after all. Everything he’s done that he hates himself for is justified because in the end he was meant for greatness. All those dead people can still achieve the thing they died for, all the dirty things he’s done were worthwhile, even his torture and despair was part of the wheel of fate and has meaning. All he has to do to sign off is agree to sacrifice a group of people who already pledged their lives to him, who he led and fought beside in full knowledge that they might one day die on his orders, for the sake of his dream, anyway.
And also Guts.
I don’t think I need more evidence that Guts is special and stands alone among the rest of the sacrifices, but I do want to point out that right before the Eclipse Miura emphasizes that Guts is no longer a part of the Hawks.
Guts fights his own battles. Unlike the rest of the Hawks, he has very deliberately removed himself from Griffith’s dream so he can be Griffith’s friend and equal instead of his underling. Back with Casca he said he wants to, “draw the line… keep things separate.” And, “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll never entrust my sword to another again. I’ll never hang from someone else’s dream.”
This distinction between Guts and the rest of the Hawks is significant because he is not being sacrificed for the same reason as the rest of the Hawks. He’s not being sacrificed as an underling, as one more necessary evil on the path to his dream. Once again, Guts stands apart to Griffith.
I tend to think of the sequence from Griffith reaching the palm of the hand to “I sacrifice,” our very last scene with original, fully human Griffith, as a mirror to our very first scene with Griffith in structure.
That first scene was much shorter, but similarly 90% of it revolved around Griffith’s dream and the philosophy of fate and vindication behind it, building up to the moment that he said, “it’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.”
90% of this sequence revolves around Griffith’s dream, his guilt issues, his self-loathing, and Void validating it all and vinidcating him, telling him he’s one of those keys that shape the world after all. And it all builds up to this:
Among thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies… you’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.
Griffith has a lot of very good reasons to say yes to the sacrifice. I sure hope somewhere in this fuckload of words about those reasons I’ve managed to show that it makes perfect logical sense for him to take the Godhand up on their offer.
And yet, the final, climactic reason given – the moment all this logic builds to, is emotional. You made me forget my dream.
Ultimately Griffith has two reasons for making the sacrifice:
1. achieve his dream, pile up some more bodies, reach the castle, let fate absolve him of guilt.
2. fuck you, Guts.
Griffith overhearing Casca telling Guts to leave, Guts’ hand on Griffith’s shoulder sending him into despair, the Count parallel, the sheer amount of Griffith’s narrative that revolves around his life-destroying, irrational feelings for Guts, the final conclusive statement from human Griffith… I feel like, given everything, it’s impossible to deny this aspect of Griffith’s motivation.
Again, the dream is an escape. In making the sacrifice, Griffith is falling back on all of his defense mechanisms to escape the pain in his heart, the pain of love.
“You’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream,” is a tender, tragic statement of love, and it’s also an accusation. How dare you be necessary to me, how dare you be able to destroy me just by leaving, how dare you make me love you.
It’s because of that love that Griffith lost everything, because he needed Guts, Guts made him weak, and Guts abandoned him. It’s because of that love, because he thought Guts was leaving again, that Griffith felt the worst despair of his life and tried to kill himself.
GOD he’s so in love. And that’s what he’s he’s trying to carve out of himself and escape from, by making the sacrifice. His fragile human heart.
It’s another form of self-destruction. The way he “destroyed himself,” by throwing himself at his dream when Guts left the first time mirrors the way he’s destroying himself now, with the exact same motivation behind it.
He becomes the monster he’s always believed himself to be. His armour and the mask – the one he wore in the torture chamber, the one mockingly modeled after his White Hawk persona – become an exoskeleton. Femto embodies Griffith’s self-loathing. Every part of himself Griffith hated, every reason he thought he was cruel, every assassination he was ashamed of, every body paving the way to his dream, is what Femto is made of, and his shame, his self-hatred, his love, his guilt, his despair, have all been shattered and torn away.
And if Femto is Griffith’s self-loathing, then NeoGriffith is the image of perfection.
In making the sacrifice and burying his heart, Griffith became the embodiment of everything he hated in himself, and everything those who never truly knew him admired about him. The cruelty, the monstrosity, the ruthlessness, the filth; the beauty, the immaculate perfection, the charisma, the sense of singularity.
He destroyed himself and became the false conception of Griffith.
Give or take.
Welp, that does it. I’m not going to really get into anything Femto or NeoGriffith has done or said, because this is about human Griffith’s character and narrative. Griffith’s final act as a whole person was choosing to sacrifice Guts for his dream, and lbr you couldn’t ask for a more narratively satisfying send off, so that’s where I’m ending this. And tbh if I went any further it’d lean way more towards critique than analysis anyway.
Ultimately the Golden Age is Griffith’s story. Guts may be the protagonist, but it’s Griffith’s feelings, actions, and choices that drive the plot. Griffith kickstarts the narrative and he ends it. And Griffith’s story is about falling in love. It’s about how love can strengthen you and help you overcome the worst of yourself, and it’s about how love can make you weak, vulnerable, and desperate for an escape. And, because it’s a tragedy, it’s about how and why Griffith chooses escape and succumbs to the worst of himself rather than overcoming his flaws through a mutually supportive relationship with Guts.
tyfyt
ty everyone who’s commented or said things in tags, liked these posts, etc, i really appreciate it and it’s v heartwarming to know people enjoyed reading this ❤
i don’t think there’s room for this in my griffith meta bc it doesn’t particularly pertain to the point, but i need to point something out:
Griffith notices this, and may even hear what Casca says since she’s shouting, and we get one of his patented jealous looks in reaction.
And the next thing we see him do right after this?
Futilely try to do anything to save Casca when Wyald immediately picks her up. Because his jealousy is a minor component of his entire being, and his love for his friends is by far a more powerful motivating factor.
Like shit like this is why I can’t deal with people who think Femto is just Griffith with power lol. He’s Griffith with the jealousy (among other negative emotions) magnified to an extreme degree and the compassion and love and empathy etc etc removed. Like that is explicitly stated but yk, these details help too.
To Griffith, the dream is emotional security. It’s assurance that if he’s dirty, then it’s because it’s necessary to be so, so he can keep winning for the sake of the dead. It’s a way for him to repress his guilt and self loathing, because when he gets that kingdom-shaped seal of approval, it will have been worth it.
So when I say that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is beginning to replace the dream, that’s what I mean – rather than relying on the dream to reassure himself that everything he’s done, even his very existence, is worthwhile, he could rely on Guts for that. He starts opening up to Guts, rather than repressing through his dream.
Despite Griffith’s Promrose Hall speech, nothing actually changes on his end. He prioritizes Guts above the dream again when he sends a search party after him and Casca despite the nobles he’s trying to suck up to telling him he shouldn’t. He drops everything during the Battle of Doldrey to have a quiet panic attack when Guts’ sword breaks. His first reaction upon achieving a huge milestone on the path to his dream when the Band is officially integrated into the royal army is to find Guts and share the moment with him.
And boy I love how the chapter that depicts Griffith’s moment of triumph for his dream ends with Griffith just smiling at Guts across a vast ballroom.
The story between Promrose and the end of the war is filled with little moments that are suggestive of Griffith’s reliance on Guts. Another of my favourites:
I just hope he stays calm and composed.
Casca worried that volunteering to defeat an army of thirty thousand with five thousand men might be an act of recklessness because a predatory pedophile who took advantage of Griffith’s extreme self loathing when he was like fourteen is the leader of that army? Naaaaaah impossible, Griffith would never let that faze him. Oh and speaking of Griffith being calm and composed, this is my last battle, it’s almost time to leave.
But those moments are just for spice. Tombstone of Flame is where the real meat of this analysis is.
This is the second night of assassinations, and it’s a neat mirror to the first. Where Guts came away from Julius’ assassination consumed with inadequacy, self-loathing, and generally feeling like a monster, now it’s Griffith who comes away totally fucked up and filled to the brim with self hatred.
Between Promrose and Tombstone we learn Griffith’s backstory. This adds to the mirror image effect between these assassinations by revealing Griffith’s insecurities to us so we can understand his perspective, and it serves as its own parallel to this scene.
And this is the scene where we see that not only does Guts surpass the dream in importance to Griffith, but he could have potentially become a much more emotionally healthy alternative to it. This is where we see how Griffith could have not just prioritized Guts, but replaced the function of the dream with his relationship with Guts.
And I want to emphasize the emotionally healthier part. One of Berserk’s most consistent themes imo is that relationships with others are a superior way of dealing with your issues compared to dreams and swords.
eg, Godo, our favourite dispenser of wisdom, has some pretty telling lines to that effect.
You
were right beside those irreplacable things… yet you couldn’t bear to
immerse yourself together in sorrow with them. So instead… you ran
away so that your own malice could burn inside you.
Guts’ personal growth post-Eclipse is associated with making friends; his backsliding and mistakes are associated with going off on his own to fight monsters; he begins to overcome his revulsion to touch when he becomes part of the Hawks;
on the rooftop after the Zodd conversation Guts recalled the night he killed Gambino and wondered if this was the answer he’d been searching for since then (family) before dedicating his sword to Griffith; part of his healing process for his childhood trauma is talking about it to Casca; etc. And Guts and Griffith’s relationship is very much included, even though it’s far more of a tragic missed opportunity.
The second half of Tombstone of Flame Part 2, aka my favourite chapter of Berserk, abruptly shifts tone from triumph and pure badassery to quiet, contemplative vulnerability halfway through. As a chapter I feel like it really encompasses the highs and lows of Griffith’s character, from defeating his enemies and cooly predicting Foss’ actions to wrap everything up in a neat little bow, to highlighting his guilt, self-loathing, and emotional dependency on Guts.
Here, Griffith opens up to Guts in an intensely vulnerable moment.
I involved you in this filthy scheme… and I didn’t even get my hands dirty. I left all the dangerous, taxing work to you…
Idiot! What kinda question’s that for the guy who killed a hundred men?
This is another scene the significance of which cannot be overstated. There’s so much to unpack here I hardly know where to start. Like… this is the moment. This is what Griffith flashes back to when he’s fucking Charlotte and burning his life down around him. This is a moment Guts remembers when slowly realizing that Griffith loves him. This is exactly what the Godhand shows Griffith to get him to agree to make the sacrifice. Guts remembers this after Griffith makes the sacrifice. This moment is the linchpin of Berserk.
This is both a mirror to Guts overhearing the Promrose Hall speech, and a call-back to Griffith in the river after Gennon.
So first, the set-up of this chapter recalls Promrose Hall strongly. It’s the second night of assassinations, Promrose Hall took place on the first night. When Guts assassinated Julius he came away from that encounter wracked with guilt over accidentally killing Adonis as well, strongly and traumatically reminded of his childhood, and basically thinking of himself as a monster in a way inseparable from his own childhood trauma:
Guts is consumed with self-loathing, comparing himself to monsters like Zodd overtly, and like Donovan symbolically. He’s also reminded of killing Gambino, like, basically this event just brings a pile of old issues crashing down on Guts’ head.
In a concussed daze he wants nothing but to find Griffith, presumably for reassurance. I don’t want to get too heavily into Guts’ side of things here, but remember that this is shortly after he dedicated himself to Griffith when Griffith told him he risked his life for him for no reason. I think it’s safe to say that he wants that reassurance again, he wants to feel the same sense of being valued and respected that he got during that staircase conversation.
And instead he overhears Griffith telling Charlotte that he has no friends. More to the point, what he gets is Griffith’s dream blocking the emotional bridge that Guts is trying to cross like a damn troll.
In Tombstone, Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and this time it’s Griffith who turns to Guts for emotional reassurance in a moment of vulnerability.
The way killing Adonis reminds Guts of his many, many issues is echoed in the strong parallel between Tombstone and Griffith in the river. We don’t get to see what’s going through Griffith’s head the way we see into Guts’, but we can infer an awful lot based on this comparison.
In the river, Griffith asked someone for reassurance after doing something he considers shameful for the sake of his dream.
Casca’s response isn’t all that reassuring.
She cuts herself off in the process of automatically reassuring him and instead she asks why he was with Gennon. This is totally understandable and not at all something I blame Casca for lol. She’s a kid, she’s understandably disgusted at the thought of Griffith having sex with Gennon willingly knowing that he’s a pedophile, and she’s out of her depth in a highly charged, difficult discussion. But that doesn’t change the fact that Griffith probably took her answer as a “yes.”
Griffith then goes into his self-harming dream spiel, as he reiterates to himself exactly why it was worth it to dirty himself for his dream while tearing open his arms. What may have been his first attempt to open up to someone else in a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability was shut down, inadvertently, so he violently returns to his original justification and defense measure, his dream.
The saddest thing about Tombstone, to me, is that this time Guts brings up the dream for him.
Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?
Guts’ answer is a depressing double-whammy of both implicitly agreeing that Griffith is cruel, and reminding him that the cruelty is necessary to achieve his goals. This second time we see Griffith try to open up to someone is also shut down, inadvertently, and the fact that Guts is the one to bring up his dream this time rather than Griffith tells us that the dream wasn’t even on his mind. Guts’ answer comes as a very painful reminder.
Like, imo this is huge. In the first part of this meta I tried to show how wholly reliant Griffith is on his dream. It’s what he clings to as his shield against his intense self-loathing and guilt. It’s a way for him to tell himself that everything awful and dirty that he’s done was worth it, and that one day he’ll be able to prove that.
Well this moment shows Griffith forgetting all that in the face of Guts’ potential acceptance, until Guts reminds him and his self loathing comes crashing down on him all at once.
If his dream was what he turned to for validation from fate or some higher power, then now Guts is who he turns to for validation. He needs Guts’ reassurance that he isn’t cruel. He needs Guts to see his “dirty side” and continue to remain by his side – that is all the validation he needs now. Not fate, not a kingdom, just love.
The same way the only thing Guts needed in order to feel like he was where he belonged wasn’t his own dream, but the knowledge that Griffith loved him, the knowledge that he had after their staircase conversation about Zodd, and which dissolved after Promrose.
But instead Guts, with Griffith’s dream on his mind getting in between them again, says the wrong thing and Griffith looks the exact same way he looked when he felt like he was responsible for a kid’s death.
So, to sum up, Griffith feels self-loathing, tries to open up to other people to assuage his sense of self-loathing in the hope that, having seen him at his worst, they don’t see him as filthy/cruel the way he sees himself, and each time his self loathing is only reinforced. The first time he clings to his dream in lieu of Casca’s reassurance, while the second time Guts is the one who brings up his dream, in so many words pushing Griffith away and telling him to cling to the dream instead of him.
Each time the dream serves as a replacement for real human connection and love.
The first time Griffith was able to close himself off, place a hand on her shoulder, and tell Casca, “it’s nothing,” when he realized how emotionally vulnerable he was in that moment. But when it comes to Guts, he’s much too far gone to separate himself and play the perfect leader.
Now, as opposed to putting the mask of perfection on and saying, “it’s nothing,” with Guts he says:
Unlike Promrose Hall, Guts putting the dream in between him and Griffith and thwarting Griffith’s efforts to open up to him and take comfort in his potential reassurance doesn’t immediately ruin their relationship. I’d say that Griffith is very accustomed to seeing himself as a monster by now, so while Guts’ implicit confirmation of that fact is incredibly fucking depressing considering what could have been, it’s nothing Griffith didn’t expect to hear.
Guts remains the man allowed to see behind the mask and into the real him.
And then there’s this contrast:
This is depicted as a cute moment, but it’s also indicative of how utterly weak and emotionally vulnerable Griffith is now that he’s let Guts in. With Casca he was still able to step back and remove himself, put the mask back on, and be the one to comfort her despite clearly needing it more.
Now Guts is the one to put his hand on Griffith’s shoulder. It’s not depicted as a hugely significant and character revealing action the way this moment in the river is, but it’s a perfect illustration of what Griffith finally realizes after it’s too late:
And it’s exactly the moment Miura uses to show us how emotionally vulnerable Griffith has become to Guts. Griffith couldn’t separate himself when he tried, and now he doesn’t try, he just accepts Guts’ assessment that his cruelty is necessary with a sad smile, and intends to continue on with Guts at his side.
Finally, there’s seemingly one thing missing from this comparison between Griffith in the river and Griffith in Tombstone of Flame: the self harm.
But, well, it’s not actually missing, we just don’t get to see it until a month later:
And the reason we’re not shown Griffith’s self-harm scratches*** until this scene is because it’s actually another big contrast between Griffith’s reaction to Casca and his reaction to Guts.
Presumably, based on the other parallels I drew between Tombstone and Casca’s flashback, and based on the placement of these panels – Griffith’s memory of Guts reminding him about his dream and questioning Griffith’s resolve followed immediately by our first glimpse of those scratch marks on Griffith’s shoulder – Griffith self-harmed at some point closely following the assassinations.
One can imagine it following exactly the same pattern we saw with Casca: Griffith asks someone if they think he’s X thing he hates about himself, doesn’t hear a no, and then some time following he reinforces his resolve, tells himself that it’s ok, it’s necessary for him to do these dirty, cruel things for the sake of achieving his all-important dream, for the sake of the people who have given their lives for it, for the sake of making their sacrifices meaningful, etc, while self-harming. Just like he did in the river.
The contrast comes now, after Guts has left.
Griffith could probably convince himself after Tombstone that the things he does for the sake of his dream are necessary and important and it’s worth becoming a monster to achieve his goal. “You believe that, don’t you?” Guts had to remind him, but Griffith agrees. “You’re right.”
But after Guts leaves him?
When Guts leaves, Griffith takes it as a rejection. Those little moments that by themselves never ruined their relationship or amounted to more than mild rebuffs have probably turned into wholesale condemnations in Griffith’s mind. Guts saying, “just order me to do it,” goes from a mild reminder that they don’t have an equal relationship to, “I won’t dirty myself voluntarily, but I’ll do it if you order me to because that’s my job.” Guts saying, “ain’t this part of the path to your dream?” turns into, “your dream is paved with cruelty and I’m sick of being dragged through the dirt with you.”
Griffith winning Guts’ loyalty in a fight turns into Guts being forced to associate with him, and leaving as soon as he’s accomplished what he thinks Griffith wanted him for, thereby fulfilling his end of the bargain.
The moment Griffith is remembering here is our first glimpse of them together. “It’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” It’s a memory of Griffith choosing to open up to someone and share his innermost thoughts for the very first time. And he’s convincing himself that Guts was disgusted by him from the very first glimpse he got of the Griffith underneath the perfect image, and wanted to escape him since the beginning.
Ironically, we know exactly how Guts felt in this moment: “At that time he shone before me as something beautiful, noble, and larger than life.” It makes the choice of this particular memory all the more painful.
The other thing this particular memory signifies is Griffith’s driving motivation behind his dream. This is the scene where he tells Guts all about his belief in fate and his desire to know what he’s destined for – it’s our first indication of what Griffith’s dream means to him. It’s a contrast: Griffith then, just beginning to open up to Guts and explaining the pragmatic philosophy behind his dream, and Griffith now, falling to pieces because he believes Guts is rejecting him.
In other words, Griffith then, reliant on his dream, vs Griffith now, reliant on Guts.
The very fact that Griffith is the one challenging him, refusing to let Guts go without a fight demonstrates how far the dream is from Griffith’s mind. Remember how important it is for the Hawks to choose to follow him? How even when Guts first joined, the duel and the stakes were chosen entirely by Guts and Griffith just went along with it? Now that’s not even a factor. The feelings of guilt lying just below Griffith’s surface don’t matter at all in the face of Guts leaving. Griffith is now so far beyond distancing himself from Guts with reminders that he may die for his dream that he’s willing to risk killing him directly, in an irrational attempt to negate Guts’ rejection.
“I guess it’s because they themselves chose to fight,” is a careful rationalization, and Griffith is no longer anywhere close to capable of rationalization in this moment. This is what happens when the emotions he buries and spends his life denying burst to the surface. Despite being more emotionally open with him than he’s ever been with anyone before, he’s never put a label on his feelings for Guts and never even identified them to himself. He asks Guts, “do I need a reason each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake?” he tells Guts, “it’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this,” he tells Guts, “you’re rough enough to share this with. To the end,” he tells Guts, “you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this,” but he never tells Guts that he cares for him, prioritizes him, trusts him, loves him, and I don’t think he’s ever told himself either.
Having ignored and rationalized away his emotions for most of his life, now he’s finally run out of logic and rationalizations. He has no experience dealing with feelings like this because he lives in denial of them; I genuinely don’t think he himself understands what he’s feeling or why as Guts announces that he’s leaving, so he ends up lashing out through an established framework that he does understand, that Guts himself once suggested as a way to win his loyalty, that, might I point out, Judeau, Corkus, and Pippin all think is reasonable, and Guts is reassured by lol.
Griffith won Guts in a fight, so Griffith will keep Guts through another fight, because he can’t bear the thought of Guts rejecting him.
Which brings me back to the scratch marks on his shoulder.
He remembers the moment Guts implicitly agreed that Griffith is cruel and called his resolve into question. “You believe that, don’t you?”
A month earlier his answer was yes. He scratched himself and told himself that everything was necessary for the sake of his dream.
Here’s his answer now:
No.
He doesn’t scratch himself – he traces the marks, trying to remind himself that yes, it’s worth becoming a monster for the sake of his dream, even if it drove Guts away… but it isn’t. Now instead of self-harming he curls up and cries. No blood this time, just tears.
Griffith scratching himself is tied to affirming his dream and repressing his feelings of self-loathing, and the pointed absence of scratching here tells us that he can no longer affirm his dream or repress his self-loathing. It’s not worth dirtying himself for, it’s not worth the deaths on his head, it’s not worth becoming a monster, because that, he believes, is why Guts left, and nothing was worth losing Guts, not even his dream.
This whole sequence with Charlotte*** is Griffith’s attempt to fall back on his dream after losing Guts. Charlotte represents his dream perfectly – Judeau even reminds the audience of that fact in the chapter preceding the second duel (chapter 34). The key to his dream is Charlotte, and Griffith showing up at her window is an irrational attempt to attain his dream now, no matter how premature it is, because he is in dire need of the emotional reassurance his dream provides him.
Guts is gone, seemingly having rejected him, and Griffith retreats to his dream the way it’s always been a defense against his self-loathing and a way of repressing his emotions.
Take all the frightening and sad things… and cast them into the fire.
But again, it doesn’t work this time – it’s not enough to cope with the loss of Guts.
I think there is also a strong component of self-destruction here. Griffith knows how risky sleeping with Charlotte is, she even points it out while he’s standing in a tree outside her window. The King alludes to Griffith “destroying himself,” as well, and everyone and their horse except Corkus, stubbornly, connects Griffith’s meltdown after Guts left to the way he and the Hawks are declared traitors the next morning. It may not be a planned suicide, but it’s an act of self-immolation just the same, and something Griffith did knowing the risks full-well.
It’s no surprise when he lands himself in a dungeon.
Oh this chapter. This chapter this chapter this chapter. I’ll admit, it’s been giving me some trouble, not because it doesn’t fit with my point, but because it fits too well lol. I debated for a long time whether I’d try really delving into it or whether I’d omit some stuff and just like, ignore the fact that I genuinely believe this is the meaning behind it.
But lbr I’m taking the first option, as hard as it’s been to find a way to talk about this shit that doesn’t like… give entirely the wrong impression, because it’s basically the capstone to this part of Griffith’s character arc, and therefore this part of this meta, and it encapsulates everything about Griffith’s self-loathing perfectly.
Everything he calls the King out on is something he hates about himself.
You’ve lived on by resigning yourself to the monster [war] you envision. But you’ve by no means tried to harness that monster.
The second part is fairly obvious. The King was born to the throne and didn’t even bother to use his power for anything worthwhile. Griffith wasn’t born into that power but he spent his life trying to attain it, and just as he was about to succeed he threw it away, ultimately accomplishing nothing. “This is… worthless.”
The first part, the mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, was the part that tripped me up for a while, because frankly, it’s such a parallel to Griffith’s feelings for Guts, to the point where when I tried to write this section while ignoring it it felt like a really glaring omission, but oh man, let’s be real here, it’s unpleasant as fuck.
I’m choosing to give Miura the benefit of the doubt because while I don’t think he’s above comparing gay pining to incestuous rape, I do think, as I’ve said, that this scene is about Griffith’s self loathing, and Griffith considering his own feelings to be just as pathetic and grotesque as the King’s lust for his daughter makes a depressing kind of sense to me.
First I want to explain why this parallel is so clear to me because I’d hate to look like I’m making this up. First of all, once we’re agreed that the King bemoaning the weight of lives on his shoulders and assuming Griffith has no idea what that’s like, and getting a very knowing look from Griffith in response, is as clear a parallel as you get, I feel like it’s impossible to ignore how neatly obsessive love for someone fits in as well.
Griffith’s feelings for Guts have been defined by giving himself in exchange for him, risking his life and his dream/kingdom for him, as Casca points out at every possible opportunity. And now he finally has given up a kingdom for him – or at least, because of him.***
We know why Griffith is in that dungeon. Griffith knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness”) Casca knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“Because you left us! Because you abandoned Griffith!”) Rickert, a little kid, knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“What I think is… it must’ve been over you, Guts.”) Eventually even Guts gets a clue. (“Was I the one who brought all thisupon you?”)
Like, just to reiterate the main point of this meta, Griffith’s narrative so far is about becoming emotionally reliant on Guts as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders, instead of the dream which had been his defense until Guts. This scene is about the King’s emotional reliance on Charlotte as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders instead of using the “sword called the throne” to defend himself against that weight by doing something worthwhile with it – something to justify what the King’s subjects have been dying for.
And it’s no coincidence that the throne is described as a sword.
In Berserk, swords are coping mechanisms. Griffith is mocking the King for his emotional dependence on someone else to shield his heart rather than using his “sword” for that purpose, which is, of course, exactly what led to Griffith ending up in a dungeon.
The King goes on this diatribe:
I would give myself… even this kingdom in exchange for her! She’s my whole life!
What value is there in this world? Wars rage on and the people’s lives are lost like they were insects! After how many decades of war and how many tens of thousands of corpses, we’ve finally built a time of remembered peace, but it’s only for an instant! On the underside, the monster named war is always seeking new blood, starting to brew itself anew! In the face of that monster, the will of one land’s king is powerless! The wisdom of one man is folly! And yet I cannot cease being king! There’s no way I can stop! In this… blood stained, meaningless world… if there is one single ray of hope to be found… it is… warmth. Only warmth covers and protects me from this world.
You’ve taken that one flower that gives me that warmth… and plucked it! Unforgiveable!
Alas, my poor Charlotte. I’ve brought her up for seventeen years. She knowing no impurity… now that she’s given herself up to the sport of a commoner… I’d rather that… rather that…
Directly from the King lamenting that monster called war and the lives lost to it, to declaring Charlotte his one defense against the world. His one means of protection from the weight of “the lives of all the people, all on [his] shoulders.”
Again, Guts was becoming Griffith’s defense against his feelings of guilt. A large portion of Griffith’s story revolves around how his relationship with Guts is in part a coping mechanism, a defense against self-loathing.
And not in a negative way – remember, compared to dreams and swords as coping mechanisms, finding emotional support in a connection with someone else is by far the superior option, according to Berserk as a whole.
Griffith’s expression of his feelings for Guts wasn’t altogether healthy, because Griffith is not altogether emotionally healthy lol. He’s an extremely repressed guilt-ridden obsessive dude who self harms and thinks achieving an arbitrary goal will justify his existence, and who fell in love, had no way to understand those feelings, and became very emotionally dependent without even noticing.
Hence freaking the fuck out, challenging Guts to a duel and thinking as he strikes that he’d rather kill him than let Guts reject him. But despite that, overall, we’re shown that Griffith’s feelings for and relationship with Guts could’ve helped him grow as a person, had their relationship been given a chance to flourish without misunderstandings getting in the way.
I’m pointing all this out because I’m trying very hard to avoid coming across like I’m saying that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is at all equivalent to the King’s relationship to his daughter.
Griffith and Guts’ relationship falls apart because of a failure to communicate and because neither realize that their feelings are mutual. Griffith believes that Guts is rejecting him when he leaves, but we the readers know that in reality Guts is leaving entirely because he loves Griffith and wants to be worthy of his friendship.
I believe that the parallel here between Griffith and Guts and the King and Charlotte is so utterly loathsome because it reflects how Griffith feels about himself, not because it’s anything close to an objective parallel or a commentary on relying on relationships with other people as a means of emotional support.
The King is nothing more than a lonely, miserable man who can’t find any reason to live beyond the one person he loves, while Griffith threw his life away over Guts’ perceived rejection, and he knows it. As much as he represses, he can’t deny this – when he curls up and weeps beside Charlotte, that’s Griffith failing to deny his feelings for Guts, and he later describes him as the reason he’s been thrown into the darkness of the torture chamber, and the sole sustenance keeping him alive. Griffith is realizing that somewhere down the line his life had switched from revolving around the dream to revolving around Guts, and he thinks it’s pathetic.
The distinction Griffith makes between the King wanting Charlotte to have him rather than having Charlotte is relevant too. I used to take this line as little more than Miura feeling like he needed to justify why the King eventually flees instead of continuing his sexual assault attempt – ie because Charlotte’s rejection was too much to bear – but it works within the framework of Griffith’s feelings for Guts very well, particularly in light of the second duel.
I mean
And again like, ngl I hate to do this lol, like I said I’m not thrilled by this parallel, but fuck, it works perfectly and I do think it’s deliberate:
The King attacking Charlotte is a parallel to Griffith challenging Guts to the second duel. In a way. Again, not an objective way, not in a way that’s truly comparable – hell, we get Guts’ inner monologue and he’s literally comforted by Griffith’s challenge while Judeau and co think it’s perfectly reasonable as former mercenaries – but within Griffith’s self-loathing mindset where he sees himself as a rejected monster, he sees himself in the King and his fucked up attraction to Charlotte. The King’s subsequent attack and “rejection” by Charlotte mirrors Griffith’s perception of attacking Guts and then being left, rejected, in the snow.
Griffith makes the distinction between having and wanting to be had because everything about his own breakdown revolves around Guts’ perceived rejection of him. Griffith thinks Guts sees him as a monster, and, through their duel, from Griffith’s perspective, Griffith was trying to keep Guts with him despite that rejection, against Guts’ will. In hindsight, removed from the heightened emotions of the moment, he believes his actions to be as pathetic as the King’s lust for Charlotte. He tried to “have” Guts against his will, when what he wanted was to be “had” by him – wanted by him, loved by him, accepted by him. He wanted Guts to want to stay with him, not to be forced to stay.
And of course, the supreme irony is that Guts did love Griffith, and that’s exactly why Guts was leaving. He wanted Griffith to want him, he just didn’t recognize Griffith’s irrational actions as a show of desperate need until it was too late. This is directly stated in the text several times, so I’m not going to try to justify this statement through a big tangent about Guts’ decision to leave. Here’s one of the most self-explanatory moments where Miura tells us what happened from Guts’ perspective:
So, again, the King attacking Charlotte is not an actual objective parallel; it’s a parallel when filtered through Griffith’s false framing of what happened between him and Guts as a vicious rejection, which makes sense because Griffith is the one bringing it all up and condemning both the King and himself.
At the end of the day I don’t particularly care whether “If I can’t have him, I don’t care,” is taken as a super dark moment or barely a drop in the pond when it comes to dark things people do in Berserk. Judge Griffith harshly for it or go ‘meh people try to kill each other in Berserk all the time, he wasn’t even trying so much as accepting the possibility,’ I just want to draw a clear distinction between that and a father trying to rape his daughter, which I think is fair.
And now the King’s final condescending judgement.
“Such a worthless matter.” We know what that worthless matter is. The King thinks it was lust for Charlotte that landed him there, but we (and half the cast of Berserk, vocally) know that it was his feelings for Guts.
And on the very next page we transition to the King’s assault of Charlotte. The King is doing some projecting himself here – he mocks Griffith for destroying himself over lust for Charlotte (Guts) which is what the King immediately proceeds to do. This attempted rape decimates him as a person; the next time we see him he looks like he’s aged thirty years, and he’s growing senile – just as Griffith is tortured to irreversible physical damage after Guts’ rejection.
After Charlotte wakes up and screams a horrified no, we return to Griffith for the last page of the chapter:
Charlotte’s assault is perfectly bookended by Griffith in the dungeon, and the repetition of “worthless,” a word used three times in this chapter.
The first time it refers overtly to the King not utilizing his power to justify his existence and assuage the guilt on his shoulders, instead comforting himself with Charlotte, with the implication that this is how Griffith feels having thrown away his dream over Guts.
The second time the King uses it to refer to the matter that Griffith destroyed himself over, ie stupid, impulsive actions based on feelings for another person. The King thinks it’s Charlotte, but we know it’s Guts.
The third time is how Griffith feels about himself, a final conclusive statement after his mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, the King’s accidental mockery of his feelings for Guts, and Charlotte’s assault. The way this chapter is structured essentially tells us that the attempted rape scene applies in some way to Griffith’s final declaration of his own worthlessness, and hopefully I’ve made a convincing case for how it’s an illustration of his self-loathing regarding his feelings for Guts.
Griffith, thrown into the darkness of the dungeon, may as well have been plunged into his own self-loathing. “Worthless.”
SO! What’s left? The torturer rips off Griffith’s behelit a short while later, nicely symbolic of the lost dream. A year passes. Guts returns. And Casca neatly condenses this enormous meta into the four sentences I stole for titles and writes the conclusion to this section for me:
Griffith had to make himself strong – remember, that refers to the way he represses his emotions and projects his image of perfection, the way he smiled at Casca and put his hand on her shoulder after violently self harming.
Guts made Griffith weak because Griffith was starting to open up to him rather than repressing those emotions and relying solely on his dream to defend against everything that haunts him. Do I need a reason? It’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this. Do you think that I’m cruel?
After being rejected by Guts and believing that Guts sees him as a monster, the promise of his dream was no longer enough for him to rely on, and he crashed and burned in an implosion of self-loathing and feelings of worthlessness.
Griffith’s no good without Guts anymore because his feelings for Guts made him weak. He came to rely on Guts to sustain his heart, because people need other people, and Guts was the person Griffith needed.
Wish Casca could’ve written this whole thing for me, it would’ve been a lot shorter and neater lbr.
That’s the end of Part Three. The next and final part is going to explore how Guts growing more vital to Griffith than the dream leads, contrary to expectations, to Griffith sacrificing Guts for his dream.
*** There is a common misconception that this is one big, thick scar rather than scratch marks, probably thanks to the anime depicting it as such, but frankly, the anime got it wrong. There is zero reason for Griffith to have a scar there, and it would have no significance – Guts’ sword didn’t touch him, and if it had he’d have either a bruise or a gaping wound lol, not a scar. They are two parallel lines that you can see Griffith trace with two fingers right as he starts crying, and since we already know Griffith has a tendency to scratch himself, this leaves no doubt to me that they are two scratch marks, not one big mark of unknown origin.
*** I think the scene with Charlotte is deeply flawed, and I’m treating it as consensual sex in this analysis because I believe that’s what Miura intended it to be read as, despite shitty, misogynist, tropey writing. More on that here, if you’d like a further explanation.
*** I remember an old conversation I had with I think @yesgabsstuff and @mastermistressofdesire where one of you suggested that Griffith burning his life down by fucking Charlotte could be interpreted as a childish act of bargaining, at least subconsciously. Griffith trying to trade his dream for Guts. And I’m js, that rang true to me and this comparison made me remember it.
you're the only one 