mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
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today i was thinking a lot about farnese’s isolation and emotional distance from ppl all her life
like even serpico didn’t tell her she’s his half sister and she had to ask if he hates her and agh there’s still a big unbridged emotional gap there
and her journey through casca’s mind, seeing her life through her eyes and feeling her feelings, must’ve been so huge for her because of that
like farnesca is right there. casca is now the person farnese knows best and is most emotionally intimate with and with whom she has shared the most
also super interesting potential for development and growth, both painful/fucked up and happy and good, in that it’s one-sided. farnese has seen casca’s whole life through her eyes and heart, but casca has to learn about farnese the old fashioned way
There are two important parallels during the waterfall scene, when Guts and Casca fight, then fuck.
The first is this parallel to Guts and Griffith’s second duel.
Casca is the new leader of the Hawks, replacing Griffith’s role. She
challenges and fights Guts when he returns, in a mirror of Griffith
challenging and fighting him before he leaves. Then she falls to her
knees and has a self-destructive
breakdown. The last time the leader of the Hawks had a breakdown after
fighting him, Guts walked away. The scenario has presented itself again,
and this time Guts makes a different choice, one that might have
changed everything a year ago: he comforts her.
Sex with Casca is Guts subconsciously (from a character perspective) or symbolically (from a narrative perspective) trying to fix past mistakes, imo.
Throughout the fight by the waterfall, Casca is screaming at him that he broke Griffith by leaving, that it’s his fault. This scene is all about Griffith and their feelings towards him. For Guts, it’s the beginning of his eventual revelation that leaving was a mistake because Griffith didn’t look down on him after all – because Griffith’s “no good without” him.
The fact that Guts lets Casca stab him as she screams this tells us that her words hit home and he feels guilty, even as he denies it. It’s a pattern of behaviour for Guts that we’ve seen before and will see again, eg, when he let the zombie child stab him in the second chapter because he blamed himself for her death, and then denied feeling responsible to Puck afterwards (”If you’re always worried about crushing the ants beneath you… you won’t be able to walk.”)
He represses that guilt and doesn’t manage to acknowledge his mistake until about five minutes before the Eclipse, unfortunately, but this is how we know he feels it regardless, and this is how we know it’s informing his choices now – specifically, his choice to comfort, kiss, and have sex with Casca.
Guts’ denial of guilt while clearly feeling it is reminiscent of another character too:
This is the second parallel, to Casca finding Griffith in the river.
Casca eventually yanks her sword out of Guts, admits to him that she’s romantically in love with Griffith, proceeds to list all the ways Griffith is wholly unavailable (he needs to marry Charlotte, Guts took the place she wanted at Griffith’s side, and now he may not even be alive), bequeaths Griffith to Guts, and tries to kill herself. Griffith Griffith Griffith – the lead-in to sex revolves around him. Guts thinking about how he abandoned him in the snow, Casca thinking about how Griffith doesn’t need her, and Guts beginning to realize that Griffith needed him.
So Guts saves her from her suicide attempt, then comforts her through sex.
And Casca does the same in return:
She couldn’t comfort Griffith, she couldn’t be Griffith’s “woman,” she couldn’t be be something indispensable to Griffith’s dream, but she can comfort Guts, she can have sex with Guts, she can help Guts achieve his dream.
The situations requiring her comfort are even v similar – Guts has just had a flashback to his rape, and Griffith was calling himself “unclean” after selling himself to a pedophilic rapist. Griffith buries his feelings and refuses to be comforted, but Guts pours his heart out to Casca and lets her hold him.
My point is that Guts and Casca having sex is not about the other for either of them – it’s about their respective relationships to Griffith. Guts is presented with a similar scenario to the morning he left the Hawks, and after being told by Casca that he fucked up then and broke Griffith, he chooses a different course of action this time, and comforts and has sex with Casca. Casca is presented with a similar scenario to finding Griffith in the river after Gennon, but instead of being shut out she’s able to comfort the man in emotional turmoil this time.
tl;dr they’re both on the rebound from Griffith here, giving to each other what they didn’t or couldn’t give to him, and there are deliberate visual and situational parallels to illustrate this.
This is what I have thought for years. Casca and Guts whole “relationship” came about because they are in love with the same man. Griffith. Every time they are together conversation turns towards Griffith and lets face it they were both most likely thinking of Griffith during the sex.
Btw I want to say thank you for this post.
In a fandom as vitriol as most of Berserk’s western “fans” are they don’t allow for any kind of insight or discussion like this. But when I read things like this post it reminds me that I wasn’t just fucking seeing things because I swear certain types of people had me believing I was crazy.(I guess that is what those people wanted me to think).
It is posts like yours that make me want to get right back into everything that I love about Berserk.
Edit: Oh yeah I just remembered the all these talk about scars
and how the beast say that Guts basically only holding on to Casca because she is the scar Griffith give him.
Kind of like all the scars Guts indirectly gave Griffith due to his time in torture.
A nice reminder of how Guts subconscious won’t let him forget and how he really doesn’t want to let go of Griffith.
Also Guts looks fucking board after he and Casca had sex
Not to mention he out right lies here
Because
and with Griffith
There is no shoving away or telling him to not to touch him (like with Casca).
So Guts is really forgetful about whose touch it is he didn’t mind or unless you know he is projecting on to Casca that he is talking/being with someone else, a particular someone else.
Oh man I know what you mean. I’ve written so much about my interpretation of Berserk by now and sometimes the rest of the fandom still makes me wonder if I’m just seeing things or making things up. That’s one reason it’s important to find like-minded people imo, especially in a fandom that can be as hostile as this one.
Luckily I’ve managed to find a good place on tumblr where I don’t really have to deal with the majority of the fandom that hates griffith and griffguts lol.
And ty for the addition! That point about the scars and the Beast of Darkness referring to Casca as the wound Griffith left him, like damn I never thought of that but holy shit it’s perfect and fits into that scar discussion between Guts and Casca like a puzzle piece.
And lol yeah, I’m not sure whether that’s Guts fudging the details or Miura conveniently forgetting that moment with Griffith, but either way Guts’ statement that Casca was the only one who could touch him is demonstratably false.
Well, as you noted in a previous post and as Puck would say “it’s more complex” which is why is so damn interesting.
totally! I mean the hill of swords reunion shortly after is such a powerful and painful mix of rage and longing and regret and loneliness etc for guts. moments like the one anon pointed out are gr8 preludes to that.
like this is one of my favourite exchanges:
like fucking, imagine being guts, obsessed with getting griffith’s attention since he was like 15, still obsessed after everything, and hearing that now. and right before griffith declares he feels nothing and “deserts” him.
his feelings are so complex and interesting to me.
You clash head-on with your own destiny. Compared to my cooled demeanor, that is a life similar to being scorched by hellfire itself.
i want to say something about serpico and how he and guts make a good compare/contrast as basically opposite reactions to an abusive childhood, but i don’t really know what to say so i’m just going to throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks
serpico’s coping mechanism is emotional repression and calm acceptance, where he just takes absolutely everything thrown at him by his mother’s expectations and childhood bullies at first (learning quickly that fighting back led to worse) and then farnese, while guts fights back and struggles, killing donovan, defending himself against gambino’s attack, etc. i mean one was a mercenary and one was a servant, one was taught by his father figure to fight and the other was taught by his mother to bear everything, so yk it makes sense.
both killed a parent: serpico killed his mother bc he was pressured to by circumstances and did so when farnese told him to (imo farnese making it an order and holding the torch with him is what made him capable of doing it), basically just numbly doing what he’s directed to do, while guts killed his father in reactive self defense, and both are pretty messed up about it.
serpico lay down to die bc it was easier and was found by farnese who nursed him back to health; guts lay down to die bc it was easier and then got back up and fought wolves.
it feels easy to compare gambino and serpico’s mother in that both guts and serpico were their caregivers for a while. and i want to compare serpico’s mother telling him he’s noble vs gambino telling guts he’s cursed but i’m not sure where to go with that. both statements kinda fucked them up tho.
they both have tendencies to fight in a self-destructive way now that i think of it: guts throws himself into the fray and just tries to kill before he gets killed, serpico otoh lets himself be wounded in order to fight to a draw + avoid making trouble.
guts and serpico both found themselves nursed back to health and then kept by haughty insecure blond ppl, and both relationships were extremely intense and exclusive. only yk guts and griff were in love and farnese and serpico are gay bffs/siblings, and neither farnese nor serpico have epically fucked their relationship up yet.
in conclusion: i have no conclusion, idk. turns out everyone responds differently to abuse and berserk is largely about that? surprise surprise guts is active and serpico is passive? guts and serpico might have more stuff to talk about if they ever got 3am drunk together than you’d think?
lol sorry anon this got kind of long and meandering, hopefully it answers your questions though.
I guess I think that Guts isn’t really fully self-aware about the fact that he’s still trying to be Griffith’s equal. It’s not like a real goal for him the way it was when he left the Hawks, it’s just that he can’t help but crave Griffith’s attention. He needs Griffith to see and acknowledge him as someone who matters to him.
It’s why Femto’s dismissal back in the Black Swordsman arc was what spurred him to finally stand and walk up to him despite like a million broken bones, it’s why he refused to heed much sounder advice like stay and take care of the Hawks that are left, and insisted on his attention-getting revenge campaign instead, and it’s why NeoGriffith ditching him makes him do this:
Because becoming Griffith’s “equal” was only a means to an end in the first place – what Guts really wanted was to be Griffith’s friend, or, put in Guts’ own terms:
He wants to be Griffith’s number one priority. At the most genuine point of their relationship, when Griffith admitted he had no rational reason for risking his life for Guts, Guts like basically found personal fulfillment. That scene on the rooftop where Guts contemplates it and decides that this means his home (at least for now bc Guts sucks at committment) is with the Hawks, is probably the happiest moment of Guts’ life.
And when Griffith became an evil demon this core desire of Guts’ didn’t go away, I guess, Guts just started expressing it through attention-getting monster killing and wanting to personally murder Femto, to force him to look at him and value him, if not as a loved one then as an enemy.
Also, to address that last bit, I think it’s very telling that Guts doesn’t hate Griffith. It wasn’t sacrificing all his friends that made Guts’ love turn to rage and hate, it was Femto spitefully raping Casca, which is something Guts knows his Griffith wouldn’t’ve done. While Femto was born out of the darkness of Griffith, something Guts probably at least has some understanding of, he’s not the same as Griffith. He tells that to Rickert too on the Hill of Swords “That’s not the Griffith you know anymore.”
And I think a huge part of the reason he doesn’t hate or blame Griffith for making the sacrifice is because he blames himself for breaking Griffith’s heart and ruining his life.
Like Guts’ narrative from coming back after a year to this moment revolves around his slow realization that leaving was a huge fucking mistake lol. And he finally figured it out right before the Eclipse, so when he thinks of Griffith afterwards he’s associated with guilt and sadness and regret and love, rather than bitterness or hate or resentment.
Like I guess Guts’ feelings are kind of contradictory but in a way that makes sense to me. The situation is complicated af and while Guts is consumed by hate, that doesn’t conveniently erase his love. Separating Femto from Griffith is probably part of how he reconciles that, which is also why when NeoGriffith shows up looking like the old Griffith it was particularly confusing and painful for Guts to handle, and why he “forgot” he wanted to kill him lol.
And both Guts’ hate and his love lead to wanting Femto/Griffith’s attention, it just changes how he goes about trying to accomplish that.
You should have known. This is the man I am. You, of all people.
“you, of all people” is a really powerful translation imo but the literal translation would be “just you” which i think ………….. is noteworthy
yesss like this line absolutely refers back to the fact that griffith let guts (and only guts) in to see the darker sides of his rise to the throne, and specifically tombstone of flame, and guts telling him his cruelty is a part of the path to his dream, and what griffith believed guts’ reason for leaving was etc, and it’s nice when learning more about the literal dialogue only solidifies my interpretation
anyway everything from dreams to ascending to godhood are smokescreens
love is the true equalizer between them
and that’s why despite the fact that the odds of guts becoming femto/neogriffith’s literal equal as in ascending to another plane of existence and being as powerful as him are approximately -10000, i still have hope that the whole equals thing is gonna come full circle in a satisfying way
this being in reference to whether griffith sent an assassin after rickert is extra interesting.
rickert: griffith wouldn’t have me assassinated… but griffith isn’t even human anymore… and even back when he was he did some shady shit… and he sacrificed the rest of the band… but still…
just the fact that that the narrative is reminding us thru rickert’s musing that griffith did indeed care about the band a whole lot when the subject is neogriffith and his feelings towards rickert now is good shit
like clearly rickert here is erring on the side of ‘yeah he probably did send raksas after me’ so there’s no reason for him to maintain that little bit of doubt at the end unless it’s relevant. and it’s not relevant to rickert’s decision making or actions soooo
idk this is just a long way of saying ambiguity is only worthwhile if the truth is (at least somewhat) unexpected.
why the portrait of neogriff at the end of chapter 250, after all the discussion of loneliness, is one of my faves:
miura’s visual depiction of isolation, loneliness, and alienation is consistent af and if this doesn’t lead somewhere i’ll eat my hat
i feel like the double standard stems partially from the fact that guts “feels bad” about what he did to casca
but griffith would fucking feel bad too if he had the ability to feel anything lol. he is literally the king of feeling bad about fucked up shit he’s done, please
griffith:
berserk fans: i am shocked, shocked and absolutely appalled that neogriffith said he has no regrets
griffith:
those same berserk fans: griffith has clearly been an evil unfeeling sociopathic monster from the beginning
ok so i went looking for those pages and when the beast of darkness bites casca’s neck while telling him to r*pe her to get closer to griffith
it says something which the official translation team translated as “you desire this”
but the old fan translation says:
it’d be interesting to see if the original japanese wording here is the same as the “what you wish for may not be what she wishes for” or w/e line
ooooh ngl it would be a p interesting twist if ‘your wishes may not be her wishes’ is ominious not necessarily because casca’s wishes are going to fuck shit up but because skull knight is referring to the fact that guts still wishes to be griffith’s friend/equal, and it’s guts who’s going to cut and run or go beast of darkness or w/e
like i’d still vastly prefer for casca to do something epic but i wouldn’t say no to guts leaving casca behind again and going griffith hunting. like honestly anything that separates guts and casca and gives them different or even clashing goals/motivations/narratives/etc is all right in my book
actually speaking of griffith/rosine parallels one thing i’m real worried about is that falconia is going to end up being another land of the elves style thing compared to guts’ jill.
not in the sense that children are murdering each other or even that there’s a dark underbelly at all, just in that falconia will be portrayed as a childish immature fantastical escape from the horrors of the world compared to the more ‘mature’ concept of just dealing with your life being terrible instead of actively trying to escape or change things, a la rosine’s escape from abuse to her fake fantasy vs jill being portrayed as more admirable for going back home and just… taking the abuse?
i hated the end of the lost children arc, is what i’m saying, but it seems like very apt set up for falconia, which worries me. i don’t want guts and griffith to be jill and rosine 2.0
well that’s a lie i absolutely do, but yk, just with the gay vibes, not with those particular themes.
these two pages are the most strongly visually conveyed theory -> rebuttal i’ve ever seen
like i’m sorry i can worry all i want over ominous fetus-y portents and casca’s narrative, and i am, but i just can’t believe the same guy who wrote this scene is going to skimp on the emotional resolution to guts and griffith’s relationship
he went to see guts to test if anything would shake his heart! and then failed that test! while watching a fight extremely reminiscent of his very first sight of guts! this is just so good
all plot, no substance. any heart bthumpy emotions NeoGriff is feeling are actually the fetus’ feelings. it’s his weakness™ and if Guts and Casca defeat NeoGriff they’ll be able to magically separate it out and fuse it with its soul, the Moonlight Boy, achieving a Happily Ever After™ as a Picturesque Family™
Or possibly if they defeat NeoGriffith they free their child’s soul to go to swirly soul heaven, and the ending is bittersweet™
Miura retcons Femto letting Guts go, and all the hints that NeoGriffith feels things that are entirely unrelated to whatever tf the fetus might care about are red herrings/misdirection.
In a flash forward we find out that Rickert and Erika are happily married in a terrible Guts/Casca parallel.
ummm what else… NeoGriff is defeated through a power-up/Elfland magic after a volume long physical battle.
Guts bones Casca and thus conquers his obsession with Griffith and is finally able to move on™ but NeoGriff attacks Elfhelm, forcing the final battle.
possibly the other godhand are there too, what with fusing the physical and spiritual worlds and miura hinting that void’s gonna be important yadda yadda yadda. it turns into Good Spirit Elemental Guardians against Evil Godhand in the most boring fight ever while Guts and NeoGriff fight.
Oooh Casca experiences some strong negative emotions upon regaining her sanity, but the Moonlight Boy appears to her and her maternal feelings™ soothe her.
Guts kills NGriff, rides off into the sunset with casca.
oh also there’s undertones of falconia being a naive fantasy while guts’ ‘just struggle your way through everything instead of finding/creating a safe happy paradise’ philosophy is touted as more mature and better
ok that’s enough dwelling on the negative
BEST CASE ENDING
the fetus is affecting Griffith only insomuch as being fused with its physical flesh makes his heart start beating because he’s corporeal and thus subject to those worldy emotions he’d thought he’d left behind.
The shot of it at the end of this chapter shows that Casca is kind of obsessed with it, and therefore when she wakes up with all her sanity and memories she demonstrates that her wishes were not Guts’ wishes and falls into despair and sacrifices that little fucker. I mean, half the apostle sacrifices we’ve seen have been parent/child, it’s possible right?
this destroys Moonlight Boy, aka the essence of the fetus, and whatever hope the audience had for a happily ever after family with Guts Casca and child. it’s meant to be seen as a tragic low point. I cackle gleefully.
I wouldn’t actually enjoy this but i think it would make sense: along with that low point Miura hints that NeoGriff’s feelings are gone thanks to Casca’s sacrifice – oh no, his one weakness! now he’s unstoppable! etc – but psych later on it turns out the feelings were his own all along.
casca, now an apostle, leaves to get revenge on neogriff. guts goes after her to either help or stop her, he’s not sure which. also if casca steals guts’ armour, i will die of happiness, but that + being an apostle might be overkill.
we get casca’s point of view, and it’s quite similar to black swordsman guts and full of parallels. guts has now achieved some character development which is why he’s torn between helping casca get revenge vs trying to just save her because she’s no match for neogriff (vs deep down wanting to save neogriff and/or stick his own sword in him because his feelings are still all fucked up. undertones of guts and casca’s old griffith-related romantic rivalry but dark)
thematically, Elfhelm is soured – the whole magical therapy for Casca thing turned out to be a terrible idea, the people there are unwilling to help clean up their mess because they’re isolationist dicks, AND maybe there are hints that the four spirit guardians schierke calls on for protection are other forms of the godhand?
however it happens, ultimately the thematic takeaway is that rather than there being a good vs evil thing going on in the spirit world, good and evil are two sides of the same coin and what you perceive really depends on what you’re calling on the spirit world for, and most things are both at once. yk, aren’t gods and devils the same thing?
i’m skipping over plot stuff and more theme stuff because i’m willing to accept a lot of possibilities and i really don’t care much.
the important thing is that guts and griffith have a final emotional confrontation after the dust of the big action climax settles, and it comes in the form of a 3rd duel.
also at some point in the lead-up to it, they figure their shit out. possibly this involves schierke’s or sonia’s or both’s magical mind exploration magic. we see griffith’s unemotional facade starting to crack. we see guts’ ambivalence towards griffith – does he want to kill him or plead with him or fuck him or reject him entirely?
and guts realizes that griffith’s heart is beating again for him, and everything he wanted – griffith’s respect admiration and love is still there, residing in his worst enemy. and griffith realizes that guts admired and loved him and never once saw human him as the monster he saw himself and allowed himself to become.
tragically idk how you could depict both without looking really silly, but either guts’ residual guilt for his part in the lead up to the eclipse gets the better of him and he lets a still-repressed griffith kill him, the way he always lets himself get stabbed when he feels bad about something, OR neogriffith’s irrational love gets the better of him and he lets guts kill him – guts ends up sticking him in the throat in a mirror of how he killed gambino.
either way there’s a lot of crying and cradling a corpse.
tbh i’m leaning towards griffith killing guts for that devilman ending, and this way casca gets to play the role of angry god by swooping in and killing him. if that’s the case griffith lets her because his irrational emotions have finally truly burst free and taken hold over him after he kills guts. his crying is a call-back to his ‘last tear shed.’
(maybe casca becomes zodd 2.0, living for battle and becoming a sword just for herself. kind of a darkly fucked-up “happy” ending for her lol.)
BEST CASE ENDING WITH NO FUCKS GIVEN FOR PLAUSIBILITY
all of the above but after finally understanding each other they make out instead of dueling and then casca kills neogriff and an adult theresia kills guts, and they both ride off into the sunset with their respective girlfriends, farnese and jill.
please look at guts facial expressions as he fights then thinks of griffith waugh
lmao can i just say i love that in the black swordsman arc miura was obviously thinking: well guts is pissed off about being sacrificed and stuck fighting ghosts and causing ppl’s deaths just by hanging out with them. that’s a reasonable reason to want revenge
and by the end of the golden age he was like ‘lol that’s not even close to enough to make guts hate griffith. all his friends dying horribly? nope. griffith offering him up for sacrifice and making his life an unmitigated hell? nope. better go above and beyond in the worst way possible for this one.
and guts still doesn’t hate griffith lmao. he hates femto and wants revenge but every time he thinks about human griffith he still just feels regret and sadness lol.
there’s a lot in this scene and tbh it’s one of the things in the story I have trouble with– why does griffith do this? is he grasping like he was with charlotte when guts left? that’s my best interpretation, but there is A Lot here, including some pretty grim foreshadowing.
i can think of like so many possible explanations for this depending on what u want to be emphasized, it’s frustrating lol
eg
griffith seeing sex as transactional + emphasizing his vulnerability/fear of being tossed aside = trying to get casca to stay with him by offering her something he knows she wanted at one time
emphasizing griffith’s desperation and irrationality = trying to return to the status quo by returning casca’s attention to him
griffith overhearing casca saying to guts ‘i just wanted someone to be near me’ + casca reflecting on how griffith used to be able to comfort her at the start of this scene + casca clumsy and shaking + casca comforting griffith at the end = griffith trying to physically comfort casca, emphasizing his patheticness when he’s the one who needs to be comforted and held instead
or maybe it’s a combination of everything, idk. i think the eclipse foreshadowing works best as a contrast – here he’s helpless and weak and maybe offering himself in desperation or unable to even comfort or entice casca or whatever, w/e it is it’s humiliating, whereas when he becomes femto he establishes his power and control thru rape.
HMMM it’s hard for me to recommend skipping around since I personally am a stickler for chronologically going through everything lol, and no matter what you’ll probably feel like you’re missing some stuff since there are always flashbacks, plot points leading to more plot points, character development, etc. But if you can live with that here’s what I’d recommend.
The Lost Children arc comes next and I’d recommend it. It’s fairly well paced, starts getting into Guts’ darkness interestingly, and there’s some good potential for griffguts parallels with Jill and Rosine. But I think you can skip it without missing too much plot relevant stuff, and it’s fairly disturbing with csa triggers too, if that affects whether you’d like to check it out or not.
If you skip it I’d recommend reading chapter 118 (The Beast of Darkness). It comes right after Guts fights Rosine and right before Guts gets caught by Farnese and her knights who’ve been tracking him due to prophecy shit blah blah blah.
The rest of the Conviction arc can get draggy and tonally it’s kind of weird and campy lol. I think you could probably get away with skipping it, all you really need to know is that the world sucks, nobles are dicks using religious persecution to terrify the masses, and Farnese starts out as an apparent sadist using religion as an excuse to burn people alive while Serpico is her doormat. Guts escapes Farnese fairly quickly and shakes her faith a little. You get their backstories and more depth for them later so I don’t think it’s super important to see their introduction. Oh also Guts meets Isidro who helps him rescue Casca.
In this arc I’d still recommend reading chapters 126 (Revelations Part 1) – 130 (A Feeble Flame) because that gets into NeoGriff foreshadowing and thematic stuff and Guts’ internal conflicts when he returns to Godo’s cave to discover Casca missing.
You can probably skip a bunch of chapters here. You might want to check out 142 (Spirit Road, Part 2) because while it’s mostly foreshadowing for plot stuff you’ll be skipping, there’s some good shit w/ Guts’ feelings on Femto.
I’d pick the story back up after the big fight and Casca rescue etc, and read 174 (Daybreak) onwards,since this has Guts and NeoGriffith’s turbulent reunion.
I’d actually probably recommend reading the entire Millenium Falcon/Hawk of the Millenium Empire arc, because while Guts’ side can get draggy with like a troll sidequest and long fights etc, Griffith’s is more interesting imo, and a lot of plot stuff happens in both. Plus Guts has a lot of character development and internal conflict, there are lots of new characters introduced and you get Farnese and Serpico’s full stories, and despite some overlong fight scenes on Guts’ side there are quite a few engaging hooks, and the art is pretty gorgeous.
If you DO get bored during the troll fight stuff, which is overlong and annoying, you can probably skip it while only missing some stuff about how magic works, which gets repeated later on I think. I’d recommend skipping it starting on chapter 207 (Magic Sword) and picking it back up on chapter 219 (Vicinity of the Netherworld).
So assuming you read the rest of the Millenium arc, the next things you’d want to skip are the fucking boat fights in the Fantasia arc. Read NeoGriffith’s storyline, skip Guts’, is my recommendation. Well specifically my rec is to read up to the end of 307 (Falconia), then skip to chapter 329 (Flowers of Distant Days), which is a little Guts flashback interlude, and read the rest from there. You literally don’t miss anything you haven’t already seen during the Millenium arc, except Farnese doing some helpful magic.
I think that’s about it. lmk if you have any questions or want a better summary of the Conviction arc lol. And if you really don’t want to read the whole 130 chapters of Millenium Empire I’d be happy to write a summary of that too while pointing out the really relevant chapters for you to read, but let me know in advance because that would probably take a while lol.
I don’t think I could find a panel where she seems attracted to Guts, partially because I agree with you and partially because my memory of the het interactions in Berserk is not the greatest lol.
But yeah I think part of the reason I find her relationship with Guts so unconvincing, and part of why I find it really easy to hc her as gay, is because her relationships to men are based around wanting to be needed, rather than her own desire.
With Griffith she wants to be something indispensible to his dream, a “sword” he can’t do without. Later on we get Judeau saying, “If she loves him… shouldn’t she want to be held by him?” And Casca saying, “Griffith’s not a god… and I am a woman.” And it’s like, if you’re going to describe a woman’s attraction to a man in terms of falling into the natural hetero order of things, it makes it easier to see it as internalized homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality lol. Casca like, hmmm my feelings for Griffith are extremely strong, he’s a man I’m a woman, this must be attraction? Without realizing there are other possibilities.
I’m sure Miura didn’t mean it that way, but that’s why it’s a headcanon.
And anyway it’s the same with Guts – it’s all about Casca’s desire to be needed, to be able to comfort someone and feel necessary to them. And I think partly it’s an obligation to her, pay back for being rescued, by Griffith, by Guts in the 100 man fight. She notices Guts’ scars from that fight before they have sex and says she wishes for a wound from Guts. And it’s what she thinks about while they have sex: “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.”
I think that’s purposeful on Miura’s part. That’s a consistent part of Casca’s characterization that seems to stem from her childhood trauma and being rescued by Griffith, and it’s what informs her two major relationships. She only started warming up to Guts after he rescued her. Miura wants us to see it as attraction, but he didn’t really show us any actual desire from Casca, it’s something the characters, and the audience, take as read just based on the fact that she’s a woman and they’re men lol, and since I don’t agree that woman + man = automatic sexual attraction it’s pretty easy to take another route imo.
Guts: This time it’s by my own will. I will never entrust my sword to another again. From now on every battle will be my own.
Also Guts: *throws away his entire life and the found family he holds dear so he can fulfill Griffith’s friendship criteria down to the letter*
ALSO can I just say “I don’t know what’s ahead. Whether bein with you will get in the way of what I want to do… or the opposite… I can’t tell now.”
Well what Guts wants to do is fight stronger and stronger enemies, like Wyald. He’s been thinking about fighting monsters since he left and decided he was sore about losing to Zodd.
And then he does get to fight a monster, and this is what happens when Casca’s with him:
so like, you’re telling me they would’ve lived happily ever after pursuing Guts’ monster-fighting dream together if Griffith turned out to be fine and fit to lead the Hawks after all?
Bc this is directly telling me that Guts would see Casca as a liability to that dream and Casca would probably stop supporting it pretty quickly if Guts kept on going the way he’s going.
(same anon) on second thought maybe the nose treatment allusion after
sex could refer to him being comforted, but not wrt Griffith but his
childhood trauma? Like of course Casca can’t help him there but she
alleviated the pain for a bit. This still doesn’t let me glimpse at
Miura’s intentions. I truly agree w your meta I am just getting mixed
signals. No disrespect or anything, feel free to ignore/delete since I’m
basically rambling in your inbox!
no worries, i always love getting messages and I have no problem clarifying my thoughts!
lol
sorry this took a while to answer, first I almost wrote an essay in
response but then I decided to clean up a post I already had in my
drafts that addresses some of this instead.
But to address
your message in more detail than that post does, tbh I think it’s kind
of meant to be a little contradictory. Miura tends to write in a way
where he presents the positive and negative aspects of something and
trusts the audience to make up their own minds. The narrative could def
lean one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean a decision/an event/a
character/etc is wholly negative or wholly positive. It’s usually some of both.
When
it comes to Guts and Casca hooking up I think there are positive
aspects. Guts opening up and telling her about his past is a good thing.
Casca deciding to try to move on from her obsession with Griffith is a
good thing. Despite the violent flashback and the virginal fumbling both
of them consider sex together to be a positive experience.
But
despite that, I think the narrative itself depicts Guts and Casca
hooking up to be ultimately a mistake. Not a mistake you can blame Guts
or Casca for because they should’ve known better or smthn like that, but a mistake in the
sense that it lead to a lot more bad than good happening, the same way
Guts leaving the Hawks was ultimately the wrong call even though he had
the best of intentions and it arguably seemed to have a positive affect on him as an individual.
And like, tbh I don’t think Miura really
gives much of a fuck about Guts/Casca as a romantic relationship lol. I
think what happened is he went with it as a way to make the Eclipse more
dramatic/give Guts a stronger reason to want revenge bc frankly
Griffith just sacrificing the Band isn’t nearly enough to make Guts that
angry lol – but he’s actually a pretty good writer when he wants to be
so rather than pushing it as a more generic and pasted on True Love Ruined By Tragedy thing he
added it as a two people on the rebound thing and incorporated it into
part of the pile-up of bad decisions and things going wrong in the lead
in to the Eclipse.
It has to be a little sweet, a little positive,
the audience has to believe Guts genuinely cares for her and they had
potential in order for the Eclipse bullshit to have the effect he
wanted, but at the same time the main thing Guts and Casca’s short lived
relationship adds to the story, other than set-up for a prolonged rape
scene, is reinforcement of Guts’ stupid dream imo.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that, rather than being
depicted as burgeoning true love ruined by the Eclipse for the
sake of extra tragedy, Guts and Casca getting together is depicted as a mistake from the start.
Let’s look at Guts’ conversation with Judeau, where he seems to consider the possibility of Casca as a romantic interest for the first time.
“The one who has her eye… is Griffith. That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this.”
I see two possible ways of interpreting this statement. Either the narrative and Guts just reframed Guts entire raison d’etre, his whole motivation for leaving and the reason he wants to be Griffith’s equal, thanks to a few leading statements from Judeau, or Guts is framing a potential relationship with Casca as another step on the journey of becoming Griffith’s equal.
The former defies belief. We just spent 22 chapters knowing exactly why Guts wants to leave and become Griffith’s equal. There’s no mystery there, there’s no detail left to be uncovered. Suddenly doing a 180 and saying actually, he wants to leave so he can be worthy of Casca, even though he never considered Casca a romantic possibility until approximately 30 seconds earlier, would just be impossibly bad writing from an otherwise extremely solid story.
But the latter, well, that fits right in.
After they have sex, Casca symbolically becomes Guts’ sword instead of Griffith’s:
To Casca, Guts is a more open, emotionally available replacement for Griffith, as I’ve discussed in detail in this post. Guts is in fact coming closer to his goal of becoming Griffith’s equal by sleeping with Casca, because after this Casca begins to transfer her obsession with Griffith and his dream to him.
And Casca isn’t an endgame for Guts. She’s not the goal, she’s not the motivation – she’s an addition to his overarching desire to have Griffith see him as an equal. He still plans to leave to continue fighting stronger and stronger enemies after they hook up. He invites her along – just so long as she doesn’t get in the way of his more important dream:
Non-committally inviting her along mollifies her, but it doesn’t address her point lol – he’s still selfishly prioritizing his dream. She’s become support for that, just the way she supported Griffith’s dream as his “sword.” Eventually that is exactly what leads to everything crashing down around them – Casca telling Guts to leave, because his dream is all-important.
And while we then leave Guts and Casca on a sweet moment where they kiss, that very same page shifts to pure ominousness to end both the chapter and Guts and Casca’s newly changed relationship on:
Cue snake man walking around and the Behelit floating down a river on its way to a date with Griffith.
And then the next chapter returns us to Griffith, a year since the last time we saw him, and his monologue about how his feelings for Guts are so strong and bright they make even the dream fade into dullness.
Guts is trying to “unbind” himself from Griffith. In his dream speech to Casca he says he can’t stay with the Hawks because he refuses to ever swing his sword in service to another again. And Casca tells Guts that she can’t continue defending the almost broken dream of someone who may not even be alive. Both he and Casca are trying to move on from Griffith in their own ways, and they try to do this through a connection with each other.
But the thing is, if you’re writing the kind of relationship triangle where two people help each other get over a third, if you want it to really feel satisfying and right, wouldn’t you want to establish that they both should be getting over Griffith, and that a relationship with each other is a more positive step for them?
The problem is that Guts’ whole thing, his whole desire to leave to become Griffith’s equal, is motivated by wanting to be closer to Griffith lol. He wants to be someone Griffith can call a friend. And it’s based on a falsehood: he thinks Griffith looks down on him.
When this is how Griffith feels about him:
Guts trying to unbind himself from Griffith doesn’t feel satisfying when we’re immediately reminded through a passionate monologue that Griffith is just as bound to Guts as Guts is to him, and that Guts only wants to become independent of Griffith because he doesn’t know that.
As for Casca, her obsession with Griffith came at the expense of
herself. Spending a year fighting for Griffith’s dream
and leading the Hawks while he was in a dungeon drove her to the point
of suicide.
But her encounter here with Guts doesn’t solve any of
that, she just transfers her obsession and her dedication to someone
else’s dream to Guts, as we see clearly through that sword metaphor,
through the parallels I linked to earlier, and through Casca telling
Guts he has to leave because his dream is the most important thing.
Casca trying to get over Griffith and move on doesn’t feel satisfying when she immediately falls into the same self-destructive patterns with a new person at the centre of her obsession.
Guts and Casca’s romance has
its postive aspects – Guts opens up to her about his childhood trauma,
eg, and is comforted. But there’s
dissonance beneath the surface. They have sex right after Guts let Casca
stab him because a part of him realized she was right about Griffith needing him. Casca had just tried to kill herself after telling Guts that Griffith doesn’t need her, as though she can only live in relation to someone else. In
deciding to leave the Hawks together, Guts continues suppressing his
eventual revelation that leaving in the first place was a mistake.
And
Guts recalls
Gambino giving him medicine – the one act of kindness from him which
Guts latches onto to help him deny the rest of Gambino’s abuse – while Casca is compared to a sword, which to me seems like a strong, not all that positive statement on their relationship: it doesn’t fix their underlying issues, it doesn’t change anything, it just helps them live in denial of those issues – Casca’s lack of independence, Guts’ dream being a mistake*** – for a while longer.
Basically, rather than moving forward and truly healing with each other, they’re revisiting the past, repeating negative patterns, maintaining denial, and essentially, well, licking wounds.
And by trying to move on from
Griffith by taking solace in each other, they only add to Guts’ original
mistake, which is failing to realize that there was no reason for him to move on in the first
place. Guts couldn’t stand the thought of Griffith looking down on him,
but this is who he is to Griffith, as we are told immediately before and
after he has sex with Casca:
And this is when Guts finally acknowledges his mistake, about 10 seconds after Griffith overheard Casca telling him to leave:
We know that Miura didn’t
intend Guts and Casca to get together from the start, let alone for it
to be a grand true love style romance. He’s said that he hooked them up
for the sake of more Eclipse drama. And I think that the way he framed
their relationship, from its placement in the narrative to the details of the scene itself to the way it goes hand in hand with Guts’ dream, makes it feel like it’s contributing to the series of unfortunate fuck ups that lead to the Eclipse, rather than just being an incidental casualty of it.
It’s a mistake the
way Miura writes mistakes – not obviously so, with no ill intent or
obviously misguided motives behind it. Their relationship isn’t meant to
be unpleasant, it’s shown as sweet and maybe not epic, maybe not
lasting, but overall more positive than negative for them. But so was
Guts’ year long sabbatical, and we’ve seen how much he regrets that:
In Berserk characters can make the wrong decisions despite having the best of intentions, despite some good coming out of those decisions, despite doing the best they can based on what they know. And I think Guts and Casca’s relationship is shown to be one of them.
*** I think both Casca’s lack of independence and Guts’ focus on his own dream of fighting stronger and stronger enemies are at least in part poor coping mechanisms for their respective childhood traumas, which makes the sword and medicine metaphors even more apt. But to get fully into that would take its own post, and it’s not necessary to my point here, so this is just a minor aside lol.
also will i ever get over this irony
guts: i threw away my relationship with griffith because i’m in love with him but i think he looks down on me for not pursuing a dream
griffith: i threw away my dream because i’m in love with guts but i think he looks down on me for the way i’ve pursued my dream
guts comes back: hey i have a dream now… oh. guess that doesn’t actually matter now.
griffith like, hey i’ve got nothing but you to live for now… oh you’re leaving for your dream.
and like the 2 monologues are perfect counterparts to each other this way. guts explaining how dazzling griffith is and how he needs to get himself a dream so griffith will see him the same way. griffith thinking about how bright and shining guts is and how unimportant his dream is next to him.
Also speaking of the monologue I want to take a sec to just gush about how it’s structured. The way it begins with two pages of Griffith reminiscing about his dream. “It was the brightest thing I had ever seen.” Shining. The next page is Griffith with that light shining before him.
Then into darkness, deep darkness without even a trace of light. The darkness of the torture chamber, the darkness, one assumes, of having his dream ripped away from him. Only one thing is vivid.
And it’s Guts.
I just love how it’s set up as a bait and switch to really drive in the point that Guts has overtaken his dream. You turn the page, expecting to see Griffith consumed with longing for his lost dream, for the castle, the thing he just described as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, but nope, it’s Guts, like lightning blazing within him.
And then the monologue ends with Griffith returning to the subject of the dream only to say it’s dull compared to Guts.
Like this is straightforward but I still love how it’s set up to play with expectation, and to compare Griffith before and Griffith after Guts. The dream shining within him, replaced by Guts shining within him.
So I think that he is trying to push those two together because he is
projecting his feelings on Casca. He wants to get them together because
he can’t insert himself in that situation. Casca is possibly a stand-in
for himself without him realizing it. That’s why he wouldn’t feel
jealous too imo. What do you think and what’s your take?
My probably-gayer-than-Miura-intended take is basically the same as yours, with the addition of Guts thinking that Casca is worthier of Griffith than he is.
From his silent and sullen reaction shots to Casca talking about him in the cave that definitely strike me as identifying with Casca’s feelings
to Casca directly telling him she’s jealous of him
to Guts feeling like all he’s good for is swinging his sword while insisting Casca has to live for something more important
to
this all seems like set-up for Guts throwing Casca at Griffith. He starts doing it after he decides to leave like he’s setting Casca up to take the place she wants, his place, at Griffith’s side, but Casca gets the addition of romance that Guts can’t begin to envision for himself thanks to repression and heteronormativity.
Also, good point about the bit where they’re both looking at him from a distance and Guts decides to take Casca down to bridge that gap for her, while he plans to leave. ia that seems like another moment of identification.
Idk basically yeah I totally agree, I think Guts is hardcore projecting, and the fact that the way he sets Casca up to take his place as Griffith’s confidante and “sword” involves shoving her into his arms, telling her to ask him to dance, telling Griffith she’s quite a sight in her dress, etc, is pretty telling.
Idk if it’s purposeful on Miura’s part, but it’s a really solid reading imo.
I originally had this as a second part of my last response but tbh it’s not actually all that related and it seemed silly to reply with a giant wall of text explaining an opinion that the person never asked for lol. So I’m just throwing it out separately.
Like I complained that Casca’s reaction to the Eclipse trauma is unrealistic but that doesn’t actually have much of anything to do with why I hate it.
Bc the
thing is, even if I assume that it is totally possible for
someone to regress to a state of infanthood due to trauma, or if I just
assume that Casca’s mental state is a result of fantasy magic, the way
Miura portrays it is still uncomfortable and worth criticizing, imo,
and he certainly doesn’t seem to care about making it feel grounded in
reality or depicting her trauma with care and respect.
For
instance, the way we don’t get to experience Casca’s point of view ever
again (even now we see her mind through Schierke and Farnese’s points of
view), the babyish mentality combined with Miura’s art still
sexualizing her adult body a whole lot, the way her current mental state
(the result of horrific rape) is often used as comic relief (eg
grabbing Puck and sticking him in her mouth in the background), the way
it totally strips Casca of agency as a character and turns her into a
plot device, the way Miura has said that he had her survive the Eclipse only to keep her around as a reminder to Guts that he wants revenge, etc.
It
seems much, much less like a genuine and thoughtful exploration of
Casca as a traumatized individual and much more like a convenient way of
reducing her to an object for Guts to protect and project on.
Even
now that we’re in her mind doing some magical therapy it seems really
half assed to me. We see Schierke and Farnese fighting dick monsters in
her mind, they’re collecting shards of her and sticking them back
together… I mean, when you compare it to, say, the absolutely
heartwrenching portrayal of Guts’ ptsd flashback during sex and his
subsequent panicky breakdown, it just doesn’t seem like Miura really
cares about selling Casca’s trauma as realistic and making sure the
audience empathizes with her. It really seems like he just wanted to
make her a cute and helpless non-entity for the sake of furthering Guts’
narrative.
It’s such a shame to me because I really like
Casca as a character but she gets such a raw treatment
from the narrative pretty much consistently, and it sucks.
I mean, if you want my two cents on the regression, I don’t buy it? Like she would have been 100% entitled to lose her shit but I don’t think she would have I guess? I was talking to @berserkerlover221 and I was just thinking that if that was the response women had every time a man they trusted raped them there would be a hell of a lot more completely regressed people.
like i’m no psychiatrist but i’m pretty damn sure casca’s reaction is 100% unrealistic fictional bullshit miura threw in to remove her from the narrative. you could argue that no one irl has ever been gangraped by monsters and an immortal demon god with powers of evil so maybe it’s fantasy magic at work, but then again miura also did the exact same thing when guts’ mother had a miscarriage so…
idk how one dude can write some traumatized characters so well and others so badly lol. like there is such a world of difference between guts griffith casca farnese and serpico’s reactions to their childhood traumas, and current casca’s generically ~wacky and childish insanity that it floors me that one guy wrote it all. i mean casca is a funny cartoonish background event throughout most of the last couple arcs. it’s just incredible.
All of that being
said, that seems to be something that he’s returning to thematically so
it might not be 100% sexisim and not knowing what to do with her. Maybe
just 90%
yeah i’m hoping he plans to do something with her after she gets magical elfhelm therapy, and hopefully that something is awesome and epic and relevant enough to justify even a fraction of how she’s been reduced for 20 years. idk, cross my fingers I guess.
Like even the idea of “childishness” being a shared trait between them is a weird area of analysis and I’m not sure if Casca, outside of the choices that Miura made for her would be this way you know?
I feel like I need to take a hard look
at the later cannon at the children and see what I can gleam from them
in regards to both Griffith and Casca as well as Guts. I mean if you’re
looking at cosmic forces that play specifically on childish feelings
frozen by trauma I feel like it kind of links all of the story arcs
together more strongly
oops replied too soon
but yeah i was actually about to say in response to the first part that while comparing griffith and casca’s childishness seems like a stretch bc griffith was just a 15 yr old who was emotionally immature in some ways and casca is mentally regressed, both casca’s regression and griffith’s immaturity stem from coping with traumatic experiences so even if one’s subtle and realistic and the other is over the top and ridiculous you could draw similarities mb. even if it’s just because miura likes writing about traumatized people.
and then you added the second comment and i’m like welp mte.
tho idk if the current children have much to do with it, none of them seem to have any real issues, they’re just annoying window dressing imho.
Oh yeah I see what you mean. And you could probably argue that Guts is doing the same thing with Casca right now too, idealizing the concept of her as healed and exactly the way she was before as a Hawk commander.
Also yeah while I’d say Utena was mostly about examining misogyny and patriarchy, I think you could apply a lot of the same conceptual stuff to homophobia and heteronormativity. Like ngl I only watched Utena for the first time fairly recently and I know this would be p much blasphemy to a lot of fans lol, but afterwards I immediately wanted to compare Griffith’s castle dream to the floating upside-down castle. I mean Griffith’s dream is kind of intwined with an ideal heteronormative relationship with Charlotte, noble storybook knight and princess, which is at odds with his genuine love for Guts, except he ends up choosing the dream.
I tend to err on the side of thinking that it’s not purposeful on Miura’s part, and being able to read Griffith’s narrative as about internalized homophobia and heternormativity is just a side effect of him being emotionally repressed, in love with Guts, and needing to marry a princess, but it’s still fun to think about, and imo it’s really not much of a stretch.
you're the only one 