mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
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ooh also now that i’m contemplating this topic i think the scene in the river with Casca could be viewed as a choice for Griffith between letting her in and growing closer to her or keeping her at a distance. When he freezes up as she hugs him, then turns around and represses his feelings and comforts her instead, that’s him choosing to keep her at a distance rather than be vulnerable around her.
So really his speech to Charlotte about not having friends is a self-fulfilling prophecy. like Griffith could have a bunch of friends but that requires letting people see your imperfections. the way Griffith describes a friend – as an equal who also has a goal and would challenge and oppose him if need be – it’s like he wants someone to fight past his barriers and climb over his walls and make him their friend, because he’s unwilling to expose himself to the possibility of rejection while emotionally vulnerable.
Guts is the exception, the one person he actually tries to let in who keeps placing him at a distance. Asking him to kill Julius instead of ordering and Guts reinforcing the mercenary hierarchy instead; asking if Guts thinks he’s cruel and getting ‘who cares your dream is more important’ as an answer; doing irrational things for him because his brain takes a back seat when Guts is involved and Guts dismissing those moments as irrelevant compared to the overheard friendship speech; etc.
Which is another reason it’s tragic and ironic that Guts takes the friendship speech to heart, because he’s probably the only person in Griffith’s life who didn’t need to follow that advice to become his friend, he just needed to accept Griffith’s overtures of friendship instead of accidentally rebuffing him.
Guts and Casca – yes, but I always thought Judeau just wanted to take
care of him, so Casca can be happy with Guts and they can ride off into the
sunset together, I don’t believe he actually cared for Griffith, but only to have Casca move on from him asap. I actually think he is the hawk, who liked Griffith the least, but that might be my hc.
i p much agree actually. the impression i get from judeau is that he admired griffith but didn’t really know what to make of him or what his deal was and was maybe a little wary of him bc of that.
actually now that i think about it maybe the best way to put the way i think the hawks (including judeau to an extent) see griffith in general by the ballroom scene is that they’re like, varying degrees between respect for a commander and friendship, and griffith is the one keeping that distance from being closed by keeping them in the dark about stuff and keeping himself on a pedestal for them. like i see potential there for real friendship that’s never actually fully reached, i guess.
tbh tho griffith’s second expression here fucks me up so much
i mean, cover his smile, and he looks almost like he’s holding back tears. there’s so much emotion in that one fucking drawing like… he’s hurt, but not really by guts’ words so much as the reminder of his dream. and it’s not like a sudden reminder of the weight of guilt on him or w/e, it’s like
idk like it reminds me of the moment griffith asked guts to kill julius and guts was like ‘just order me to do it’ and we didn’t see griffith’s expression then, and it probably wasn’t this intense, but i imagine guts’ answer was a disappointing reminder of the artificial distance between griffith and guts based on status and now class etc. and i feel like this is the same – this is griffith treating guts like the only friend he has and opening up in a vulnerable moment and guts returning that distance between them by reminding griffith of his dream.
and in this moment the reminder of his dream hurts not for all the reasons it should, but bc it’s a barrier between him and guts, yk?
idk this is such a crossroads moment imo and ugh this scene is so perfect
Casca babe. I still don’t know why the fuck you would say that. It makes zero sense.
Tbh at this point I felt things were happening, only because they had to happen, even if it made no sense to anyone to act like this. Like Casca saying this, as if it still mattered what Griffith saw as a equal. Like Guts acting as if not realizing how severe Griffith’s injuries were and saying he will swing that sword again. Like the Band throwing a fucking tantrum how their future is ruined, while Griffith was 5 steps away and probably listening. Like even Guts and Casca having this talk there, as if he wasn’t sleeping nearby… the amount of moments, where everyone was being inconsiderate was so huge, that it felt kind of…. forced to me 😮 Either this or at this point they had all stopped seeing Griffith as a person already.
And tbh, there was no going back from there on in my opinion, even if he had never been offered to sacrifice them, even if he had accepted living in a broken body, he wouldn’t have accepted being their mascot.
Yeah, I completely agree actually.
Like of course at this point Miura was trying to take the plot to the eclipse so maybe everything doesn’t make sense from character consistency point of view.
But really if we leave that aside this arc really was evidence that both of what Wyald said and what we knew of Griffith’s apprehensions were almost completely justified.
Like it really just came across as if nobody actually gave a shit about griffith as a fucking human being. And it was upsetting because all this while, we were thinking how Griffith was wrong and being pessimistic and he should maybe stop distancing himself so much. But then griffith was absolutely right all along.
It really just seemed like everyone was waiting for griffith because of the usefulness he’d have to their lives. The moment it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to do that, they immediately ran to Guts to leave with him instead.
Like notice how no one else even tries to visit him after that, I mean yeah okay, you were throwing around words like love before, but okay.
yes , they most probably wouldn’t have abandoned him but that would most probably be because such a thing would be ‘distasteful’ rather than anything else. I mean you might be right about the fact that they’ve already stopped seeing him as a person at this point.
And honestly even with Casca, like this really rubbed me the wrong way- but she has this little bit of internal monologue where she says “Yes now it’s my turn to fulfill this duty. ” And that sense of duty is repeated when she tells Guts that she can’t leave with him. And wow. So it’s DUTY now ? Like a couple of chapters ago you were wondering why he’d chose Charlotte to bed instead of you and were being jealous of the fact. And now it’s only your sense of duty holding you back. Like honestly I thought you loved this person? Wow for consistency.
I mean I remember Griffith saying in the lake, while hurting himself that the only thing he can do for his men is to keep winning.
And really he was right.
That’s all they want from him and that’s all that he’s good for in their eyes.
tbh this never bothered me from a writing perspective because it felt very realistic to me
it’s not good and it doesn’t reflect well on the hawks, but it seems consistent because none of them ever gave a fuck about griffith as a person except guts and casca. judeau practically flat out said it during his first chat with guts, when he said everyone followed griffith for his charisma but he couldn’t really say what kind of a man he is.
and it’s partially griffith’s fault for distancing himself. you can’t expect people to care about you as a person if they only know you as a flawless leader. but it’s also definitely dickish of the hawks – but the kind of dickish that doesn’t seem out of place imo, especially in berserk’s shitty world where if you’re accepting that half the men casca runs into want to rape her, ableism doesn’t seem like a stretch.
also in fairness, only corkus made a scene when casca announced the news, and that’s pretty in character for him, and there was only like, maybe a couple hours between that and the eclipse, during most of which griffith was asleep, so there wasn’t much opportunity for people to visit him, or even sort out their feelings beyond abject disappointment that their hopes are dashed.
i actually love casca and judeau telling guts to leave while he’s trying to say he wants to stay, because they are treating griffith as an inevitable burden someone has to deal with, and guts is the only one who isn’t. judeau has his, i’ll take some hawks, start a thieves gang and take care of him, because it’s the least i could do for all he’s done for us. plus being ‘self sacrificing’ for casca’s sake lol.
casca’s feelings are more complex but they also work for me – because she wanted to leave with guts after rescuing griffith and try to move on from her feelings for griffith, and now he needs her, and she’s someone who wants to be needed, so it’s like just as she had hope that she could move on she’s back to square one. also tbh her attitude strikes me as more evidence that she never really loved Griffith, just admired him.
and they both expect guts to view him as a burden so they encourage him to leave – because according to those rules of the battlefield judeau likes to cite so much, he’s no longer a hawk so griffith isn’t his responsibility.
and guts partially wants to stay out of guilt probably, but based on his actions at the start of the eclipse it seems clear that he, more than anyone else in the hawks, still just genuinely likes griffith and wants to be with him in some capacity. he’s the one who speaks out when the godhand says griffith is one of them, he supports and holds him until they’re forcibly separated and then he climbs up to griffith to try to save him, and he refuses to believe griffith sacrificed everyone for quite a while.
idk basically it’s harsh and depressing but it works for me largely bc i never got the sense that anyone except guts genuinely liked griffith as a person, even casca. well charlotte i guess, but w/e. even she believed he’d recover when she wanted to stay with him.
Hmm yeah.
Of course it makes a lot of sense from the writing perspective. And from character perspectives. And everything makes sense with everything else because that’s just how Berserk is. It’s brilliant. And all that is precisely the reason I love it so much.
I don’t think my issue was with character consistency actually, like tbh I don’t have an issue at all, -that’s what makes for good story telling and that’s what I’m here for.
I have zero issues with the Hawks not giving a fuck about Griffith. Because it makes sense. And because realistically that’s how people are.
Same with Casca.
I think what I had a not very objective, reaction to^ up there was the fact that the fact that the Hawks or Casca may be didn’t give a fuck is very rarely recognised
Which makes for very one dimensional analysis. And THAT is frustrating.
The thing with Casca is I have very mixed feelings about her in general and that just spills onto every time I mention her so. Yeah.
And like hey I liked griffith so sometimes there’s an emotional ‘why you do this?’, but intellectually yes, makes sense, sign me the fuck up, sweet angst God yes.
Like the fact everyone is equal parts nice and low-key assholeish is amazing?
But sometimes people are not nice to someone you like (Even if that makes perfect sense to you )and you are like ‘hey!’
yeah i know what you mean. casca is such a difficult character in some ways for me bc i love her in theory but i feel like i’m constantly mentally compensating for the way miura writes her.
like eg i’d infinitely prefer if instead of casca switching gears bc now she loves guts instead of griffith, she was telling guts to leave because she believes she’s being self-sacrificing but deep down she wants griffith to herself and she still isn’t over her jealousy of guts. i don’t feel that’s the case, that’s not the vibe i get from this scene at all, but man i’d be into that, and i kind of headcanon it that way.
like i like petty jealous casca whose “love” for griffith is a flaw (and a defense mechanism she uses to avoid self-examination) she needs to overcome to come into her own as a person. i don’t like casca just switching from griffith to guts and this being treated by the narrative as a touching and significant development for her lol. same like, i like casca as a badass responsible and respected military leader, i don’t like casca as someone who “had to give up being a woman” (wtf does that even mean lol) and is conflicted about that, it sucks.
enjoying casca as a character to me is like navigating a minefield of miura’s shitty misogyny lol. there’s lots i love and it’s worth the effort of downplaying the shitty aspects of her writing imo, but man i wish i didn’t have to.
Casca babe. I still don’t know why the fuck you would say that. It makes zero sense.
Tbh at this point I felt things were happening, only because they had to happen, even if it made no sense to anyone to act like this. Like Casca saying this, as if it still mattered what Griffith saw as a equal. Like Guts acting as if not realizing how severe Griffith’s injuries were and saying he will swing that sword again. Like the Band throwing a fucking tantrum how their future is ruined, while Griffith was 5 steps away and probably listening. Like even Guts and Casca having this talk there, as if he wasn’t sleeping nearby… the amount of moments, where everyone was being inconsiderate was so huge, that it felt kind of…. forced to me 😮 Either this or at this point they had all stopped seeing Griffith as a person already.
And tbh, there was no going back from there on in my opinion, even if he had never been offered to sacrifice them, even if he had accepted living in a broken body, he wouldn’t have accepted being their mascot.
Yeah, I completely agree actually.
Like of course at this point Miura was trying to take the plot to the eclipse so maybe everything doesn’t make sense from character consistency point of view.
But really if we leave that aside this arc really was evidence that both of what Wyald said and what we knew of Griffith’s apprehensions were almost completely justified.
Like it really just came across as if nobody actually gave a shit about griffith as a fucking human being. And it was upsetting because all this while, we were thinking how Griffith was wrong and being pessimistic and he should maybe stop distancing himself so much. But then griffith was absolutely right all along.
It really just seemed like everyone was waiting for griffith because of the usefulness he’d have to their lives. The moment it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to do that, they immediately ran to Guts to leave with him instead.
Like notice how no one else even tries to visit him after that, I mean yeah okay, you were throwing around words like love before, but okay.
yes , they most probably wouldn’t have abandoned him but that would most probably be because such a thing would be ‘distasteful’ rather than anything else. I mean you might be right about the fact that they’ve already stopped seeing him as a person at this point.
And honestly even with Casca, like this really rubbed me the wrong way- but she has this little bit of internal monologue where she says “Yes now it’s my turn to fulfill this duty. ” And that sense of duty is repeated when she tells Guts that she can’t leave with him. And wow. So it’s DUTY now ? Like a couple of chapters ago you were wondering why he’d chose Charlotte to bed instead of you and were being jealous of the fact. And now it’s only your sense of duty holding you back. Like honestly I thought you loved this person? Wow for consistency.
I mean I remember Griffith saying in the lake, while hurting himself that the only thing he can do for his men is to keep winning.
And really he was right.
That’s all they want from him and that’s all that he’s good for in their eyes.
tbh this never bothered me from a writing perspective because it felt very realistic to me
it’s not good and it doesn’t reflect well on the hawks, but it seems consistent because none of them ever gave a fuck about griffith as a person except guts and casca. judeau practically flat out said it during his first chat with guts, when he said everyone followed griffith for his charisma but he couldn’t really say what kind of a man he is.
and it’s partially griffith’s fault for distancing himself. you can’t expect people to care about you as a person if they only know you as a flawless leader. but it’s also definitely dickish of the hawks – but the kind of dickish that doesn’t seem out of place imo, especially in berserk’s shitty world where if you’re accepting that half the men casca runs into want to rape her, ableism doesn’t seem like a stretch.
also in fairness, only corkus made a scene when casca announced the news, and that’s pretty in character for him, and there was only like, maybe a couple hours between that and the eclipse, during most of which griffith was asleep, so there wasn’t much opportunity for people to visit him, or even sort out their feelings beyond abject disappointment that their hopes are dashed.
i actually love casca and judeau telling guts to leave while he’s trying to say he wants to stay, because they are treating griffith as an inevitable burden someone has to deal with, and guts is the only one who isn’t. judeau has his, i’ll take some hawks, start a thieves gang and take care of him, because it’s the least i could do for all he’s done for us. plus being ‘self sacrificing’ for casca’s sake lol.
casca’s feelings are more complex but they also work for me – because she wanted to leave with guts after rescuing griffith and try to move on from her feelings for griffith, and now he needs her, and she’s someone who wants to be needed, so it’s like just as she had hope that she could move on she’s back to square one. also tbh her attitude strikes me as more evidence that she never really loved Griffith, just admired him.
and they both expect guts to view him as a burden so they encourage him to leave – because according to those rules of the battlefield judeau likes to cite so much, he’s no longer a hawk so griffith isn’t his responsibility.
and guts partially wants to stay out of guilt probably, but based on his actions at the start of the eclipse it seems clear that he, more than anyone else in the hawks, still just genuinely likes griffith and wants to be with him in some capacity. he’s the one who speaks out when the godhand says griffith is one of them, he supports and holds him until they’re forcibly separated and then he climbs up to griffith to try to save him, and he refuses to believe griffith sacrificed everyone for quite a while.
idk basically it’s harsh and depressing but it works for me largely bc i never got the sense that anyone except guts genuinely liked griffith as a person, even casca. well charlotte i guess, but w/e. even she believed he’d recover when she wanted to stay with him.
Also speaking of Griffith and Casca and transformations
Once you get down to it using the behelit and becoming an apostle or godhand is in part a magical fantasy metaphor for dealing badly with trauma, right? Within the confines of the fantasy story Griffith’s dark side emerged heightened by the power of evil and turned into a demi god, his heart was frozen, and he became a monster, but metaphorically u can say he’s lashing out and repeating patterns of abuse.
Idk whether Miura would put that in the same words but yk, it’s pretty explicit that you become a monster as a reaction to profound suffering in Berserk (+fate and a magic talisman), and then you turn into a giant dick and it’s basically letting your dark side reign free bc life fucked you and you’re mad about it. It’s not the most kind or sensitive of metaphors lol, especially when it comes to victims like Rosine (and Griffith imo) rather than say a dude who was just mad bc his wife was sleeping around with heathens, but that’s a berserk for u.
Guts is also struggling with the same thing but his magical fantasy metaphor is the berserker armour making him lose control in a rage, so he’s more caught in between, struggling to better himself but occasionally falling into abusive and violent patterns. There’s also the hound, but since he got the armour they’ve basically merged into one metaphor.
Casca is the only one who didn’t get a magical fantasy metaphor, she just broke. Which is partially why I want the behelit to be hers – I dislike the woman being the only “pure” one who passively internalizes pain rather than lashing out, yk?
I feel like I had more of a point with this… idk. Let Casca go on a rampage too, basically.
Also related to that last ask but my response was getting way too long so I’ll mention this separately:
I feel like part of my problem with the current lighter tone is that a lot of the darkness, specifically the emotional angst, of Berserk so far was based on the fact that all the main characters are traumatized and have shitty coping mechanisms. Guts Casca and Griffith sure, and also Farnese and Serpico (neglected throughout childhood and coped by burning people alive and terrorizing ppl, and abused by peers and Farnese + weird expectations from his mother and coped by becoming an unfeeling doormat). And none of them have really dealt with it?
Griff transformed into a monster so fine his story has a conclusion, and Casca’s is maybe coming to fruition soon, but Guts’ trauma just transferred from rape and abuse to feeling manpain about Casca’s trauma, which is a huge disservice to both characters if it’s never brought up again and dealt with.
And while Farnese is bettering herself we’ve never really seen her actual issues addressed, and her whole sadism burning ppl alive thing just kind of easily melted away in favour of a new helping someone philosophy. I wished for more internal conflict there, basically, and I hope it’s addressed in the future but for now it seems like a pretty abrupt change and a missed opportunity. And Serpico is still Serpico. He hasn’t changed a whole lot but his issues haven’t negatively impacted anything either.
In the Golden Age all the psychological baggage these characters had contributed to its absolute disaster of a climax. And I’d love, love to see that happen again, esp with Farnese and Serpico adding more shit to the pile, or I’d love to see their issues flare up but have them manage to overcome them now that they’ve grown in a happier, healthier contrast to the Golden Age.
But throughout the Millenium Empire arc all these issues the characters have never really affected them adversely. I’m hoping that now that we’re delving into Casca’s psyche things will start to snowball and we’ll see that these traumas haven’t just been forgotten but only put on hold for a while so this group can be happy and hopeful.
But for now I do miss reading about fucked up characters and the internal and external challenges posed by their issues.
The weird part is actually, that sometimes I think, objectively, the manga hasn’t become lighter since the Golden age. The Lost Children and Tower of Conviction arc were pretty fucked up and even now we’ve had troll rapes, the daka demons ripping out uterus es, people being eaten alive, a lot of really weird ass and perverted monstrosities.
But it’s simply that the fucked up Ness isn’t viscerally gripping anymore.
In the Golden age we we’re first introduced to characters, made to care about them by slowly revealing both their strengths and flaws and slowly, insidiously piling on the foreshadowing and layers of emotional as well as external fuckery.
It felt so dark because we cared about the people it was happening to.
In recent chapters the characters are introduced along with the ‘darkness’ bringing it forward as a part of their plotlines. Even Farnese was introduced as a sadistic pyromaniac first . Along with the horror which was the heretic related prosecution.
And only much later were we given a glimpse into the character and learnt to retroactively care about her.
I mean ultimately that worked as far as characterisation is concerned. As in I definitely care about Farnese now.
But it does reduce the emotional impact of the should have been traumatic scenes.
These are really good points. I totally agree about the grimdarkness – like I care when the protagonist has a traumatic backstory and it leads to him making unfortunate decisions, I’m less affected emotionally when random npcs are being tortured in two-page spreads for shock value.
+ tbh i don’t think it’s necessarily a mistake to introduce Farnese’s dark side first and then reveal her better nature, bc I do like when writers make you love a former antagonist and I love that about Farnese, but it definitely adds to the differing tones.
And I mean it does make sense to reverse the Golden Age format this way – now instead of beloved characters going dark, we can have dark characters learning to be better. But it really boils down for me to feeling like it’s been too easy I guess. Guts made new friends and now his hound is on a leash and now it’s the Berserk armour’s fault when he tries to murder everyone. Farnese dropped the pyromania and became a protector. And yeah for Farnese it’s been an ongoing journey as she gets braver and more competent and learns new things, and I love that journey, but since deciding to join Guts she’s never had second thoughts or felt sadistic or masochistic urges and more internal conflict for her would’ve been sweet.
But again, that’s assuming that this Guts and Friends story has all been a journey of personal growth and a brighter future, and not just the calm before the storm. So we’ll have to wait and see.
Oh yeah I completely agree with you about, the retroactive characterisation actually being pretty interesting.
That’s what, it works for characters .
But the setting seems to loosing the conflict which would make it more anticipatory and exciting. As you mentioned things seem to be happening too easily, too perfunctory. The high points seem expected and a foregone conclusion, and the obstacles too easily overcome.
There a vague sort of plot armor around the plot itself for every subplot involving Guts party members.
Griffith’s side of the story is still more interesting because of all the supposition we can do regarding the nature, relationships and back stories of the apostles and what falconia itself stands for AND the fact that there’s piling evidence that emotionless, divine doll Griffith may in fact be our beloved emotional-fuck Griffith afterall.
Like seriously I have no shame in admitting that in comparison I give zero fucks about Guts party or Elfhelm, beyond my investment into the follow-up of Casca and Farnese’s relationship.
I think a part of what I was trying to convey is that Berserk has always been a hugely character driven plot. As such ‘darkness’ of characters is linked to the ‘darkness’ of the plot.
So while the character writing is still quite enjoyable, introducing the character at their point of highest conflict and darkness and gradually resolving that, puts the plot and pacing in a perpetual cycle of falling action which Miura hasn’t yet broken.
Which is why I DO hope that this is actually just the calm before the storm.
Because unless there’s a change to rising action, we lose the excitement or anticipation or build up to any sort of satisfying climax.
Like that’s what the Golden Age did with perfection. It built on itself.
Deconstruction is something I really really enjoy actually but I think it’s being drawn out a little too much.
And Berserk though masterful in it’s quiet moments, has kind of made it’s rep for the drama.
Also related to that last ask but my response was getting way too long so I’ll mention this separately:
I feel like part of my problem with the current lighter tone is that a lot of the darkness, specifically the emotional angst, of Berserk so far was based on the fact that all the main characters are traumatized and have shitty coping mechanisms. Guts Casca and Griffith sure, and also Farnese and Serpico (neglected throughout childhood and coped by burning people alive and terrorizing ppl, and abused by peers and Farnese + weird expectations from his mother and coped by becoming an unfeeling doormat). And none of them have really dealt with it?
Griff transformed into a monster so fine his story has a conclusion, and Casca’s is maybe coming to fruition soon, but Guts’ trauma just transferred from rape and abuse to feeling manpain about Casca’s trauma, which is a huge disservice to both characters if it’s never brought up again and dealt with.
And while Farnese is bettering herself we’ve never really seen her actual issues addressed, and her whole sadism burning ppl alive thing just kind of easily melted away in favour of a new helping someone philosophy. I wished for more internal conflict there, basically, and I hope it’s addressed in the future but for now it seems like a pretty abrupt change and a missed opportunity. And Serpico is still Serpico. He hasn’t changed a whole lot but his issues haven’t negatively impacted anything either.
In the Golden Age all the psychological baggage these characters had contributed to its absolute disaster of a climax. And I’d love, love to see that happen again, esp with Farnese and Serpico adding more shit to the pile, or I’d love to see their issues flare up but have them manage to overcome them now that they’ve grown in a happier, healthier contrast to the Golden Age.
But throughout the Millenium Empire arc all these issues the characters have never really affected them adversely. I’m hoping that now that we’re delving into Casca’s psyche things will start to snowball and we’ll see that these traumas haven’t just been forgotten but only put on hold for a while so this group can be happy and hopeful.
But for now I do miss reading about fucked up characters and the internal and external challenges posed by their issues.
The weird part is actually, that sometimes I think, objectively, the manga hasn’t become lighter since the Golden age. The Lost Children and Tower of Conviction arc were pretty fucked up and even now we’ve had troll rapes, the daka demons ripping out uterus es, people being eaten alive, a lot of really weird ass and perverted monstrosities.
But it’s simply that the fucked up Ness isn’t viscerally gripping anymore.
In the Golden age we we’re first introduced to characters, made to care about them by slowly revealing both their strengths and flaws and slowly, insidiously piling on the foreshadowing and layers of emotional as well as external fuckery.
It felt so dark because we cared about the people it was happening to.
In recent chapters the characters are introduced along with the ‘darkness’ bringing it forward as a part of their plotlines. Even Farnese was introduced as a sadistic pyromaniac first . Along with the horror which was the heretic related prosecution.
And only much later were we given a glimpse into the character and learnt to retroactively care about her.
I mean ultimately that worked as far as characterisation is concerned. As in I definitely care about Farnese now.
But it does reduce the emotional impact of the should have been traumatic scenes.
These are really good points. I totally agree about the grimdarkness – like I care when the protagonist has a traumatic backstory and it leads to him making unfortunate decisions, I’m less affected emotionally when random npcs are being tortured in two-page spreads for shock value.
+ tbh i don’t think it’s necessarily a mistake to introduce Farnese’s dark side first and then reveal her better nature, bc I do like when writers make you love a former antagonist and I love that about Farnese, but it definitely adds to the differing tones.
And I mean it does make sense to reverse the Golden Age format this way – now instead of beloved characters going dark, we can have dark characters learning to be better. But it really boils down for me to feeling like it’s been too easy I guess. Guts made new friends and now his hound is on a leash and now it’s the Berserk armour’s fault when he tries to murder everyone. Farnese dropped the pyromania and became a protector. And yeah for Farnese it’s been an ongoing journey as she gets braver and more competent and learns new things, and I love that journey, but since deciding to join Guts she’s never had second thoughts or felt sadistic or masochistic urges and more internal conflict for her would’ve been sweet.
But again, that’s assuming that this Guts and Friends story has all been a journey of personal growth and a brighter future, and not just the calm before the storm. So we’ll have to wait and see.
Also related to that last ask but my response was getting way too long so I’ll mention this separately:
I feel like part of my problem with the current lighter tone is that a lot of the darkness, specifically the emotional angst, of Berserk so far was based on the fact that all the main characters are traumatized and have shitty coping mechanisms. Guts Casca and Griffith sure, and also Farnese and Serpico (neglected throughout childhood and coped by burning people alive and terrorizing ppl, and abused by peers and Farnese + weird expectations from his mother and coped by becoming an unfeeling doormat). And none of them have really dealt with it?
Griff transformed into a monster so fine his story has a conclusion, and Casca’s is maybe coming to fruition soon, but Guts’ trauma just transferred from rape and abuse to feeling manpain about Casca’s trauma, which is a huge disservice to both characters if it’s never brought up again and dealt with.
And while Farnese is bettering herself we’ve never really seen her actual issues addressed, and her whole sadism burning ppl alive thing just kind of easily melted away in favour of a new helping someone philosophy. I wished for more internal conflict there, basically, and I hope it’s addressed in the future but for now it seems like a pretty abrupt change and a missed opportunity. And Serpico is still Serpico. He hasn’t changed a whole lot but his issues haven’t negatively impacted anything either.
In the Golden Age all the psychological baggage these characters had contributed to its absolute disaster of a climax. And I’d love, love to see that happen again, esp with Farnese and Serpico adding more shit to the pile, or I’d love to see their issues flare up but have them manage to overcome them now that they’ve grown in a happier, healthier contrast to the Golden Age.
But throughout the Millenium Empire arc all these issues the characters have never really affected them adversely. I’m hoping that now that we’re delving into Casca’s psyche things will start to snowball and we’ll see that these traumas haven’t just been forgotten but only put on hold for a while so this group can be happy and hopeful.
But for now I do miss reading about fucked up characters and the internal and external challenges posed by their issues.
(cont’d) characters that have seem to multiplied since the aftermath of
the eclipse. the comic bits with isidro and puck are especially
tiring. idk i just miss griffith/guts interactions and the golden
age/black swordsman arc.
Yk I mostly agree. I love Farnese and Serpico, and I find NeoGriff’s side of the story rly engaging, but overall I’m also not super invested in most of Guts’ posse and I feel like I’m kind of just waiting for half of them to die lol. Like Magnifico, you’re just not necessary man, your cute subplot with Puck adds nothing.
When it comes to tone I also mostly agree? Like I recognize that this is personal opinion and I totally get why people would enjoy lighter, less angsty Berserk just as much if not more, but I’m a big fan
of dark stuff, I got into Berserk in part bc it was dark and tragic, and
my favourite kind of light fluffy stuff is when it’s bittersweet
because of what’s to come (eg the whole golden age), or when it’s a stark contrast to the darkness
surrounding (eg when Jill falls asleep on Guts’ lap – great sweet
moment, all the sweeter because it’s surrounded by darkness in and around Guts).
So yeah, it’s subjective, but also… tbh I think the way the change of tone has been executed is lacking. Liiike, idk eg the Golden Age had a lot of light, good, funny moments, and the tone of it definitely wasn’t grimdark until everything went to pieces. But the humour was more balanced and natural and plot-based, I felt, rather than the current digressions for Puck to be cutesy and Isidro to be a little brat. Like, Puck also had gr8 funny moments during the Black Swordsman and Lost Children arcs, to balance out the rly dark tone, but they felt better integrated to me then in general, character-revealing and part of the plot, rather than asides that distract from the focus of the moment.
Maybe it’s part of the difficulty of making your core cast larger – like there are a lot of panels now that are just a series of reactions from the side characters to the main action, and it interrupts the flow imo. The secondary Hawks in the Golden Age didn’t get that amount of time dedicated to their reactions to stuff bc they weren’t important except insofar as their reactions added to the tone or to our understanding of the main characters (eg the abject horror when they run into the eclipse, the raiders crying when Guts returns, etc). Now it feels like an obligation to include 8 characters in everything even when they’re not particularly important to the scene.
Also there’s a bit of tonal whiplash with that bc it’s still just as gorey and violent, and there’s still gratuitous rape w/ trolls and ganeshka eg (though way fewer rape threats and attempts at least, which is one blessing for sure). It’s just that there’s more children and elves and their wacky antics too, which makes it a little whiplashy at times.
And this isn’t really related to anything you said but for my part there’s also the way that the first two arcs feel like a self contained story. The Black Swordsman arc shows Guts being a depressed anti-hero, the Golden Age arc shows how that came to be. The rest of it is very open-ended, which isn’t a bad thing obviously because we’re all excited to see where it’s going and that’s the nature of an ongoing series, but it does make it harder for me personally to enjoy some of it because I don’t know what the payoff is yet. A lot of the post-eclipse stuff feels like seed-sowing for later drama to me, and until we get to that drama I’m unable to react to the seeds with anything more concrete than anticipation.
TBH tho that’s just my personal thing. I almost never get into ongoing stuff lol, most of the shows I watch I wait until they’re over because this is how I feel about ongoing works. For lots of other people I’m sure the sense of anticipation and not knowing what’s to come adds to their enjoyment, rather than diminishing it, but for me I feel like I can never truly appreciate something until it’s over. So looking back I might find all this a nice change of pace between dark angsty and emotional arcs, but at the moment I do miss the angst lol.
lol sorry I kind of took this as an opportunity to share my own less positive thoughts on current Berserk. Don’t get me wrong though everyone reading this, I still love it, and it still has a lot of breathtaking sequences and moments, and a lot of great characters. And earlier Berserk wasn’t perfect either by a longshot. But yk, just when it comes to tone and style of comedy and cast of characters I get why people would have a preference.
i honestly can’t comprehend the concept of sitting down to read berserk and not coming out of it shipping guts/griffith, at least in the sense of being heavily invested in their intense, eroticized relationship
i mean yeah ok it takes all kinds, there are people out there who watched xena and thought her and gabrielle had a sisterly bond, apparently there are people who watched hannibal and thought hannibal being head over heels in love with will was an elaborate fakeout bc they think he’s incapable of emotions or smthn, but like, man, idk
idk how that works. idk how you read a story that’s like:
– these two dudes hate each other. the reason is because one sacrificed the other in a ceremony where to escape unbearable emotional pain you have to sacrifice a person you love so much it’s like they’re a part of you, and your illustrative example for this concept is a husband and wife. – let’s introduce their relationship with the textual suggestion that one is sexually attracted to the other. and just to make it even the other can mention how pretty and beautiful he is multiple times. – oh now here’s 70 chapters to demonstrate the fact that these dudes care more about each other than anything else in the world. we’ll state that outright too. – 90% of the purpose of this arc is to show how meaningful and deep and intense and life-altering this relationship is. – now one guy is supposed to be emotionless but oops turns out when he looks at the dude he loved more than anything his heart starts fluttering. – now this other guy is supposed to be consumed by hate but oops the dude he hates looks just like the dude he loved more than anything again and his resolve crumbles. – now they’ll have totally separate narratives for a while but just look at this foundation of solid bedrock their relationship is built on, informing every pointed moment of emotional ambiguity, every reminder of the past, and every hint of potential foreshadowing.
and come away from it thinking ‘man i can’t wait til guts cuts off griffith’s head and rides off into the sunset with casca as his narrative reward’
UM??? IDK MAN
Maybe people dont come out of Berserk shipping Griffith and Guts because Griffith literally betrayed Guts and CURSED him. Remember that? Maybe some people don’t ship Griffith and Guts together because Griffith is a rapist. Maybe they don’t because he is a sociopathic war criminal. Maybe they don’t do it because he isn’t a fucking???? Good person???? Like come on your metas are usually good don’t come on here playin dumb and actin fuckin stupid because what you are saying is stupid. I personally do not even have the slightest problem with griffguts. But why can’t ya’ll have the fuckin decency to keep this shit in the golden age???? Why do you have to bring this mess into post-eclipse arcs?
Golden age????? You could honestly make that shit as HOMOEROTIC as you fucking want bro. But Post-Eclipse??? oH the fucking nerve. Like. I swear to fucking God some of you Berserk fans really have your fucking nerve. It takes Zodd’s huge, sweaty, hairy bowling balls to look at eclipse and post-eclipse content and still find a way to write a whole ass essay about why you think Griffith and Guts belong together, unwittingly using casca’s plight as your source.
If you wanna sit there and ship a toxic as fuck ship then that’s on you do you. Nobody’s judging you for that whatever. But don’t sit up here and question why people don’t agree with your toxic ship. Don’t play dumb. Like????? You already KNOW why ??????????? You should already KNOOOOOW whhhhhhy somebody would NOT be okay with griffguts??????????? It should be obvious?????????? Every reason why people WOULDNT dig it is lit staring you right in your face???? and has been for a WHILE??? this little bullshit list you composed is not ONLY missing PIVOTAL details in regards to the reasons why Griffith and Guts’ friendship fell out in the first place, but EVERYTHING in that list became meaningless once Griffith went left and decided to do what the fuck he did.
Again idk man, maybe a nigga wanna see Guts chop this inbred piegon’s head off and run away with Casca in the sunset because that’d be the perfect revenge against the feather duster motherfucker that tried to take everything away from him and his family. Peace.
ok look
this was tongue in cheek and off-the-cuff and purposefully exaggerated for the sake of humour, and in the post directly after i clarified that i don’t mean “want them to live happily ever after” by “ship”, i mean be invested in their gay dynamic bc it’s the basis of the story. I mean I actually kinda stated that in the beginning of this post too, but not quite as clearly so w/e. The only point of this post was to point out that Guts and Griffith’s relationship is the basis for 90% of the complexity and emotional investment in both characters, yeah even after the Eclipse, and it IS weird and unrelatable to me to enjoy Berserk while dismissing that. Like I know there are other things to like about it, I like other aspects too, but the emotional complex friends to enemies relationship is still the whole point so yeah it’s strange to me that a lot of Berserk fans ignore it.
and tbh I actually don’t know why someone would hate Guts/Griff but ship Guts/Casca. like I actually think it’s downright bizarre to call griffguts toxic but want guts to ride off into the sunset with the woman who is terrified of him bc he tried to rape her.
And I don’t know why someone would want an unemotional action climax between Guts and Griff where Guts kills Griffith instead of an emotional climax as payoff to their intense relationship, because I don’t get why you wouldn’t drop the manga after it became clear that Miura is still invested in keeping the relationship between Guts and Griff complicated and interesting (and has directly stated that he intends NeoGriffith to be morally ambiguous like lol jfc dude) despite turning one of them into an evil demon rapist and the other into a human attempted rapist, if badly written sexual assault is a dealbreaker. Like, yeah, it’s a mess, both characters are terrible, Miura is a pos for throwing rape in as a lazy way of demonstrating a character’s “dark side,” and wanting the reader to still give a shit about those rapey characters, but that’s the story we’re stuck with and that story is still about Guts and Griffith’s relationship.
A story about a guy turning into an evil demon rapist and becoming a two dimensional moustache twirling villain with no depth and another guy sexually assaulting his traumatized girlfriend and becoming a loathesome piece of shit you’re supposed to hate would be a very different, less offensive but also more boring, story, and it’s just not the story we’re reading. We’re stuck with the story where the author made his two main characters sexually assault the same woman and yet continues to write them as interesting complicated characters. So you can ignore the complexity or you can ignore the rape or you can put down the book or you can throw up your hands and go ‘miura is an offensive dick’ and doublethink your way through the story. And tl;dr it’s weird to me that so many Berserk fans go with the first option.
Finally, again, Miura is the one writing the story about how Casca gets fucked over repeatedly bc Guts and Griffith are obsessed with each other and take it out on her, not me. Casca’s story sucks and offends on every level but don’t blame GriffGuts shippers for that, that’s on the author. Like personally as a GriffGuts shipper I want those two to kill each other in an emotionally climactic way and Casca to live happily ever after far away from both of them.
Ok so see I really hate when people blame guts himself for trying to rape casca because it literally wasn’t him WHY DOESN’T ANYONE FUCKING REMEMBER THAT it was a literal ghost or demon or whatever but point is it possessed him and made him do that
I disagree. from what I can tell the hound is a manifestation of his dark-side given more form than most ppl’s dark sides by the brand. it first appeared in godo’s cave which repels evil spirits, and it’s directly compared to femto, so i’m confident that it’s a part of guts, not a separate entity. he lost control and gave into his dark-side when he assaulted casca (the second time, the first time was when he tried to kiss her in godo’s cave, with no hound in sight, and scared her), and bc of the brand’s reality-bending powers, that loss of control manifests as the hound.
i honestly can’t comprehend the concept of sitting down to read berserk and not coming out of it shipping guts/griffith, at least in the sense of being heavily invested in their intense, eroticized relationship
i mean yeah ok it takes all kinds, there are people out there who watched xena and thought her and gabrielle had a sisterly bond, apparently there are people who watched hannibal and thought hannibal being head over heels in love with will was an elaborate fakeout bc they think he’s incapable of emotions or smthn, but like, man, idk
idk how that works. idk how you read a story that’s like:
– these two dudes hate each other. the reason is because one sacrificed the other in a ceremony where to escape unbearable emotional pain you have to sacrifice a person you love so much it’s like they’re a part of you, and your illustrative example for this concept is a husband and wife. – let’s introduce their relationship with the textual suggestion that one is sexually attracted to the other. and just to make it even the other can mention how pretty and beautiful he is multiple times. – oh now here’s 70 chapters to demonstrate the fact that these dudes care more about each other than anything else in the world. we’ll state that outright too. – 90% of the purpose of this arc is to show how meaningful and deep and intense and life-altering this relationship is. – now one guy is supposed to be emotionless but oops turns out when he looks at the dude he loved more than anything his heart starts fluttering. – now this other guy is supposed to be consumed by hate but oops the dude he hates looks just like the dude he loved more than anything again and his resolve crumbles. – now they’ll have totally separate narratives for a while but just look at this foundation of solid bedrock their relationship is built on, informing every pointed moment of emotional ambiguity, every reminder of the past, and every hint of potential foreshadowing.
and come away from it thinking ‘man i can’t wait til guts cuts off griffith’s head and rides off into the sunset with casca as his narrative reward’
just based on guts’ first look at them, who would you guess is the love interest?
casca:
griffith:
Yes yes yes. This Exactly. I’ma little slightly not well I am excited right now so this might not make sense. But. They do this visual chemistry thing, the angles Griffith gets, the way his eyes are drawn, how they stand together, the light breeze running through their hair. How they fit together in the frame, bodies turned in. And you do this for 10 volumes almost with these characters and then suddenly do the same with Guts and Casca for one damn chapter and now we’re supposed to have that superimpose 50 chapters of the same thing with a different set of characters. Like chemistry. Where was this.
It’s like buying a bag of m & ms and finding Cheetos inside Like I don’t hate the Cheetos. But that’s not what I signed up or paid emotional investment for .
This makes perfect sense and ia, when it comes to visual language Griffith is pretty straightforwardly romanticized and eroticized from Guts’ perspective.
like look at Guts’ point of view shot right here
first thing he thinks of when he wakes up after sensing a naked woman in bed with him:
griffith looking vulnerable and in need of rescue with his hair splayed out
this which is even more eroticized than those first panels
actually don’t quote me on this bc i’d have to re-read to make a real judgement call here, but I think these kinds of shots (from Guts’ perspective specifically) actually peter out after the Promrose Hall speech?
which, if so, makes it even more likely to me that it’s purposeful bc that’s when his view of Griffith shifts from him being a guy he likes who likes him back to being a distant goal.
though Griffith remains beautiful, noble, larger than life, dazzling, pretty, etc just to throw a few words guts has used to describe him, in Guts’ mind:
and then all bets are off once guts starts thinking about neogriff.
(the waters get a little muddier once miura starts drawing griffith like a wet dream every time he’s in a panel but honestly this shot of guts thinking about him goes above and beyond to a ridiculous extent)
oh also i was gonna say that it blows that casca gets super diminished and girlier once she ends up slotted into the love interest role, like judeau even comments on it ffs.
Anyway, on Griffith always facing away in Guts’ memories:
Guts left Griffith in the snow in an attempt to become Griffith’s equal. When he came back, by all standards of measurement these two dudes give a fuck about, Guts is by far his superior. Griffith was broken by Guts leaving, then broken by torture, and is dependent physically and emotionally on him.
It’s a very be careful what you wish for thing lol.
However, one side-effect of the Eclipse, not intended by Griffith but intended by the narrative, is it’s a reset button on their stupid power dynamic obsession – Guts has another shot at achieving his dream, ironic as that is.
Guts left, when he came back he discovered in as brutal a way as possible that he left for no reason. The fact that his leaving destroyed Griffith was proof that his attempt to become Griffith’s equal was based on misinformation. However, after the Eclipse, Griffith is a god and now Guts is back at square one.
This is basically directly stated when Guts thinks of Griffith’s friendship speech while declaring war on him.
So I think part of the reason he usually remembers Griffith with his back turned is basically because he’s in a cycle of pursuing him, first to stand beside him, and now to drag him down to him.
Which begs 2 questions imo:
1. Can Guts break free of this cycle? 2. Does Guts need to pursue Griffith at all to be his equal, or does the irony of the Golden Age (I left to be your equal but turns out I already was lol whoops) still hold true? ie, how emotionally compromised is NeoGriff?
I mentioned a while ago that the first time I feel we got a real visual* glimpse of Guts’ hound-esque inner darkness chronologically was during the rescue mission.
The way he cuts out the torturer’s tongue is very reminiscent of his tendency to torture apostles before killing them imo (which probably has its origins in the way he killed Donovan), and then he just rampages through the castle like a demonic one-man army, very black swordsman ish.
Look at this imagery like:
(i love Casca’s ‘holy shit dude’ expression)
Plus you got Charlotte saying he scares her, and the Wyald fight is when everyone starts comparing Guts to a monster and saying he’s inhuman.
So I was thinking – why? Why would we get this before the Eclipse, before he starts killing ghosts and infusing his sword with Essence of Darkness, before the brand + killing monsters make him literally superhuman? Why do we get our first look at monster slaying, revenge-obsessed, black swordsman Guts a day and only a day before the main event, the point of which is to make him revenge-obsessed, even takes place?
And I want to suggest that it’s because this is it – this is Guts’ revenge spree. It’s not one revenge spree that ends, followed immediately by another unrelated revenge spree. It’s the same rage. He killed the torturer like he kills apostles, then he fought an actual apostle to defend Griffith, then the Eclipse happened and he declared war.
It’s all intimately connected in Guts’ mind and emotions:
He started off on a vengeful rampage for Griffith in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt, and he continued on a vengeful rampage against Femto/NeoGriffith, also in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt.
We know this because as he’s running towards Griffith in the torture chamber Guts thinks about how it’s his fault that Griffith is there without actually coming to a proper conclusion (if that’s the case… then I –) – and he reaches that conclusion (was I the one who brought all this upon you?) right as he’s running towards Griffith at the site of the Eclipse. Guts’ guilt is strongly associated with his rage this way. Guilt followed by external target followed by lashing out.
Idk, there’s just such a through line to me from Casca telling him it’s his fault to the Eclipse. The most significant moments of Guts’ internal thoughts are given to him processing this information and finally concluding that he fucked up right before the Eclipse begins. The Eclipse didn’t then erase his feelings of guilt, it just let him continue to repress those feelings and gave him acceptable targets to lash out at instead of dealing with his feelings.
Now this is a bold statement, but I think that in a way, rampage part 1, kill half the soldiers of Midland, and rampage part 2, kill demons, are both about Guts avenging Griffith – the latter only in part ofc, because the rest of the Hawks need to be avenged too now.
Because the thing is, I think he still sees Griffith as a victim. After finally acknowledging that Griffith did sacrifice everyone, he still looks back at him wistfully. He thinks of Griffith while flashing back to the lost Hawks after the Eclipse. He tells Rickert that NeoGriffith isn’t the Griffith he knows (incidentally something Rickert repeats to NeoGriffith later, which NGriff acknowledges). He flashes back to Griffith in the snow a lot. To Guts, Griffith isn’t his friend who turned out to be a dick, Griffith is his friend who basically committed fantasy murder/suicide after being tortured for a year because Guts broke him by leaving.
His feelings towards Femto/NeoGriff are complicated and fucked up as all hell, but while his feelings for Griffith feed into his complicated feelings for Femto/NeoGriff, his hatred for F/NG doesn’t retroactively affect his feelings towards human Griffith. They’ve remained pretty solidly longing, guilt, love, regret. He’s not thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and feeling rage at what he would go on to do a year later, he’s thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and trying to find a way to atone for it. Griffith is still explicitly part of the “campfire from those days still [burning in his] chest.”
Idk basically I just wanted to say that a part of Guts’ fuel for his revenge rampage was feeling responsible for Griffith’s pain and not being able to save Griffith from it, both the first time against Midland and the second time against the Godhand, and I chose a very long drawn-out way to do that.
* I specify visual glimpse bc i think there’s a solid argument that it’s there when he kills Donovan, based on the way he taunts him and tortures him briefly first, but we don’t have any of the ragey demonic imagery associated with Guts’ darkness there – he just looks like a kid. So I feel like it works as a point of origin for a lot of Guts’ dark vengeful urges (Donovan is the first monster he killed), but he wasn’t anywhere close to losing himself to darkness then.
Honestly I don’t think there’s anything I have to add here which you haven’t already said. But I’ll just leave this here,
From Schierke’s trip into Guts Mindscape, where at the pit of the fire which drives Guts forward, There is a chant of Griffith’s name and a confused roil of affection and rage which comes with it. And though Friend and enemy overlap, they haven’t quite superimposed yet, they are still distinct entities.
And really you’ve said this before but I definitely agree that a part of his current motivation to fix things comes from his guilt of being unable to ‘fix’ what he had with Griffith. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have done it for Casca on her own too, but that Guttural fear, the panicked “Did I Do it AGAIN?!” that comes from a place of Guilt. A place quite firmly occupied by Griffith.
The “This time, I was the one left behind.” goes to show that Guts now wholeheartedly sees himself leaving the first time around as an act of abandonment, there’s no allusion to leaving to pursue his own dream because really even back then- :”Now I realise, this was what I’d been seeking this whole time.”
What I also like about this is that Guts seems to treat it as Griffith sort of “Paying him back’ for that offense. So he’s kind of subconsciously seeing Neo-Griffith as a very human, emotionally motivated figure with remnants of the ‘original’ Griffith’s emotional experiences and for once Guts might just really be on to something.
Also Interestingly, as mentioned before i guess, ever since the Eclipse all of Gut’s memories of Griffith have morphed into images of him standing with his back towards Guts or at a distance and the imagery is really interesting to me here. Because it could signify so much.
We know that the image of Griffith’s back, kneeling in the snow has sort of become a haunting image for Guts. What if the turned back everywhere else is an extension of this, the fact that all his memories are tinged with the same regret or guilt.
Secondly it could be simply a perceived distance and further unreachability, because the past is literally an unachievable objective. And specifically that shot he has of the entire original band during the ‘companions’ speech. Griffith is walking away in the background there, it’s almost as if Guts realises that even during what he considered his happiest memories he was already losing Griffith.
Oh and the “Campfire from those days still burns in my heart” spread?
First of all. Ahhem.
Second of all once again you compare in importance a woman you literally have an appendage of yours inside in that particular shot with this other guy who actually looms much larger. An more encompassing. With his presence literally symbolically wrapped around you for emotional warmth.
Also Under his cover but behind his back and I really wonder if that has significance too.
And then again maybe simply because he doesn’t know what face to give him. Is it the face of a friend, an enemy, something else all together? Guts doesn’t really know yet.
lol i was almost going to make my original post like twice as long by going on to guts’ decision to stick with casca this time and how it’s framed as him trying to make up for abandoning griffith etc. but then i was like, this is already rly long.
also good point about Guts interpreting Griffith rejection as payback – ia, i don’t think Guts is exactly wrong about that lol.
I’ve been reading Guts’ memories of Griffith’s back (bc yeah I noticed that too, he’s always facing away) as, I guess, recognition that that relationship has been destroyed. Whenever Guts remembers leaving Griffith he’s looking back at him kneeling in the snow, which tbh strikes me as symbolic rather than literal because Guts never looked back. It’s a visual representation of Guts’ acknowledgement that he left Griffith behind. And I think Guts’ other memories of Griffith with his back to him are similar – an acknowlegement that Guts ruined everything and now he’s back to chasing Griffith. I might say more on that in a separate post actually.
and lol the campfire from those days spread is so damn blatant in its acknowledgement of the fact that guts and casca hooked up not only while they were both in love with griffith but, tbh, because of it. at least that’s what i get when i look at a picture of 2 ppl fucking while wrapped in the symbolic flowing cape of the dude they were both acknowledgedly obsessed with plus like you said, it’s with griffith facing away. Which, to me, adds the sense of them trying to fill a hole left by his loss.
Which is why it makes perfect sense to show us this image at this point in the narrative while Guts is contemplating revenge and rescuing Casca because he’s shifting from trying to fill that hole by chasing Griffith/Femto down and “[giving] him a heap of raw iron” to trying to fill it with Casca again (tho he doesn’t actually solidify that choice until NeoGriffith ditches him).
And I think it’s going to be a mistake – we see that Guts leaving revenge behind is good, but his desperation to get Casca back is not so good and will probably have consequences. And I think we’re supposed to understand that he’s doing it for the wrong reasons – if he wanted Casca sane again for her sake he’d be giving her time and a safe place to recover, or just to live. He wants Casca sane again for his own sake bc a) he can’t let go of the past and she represents the Hawks, b) he’s trying to make up for leaving Griffith and c) he’s still trying to fill the Griffith-shaped hole in his heart.
And then again maybe simply because he doesn’t know what face to give
him. Is it the face of a friend, an enemy, something else all together?
Guts doesn’t really know yet.
Also I love this idea.
you think the torturers being outcasts collected by and devoted to mozgus is supposed to be a preview of neogriff’s apostles/war demons
tbh actually it makes sense bc it’s easy to view mozgus and neogriff as foils. like they both got that sinister angelic thing going on but their differences are more light-shedding than any similarities – the whole conviction rebirth arc was largely about outcasts and creating enemies out of other groups to strengthen your group (ie religion) while the point of falconia is to unite humanity with literal fantasy monsters as the enemy. mozgus’ outcasts tortured people, griffith’s save people. mozgus condemned most people, griffith accepts everyone. mozgus upheld the status quo and the way of the world (those with power trample those without) while griffith creates a world with a new status quo
and this is humanity’s deepest desire so it’s basically a direct response to mozgus and people like him dividing and conquering and demonizing outsiders and upholding nobility while making the lower classes suffer etc.
there’s a whole false god vs true saviour w/ divine right vibe i get from this comparison. and i mean the true saviour is still a largely cynical depiction since berserk is in part a criticism of religion, “god” included, but neogriff’s utopia is a lot less easy to denounce as fucked up and evil than mozgus’ inquisition thing.
I mentioned a while ago that the first time I feel we got a real visual* glimpse of Guts’ hound-esque inner darkness chronologically was during the rescue mission.
The way he cuts out the torturer’s tongue is very reminiscent of his tendency to torture apostles before killing them imo (which probably has its origins in the way he killed Donovan), and then he just rampages through the castle like a demonic one-man army, very black swordsman ish.
Look at this imagery like:
(i love Casca’s ‘holy shit dude’ expression)
Plus you got Charlotte saying he scares her, and the Wyald fight is when everyone starts comparing Guts to a monster and saying he’s inhuman.
So I was thinking – why? Why would we get this before the Eclipse, before he starts killing ghosts and infusing his sword with Essence of Darkness, before the brand + killing monsters make him literally superhuman? Why do we get our first look at monster slaying, revenge-obsessed, black swordsman Guts a day and only a day before the main event, the point of which is to make him revenge-obsessed, even takes place?
And I want to suggest that it’s because this is it – this is Guts’ revenge spree. It’s not one revenge spree that ends, followed immediately by another unrelated revenge spree. It’s the same rage. He killed the torturer like he kills apostles, then he fought an actual apostle to defend Griffith, then the Eclipse happened and he declared war.
It’s all intimately connected in Guts’ mind and emotions:
He started off on a vengeful rampage for Griffith in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt, and he continued on a vengeful rampage against Femto/NeoGriffith, also in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt.
We know this because as he’s running towards Griffith in the torture chamber Guts thinks about how it’s his fault that Griffith is there without actually coming to a proper conclusion (if that’s the case… then I –) – and he reaches that conclusion (was I the one who brought all this upon you?) right as he’s running towards Griffith at the site of the Eclipse. Guts’ guilt is strongly associated with his rage this way. Guilt followed by external target followed by lashing out.
Idk, there’s just such a through line to me from Casca telling him it’s his fault to the Eclipse. The most significant moments of Guts’ internal thoughts are given to him processing this information and finally concluding that he fucked up right before the Eclipse begins. The Eclipse didn’t then erase his feelings of guilt, it just let him continue to repress those feelings and gave him acceptable targets to lash out at instead of dealing with his feelings.
Now this is a bold statement, but I think that in a way, rampage part 1, kill half the soldiers of Midland, and rampage part 2, kill demons, are both about Guts avenging Griffith – the latter only in part ofc, because the rest of the Hawks need to be avenged too now.
Because the thing is, I think he still sees Griffith as a victim. After finally acknowledging that Griffith did sacrifice everyone, he still looks back at him wistfully. He thinks of Griffith while flashing back to the lost Hawks after the Eclipse. He tells Rickert that NeoGriffith isn’t the Griffith he knows (incidentally something Rickert repeats to NeoGriffith later, which NGriff acknowledges). He flashes back to Griffith in the snow a lot. To Guts, Griffith isn’t his friend who turned out to be a dick, Griffith is his friend who basically committed fantasy murder/suicide after being tortured for a year because Guts broke him by leaving.
His feelings towards Femto/NeoGriff are complicated and fucked up as all hell, but while his feelings for Griffith feed into his complicated feelings for Femto/NeoGriff, his hatred for F/NG doesn’t retroactively affect his feelings towards human Griffith. They’ve remained pretty solidly longing, guilt, love, regret. He’s not thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and feeling rage at what he would go on to do a year later, he’s thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and trying to find a way to atone for it. Griffith is still explicitly part of the “campfire from those days still [burning in his] chest.”
Idk basically I just wanted to say that a part of Guts’ fuel for his revenge rampage was feeling responsible for Griffith’s pain and not being able to save Griffith from it, both the first time against Midland and the second time against the Godhand, and I chose a very long drawn-out way to do that.
* I specify visual glimpse bc i think there’s a solid argument that it’s there when he kills Donovan, based on the way he taunts him and tortures him briefly first, but we don’t have any of the ragey demonic imagery associated with Guts’ darkness there – he just looks like a kid. So I feel like it works as a point of origin for a lot of Guts’ dark vengeful urges (Donovan is the first monster he killed), but he wasn’t anywhere close to losing himself to darkness then.
Well tbh I have my issues with how Charlotte is written since I think she’s too passive and two dimensional at the moment (though I have hope for her in the future bc there’s plenty of room for her to grow and she has shown some depth before, eg spearheading the plot to rescue Griffith) but I think these points in particular are a little unfair.
When the first thing your boyfriend does when he shows up again after 2 years is fly you out of a tower with the help of a cool monster idk if I’d think to question his recovery either. It’s even possible she asked off-screen, but not important for the reader to see because imo it’s pretty easy to assume that “magic” is a reasonable explanation when this is a dude who performs miracles.
And as for Charlotte ruling her kingdom, I mean, this is fantasy middle ages in Berserk, aka a world hardly known for granting women a lot of power. I don’t think Charlotte was ever expected to actually take control of a kingdom – she was supposed to get married to someone who would do that. And from her point of view she’s marrying the literal saviour of the world, declared divine by the highest religious authority, regular performer of miracles, who magically created the best damn kingdom the world’s ever seen. I don’t think she’d feel the need to vy for control when by all accounts Griffith is doing a bang up job.
Like idk she’s boring to me too, but her choices and reactions all make sense to me since she’s a sheltered princess without a lot of life experience, so I can’t really direct any ire at her. I just wish she was written to be a little more dynamic I guess, and I can totally see why her passivity would grate on you. Here’s hoping she does something interesting in the future.
Oh and lastly I don’t think there’s any reason to believe Griffith wouldn’t continue being blandly nice after marrying her. Why do you think that would change?
Neo-Griffith is honestly really hard for me to understand. Like what’s going on in that mind of his, it’s so difficult to tell.
I’m not really sure about offended because he didn’t seem angry to me just dissapointed and slightly deflated but I do think he was shocked, much like most of us didn’t see that slap coming.
However I don’t think that Rickert’s refusal came as a complete surprise to Griffith, he’d already considered the possibility, he’d already said “It’s possible you may hate me after knowing the truth…”
But it’s interesting that he didn’t say probable. That’s most probably Griffith’s personal desires warping the truth of the facts around him. Griffith wants to go back to that stage in his life when he had it all figured out, and the Band of the Hawk was by his side. He wants to think that Rickert may chose to join him because he Wants Rickert to join him. All his actions with the Neo Band of the Hawk reflect his desire. He’s trying to rebuild what he’s lost. But They are empty replacements, and so to have Rickert back , a real part of the past he’s trying to recreate is important to him.
It reminds me of two lines from the Manga which have been recurrent themes
“Don’t abandon what you can’t replace”
“Even if you painstakingly put something back together piece by piece it will never be the same.”
They were said with respect to Guts but I feel are highly applicable to Griffith right now too. And is I feel one of the many parallels between them that we get.
So in conclusion, yes the slap was definitely a harsh reality check for Griffith. Which is precisely why he’s playing it cool and saying it doesn’t matter. But yes he’s shaken and contemplative now.
When he first saw Rickert in Falconia, You could see the enthusiasm in Griffith’s body language. It was self delusional yes. But he dropped everything and practically ran to him. He’d obviously been looking forward to seeing him.
Also I think he’d taken it for granted that the fact that Rickert came at all meant he had already decided to accept. I mean most people don’t come all that way, braving monsters and climbing a million stairs just to deliver a well deserved slap.
He opens the conversation grandiosely, many words and poetry. Exposition and greeting. He’s already expecting things to go up from here, they have been for sometime after all. Nothing has changed he wants to believe that. Then the refusal comes and all that comes out for the rest of the interaction is a muted ‘so it is’ because I think he’s coming to come to terms with the fact that truly? Everything has changed.
@bthump Because you always have the best neo-griffith thoughts. 🙂
oh my gooood i got to the bolded bit and started practically rubbing my hands together in glee at your insight. this whole answer is amazing.
The exploration of identity with NeoGriffith has the potential to be so so good. The way it does seem like he wants Rickert to join him because having a former Hawk accept the NeoBand would be a kind of validation that he needs on some level.
The way Rickert phrases his refusal is one of my favourite moments because of the emphasis he places on how it’s not his Band, and Griffith isn’t his Griffith, and the small differences between insignias matter. And all Griffith can do is passively agree. Now that you’ve drawn the comparison between the NeoBand and those significant lines about forcing back what was and abandoning irreplacable things I am dying to see where that leads even more.
Also it occurs to me that this is the first scene we see where NeoGriff is taken aback and not in control – the way Rickert slaps him, the way he has no response to Rickert’s speech – since the very first scene where his heart started beating and he saved Casca and went ‘wtf’ to himself. Add the fact that he apparently didn’t see the slap coming despite his magic powers of being essentially untouchable, and I think it’s a fair guess that his beating heart and surviving emotions are throwing him off his game again here. (Which incidentally is another solid sign that it’s not the fetus screwing with him bc i doubt very much the fetus gives a fuck about Rickert.)
ty for tagging me! I don’t think there was really much to add to your answer so this is mostly me nodding vigorously and flailing a little lol.
I think a part of Griffith’s motivation for making the sacrifice is actually Guts’ death tbh.
It’s mostly the guilt trip, but I do think getting to sacrifice Guts along with the rest is a feature, not a bug for him.
Here’s the thing: Griffith is ridiculously in love with Guts. Before the year of torture he was willing to risk his life (and all-consuming dream) for him, Guts made him irrational, Guts leaving him drove him to self-destructive despair, Guts was the only one he shared the dark underbelly of his dream with, etc etc. Like by all metrics, Griffith’s love for Guts was already pretty epic.
Then add a year of torture during which Guts is the only thought that occupies his mind and keeps him sane. Guts is like lightning in his mind and now the dream, which had driven every aspect of his life previously, is dull. Many of his thoughts towards Guts are negative (”sorrow,” and “malice” are some of the words he associates with him eg,) and when he first sees Guts again his immediate reaction is to strangle him.
But all it takes to move his hand from Guts’ throat to Guts’ hand is Guts expressing emotion towards him by crying over him. Like, Guts takes him on a seriously extreme emotional roller coaster.
The moment that finally unlocks the behelit and calls the Godhand down isn’t when he lets go of his dream and it’s not when he thinks Guts is going to leave him again and it’s not when he tries to kill himself. It’s when Guts touches him again after all that. “Never again with you.”
I’ve talked about how I love that before but I’ve never rly said why, and really it’s because I think it shows that what finally truly sends Griffith into despair is knowing how utterly emotionally fucked up he is for Guts. To split hairs, it’s not because he thought Guts would leave him, it’s because he knew that if Guts left it would destroy him. It’s because of how Guts gained “such a strong hold over [him].”
Because he’s irrational, because he’s weak, because Guts overtook the dream by a mile in the last year of torture, because if Guts leaves him Griffith will basically become an empty shell (as we could surmise from Griffith’s vision/dream/hallucination of a future with Casca), because Griffith is so wholly and utterly emotionally dependent on Guts, because even after Guts’ touch makes him feel so much despair the Godhand shows up he reaches to save Guts from falling – that’s what made Guts the person Griffith “loved and hated the most,” to quote the Godhand on a parallel situation.
In that last glimpse Guts sees of Griffith, he’s smiling. I interpret his expression as tender – I’d say there’s love in his eyes – but not regretful or agonized or horrified at himself or the circumstances that caused him to make a choice like this. This is me taking this concept and running with it but I think if it was anyone else in the Band he’d laid eyes on in that moment, he wouldn’t be smiling. He’d probably be unable to look them in the eye, he’d feel ashamed, he’d feel, if not regret, then at least inner conflict and emotional turmoil. But when he sees Guts, he looks serene in his choice.
And I think this is because, like the other sacrifices we see (Count’s wife, Rosine’s abusive parents, Eggman’s world that shunned him, Ganeshka’s assassinating son) Griffith sacrificed Guts because at least part of him wanted Guts gone. Guts was the source of the final nail in the coffin of despair, and Griffith was at the point where a part of him hated Guts because, ironically, he loved Guts so much.
So yeah I don’t think Griffith chose to sacrifice Guts out of malice or jealousy/possessiveness or betrayal exactly, but because he loved him to the point where he couldn’t function without him, and I think he resented (to put it mildly) that dependence. Believing Guts would leave him was his final wake-up call to how lost he was without Guts. So when the Godhand offered him an escape from his despair and a way to cut it off at the source, he agreed.
(Which is not to diminish the driving force of guilt behind his choice, but I don’t think his complicated yet overwhelmingly powerful feelings towards Guts can be disregarded either.)
Well so far these are probably my favourite pages of the Fantasia arc (+ the slap ofc)
Rickert’s speech as a whole is just breathtaking, Rickert pointing out the difference in the insignias, the present tense of “I am led by the white-winged Griffith” showing he still respects Griffith as he was but considers this guy not to be him, Griffith’s only words are an acknowledgement of that difference – “…so it is” -, the hair over Griffith’s eyes suggesting he is feeling feelings and we just don’t get to know what they are, Rickert’s smile of pride when he talks about the Band he considers himself a part of…
it’s just so good
I personally don’t feel that whatever is being shaded over in Griffith’s face is malice.
I think it’s him having to face the consequences, or at least feel them up close for the first time after the eclipse granted him the powers to enable his escapism. I think Griffith is slowly coming to realise that the numbness he weaponised and clung to on transforming to Femto is sort of out of commission as of his rebirth.
But he’s going to pretend it’s still there for his audiences’ benefit right till the end.
I am actually looking forward to Griffith looking back on what he did and actually looking at it from the human perspective he now has. Back when he made the decision he wasn’t even close to thinking rationally , the decision was influenced by despair and the mindscape fuckery Conrad and Ubik were indulging in and I always saw Griffith’s decision more as motivated from wanting an escape from his current emotional mess rather than a grab for power–but I digress.
My point was that the Eclipse wasn’t a result of Griffith’s clear thinking or reflection which we know he has always been capable of because he wasn’t in the state of mind to be able to do that then. But now he does. Honestly Neo- Grifffith most probably has a fair bit of time on his hand s right now. And I’d love for him to get thinking.
Put in perspective the fact that the nameless bodies he’d decided to ‘pile up’ back then to try and give meaning to the cries of the mangled corpses pleading with him in his mindscape at that very moment- were not nameless or faceless.
These were people he knew, had memories with, had cared about.
And having Rickert come up and spell it out, REMIND him.
I want that to fuck him up. And I’m pretty sure it’s happening too.
Guilt has always been an emotion Griffith feels strongly, maybe even one of the strongest tributaries to his ambition.Its what caused the Gennon incident and it’s arguably what caused the Eclipse.
Bring that back Miura, Please.
P.S. – I am a hundred percent sure it was Locus not Griffith who sent Rakshas after Rickert. Like dude was raving mad about that slap.Broke a wall.
Yk, take the “so you could bury your fragile human heart” line to the count, add Puck pointing out that the Count is still human even though he denies it (like you said in that other response – apostles are in a way almost extra human, I totally agree), add Rosine fucking up because Jill was in danger, especially add Ganeshka’s terrified isolation when he ascended to a higher plane, and add Femto’s failure to kill Guts and NeoGriff’s heartbeat, and I’m js the groundwork is so laid out for NeoGriffith to start demonstrating some intriguing emotions (to the audience if not other people) that you could build a skyscraper on that foundation.
I could see him questioning his own identity after going through 3 magical transformation sequences and Rickert straight up calling him not-Griffith, the way Ganeshka started screaming “WHO AM I.” I could definitely see isolation. I could definitely see longing – for Guts obviously, for an equal in general – and of course if the guilt made a comeback (and esp after Rickert’s speech I could see that too) I’d be ecstatic.
I could see him feeling cut off from his past as a human (or viewing it like a dream a la what the Godhand said as he transformed) and growing perturbed by that rather than content.
Like okay when he became Femto his heart “froze.” Hence the “strange… I don’t feel anything” while the Band were gruesomely dying etc. How that works with wanting to hurt Guts and then not being able to kill him is anyone’s guess, but we know that when he became NeoGriffith his heart started beating again. I could accept, if Miura wants to go this direction, that he’s basically Griffith now (I mean he’s he’s made of flesh and blood again rather than astral plane evil, and his frozen heart has thawed right back up), just ascended to a higher plane of existence and therefore much more capable of distancing himself from human concerns. At least until his past comes for him.
(Also as an aside yeah I totally agree that a big part of his motivation for making the sacrifice was escaping his own emotional vulnerability – both wrt the guilt and wrt his love for Guts.)
i’m in an attaching whatever shit i think of while looking at something to the post instead of keeping to the tags mood rn so
this has to come full circle at some point, right? this is one of the most important themes of berserk it can’t just be left dangling with no resolution
so there are 2 ways (imo) for it to come full circle – Guts finally becomes Griffith’s equal (either they’re equalized in some way that makes the whole absolute god incarnate thing irrelevant, eg focusing on emotions rather than power, or Guts becomes a god, or Griffith loses godhood)
or the fact that Griffith is now absolute and therefore totally alone and Guts is achieving his new-found goal of not caring anymore gains significance
i’m expecting the latter tbh. bc i mean like… this can’t just never come up again, how unsatisfying would that be? it’s the driving force behind the wedge between Guts and Griff and was replayed when Guts was seeking revenge after the Eclipse, and there’s no conclusion to that thread yet.
I took a final look at it and whispered, not the berserk tag. Sorry, but I’m not brave enough.
Is this a reimagination of the falling off the cliff before the battle of doldrey scene or post torture arc?
Good question – but now that you mention it omg a reimagining of the whole cliff debacle with Griffith in place of Casca would be amazing. Casca would step up, take command, and own the battlefield. Griffith could have a debilitating fever and share some of his past while his temp is 103 and he’s out of it after like a fever nightmare about the inevitable battle of Doldrey. Guts would get possessively protective the way he does. Casca could show up in the nick of time to save Griffith from passing out and being killed by the enemy while Guts does his 100 man slayer thing (convincing Griffith to leave his side the same way he convinced Casca, ie, you have a dream and also you’re a burden rn so get lost, which I could see Griff either seeing through and brushing off or having a v bad delayed reaction to) – it would just be wall-to-wall Good Shit.
This was actually what I took away from the fountain speech between Charlotte and Griffith the first time I watched it. Honestly the ‘Omg he’s such an asshole for not considering them friends’ was new to me until I saw others talking about it.
I once remember saying I can make everything about Berserk.
@bthump I remember you once saying something similar.
i love that this is on a britney spears gifset lmao, your talent for making anything about Berserk is impressive.
but yeah strong agree, like, Griffith doesn’t call them friends but they don’t treat him like a friend, they treat him like a leader and figurehead. even guts does when it comes down to it.
the scene between Guts and Griffith that comes right before the Promrose Hall speech was Griffith asking Guts to assassinate Julius for him, which I find really telling. Griffith words it carefully, very pointedly not giving him an order but simply making it a request – it was Griffith treating Guts like an equal and friend and co-conspirator. And Guts’ response was, “just order me to do it.”
Which yk makes sense and is a perfectly reasonable and kind of amusing and dry response, but it’s another thing Griffith could and probably did take as a mild rejection (especially if he’s looking back on their relationship after everything goes south). It was easily interpretable as Guts saying “I’m doing this because I’m your soldier, not for you.”
If Griff won without killing Guts or permanently maiming him I think the tragedy would be subtle and quiet but there.
Guts would give up his attempt to be Griffith’s equal. I think on one level he’d actually still be glad that Griffith fought to keep him, but he would stop thinking of himself as a potential friend and equal, and start thinking of himself as truly lesser. Consequently he would grow distant. He might feel restless and stuck since now he’s made the choice to leave the Band once and been unable to. At any rate, he and Griffith would absolutely lose their camraderie.
Guts would no longer be the person who treats Griffith irreverently, disobeys orders, has waterfights, etc. Griffith would be up on a pedestal now, totally unreachable, and that would be reflected in Guts’ attitude towards him. He’d still admire him (though he’d probably still feel some resentment too), but he’d treat him like a leader and figurehead, not a person anymore.
Good ending: Griffith eventually breaks, does stuff like… idk starts pushing Guts’ boundaries, gives him more commands that keep him close (promotion to bodyguard?), tries to force conversation etc, eventually Guts feels backed into a corner and they have a confrontation and finally manage to talk and grow. OR Griffith does something stupid and irrational for him again and Guts finally manages to have an uninterrupted conversation with him about it.
Bad ending: Griffith lets the distance grow, resigns himself to it, throws himself into political machinations, loses touch with the Band in general now that he’s among nobility, maintains only a working relationship with his former Hawk commanders, gets everything he thought he wanted and ends up miserable without knowing why.
If Griffith just killed Guts then I think, if I had to settle on one outcome, he’d suppress his emotions harder than he’s ever suppressed anything before, continue on like normal, grow distant from the Band who would probably be pretty disturbed by this reaction, marry Charlotte, and one day have a complete breakdown.
I’m kind of into the idea of Griffith achieving his dream at a cost he can’t bear ngl.
I’ve been wondering Like is there people out there who like…don’t think of Griffith and femto as the same person you know like how some dipshits are like “oh no anakin didn’t slaughter the younglings that was darth Vader darth Vader killed anakin from a certain point of view actually” is there people who think Griffith didn’t rape casca and slaughter the entirety of the band of hawk?
That it was his fucking alter ego countess boochie flagrante
tbf unlike anakin griffith literally got an explicitly described evil injection (”a fissure in your heart will open into which evil will surge), a new body created out of the same negativity as the idea of evil, and was explicitly shown losing his capacity to feel as the Band died and he was transforming so like…
yeah i feel it’s pretty well-established canon that femto is different than griffith.
whether you’d say griffith’s dark side + extra evil + new name – ability to feel empathy and other positive emotions = technically a new person or not doesn’t really matter imo, he’s definitely shown to be magically transformed enough physically and mentally for me to be able to draw a pretty solid line between femto and griffith regardless.
I mean they don’t put it down to magic but anakin DOES actually change when he becomes a sith it’s actually shown through out the series that being apart of the dark side does change a person at least physically (I think anyway maybe that was just a theory I read..)
I know there’s a big difference between pre and post eclipse Griffith my main point here is that it was /still/ Griffith who did those things regardless of how much he changed unlike some ppl may say
I used darth Vader as a comparison mainly because I assumed it would be the most well known case
I can actually think of two characters who would probably make a better comparison for numerous reasons but since their from a series of Irish children’s novels I assumed no one would have any idea wtf I was talking about
if that’s the case than fair enough, i’ve only seen the prequels once. i guess he did get yellow eyes somehow come to think of it lol.
I mean I guess this makes this a case of semantics then? As far as I’m concerned once a character goes through a magical fantasy transformation that includes changing the way he thinks it just makes more sense for me to consider them basically different people. If that’s stated somewhere in the movies to be the case between Anakin and Darth Vader and I’ve just forgotten then I’d consider them different too.
to me saying that it was still Griffith who did those things despite changing is like saying Guts tried to slaughter his friends while wearing the berserker armour imo. Sure, it’s technically accurate, but does that mean I should hate Guts because a magical element let the part of him that wants to indiscriminately slaughter innocent people reign free? We’re shown and told in both instances that these magical fantasy processes change the way a character feels and thinks and reacts, the only difference is that Griffith was entirely subsumed by his magic evil alter ego while Guts keeps coming back bc he has a witch and a magic kid on his side. but both Femto and the Berserk armour are manifestations of a character’s dark-side augmented by magic and suppressing their light-side/humanity, so they seem pretty comparable to me.
So what do you mean when you say Griffith still did those things regardless of how much he changed? If you agree that he changed first then we’re pretty much on the same page as far as I can tell. But when that change involves an irreversible physical transformation including new name change and literal “rebirth” as he hatches from an egg, I can understand why lots of people frame that change as a new person.
Like at the core we’re talking about fantasy situations that are not applicable to real life so it really just boils down to what you make of them I guess.
I’ve been wondering Like is there people out there who like…don’t think of Griffith and femto as the same person you know like how some dipshits are like “oh no anakin didn’t slaughter the younglings that was darth Vader darth Vader killed anakin from a certain point of view actually” is there people who think Griffith didn’t rape casca and slaughter the entirety of the band of hawk?
That it was his fucking alter ego countess boochie flagrante
tbf unlike anakin griffith literally got an explicitly described evil injection (”a fissure in your heart will open into which evil will surge), a new body created out of the same negativity as the idea of evil, and was explicitly shown losing his capacity to feel as the Band died and he was transforming so like…
yeah i feel it’s pretty well-established canon that femto is different than griffith.
whether you’d say griffith’s dark side + extra evil + new name – ability to feel empathy and other positive emotions = technically a new person or not doesn’t really matter imo, he’s definitely shown to be magically transformed enough physically and mentally for me to be able to draw a pretty solid line between femto and griffith regardless.
Man they’re like beginning the most important conversation of their lives here and it’s genuinely tragic that they never get to finish it bc it could’ve changed so much. Like this exchange is enough for Guts to begin to realize that maybe he’s found a
home and the nebulous thing he’s been searching for (love,
affection, respect – everything he never got from Gambino) here, with
Griffith.
But it’s not enough for Griffith to get in touch
with his own emotions. I think he could’ve though, if the conversation
had a chance to keep going. Guts’ response to Griffith’s “do I need a
reason each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake” started with,
“No, I just -” before he was interrupted. And the fact that Miura
chose to make it an interruption instead of letting their conversation
end before the king and co show up tells me that the conversation
wasn’t over – so it wasn’t Guts saying, “No, I just wanted to ask,” or
something meek and final.
It was Guts saying, “No, I just thought I was
just another soldier to you,” or “No, I just don’t understand why you would,” or “No, I just never thought there’d be someone who would risk
their life for me.” Yk, something that would force Griffith to consider
what he just said and what it actually means and make it impossible for him to keep deflecting.
ok i’ve been trying to write a long involved thing but yk what fuck it i’m gonna be pithy for once and just point something out:
to guts, neogriffith and casca evoke similar feelings. they’re both former friends, now utterly changed, walking around reminding guts of the unreachable past. he turned his focus to casca after neogriffith showed up looking like the old griffith and acting like a stranger. physically reachable but emotionally unreachable.
and i think there’s an argument in there that guts is so wrapped up in fixing casca, despite acknowledging to himself that there’s a good chance it’s not even in her best interests, in part because he can’t do anything to fix griffith.
Absolutely.
Even the narrative calls attention to this actually. That around the moment when Guts says ‘this time I promise I won’t leave you’ after Griffith leaves, instead of getting a flashback to when he left Casca behind in the cave- which is what should have been the case if these words were intended for her- he flashbacks to leaving Griffith on the snow after their duel.
And you compare to just a few panels before “this time I’m the one left behind” and the previous bit seems a continuation of this.
He’s physically putting his arm around Casca, but he’s thinking of something else, looking up in the sky where Griffith just disappeared.
And once again I hate how all the evidence I have of Guts regard is so fucking unfair to Casca .
ok i’ve been trying to write a long involved thing but yk what fuck it i’m gonna be pithy for once and just point something out:
to guts, neogriffith and casca evoke similar feelings. they’re both former friends, now utterly changed, walking around reminding guts of the unreachable past. he turned his focus to casca after neogriffith showed up looking like the old griffith and acting like a stranger. physically reachable but emotionally unreachable.
and i think there’s an argument in there that guts is so wrapped up in fixing casca, despite acknowledging to himself that there’s a good chance it’s not even in her best interests, in part because he can’t do anything to fix griffith.
you're the only one 