lmao i think about this all the time. also audience leniency and sympathy towards guts moral failings is amplified due to him being the narrative point of view and protagonist for the majority of chapters, and in comparison to starkly standard evil characters like apostles, femto, etc he SEEMS to be a good guy, even though realistically he isn’t. the grey morality of berserk extends to literally everyone even guts. it’s like really no coincidence that miura draws guts visually similar to
femto and the apostles
often lol. i mean i can’t insert examples or whatever bc this is just a
rambling reply but i’m sure you’ve seen the comparison posts of guts in
berserker armour or just in battle to femto. it’s like….. so not subtle
that he’s an asshole and not presented as a shining example of perfect
morality yet bc the fandom can’t read and he’s their macho straight guy
testosterone hero he gets a pass for doing bad stuff lol
yeah absolutely lol, like most of the point of Guts’ narrative is that at times he gets pretty damn indistinguishable from demons/monsters even without a magical transformation. Like yeah definitely visually, but tbh it’s also directly stated a lot lol. Like ngl this is actually one of my fave (well, non griffguts) lines:
And then once we’re in NeoGriffith’s narrative and meeting the cool apostles, a lot of them seem way better than Guts by any moral standard lol. Grunebeld, Zodd, Irvine.
Like the dock fight really directly compares Guts and Zodd and both of them balancing humanity/reason and bloodlust.
Idk I love this aspect of Berserk basically lol, I’m all about dark monstery protags. And it’s dumb that so many people want to see Guts as an admirable beacon of virtue because that’s like the opposite of the point.
I mean I genuinely do think (human, obviously) Griffith is by far a more “moral” person than Guts by most standards lol, which ironically is partly why he ended up succumbing to his inner darkness – pushing past your own moral limits is what makes it grow.
Guts doesn’t push past his own moral limits very often because his moral limits are fewer and far between than Griffith’s, while Griffith pushes past his moral limits p much every time he goes into battle.
tbh yeah I think that’s basically his driving philosophy when it comes to his dream. A lot of people get weird about it and think that means he was born as like a cutthroat ruthless evil kid who’d do anything to get what he wants lmao, but yeah I mean his motivations are complex and interesting but you can boil his attitude down to the end justifies the means.
He does commit acts he believes are wrong in the course of achieving his dream, because he considers the goal to be worth it.
There’s also a side of his belief in fate at play, where he thinks if he achieves his dream then that’s a sign from a higher power/arbiter of these things that he was meant to do all the wrong things he does along the way to achieve it.
But it does all come back to guilt. If he achieves his dream then the deaths of all the people who died for it will be meaningful and justified. They died for his dream, therefore he must achieve it.
Also it’s worth noting that the things Griffith considers to be wrong, that make him feel guilty, are mostly things Guts brushes off and doesn’t even give a second thought to. Kill hired goons and keep the money we were supposed to pay them? Yeah that sounds fine. Fight a war, leading many people to their deaths and killing many enemy soldiers? Duh that’s just life. Assassinate people? Yeah why not they’re dicks and I like killing people. Griffith’s mountain of guilt corpses include enemy soldiers, people his Hawks killed, etc. It all fucks him up.
So yk in that sense “the end justifies the means” comes down to what the person in question considers wrong. And Guts also shares this philosophy when his ends (eg become Griffith’s equal, kill monsters) justify his means (abandoning all his friends, torturing apostles for information or fun, using kids as bait/hostages, etc). Guts just has a different standard of immoral, and he crosses it a lot too.
And I tend to think that a major aspect of Berserk is showing how this philosophy can corrupt you, until your means get worse and worse (eg Griffith making the sacrifice) because committing a constant stream of acts you yourself find morally reprehensible kind of numbs you to it and makes it easier to do worse.
Guts leading his Raiders and killing thousands of people in his life would never lead to Guts making a sacrifice, because Guts doesn’t care about the faceless soldiers he kills, he doesn’t feel guilty about being a mercenary, and he differentiates between his friends and everyone else. His friends are important, everyone else isn’t.
Griffith doesn’t differentiate. All those deaths hit him, he deliberately refuses to see the Hawks as his friends because he’s well aware that they can and probably will die for his dream, what with being soldiers, and so eventually sacrificing the Hawks starts looking like adding one more generic scoop of bodies to a mountain.
Sooo idk basically I think you’re v right, his guilt plays a major part and most people would say “Griffith thinks the end justifies the means” and use that as a reason he’s an evil conniving sociopath, but yeah imo while it’s true that Griffith thinks that way, it’s a lot more complicated than “and that proves he’s evil” lol.
Swords/dreams as poor substitutes for human connection in Berserk.
like idk man I can say that I get why people hate Griffith and say I blame Miura (when the culprit isn’t blatant homophobia) for ppl willfully misinterpreting him because they don’t want to see him as relatable in any way due to the Eclipse rape or whatever, but god it still really bugs me lol. Like read the book! It’s not unclear! It’s not subtext, or even subtle! Saying Griffith didn’t care about Guts is a factually incorrect statement!
Literally the entire point of the Golden Age is that Griffith loved Guts. Like, it’s not just a fun extra detail, it’s built into the fabric of the story, it’s the point the Golden Age exists to make. (Or more accurately it’s the point the Black Swordsman arc exists to make, and the point the Golden Age exists to explore the implications of.) It’s not subtext, subtext comes into it when you’re talking about physical attraction between them, but the genuine and wholehearted love is absolutely undeniable text.
And yeah there does seem to be a lot of fans who think Femto is just Griffith in new suit lol. But yk, also factually incorrect, again this is something Berserk is extremely unsubtle about so it baffles me why so many people fail to understand it lol. Femto = Griffith – positive human traits associated with caring for other people + literal essence of evil. It’s spelled out in the Black Swordsman arc and while Griffith transforms. A fissure into which evil will surge. A heart is frozen. The crystalization of your last tear shed. Their deaths are pouring into me. Strange… I don’t feel anything. etc etc etc. We see him visually losing pieces of himself. We see the blood of the sacrificed feeding Femto as he transforms. The Lost Chapter (tho it’s canonicity is in question tbf) says that Femto’s body is made of the same Evil Side of Humanity that the Idea of Evil is.
I mean basically lol yeah I get you, it’s frustrating.
mmmmmh really tho i don’t think griffith was fragile, not before he was broken at least
oh no you gave me an opening to talk about griffith. tbh it depends what you mean by fragile, like I might not even be disagreeing with you at all, but I have Strong Opinions on Griffith being a hot mess all his life and I can’t not take the opportunity to talk about them lol.
Basically overall I feel like this kinda sums it up:
I don’t think Griffith was fragile exactly – when Casca says he made himself strong, it’s not just a facade, he genuinely has the confidence to take 5,000 men and conquer an undefeatable fortress guarded by an army of 30,000, burn a queen to death while looking her in the eye, etc. Griffith is badass, and the fact that he basically deliberately chose to be as hardcore as he could to achieve a goal makes him extra badass imo. So if it’s a case of faking it til you make it he’s definitely made it.
But he makes himself that way by not just hiding but denying his vulnerabilities. Casca says Griffith had to make himself strong the first time after telling Guts about how he pretty much had a breakdown in front of her before smiling and telling her he’s fine.
imo Griffith is a giant self-loathing mess of guilt issues that he just almost never ever reveals or admits to himself, and while he uses his dream to help bury his weaknesses, Guts brings them out. It’s like, the dream is his emotional crutch, how he denies his guilt and self-loathing by telling himself it’s all necessary. But then Guts becomes an alternative to that – by the time they’re assassinating queens together Griffith wants Guts’ to assuage his guilt by telling him he’s good more than he wants to prove he’s doing the right thing by succeeding in his goal lol
And imo his emotional reliance on Guts starts as early as when he first met him, but we see the self-hate that he needs to build his defenses against even before that, during Casca’s flashback.
Oh also I say all this but I feel like Puck’s statement here is kind of a more universal statement on humanity than specifically calling the Count extra fragile. Everyone’s got issues, and got defense mechanisms to help deal with their issues, and everyone’s heart is fragile when they lose that armour.
Tho I def think Griffith has more than his fair share of issues.
(i promote this big griffith meta thing at every possible opportunity lol but it’s extra fitting for this topic so if anyone feels like reading this exact same point but in a whooooole lot more words, i got you covered)
oh!! absolutely, you’re right on all of this, i didn’t want to get too wordy on a reply to my own post then spiral into an incomprehensible analysis before dinner, but i know both of my statements were flawed. i got too thinky and offered no explanation to back up because i was in a rush 😭
i didn’t want to discredit the amount of strength it took to hold himself together more than anything else. i don’t know how he made it as far as he did honestly, knowing how thin that veneer was that kept him from shattering. i imagine he was mythologizing himself just to survive. the ~concept~ of griffith was his alone to bear. he’s ABSOLUTELY fragile. and i wouldn’t call it strength per se (in opposition to this fragility idea) but perhaps living up to the mythologized idea of himself was easier to focus on than unpacking even the smallest bit of mental baggage. i’m sure he would’ve unraveled if he’d started honestly addressing any of it.
maybe i was thinking in a … “could i possibly deal with this?” kind of mindset. i couldn’t, for sure. i’d have to be an extraordinary actor, at worst (as you mentioned, fake it till you are it, basically). even with his mountain of issues and posturing he somehow managed to pull through (until it was too much, obviously) and it’s very admirable (to me, a very fragile person, lol), and very, very sad. i feel like the guilt alone would’ve killed me. but i know he’s a master of compartmentalization and appearing strong to anyone looking up to him (maybe aside from guts, who i think he was fairly comfortable being honest with, maybe because guts treated him like a real person and not an idea/ideal, among other things.)
i’m sure you’ll agree with some of this! and i absolutely do subscribe to and understand these things you’ve pointed out, i’m just … very clumsy at cobbling together my thoughts together coherently or in order sometimes 🤧 i very much appreciate your deep analyses 💖 i could think and talk about this stuff all day, but i digress, because somehow it’s 4am???
Oh yeah I absolutely agree with all of this! and like yeah I didn’t think one off the cuff sentence encompassed all your thoughts, it’s why i was like idek if I disagree with you bc the word “fragile” is so nebulous, but yk genuinely if someone says something about Griffith to me I’m immediately like LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I THINK lol. And ty for your response, this is all so good!
Like everything you’re saying is something I really, really love about Griffith. it’s a contrast that highlights both sides – the severity of how he cracks in those vulnerable moments, like the self-harm, up to burning his life down around himself when Guts left, really shows how fucking impressive it is that he goes from back-alley peasant to nearly royalty while containing all of that in him. And his sheer self-control and the perfection of the image he portrays shows how intense the dark negative feelings are when they do break through.
Like eg Casca’s flashback makes the scene where he tells Gennon he gives zero fucks about him before killing him that much more powerful, because we know some of what he’s holding back.
Like I wouldn’t really say he’s admirable because his way of dealing with his issues by completely ignoring them is not great and causes many problems to put it mildly lol, but it’s impressive and pretty awesome, and like I would also crumble immediately in Griffith’s shoes lol. So I can see why Casca watches him bury his breakdown behind a smile and calls it strength and decides she wants to be his sword.
also
perhaps living up to the mythologized idea of himself was easier to
focus on than unpacking even the smallest bit of mental baggage. i’m
sure he would’ve unraveled if he’d started honestly addressing any of
it.
yesss i love this. I never really thought of it like this but yeah the idea that he’s focusing on being this ideal image of himself not just because he has to to achieve his goal, but because it’s practically a distraction from looking at the darker, guilt-ridden, fucked up real him buried underneath.
and that makes the “do you think I’m cruel” conversation that much more heartbreaking, because it was Griffith opening himself up to starting to address some of it, maybe able to with Guts as emotional support, but instead he gets shut down.
this is so sweet… thinking bout a disabled post torture griffith and guts having a potential healthy romantic and even sexual relationship when its narratively framed as Bad is hmmm good
another point for griffiths behelit shouldve cascas all along au tbh
lol like i know there’s a million and one ways guts and post-torture griffith living a life together could go wrong but I’m an optimist and I think they could make it work
plus yk a lot of the narrative tension in the lead up to the Eclipse comes from teasing the audience with hope spots, which become meaningless if Guts and Griffith are doomed no matter what. I say they could’ve been happy together.
also lol idgaf what Miura probably intended, griffguts is extraordinarily readable as a story about how two dudes failing to act on their obvious sexual attraction was what ruined everything and it’s more fun that way.
so yeah if griffguts got together the behelit would have to be Casca’s. It’s perfect.
Your writing is so good! I love you brought up Guts tenderness and helping attitude with holding Shizu’s hand. I wonder how much different Gut’s life would be if she lived? He probably would be a Merc still but would he have the same characteristics that attracted Griffith to him?
thank you so much ❤ and yeah I find that moment so touching ngl, it’s such an interesting character establishing moment for Guts, after the Black Swordsman arc especially.
Good question tbh. We know at least some of Gambino’s abusiveness is rooted in blaming Guts for Shizu’s death (he says it’s why he sold him to Donovan), and it also contributed to the rest of the band considering him cursed. Plus yk just having a mother around, assuming Shizu would’ve been an alright mom, and I’m fine with defaulting to assuming parents aren’t going to suck, would probably be a good influence on Guts. So Guts’ issues with feeling like an ousider would be way lessened, probably.
He’d live a much happier life if Shizu never died imo. More love in his life, Gambino as a distant but maybe not actively horrible father figure. I imagine Guts would’ve started learning the sword at a more reasonable age under these circumstances, being mostly raised by Shizu until he’s actually old enough to fight. No oversized sword in this AU.
Also I think his rape trauma is largely responsible for his run directly into danger by himself and then claw his way back out style of fighting. I think it’s how he deals with a deep seated fear that started there (compounded w/ Gambino trying to kill him later too) and that hits him again every time he faces an opponent and makes him want to lash out to a somewhat irrational extent (tho he wouldn’t be conscious of it when it comes to typical human soldiers imo. monsters bring it out more). Hence things from pre-emptively charging the ram knights as a one-man army to insisting on taking wyald one on one.
So yeah without that trauma I think he would be much chiller on the battlefield. He wouldn’t be as strong as he is, or as driven, or as singular, and he might not’ve caught Griffith’s eye at all. Though I like to think there still would’ve been that spark between them. But they would lose that two lonely dudes finding their loneliness eased around each other vibe. Also Guts would probably not be as desperate for attention, though he might still be a little, since lbr Gambino wouldn’t be a doting parent under any circumstances.
I mean okay I guess I gotta admit that 99% of Guts’ character stems from his childhood and Gambino’s treatment of him, so if that changed, anything and everything could be different, and his relationship with Griffith especially is informed by his shitty childhood imo.
So even if Gambino and Shizu both died b4 he was 15 and he ended up with the Hawks anyway, I feel like his relationship with Griffith just wouldn’t have that intensity. He wouldn’t feel driven to be his equal and have him look at him, Griffith saying he wants him wouldn’t affect him much, Griffith saving him from Zodd wouldn’t have the same impact, same w/ Guts finding a new family with the Hawks, etc etc.
(Maybe this would be good actually lol. I could see this version of Guts telling Griffith what he needed to hear in Tombstone of Flame, eg. And he wouldn’t leave the Hawks even if he did overhear the Promrose speech. He’d probably be more in a position to recognize that Griffith isn’t so much admirable as fucked up. And he’d be more likely to actually apply Casca’s story about him to what he thinks he knows about Griffith and reach a greater understanding of him, when not blinded by a desperate need to be loved.)
mmmmmh really tho i don’t think griffith was fragile, not before he was broken at least
oh no you gave me an opening to talk about griffith. tbh it depends what you mean by fragile, like I might not even be disagreeing with you at all, but I have Strong Opinions on Griffith being a hot mess all his life and I can’t not take the opportunity to talk about them lol.
Basically overall I feel like this kinda sums it up:
I don’t think Griffith was fragile exactly – when Casca says he made himself strong, it’s not just a facade, he genuinely has the confidence to take 5,000 men and conquer an undefeatable fortress guarded by an army of 30,000, burn a queen to death while looking her in the eye, etc. Griffith is badass, and the fact that he basically deliberately chose to be as hardcore as he could to achieve a goal makes him extra badass imo. So if it’s a case of faking it til you make it he’s definitely made it.
But he makes himself that way by not just hiding but denying his vulnerabilities. Casca says Griffith had to make himself strong the first time after telling Guts about how he pretty much had a breakdown in front of her before smiling and telling her he’s fine.
imo Griffith is a giant self-loathing mess of guilt issues that he just almost never ever reveals or admits to himself, and while he uses his dream to help bury his weaknesses, Guts brings them out. It’s like, the dream is his emotional crutch, how he denies his guilt and self-loathing by telling himself it’s all necessary. But then Guts becomes an alternative to that – by the time they’re assassinating queens together Griffith wants Guts’ to assuage his guilt by telling him he’s good more than he wants to prove he’s doing the right thing by succeeding in his goal lol
And imo his emotional reliance on Guts starts as early as when he first met him, but we see the self-hate that he needs to build his defenses against even before that, during Casca’s flashback.
Oh also I say all this but I feel like Puck’s statement here is kind of a more universal statement on humanity than specifically calling the Count extra fragile. Everyone’s got issues, and got defense mechanisms to help deal with their issues, and everyone’s heart is fragile when they lose that armour.
Tho I def think Griffith has more than his fair share of issues.
(i promote this big griffith meta thing at every possible opportunity lol but it’s extra fitting for this topic so if anyone feels like reading this exact same point but in a whooooole lot more words, i got you covered)
this is a real mood, and I’m ngl one of the bigger reasons I want Casca to use the behelit is because I feel like it’s the best way of totally destroying any possibility of them eventually getting together, while giving Casca an actually interesting role in the story.
I mean ofc my major fear is that whatever goes wrong (and something will, of that I have no doubt) won’t be enough to completely kill the ship and I’ll be stuck dreading it for the rest of Berserk.
And my other major fear is that g*tsca will be dead in the water as a potential future thing but Guts will end up 100% motivated by whatever happens to her/whatever she does/her trauma/etc, with his complicated feelings towards Griffith dropped. But I don’t think that’sall that likely.
But! I think there’s plenty of reason to maintain hope lol. Like in the context of Berserk a happy ending is probably not gonna be a return of the jedi style elfhelm party where guts and casca make out. A happy ending could be Guts dying with his humanity intact lol. It could be Guts’ whole life being a garbage fire, separated from Casca and the rest of his friends, but having a moment of emotional connection with Griffith and choosing not to kill him, thus saving his soul from hell or whatever. Or the next gen children being able to grow up in a slightly better world regardless of what happens to the adults.
Like I’m pretty sure any ending that isn’t “everyone dies and Guts goes to hell” counts as not grim.
Plus that’s from an interview back when he was still in the middle of the conviction arc
–Is it even possible that we’ll see a happy ending?
Miura: I’d say it’s possible. I used to have the
final moves planned out, but lately I’ve been thinking I’d rather figure
them out when I come to it, so now it’s hard to say what could happen.
Being the sort of person I am, though, I actually don’t think I could
let such a long grim story end with a grim ending — like, say, having
him suddenly die. I don’t really like that kind of entertainment. I’ll
leave it to my subconscious.
and it sounds pretty up in the air anyway. I feel like whatever we’ll get will lean more towards bittersweet than purely happy, especially since his example of a grim ending is “suddenly guts dies” lol. There’s plenty of room there, and Berserk hasn’t been grim for ages anyway.
Plus I think Guts and Farnese getting together at least is pretty unlikely after being overtly compared to Casca and her feelings for Griffith several times, and Guts has never expressed interest in her so it would come out of left field imo (not that that stops het ships, but yk, gives me hope).
Aaaaand lastly the vibe I get from Miura when it comes to romance is that he’s not interested in it and just gives all his female characters one-sided crushes because he doesn’t know what else to do with them lmao, so while I could definitely see a bunch of boring side pairings getting together at the last minute/children making significant eyes at each other so you know they’ll get married when they grow up, I doubt we’re gonna get anything like Guts and Casca resuming their relationship for the last quarter or so of the manga. If we do get more g*tsca content I feel like it’ll come in the form of a sad kiss before one of them dies or something.
I have this fear that Farnese is going to die in part to motivate Serpico so I’d prefer this to that ngl, tho I want both to live.
And it’s possible I guess, Serpico’s had less development than Farnese overall so he might be more expendable, and it would be kind of ironic if after Serpico being p much entirely motivated by wanting to protect Farnese, he was the one who got killed.
I wouldn’t really bet on it though, mostly bc at this point in Farnese’s narrative, I feel like it wouldn’t further her story much – she’s no longer as attached to Serpico as she had been, or dependent on him in any way, so all it would really do is make her angry or sad.
Tho actually now that I think about it what if things go wrong with Casca’s return and she ends up killing Serpico? (Uses behelit, sacrifices Farnese, apostles kill their sacrifices themselves from the looks of it so monster!Casca tries but Serpico leaps in to save Farny and dies instead, then Skull Knight bursts in like the kool aid man, does his thing w/ sealing the Godhand away, and everyone else manages to escape and survive. w/e) Like i’m js farnesca/griffguts parallels would be super fun.
Or yk it would still be kind of fitting if he died in some other circumstance by sacrificing himself for Farnese, but I think that would be pretty boring unless Casca killed him.
omg Guts would just be so tender and gentle with him.
I have this image of Guts sleeping beside Griffith on like the first night and holding him in his sleep, and he’s careful with him even while unconscious because he used to fall asleep cradling his sword sometimes.
Also gentle caretaker Guts is so good in contrast to >:| sword swinging Guts, and it’s like canon. Guts wants to be there for people, he wants to support people, the very first thing we ever see Guts do (chronologically) is hold Shizu’s hand while she dies. Guts cutting himself off from people who need his support (Casca, and I’d argue Griffith during Guts’ year long dream journey too) goes against his own instincts and is associated with his growing inner darkness, it’s a betrayal of himself/his own values.
So yk, I think Guts would kind of be in his element in a way taking care of Griffith. He’d be good at it overall – not treating Griffith all that differently, but taking his physical needs and disabilities into account, taking things like dressing him, helping him wash, helping him eat, etc in stride to minimize Griffith potentially feeling humiliated (tho tbh after a year of torture I don’t really think Griffith would be all that self-conscious).
Like, imo Guts kind of fucks up when he awkwardly pretends that Griffith could still recover as he’s dressing him in his armour, but before that, when he’s reminiscing about Zodd and asking Griffith to take the mask off since it’s just the two of them, etc, that’s the typical attitude Guts would adopt with Griffith once they both fully accept Griffith’s limits. Matter-of-fact and companionable, both verbally and physically.
Also I think Guts would touch Griffith a lot, like casual pats on the shoulder, steadying hands, helping him stand even when not super necessary, etc, just based on what we see in canon. I could see an argument that Guts might second guess himself, thinking maybe he shouldn’t touch Griffith except when necessary because after a year of torture he’s probably traumatized as shit and Guts remembers not wanting to be touched himself, but in canon Guts’ first instinct around him keeps being to touch him, so yeah.
Plus we see Griffith feeling dissociated from his body and Guts could be a grounding influence that way, helping Griffith reassociate his body with something positive. And I don’t mean sexually, though hey eventually maybe, but just yk, touch being proof of Guts’ physical presence. And I think Griffith would reach out a lot too, physically, he would crave the physical closeness. Like in contrast to Guts taking care of Gambino and getting nothing but neglect and abuse back, Guts would be Griffith’s central focus, I mean Griffith stayed sane during torture by obsessing over him lol, and Guts would love the attention. He’d feel watched whenever he walked into the room, Griffith would gravitate towards him, lean into him, etc, and he’d like it.
This would be after a while together, not like immediately, since in the day’s worth of post-torture Griffith we saw he ran pretty hot and cold. But I feel like eventually things would even out.
And to digress for a sec, I think they’d manage communication just fine too after a while, with body language, lip reading, and Guts asking leading questions. Plus while I think Griffith might be more self-conscious about this and might avoid trying to talk with a severe impediment, with some practice you can be fairly intelligible without a tongue afaik (mb depending on the language, but ik in English you can be understood). So yk it’s not like physical touch would replace actual communication or anything, it wouldn’t have to get weird and objectifying w/ only one-sided conversations etc like we saw in Griffith’s nightmare.
Oh also incidentally I’m imagining Griffith w/ wounds for a while after the rescue that
eventually heal, because uh the missing patches of skin thing is stupid
as fuck and Griffith would be dead of infection long before Guts ever
showed up. So yk Guts can touch Griffith without worrying that he’s
directly prodding exposed muscle (not that that stopped him in canon for
some reason, seriously Miura what the hell).
Anyway ty for asking this was fun to ramble about, and if you want lmk your thoughts too, if you have anything to add or a different opinion or w/e!
hmmm as far as terminology goes I’d assume they’d just default to “lover” if they ever like, had to label their relationship. Or when it comes to internal thoughts, I could see both Guts and Griffith just thinking of the other as “mine” lol. “He’s my… mine.”
But like, when it comes to relationship discussions and stuff, lol i have such a hard time imagining them actually talking about it. I feel like it would follow the trajectory of the canon discussions of their relationship, in which Guts asks and Griffith prevaricates. like Guts: So what are we now? Griffith: the same as always but now we have sex :))) Guts: ten minutes ago you were crying and saying you loved me Griffith: :)))))))))))))
Assuming they got together in a relatively low-key way.
If it was like, after some hugely revelatory event in which eg Griffith threw away his dream for Guts, or Guts nearly died, or something, then I think they could have a v emotionally charged discussion w/ confessions of love, Griffith making Guts promise he’ll never leave, “you’re the only one” “it’s always just been you,” all those fun + v griffguts cliches.
Or even if they got together in an emotionally vulnerable moment, like say Tombstone of Flame but Guts isn’t planning to leave so he actually says the right thing and also kisses him. I could see love confessions then too. Things like “I need you.”
Like if their relationship just evolved naturally I feel like Griffith would avoid examining it as much as possible, but if it happened in a charged, emotionally intense moment then Griffith might be forced to confront his feelings. Like I still think that Griffith genuinely believed what he said when he told Charlotte he had no friends lol, so I feel like the contradiction between seeing none of the Hawks as equals while being wildly in love with Guts is something he’d continue to avoid as long as possible.
He might never even have to confront it if this was a scenario where he did attain his dream and become king etc while in a down low relationship with Guts. He’d just naturally shift to thinking of Guts as the most important thing/an equal despite social status, while letting go of his beliefs about what constitutes equality lol. Since he’s obtained his dream, his obsession is no longer necessary and he automatically drops a lot of the associated bullshit, kinda thing.
I don’t ever really see them sitting down and having a talk about relationship expectations or that kind of thing though lol, I figure they’d deal with stuff as it comes, and probably badly. Like, eg, I think Guts would default to monogamy without them ever having to talk about it, like he wouldn’t be interested in anyone else while fucking Griffith anyway, but if Griffith ever thought he was then… well imo Griffith wouldn’t say anything outright but he’d get sulky and weird and passive aggressive until Guts either forced the issue and made Griffith admit what his problem was or figured it out himself, and then they’d have the talk about exclusivity. After Guts teased him about being jealous.
Idk I always think of Guts as the more emotionally mature one who would actually be able to have adult discussions while Griffith is avoidant, and Guts is mostly fine w/ that bc he’s a go with the flow kinda guy so they generally would leave things unsaid but when it’s immediately important Guts would be able to force the conversation.
Tho that said this is only the case when it’s something bothering Griffith, or something that’s objectively an issue that needs to be resolved, like, idk, Guts asking where he fits in when Griffith gets engaged to Charlotte or w/e. But if Guts was personally bothered by something, feeling neglected, jealous, insecure, whatever, he’d never say anything, at least not to Griffith. Maybe being friends with Casca would come in handy here lol.
I feel like this was v meandering and only kind of actually addressed what you asked lol. But w/e close enough. What do you think?
oh no lol I think this got cut off. i have another message sent right after but it’s only the letter “S” so I think something went wrong/tumblr glitched and it would be great if you could resend your second question, because I’d love to answer it!
But as for the first part (and idk maybe I’ll end up accidentally answering the rest too) I think it would almost certainly change things.
And imo it wouldn’t be so much because of what Griffith would say than because of what Guts would say knowing Griffith can actually have a conversation.
Like, even despite having the relevation that he loves Guts so much his dream is dull in comparison, I find it so hard to picture Griffith actually saying anything like that outloud to Guts lol. He might, and I think that like, if someone was writing a fic eg, it’s possible to make it feel in character, so yk maybe having a tongue would fix everything because Griffith would finally be at the point where he knows what he feels and has nothing to lose by telling Guts.
But I think it’s more likely that what would actually change things is Guts starting the conversation. In canon he had that slow creeping realization that he fucked everything up, Griffith isn’t a god, Griffith needed Guts, and by leaving Guts threw away what he actually wanted. With Griffith actually available for comment, I could see Guts bringing this up.
Not like, “hey so are you in love with me or what?” lol, but more like just asking Griffith why, the way he always does when Griffith demonstrates feelings for him. He can’t come at it from an assumption that Griffith does love him, because Guts defaults to assuming he doesn’t, hence why it took him 3 days to finally accept Casca directly telling him he broke Griffith. He wouldn’t say, “is it my fault you ended up in a dungeon?”
But he might say, how did it all go so wrong? Some of the Hawks think it’s bc I left. I told them that was ridic but… then he sees the telling look on griffith’s face or something. THEN maybe the truth would smack Guts across the face and he’d tell Griffith why he left.
Conversely I could see Guts avoiding this conversation and Griffith absolutely not talking about his feelings unprompted until the Eclipse happens anyway lol. Or yk if they still got to the point where Griffith snapped and ended up in a shallow pond with a broken arm trying to kill himself, he would have screamed “stay away!” to Guts outloud, and everything would’ve come flooding out then. Considering his thoughts at that point (”I’ll never – never again with you”) I could see him just finally confessing everything he feels if he was able to, because he’s pretty far past self-restraint in that scene.
Idk if there’s anything Guts could say to avert the Eclipse tho, because at that point I think Griffith’s despair comes not so much from Guts maybe leaving again as the fact that because of how he feels Guts is fully capable of destroying him with a word. Buuut on the other hand Guts like falling to his knees in front of him and telling him he’s sorry and having his own mini guilt breakdown might assuage Griffith enough to pull him back from the brink of despair, and then they can start dealing with their shit.
I mean to be fair there’s a narrative reason Griffith had to lose his tongue, and it’s because they could theoretically talk everything out. So if Griffith could talk I think the Eclipse would be averted, though it might be a last minute thing lol bc they’re both still dumb and avoidant.
Based on like, plot set up stuff in the last few chapters, my guess is that there’s going to be a time skip when everyone leaves Elfhelm. Rickert will have spent the last 10 or however many years in the Bakiraka village, he’ll be a cool warrior/inventor, he’ll give everyone weapon upgrades lol, and yk, village full of super intense assassins who do nothing but train + a wizard = handy canon fodder allies.
Now ofc I’m hoping really really hard that doesn’t mean we’re just going a rote route of Guts and co leaving Elfhelm to attack Falconia/Griffith and hitting up the Bakiraka and Rickert along the way for allies and power ups lol. I mean god could you imagine anything more boring?
Guts is due to go Beast of Darkness, so another possibility is that whichever of his friends survive whatever goes down trail him on his way to kill Griffith, stop at the village along the way, swap Guts stories with Rickert, get power ups and allies, and then go kick Guts’ ass and try to bring him to his senses.
Then there’s my Void (probably but hell maybe Elfhelm, I got some vague hopes there) is the actual big bad theory and Rickert and co could end up being part of an enemies teaming up to fight the worse dude plot.
Anyway I guess regardless of the circumstances my answer boils down to Rickert probably being the archetypal helpful ally who
provides weapons, maybe helps fight, and knows more about Guts and Griffith than just
about everyone else (pending Casca’s narrative future) and so can potentially provide ~wise insight~ wrt how the past could inform the future.
And also since he visited Falconia and met NeoGriffith there he could also tell Guts what happened, though I didn’t get the impression that he discovered anything particularly insightful. Unless the fact that he was able to slap Griffith goes somewhere interesting.
Well there’s no proof, in the sense of like a definitive statement, because I think the point of NeoGriffith’s narrative right now is that it’s ambiguous. We’re being teased with the possibility, but Griffith is using the fetus as a scapegoat and excuse to ignore his feelings, and it’s technically left up in the air as to whether that’s true or whether Griffith is in denial. The reader is meant to be uncertain right now.
That said, I’m gonna give two reasons I’m 110% certain NGriff’s feelings are legit:
the first is straight up the entirety of Berserk lmao. Guts and Griffith’s feelings for each other are the core of the story, the driving thrust of every aspect of the narrative, from the Black Swordsman arc’s climactic reveal of those feelings, to the Golden Age’s exploration of them, to the Millenium Falcon arc’s tension as Guts tries to let go of those feelings and NeoGriffith’s feelings are left very pointedly ambiguous.
Like, even when Guts chooses Casca in the MF arc, his choice to stick with Casca is framed as the alternative to his feelings for Griffith. Those feelings drive Guts, whether it’s in feeling like he’s found the place where he belongs, striving to feel like he’s earned Griffith’s friendship, striving to hunt him down and kill him, or striving to escape his feelings.
You cannot write a story about those feelings, make Griffith’s choice to escape those feelings the epic climax of his narrative, then tease that those feelings may still exist only to go ‘psyche it’s actually just the unrelated feelings of a fetus.’ You can use the fetus to keep things ambiguous until the big reveal, but you can’t have the fetus be the reveal. it would be comedically absurd.
But the second reason is the visual details of two scenes:
Femto, completely pre-fetus, letting Guts go. These are Griffith’s feelings, maybe not entirely wiped away because Guts managed to survive the sacrifice, but for whatever reason, they’re there, and they’re still making him do irrational stupid shit for Guts.
We know Femto didn’t let Guts escape because he needed two people w/ brands of sacrifice and a fetus as part of a grand plan to resurrect himself three years later because we see that he has intent to kill. He tried to kill Skull Knight who narrowly dodged the telekinetic attack, and he’s raised his hand to attack again here, only to lower it after a close up specifically of Guts, the dude Griffith does stupid irrational shit for.
Then we close this moment with a distant shot of Femto from a high angle (used to make the subject appear weak/small/vulnerable) as a smear on the background, surrounded by monsters, perfectly evoking a feeling of isolation. This is what Griffith is left with after purposefully destroying his relationship with Guts – nothing but his own monstrousness.
This moment is followed through subtlely but consistently throughout NGriff’s narrative, in the way he’s portrayed as unknowable, distant, singular. He’s the absolute, without equal, and, in the context of Berserk’s themes, that’s just a grandiose way of saying he’s alone after sacrificing Guts.
The other of the two scenes is:
NeoGriffith has come to see Guts specifically to test whether anything can shake his heart. “It seems I am free,” he declares smugly. Then he watches Guts fight (and it’s v worth noting that his very first entranced glimpse of Guts back in chapter 12 was while observing another fight against a bigger stronger opponent, Guts throwing himself into danger then struggling his way out), and feels his heart start to stir after all.
“uhhhh that’s gotta be that fetus” thinks Griffith. Next page:
Like, everything about this says Griffith is lying to himself, at least where Guts is concerned. This is the page that inspired my url for a reason lol.
The positioning – Griffith left, fetus vs Guts right. Fetus is Griffith’s thoughts/hope, Guts is what’s right in front of him in reality.
The fact that this is the final page of the chapter, so it has a feeling of conclusiveness to it. Griffith is a champ at denial, but reality is still reality.
the “……..” “bthump,” that practically reads like a taunt.
The fact that Griffith deliberately came to face Guts to test himself, then his heart went off! Like I said at the start, there’s no way you make these dudes’ feelings the core of Berserk, have Griffith fail his own test of whether he successfully got rid of his, then say “lol it’s not really his feelings though.”
Liiiiike from a pure storytelling perspective, this scene is emotionally pointless if it ends up being the fetus after all.It may be significant to the plot eventually – I wouldn’t be surprised if it is to blame for Griffith saving Casca, even if I think that’s dumb as fuck lol – but the emotional purpose of this scene is to tease the audience.
Guts is unaware of Griffith’s heart doing anything so it’s meaningless to his emotional state and decisions.
It’s only meaningful to the audience, and only because we are invested in Griffith’s feelings after the Golden Age – we want Griffith to fail his test. “I am free” is disappointing, “my blood should have been frozen” is intriguing.
Griffith has dismissed his feelings by blaming them on the fetus, and if he’s right, then this scene is meaningless to him.
And if it turns out to be the fetus after all, it’s meaningless to us too.
Also I feel ridic doing this lol but I have such a huge backlog of posts by now that it almost seems like a waste not to link some when relevant, so for ~further reading~ lmao:
Yeah it’s really unfortunate that a large majority of the fandom is totally steeped in homophobia bc honestly the most compelling aspect of Berserk (imo but also lbr objectively) is Griffith and Guts’ extremely charged relationship, and I think the fact that so much of fandom tries hard to downplay it is kind of itself proof of how super gay it is lol. Like they can insist it’s just platonic but the fact that they feel compelled to ignore huge important plot points like eg the fact that Guts’ sole motivation for leaving the Hawks was to become Griffith’s friend, or the fact that Griffith textually valued Guts over his dream, etc, is pretty telling. Would they need to ignore so much if they really believed they were only platonic bros?
(lol sorry think I just had to get that out of my system and you gave me an opening.)
But anyway wrt your question, I think it would depend why Guts chose to stay (did Griffith win their second duel? did some action of Griffith’s convince him that despite the speech Griffith does value him ridiculously highly? or did Guts never hear the Promrose Hall speech in the first place?), but regardless of the exact reason Guts stays, I imagine that Berserk would end up being pretty much a really compelling story about medieval politics and relationship drama lol.
Like, take the tone of Tombstone of Flame Part 2, and that would be Berserk. Cool political scheming and complicated yet intense character relationships. Actually I say “relationships” but really it’s just Guts and Griffith’s that gets the real intensity and complexity lol.
Tho speaking of, I don’t really know where Miura could’ve taken their relationship in this alternate version of Berserk. Like, I can only see them eventually getting together if the Eclipse doesn’t happen ngl. But idk I guess this version of Berserk would be shorter, and maybe Guts and Griffith would have some conflict (eg if Guts lost the duel, maybe Guts’ feelings of inadequacy vs Griffith’s feelings of rejection) that eventually gets resolved. Ooh yk the logical happy ending for them in this kind of AU would be Griffith forced to choose between his dream and Guts and choosing Guts.
So yeah how about that? Political scheming, Griffith’s rise to the throne, both Guts and Griffith filled with self-loathing and their relationship totally tanked because Griffith thinks Guts wanted to leave and he forced him to stay, and Guts thinks he’ll never be someone worthy of respect in Griffith’s eyes, neither of them acknowledging this and Guts maybe continuing to help him but beneath the surface their closeness is gone, but then plot happens, Griffith demonstrates how he really feels once again but rly decisively this time by prioritizing Guts over his dream again, and they both start to figure their shit out.
As for a no Eclipse AU, I think it’s actually the perfect scenario to force Guts, Griffith, and Casca to actually deal with their issues. Like, in canon the Eclipse is basically a giant distraction. For Griffith it’s an escape, for Guts it’s an excuse to bury all of his emotions except rage and swing his sword at monsters for 3 years (and that’s his own escape and outlet: “when I’m swinging this sword… I don’t have to think about anything”), for Casca it drives her insane and puts her entire character on hold.
Without it what you have is Griffith with no dream, his emotional dependency on Guts mirrored by his physical dependency, and no escape from either his feelings for Guts or his feelings of failure and self-loathing. You have Guts who has just realized how hard he fucked up, who blames himself for ruining everyone’s lives but especially Griffith’s, and who has just figured out how much he actually means to Griffith. And you have Casca who… idk I think maybe her biggest issue now is with Guts and Griffith both losing/giving up their “dreams” and gravitating towards each other, she’s lost her motivation. She switched from supporting Griffith’s dream to supporting Guts’ dream and she has to let both go and support herself instead of dudes imho. And okay, maybe Miura wouldn’t go that direction with her character, but idc.
But I’m going to stay vague on how these issues could be resolved and lead to a low key happy ending because I’ve had this as a fic idea on the backburner for ages and someday I might actually finish it lol.
hill of swords sets up the ideal climactic griffguts drama so perfectly that it’s ridic
Guts: conflicted because he desperately misses Griffith, the way he was back when all Guts wanted was for Griffith to look at him (value him, love him). He maintains his rage by separating Griffith now from Griffith then, and NeoGriffith’s existence makes it that much harder.
That same beating heart?
Griffith: has failed to completely eradicate his past self.
Like, that’s the two important emotional points this scene sets up: Guts conflicted about killing NeoGriffith because he’s reminded of human Griffith, and NeoGriffith evidencing human Griffith’s emotions.
You can’t write this without intending to pay it off by forcing Guts to square with the fact that there’s still some of his Griffith remaining in NeoGriffith. This absolutely requires a future moment where Guts and NeoGriffith confront each other and Guts realizes that NGriff is still in love with him.
Ofc this could lead to like, a final test of Guts’ obsession with Griffith which he then passes by killing him anyway or something like that. But if the narrative turns back to Guts and Griffith focused on each other rather than Guts and Griffith steadfastly focused on their goals in their mutual attempt to get over each other it could lead to some excellently hightened, resonant emotions during their final confrontation.
Plus it’s worth noting that Guts’ obsession with Griffith which he’s trying to drop is an obsession with killing him – that’s what leads him to darkness – while this conflict between Griffith now and Griffith then makes Guts forget his urge to kill. So yk, if Miura’s theoretical not super bleak ending involves Guts not succumbing to his inner darkness and urge to kill, this conflict might actually facilitate that happyish ending.
Or maybe this is irrelevant and it’s all the fetus anyway and NGriff is fully removed from human Griffith’s emotions so Guts can kill him completely sans internal conflict and then ride off into the sunset lol. Or maybe the perfectly on point emotional content is an accidental side-effect of just establishing NGriff’s plot-point weakness.
ngl I’ve wondered this a lot. What would make Guts fall into despair and choose to make a sacrifice?
pre-Eclipse, I don’t think there’s anything that could make him sacrifice Griffith, and Griffith is his most important person. Like, Griffith is his sole motivation for everything he does up til like chapter 130, so there’s nothing else that’s important enough to Guts to make him fall into despair imo. Griffith could make him fall into despair, but he’s not the sacrifice-the-person-you-love-to-kill-the-pain type.
However, that said, I think in like, an AU where the crimson behelit was Guts’ instead of Griffith’s, I could maybe see a scenario where Guts sacrifices the rest of the Hawks. Guts leaving the Hawks to go on his dream journey is kind of… paralleled to the Eclipse, in the sense that the Eclipse is a much more fucked up, dark, and emotionally intense version of prioritizing a dream (an escape from your feelings) over your friends – like in both scenarios the Hawks get screwed over because of someone’s willingness to prioritize their dream over their relationships to make themselves feel better.
So it stands to reason that if you jack up the emotional intensity, Guts’ reaction would similarly get darker and more intense until you reach his Eclipse.
Sooooooooooo idk I’m thinking maybe if Griffith successfully committed suicide after the rescue mission? Guts doesn’t reach him in time but is close enough to see it happen, blames everyone but especially himself… but idk I think if his despair was enough to open the behelit, what Guts would actually do instead of making a sacrifice is attack all the monsters until one killed him lol.
The problem I have is that Guts does have a need to escape his pain, he does it by killing stuff, but a calculated “yeah I sacrifice” doesn’t suit him. Like if he had the armour and this happened I could see him personally killing all his friends himself, but I can’t see him verbally agreeing to let demons eat them.
Maybe if he was the one who ended up tortured for a year and physically helpless. Take away his ability to lash out and he has no choice. Something else would still have to seal the deal tho, something involving Griffith. Being physically helpless would reinforce the idea of Griffith looking down on him which is what led to him leaving the Hawks in canon, so there’s something there…
OOH okay what if Guts ended up… idk getting blamed for the Queen’s assassination or something, maybe he was seen and recognized, whatever. Ends up in the torture chamber. Griffith sabotages his dream to rescue him. They save him but end up fleeing Midland, now Griffith is a traitor. So now Guts is physically helpless, can’t do the only thing he’s ever been able to do ie swing a sword, sees Griffith as insurmountably his superior now, they’ll never be equals, plus he blames himself for destroying Griffith’s dream, and has no outlet for anything he’s feeling.
agh tho would he sacrifice Griffith?
Ok more details: tensions are running high among the rescuers because it was meant to be a secret operation, but they were found out – and now every other Hawk still in Midland is in danger because if Griffith is a traitor they all are, and they could’ve been killed by now. So there’s blame being thrown around, esp at Griffith for gambling everything for Guts and losing. And while he knew it was a possibility, Griffith wasn’t intending to throw his kingdom away for Guts, so he’s like in shock right now at how fucked everything suddenly is. Meanwhile Guts is convincing himself that Griffith must be filled with regret and hating him…
lol idk can I just separate Griffith and have Guts sacrifice everyone else? I mean his dream, what he values above all else, is the idea of being Griffith’s equal (Griffith’s attention, respect, and love), it’s what he’d make a sacrifice for, so he can’t sacrifice Griffith to do it. Like Griffith’s dream and Guts are separate so he can sacrifice one for the other, Guts can’t sacrifice Griffith for his dream bc Griffith is his dream.
So idk I give up on the pre-eclipse scenario. All of the above but Griffith takes off before the Eclipse to find Rickert and the second unit or something and misses it lol. (Also I mean maybe Griffith losing his dream to save Guts would actually make Guts feel better, but idk I could def see him just feeling worse about that. So w/e.)
POST ECLIPSE tho is so much easier because now Guts can sacrifice Griffith. So after NGriff ditches him and Guts leaves with Casca, he kills Casca himself, behelit opens, Guts sacrifices Griff, Beast of Darknesses it up, and just lives for no reason but to kill, like he’s 14 again. And NGriff has to be a viable sacrifice bc there’s no one else so close to Guts they’re like a part of his soul, and even if you argue Casca is, she can’t be sacrificed twice. And I’m making this all up anyway so Guts can sacrifice NeoGriff bc I say so.
Anyway killing Casca is my automatic answer bc she represents his humanity and it was presented as a very real danger that could’ve happened if Guts didn’t meet his babysitters. Plus Guts would choose to make a sacrifice and go full monster rather than, say, committing suicide by apostle army, because he still has his dream which is now centred around killing Griffith.
Anyway ty for the question anon, this was fun to ramble about.
i actually kinda like how unconcerned griffith is. he’s just like, welp what can you do casca, naked man + naked woman = acceptable, naked man + naked man = bad, that’s just the natural way of things and I got way too much internalized homophobia to fight it. (“warming a man is a woman’s duty, he said.”)
lol i seriously cannot read griffith’s narrative as anything but dream/heteronormativity vs guts/living ur gay truth.
like i’ve seen this scene described as just tone-setting casual ye olde sexism, but it feels too significant for that. it just fits their whole messed up love triangle dynamic so perfectly, it’s like, an ideal establishing action that just sums it all up.
I was actually a bit pissed when I found that out, but it’s one of those things that’s infuriating at first and then it makes sense later. It had nothing to do with sexism and everything to do with knowing that people would want Guts killed. No one would dare do anything to Guts while Casca was there. Griffith doing it himself would cause a lot of raised eyebrows for sure and he was shrewd enough to know that.
She’s right to be angry though, but Griffith doing it himself/leaving Guts alone would have been a bad idea.
this explanation has never occured to me but it does make a lot of sense logically.
but then i have to ask, why wouldn’t griffith/miura give that as the explanation then? there’s no in-story or out of story reason to keep it secret that i can think of, and it would make more sense for griffith to use that as his reasoning since it would presumably piss casca off less. plus i guess in the same vein griffith could’ve theoretically asked some dude to cuddle with guts while casca stood guard, but it had to be casca herself.
so tbh while it works as an explanation, I don’t think this is what Miura was intending. I def think it’s supposed to be basically an introduction to the way Casca’s narrative is all about misogyny and being a woman.
(I don’t think Miura necessarily intended the internalized homophobia thing btw, it just fits so well and reading it that way improves the story imho, and I can’t help but see it everywhere throughout lol)
i actually kinda like how unconcerned griffith is. he’s just like, welp what can you do casca, naked man + naked woman = acceptable, naked man + naked man = bad, that’s just the natural way of things and I got way too much internalized homophobia to fight it. (“warming a man is a woman’s duty, he said.”)
lol i seriously cannot read griffith’s narrative as anything but dream/heteronormativity vs guts/living ur gay truth.
like i’ve seen this scene described as just tone-setting casual ye olde sexism, but it feels too significant for that. it just fits their whole messed up love triangle dynamic so perfectly, it’s like, an ideal establishing action that just sums it all up.
Guts’ slow realization that
he had Griffith on a completely unrealistic pedestal and
destroyed him because of his belief that Griffith is distant and untouchable and above him is perfectly mirrored, foreshadowed, and summed up by this statement of Casca’s:
Except yk Guts never gets that moment of realization that his feelings have a sexual component.
And it’s just so easy to read this as a statement on that lol, on how if Guts did have that realization maybe the fact that Griffith isn’t a god would’ve followed. Or if he’d had another few minutes between this
and the Eclipse.
Like I’m js you equate removing Griffith from his pedestal and seeing him as a fallible human to recognizing your buried attraction to him w/ one character, I’m obviously going to follow that thread through to the other character and his paralleled feelings towards Griffith.
Maybe it’s a bit much to equate Guts swinging his sword several hundred times until his hand is covered in blisters to Griffith scratching himself, but hey both are forms of self-harm associated with their dreams. (Plus the blisters work as a solid symbol of Guts’ typical self-destructive way of fighting, letting monsters stab him so he can shoot them, that kinda thing).
Anyway I just noticed that Guts’ hand was bandaged the morning he left the Hawks despite it having been a month since he had to kill anyone, and was like, hmm.
This is actually my biggest issue with imagining AUs lol, and why I’m kind of terrible at it.
I mean I think it’s easier for some people to see characters, their personality traits, and transpose them onto another setting, either with different reasons for those personality traits existing, or tweaking those reasons to fit a new setting (eg Guts could’ve still grown up in an abusive home in a modern AU, with a lot of the same issues). I think it takes a certain kind of talent to be able to like, know what to emphasize and what to downplay to make it work and make the characters feel IC in different settings while discouraging the readers from asking too many questions lol. But it’s a talent I absolutely don’t have.
Like if I was writing a griffguts f/f au fic (to take inspiration from that last ask), I have no idea what I’d do. I’d have to spend forever carefully figuring out exactly how to change their backgrounds to make sense and keep them in character. Like you could maybe argue that if Guts showed a willingness to fight/kill at a young age and a talent for it Gambino might still keep her around and teach her to use a sword bc he doesn’t really give a fuck as long as she can help him make money. Idk how believable that is, but it’s like, theoretically possible. If Casca can lead the Hawks Griffith could lead the Hawks as a woman, but ascending to the throne within the system just wouldn’t work in Berserk’s setting, she’d have to go full on Xena-esque warlord and forcibly take a kingdom. Which would still change her character significantly bc she’d be way darker. Her focus would be 100% military rather than focused on political machinations.
She could still be driven by a combination of childish determination and guilt tho at least? Idk my point is that there are a million things to consider in AUs and my problem is that I feel like I have to consider all of them bc I have a nitpicky analytical brain lol, I’d get stuck on all the details, while other people are good at just pinpointing the important stuff and focusing on that and making it work. So I’m basically with you lol, and when ppl ask me about stuff like AU ideas and whatever my answers tend to be kind of shallow bc of this.
Also this is why my favourite AUs to think about tend to be canon AUs/for want of a nail stuff where it’s the same as canon but a character made a different choice or something didn’t happen or whatever. It’s so much simpler.
Well Griffith trying to ascend to the throne thru military feats and heroism would ruin Miura’s ye olde sexism vibe, so he’d either have to boil Griffith’s whole narrative down to just seducing a prince thereby changing the entire plot, or go full (less campy) xena-esque historical fantasy where misogyny just isn’t really a problem. Which would actually be awesome, and if Guts was a woman too that would be the ideal story lol.
Also obviously Guts/Griffith would be considered canon. Like even if it was the exact same level of subtext as the actual story, Berserk would be known first and foremost as a tragic dark romance, and the fact that it’s full of blood and action would be considered secondary. No one in the world would read it and think Guts and Griffith were just platonic friends. I mean, I guess if I were reading it I’d deliberately choose to see them as platonic friends lol, but even I’d know they’re supposed to be in love.
I mean like, if this scene was hetero it would instantly seal the deal on their inevitable romance lbr, you’d be called delusional if you didn’t acknowledge it:
And it’s just one moment out of so many lol.
Bringing Casca into the picture, Miura would go just as hard or harder on the Guts vs Casca as romantic rivals vibe. They probably wouldn’t have a bonding moment followed by burgeoning friendship tho, and obviously they wouldn’t hook up. I figure they’d remain standoffish and surly until the Eclipse, at which point something else would drive Casca insane and Guts could still eventually grow as a person by choosing to take him to Elfhelm bc he’s all that remains of the Hawks or w/e. Or more likely he’d die and something else would drive Guts’ Millenium Falcon narrative.
I don’t think there’d be much subtext between Guts and Casca in this theoretical version of Berserk, bc if Casca can’t be Guts’ actual love interest and no homo bridge between Guts and Griffith, what would his role in the story even be, other than the dude who brings Guts’ insecurities out (ie Casca’s pre-romance role). The story’s all about Guts and Griffith, making it het just cuts out the middle man.
On the other hand, if Guts and Casca did still eventually become friends and eventually Casca became the symbol of Guts’ humanity and way of distracting himself from Griffith, I might ship it lol. I can’t lie, I’d actually hate griffguts if it was het, especially if Griffith was a woman, and I’d be searching for an alternative. The narrative about destroying yourself and your ambition because you fell in love would be extremely not my thing if it was a woman falling for a dude, Griffith sacrificing Guts for her dream in this case would probably make me cheer lol, and I’d be first in line to suggest that NeoGriffith’s feelings aren’t real.
So idk I guess my answer to your question is that it would probably still be love triangle-y, but instead of Guts and Casca getting together the focus would stay on Guts and Griffith, probably with Casca as a more minor character. And the plot wouldn’t necessarily have to change, but the setting would to an extent, if we accept that a woman could become a war hero as part of a rise to power.
Also a lot of details would almost certainly change, like Casca’s backstory of being rescued by Griffith and hero worshipping her. I imagine Miura would be more likely to emphasize the protective aspect, and have Casca fall in love after seeing Griffith vulnerable, after joining the Hawks just because. Griffith saving Guts and Guts feeling like he’s found his home could be the same, but if Griffith is a woman I wonder if Guts’ backstory would change a bit to emphasize his mother – maybe instead of dying she’d take off. Yk, that kind of change.
My preference would be to change very little just on principle tbh, but I’m trying to think of what Miura would do lol. Anyway idk, this is getting long so I’ll end my answer here.
This parallel/contrast is a great little illustration of the significance of the Zodd encounter.
Cuddling with his sword the way he did as a child when faced with mistrust and derision vs dedicating his sword to Griffith – in the first his sword is a comfort object, an escape, a distraction. In the second his sword is a tool – he’s not wielding it as a distraction from his own pain, he’s wielding it for someone else, as a symbol of a meaningful connection with another person.
It’s also worth noting that right before the conversation with Griffith, Guts was angrily swinging his sword as a distraction while remembering Casca making him feel like an outsider (”you’re just a mad dog!” “it’s your fault!”), essentially underlining this contrast between the way Guts regards his sword before and after Griffith says he saved his life for his sake.
And check out these matching visuals of Guts looking at his blistered hands, just to drive the point home:
I feel this, tho I think the biggest story progression is happening on Guts’ side of the narrative rn so switching to Griffith’s side feels like a way to slow it down I’ll be thrilled if something actually important happens w/ him tho. i mean he got falconia, it’s time to introduce an actual conflict to bring us into endgame *cough feelings cough*
And like, on the one hand I just want to find out what’s going down w/ Casca, like, rip the band-aid off already Miura the nervous anticipation is killing me.
On the other hand there’s a decent chance that I’m gonna hate whatever happens so maybe it’s better to have some extra time to live in hope lol.
lol this just sums up the guts-griffith-casca love triangle so perfectly.
Like… it sets up both the way Guts and Griffith use Casca as an intermediary for physical (and emotional) intimacy with each other, making her life a living hell, and the way Casca’s whole existence revolves around her gender in contrast to the men surrounding her, and ties those two things together.
Plus, with Guts’ nightmare and subsequent relief that it’s a woman rather than a man with him, it adds trauma to the mix. It ties everything together.
And man it is thematically neat as fuck.
Like what I’m saying is that if you choose to believe this is purposeful, then what the Golden Age is about is two dudes who are both attracted to each other and can’t act on it thanks to internalized (trauma)*** and externalized (heteronormativity) homophobia, and this fucks up both the dudes in question, and the woman/en (? Charlotte isn’t shown to suffer from this, but I imagine being in a one-sided relationship will eventually take its toll on her) they end up turning to instead out of that internalized and externalized obligation.
Casca’s story is almost entirely about dealing with misogyny, and this makes heteronormativity a part of that. It’s not just a woman’s duty to warm a man – another man can’t. Men can’t be physically intimate with each other, only with women, and more, they have to be physically intimate with women to attain like, an artificial sense of self-actualization – in Berserk, their dreams. And this harms both the men in their enforced isolation from each other and the women in their enforced intimacy with men.
Like, Guts even references Casca warming him here after they have sex, again, tying physical intimacy with her to his trauma.
And while Charlotte is Griffith’s means to achieving his dream, Casca is Guts’ – because attaining Casca’s affection, being “good” for her, means he’s more like Griffith, and closer to his goal of being Griffith’s equal.
I mean Guts leaving Griffith because they couldn’t share their feelings with each other, and Griffith sleeping with Charlotte as a means of denial (“take all those sad and frightening things and cast them into the fire”) and then Guts sleeping with Casca as a means of denial (”don’t think about those things. Right now all you need is to feel alive”) both lead directly to Griffith choosing to destroy his feelings so he can live solely for his dream. Draw your own conclusions about how this culminates in the most destructive display of heterosexuality in the story.
Once the nature of Guts’ dream switches from abandoning Griffith to pursuing him in rage things get murkier on Guts’ side, but this reading still works if you consider that Guts’ problem isn’t exactly his lingering, twisted feelings for Griffith, but his refusal to actually examine and untangle them, with revenge as just another distraction.
And to be perfectly crystal clear I’m not saying this is purposeful, or that even if it somehow is purposeful Miura doesn’t still go about it as offensively as possible. Like, by this reading internalized homophobia is essentially positioned as a result of evil gay pedophiles, to a much greater extent than any vague reference to societal norms. Both these dudes succumb to inner darknesses and assault a woman explicitly because of their feelings for the other dude. I’m not giving him a round of applause here lmao. It’s probably actually less offensive if it’s all accidental.
And lbr it’s probably a side-effect of writing a) a female character whose life revolves around misogyny, b) a homoerotic relationship between 2 dudes and c) a half-assed het subplot between one of those dudes and the aforementioned woman
But like still, it just fits together so freaking well. It’s ridiculous how neat this reading is during the Golden Age.
***to be clear i’m not saying internalized homophobia is always a result of trauma lol, I’m saying that’s how the story does it.
I’ll be thrilled if something actually important happens w/ him tho. i mean he got falconia, it’s time to introduce an actual conflict to bring us into endgame *cough feelings cough*
you're the only one 