cutting this for kind of graphic descriptions of sexual assault
I’d argue he didn’t even black out, he was clearly aware when he forcibly kissed her after pointedly noticing she’d been assaulted (we get a closeup from Guts’ perspective of blood dripping from her vag, ffs), we get like literally five whole pages of sexual assault depicted completely without any kind of possession or beast-y imagery, and the subsequent beast of darkness imagery in Guts’ mind that we see after that isn’t indicative of “possession,” it’s an illustration of what’s going on in his subconscious – his own inner darkness gaining strength.
Like it happens in broad daylight for a reason, in contrast to the chapter earlier when he strangled her while actually briefly possessed during a night-time ghost fight, and that reason is so that the readers can’t absolve Guts of blame. There’s nothing but Guts in this scene.
And anyway, at the end of the day the whole point of the Beast of Darkness is to show that Guts’ inner darkness is no better than Griffith’s. According to Berserk practically every dude has an evil rapist lurking in their subconscious, it’s not a great nuanced examination of male entitlement or anything lol, it’s just using rape as a lazy shorthand for inner darkness.
Like imo the only valid reaction to have to this dumb story is to recognize the misogyny on the part of the author, and honestly both excusing Guts and reacting with ott hatred towards Griffith is the exact opposite of that. Like I can’t blame anyone for hating Griffith, everyone’s entitled to their emotional reactions to a rape scene, especially one as offensively depicted as the Eclipse rape, but when that’s your reaction instead of recognizing the author’s horrendous writing, or while praising the author’s writing because he made you feel that angry, that’s an issue, yk?
And people blaming Griffith/Femto for Casca’s character being destroyed, for Casca’s gratuitious and sexualized victimization, etc, lets Miura off the hook. Like, Femto is ink on paper, Miura is the one with actual agency who chose to write Casca out of the story in the most misogynist way possible for the sake of making his protagonist feel bad.
tl;dr berserk is an offensive story about two dudes who both have rapist alter-egos, we all gotta acknowledge that.
i mean i guess to be fair the scene w/ casca and griffith in the wagon confuses everyone, and if you add that to the (absolutely nightmarish) dream sequence i could… maybe kinda sorta see how some people come away not knowing what else to think if they’re the kind of person who defaults to man+woman=attraction lol.
But I mean come on even if you can’t make sense of some of it it’s so clearly about Griffith’s helplessness and powerlessness. Like, the nightmare of living with Casca while Guts is off doing his thing is his worst case scenario and he tries to kill himself right after! How do you read that and think, ah yes clearly Casca is the person Griffith wants.
I mean I’d say a solid potential throughline from Griffith and Casca in the wagon to that nightmare is Griffith grasping at straws for some kind of life, since he’s dependant now and has no choice but to rely on someone else to take care of him (which Wyald helpfully made absolutely clear a chapter earlier), and then realizing that he’d rather kill himself than live that life if Guts is absent from it.
I mean there are romantic feelings there, but they sure aren’t directed at Casca.
Huh, I’ve never rly seen that opinion tbh, maybe we hang out in different parts of fandom. Well, I’ve seen a few people expressing worry that Casca might forgive Griffith, but honestly if Miura writes that I will like, personally fly across the ocean to salt his garden. And I definitely don’t think it’s likely.
As for Guts… hm I’m just going to go all out and explain my take on Guts’ reaction to NGriff bc you gave me an opening lol.
I don’t think forgiveness for the Eclipse rape is on the table. But I definitely think his feelings towards NeoGriffith are very complex and he’s absolutely emotionally conflicted towards him, not just surprised by his appearance.
But yeah I don’t think his emotional conflict stems from wanting to forgive Griffith. What he wants is for Griffith to be or contain the version of himself that like, doesn’t require forgiving, because the only thing human Griffith did that hurt Guts was sacrifice the Band – and Guts never seemed to really blame him for that anyway.
Like when we’re talking about a dude who has undergone two (2) magical transformations and basically exists as three versions of himself, each with apparently very different internal emotional lives, it’s hard not to be conflicted about him.
Guts differentiates between human Griffith and Femto, and Guts does not hate human Griffith. We never ever not once see Guts direct an iota of rage towards Griffith as a human. Not even during the Eclipse, after he sacrificed everyone.
Very consistently, every time Guts thinks about human Griffith it’s with regret, sadness, a sense of loss. He regretfully thinks about Griffith kneeling in the snow like a million times, and never expresses anger about how Griffith sacrificed everyone and turned into an evil demon a year later. He thinks about Griffith among the dead Hawks during his run through memory lane, right after the Eclipse, and cries. Griffith is the most prominent shining light Schierke sees in his subconscious. Griffith is a part of the “campfire from those days” that still burns in his chest, and prevents him from being fully consumed by hate. etc etc.
He thinks about demonic-looking Femto when he’s feeling rage and hate, never human Griffith.
And I’m going to suggest that there are three main, related reasons that Guts feels emotional conflict in regards to NeoGriffith.
One is that it’s another change. Guts doesn’t know what exactly to expect from this third version of Griffith, who looks human again rather than demonic. He knows that he’s not “his” Griffith, because Skull Knight told him the fifth Godhand would incarnate, because he flew away from the Tower of Conviction on Zodd, and because the brand bleeds around him, but there’s a reason Guts rather desperately searches for a hint that NeoGriffith has regrets or feels remorse. Deep down he’s hoping that he’s closer to human Griffith than to Femto, basically, or that more of human Griffith is in there and reachable, or however you want to phrase it.
He lets Rickert hold him back from attacking until NeoGriffith directly says he’s free from his emotions, and then doesn’t actually try to strike until NGriff reiterates that sentiment with “I’ll not betray my dream. That is all.”
If NeoGriffith had feelings, if he felt regret, if he was no longer a malevolent demon, then Femto could be considered an anomaly that would carry sole blame for the Eclipse rape. Like, when we’re talking magical transformations that affect your mind as well as your body, the concept of blame is kind of nebulous. If NeoGriffith basically had all of human Griffith’s emotions and was horrified by his actions as Femto, and wanted to regain his relationship with Guts, then tbqh Guts would probably be able to go “oh well it wasn’t really you anyway.”
Yk, kinda like a Berserk fan who doesn’t consider Guts to be responsible for “the beast of darkness” assaulting Casca, but with the handy addition of a literal transformation. You can argue fictional moral philosophy wrt the morality of magically transforming into a monster and back again lol, but I definitely think Guts would seize the opportunity to write Femto off.
So, to split hairs, it’s less about potentially forgiving him, and more about potentially not holding him responsible. But yk, unfortunately for Guts NGriff turns out to be an apparently emotionless asshole who still won’t give him the time of day and says straight up that he regrets nothing, so that’s not an option for him.
The second reason is that, well, he looks like the dude that Guts felt such ridiculously intense feelings for that he rearranged his entire life and abandoned the people he considered his family just to feel like he was worthy of being his friend.
It’s a whole lot easier to feel rage against an aspect of someone you’re p much in love with when they look like a bona fide monster, rather than exactly like the person you love. You’ll even notice that, except in moments that emphasize the potential Guts has of following in his footsteps, Griffith’s face tends to be obscured or completely nonexistent when Guts thinks about Femto.
And the third reason is that he was already very emotionally conflicted over Femto. Femto raping Casca did not make him retroactively hate human Griffith, but his love for the man Griffith once was absolutely complicates his feelings with regards to Femto.
We see this in the way becoming a rage-fueled monster is framed as a temptation because he still wants to be his friend and equal, as per Griffith’s Promrose speech.
It’s also there in how Guts blatantly wants his attention and regard after everything.
He “threw away” Griffith’s love, so if he can’t have that then he wants Femto’s hate. He wants to be seen and acknowledged, even as a threat, so when Femto says that Guts doesn’t even register to him as an enemy, it pisses him off so much it gives him the strength to climb a flight of stairs with like half his bones broken and potentially-fatal pain in his brand, and swing his giant sword at him.
And we see it when he still thinks of him as a shining light in the darkness, despite everything.
Basically, on some emotional, irrational level, he still wants this:
Like, to reiterate, imo Guts’ emotional conflict isn’t about whether he can forgive Femto/NeoGriffith. It’s about the fact that Femto and NeoGriffith are both aspects of a dude that Guts had incredibly intense feelings for. They are distinct from Griffith but also inseparable from him, and that’s really, really hard to reconcile emotionally.
Hence, eg, a bunch of this maudlin shit:
Idk basically no I don’t think Guts is going to forgive NeoGriffith, but I do think that he is still very conflicted about him. He wants to want to kill him lol, but just as much, he wants to be seen by him, he wants his attention, he wants his love, he wants to be his equal, and he also wants to completely move on and just forget all his painfully fucked up and conflicting feelings towards him.
And I guess time will tell whether he achieves any of that.
like i think the reason i love griffith so much is that he’s made up entirely of huge contrasts lol, because his whole thing is denying his weaknesses and pretending to be perfect so hard that he basically convinces himself, except in occasional moments where all his insecurity and guilt and self loathing comes seeping out.
“It’s not that he’s strong. Griffitih had to make himself strong.” Like this line is in reference to this
and it’s such a perfect summarization of Griffith’s character.
So idk like when it comes to pondering Griffith’s characterization in AUs and stuff, or even not in AUs, just in general, I basically think that like 90% of what we see is essentially a facade… but complicated by the fact that it’s a facade Griffith himself buys into most of the time.
So idk it’s a weird line because you can’t say he isn’t, eg, confident, because he walks the walk as well as talking the talk – this is a dude who defeated an army of 30,000 with 5000, who went from street kid to nearly becoming the next king of Midland through sheer force of will – but it’s like, manufactured confidence that can be shattered, yk? That occasionally cracks and reveals the exact opposite underneath.
I could see either of them proposing tbh. I could see Guts saving up to buy something way too expensive and trying to plan the perfect grand gesture that Griffith would love. I mean this a dude who went on a knight errant quest to win Griffith’s favour basically, lol.
And I could see Griffith like, hmmmm, buying a ring and carrying it around for six months waiting for the perfect opportunity? I feel like he’d be pro-active enough to buy the ring and then second guess himself every time he thinks about proposing bc it has to be perfect to guarantee that Guts says yes, even tho nothing can possibly guarantee it.
And then finally he’d break and just pull it out one night while they’re sitting around watching a movie and eating leftovers.
Idk like, I can see Griffith being confident in their relationship, especially if unlike canon Guts has never abandoned him in a modern au lol, but idk I think there’d always be this seed of self-doubt and insecurity. like his confidence and total self-assurance is his way of covering that up, but something as high-stakes and outside of his control as proposing to the dude he loves would bring it out.
people assume that griffith saw guts as a tool or whatever tbh…i tend to lean towards the ignorance one but like self aware griffiths are valid to some extent i just feel like the first makes all his actions more romantic and im a glutton.
lol i should’ve phrased that as ‘what do most people who have even the tiniest understanding of griffith as a character think’
yeah i think even if he is aware that he’s in love by this point like, that’s still after a year of torture and lying in the dark thinking about his life and his choices lol, for me it’s hard to see him as aware of his feelings before this point at all. Like I think he could be, I could see an argument where he’s known he’s in love for three years and just steadfastly refuses to deal with it/compartmentalizes, but idk I like totally-disconnected-from-his-own-emotions-Griffith lol. Griffith like, buying his own con, portraying his distant leader/knight in shining armour image so well that he believes it himself, shocking himself by his own irrational actions wrt Guts, etc. ia it does seem more romantic that way too.
tho now i’m thinking about if griffith is still unaware that he’s in love – he knows he feels overwhelming things for guts but doesn’t associate that with romantic feelings – even up to and including the point where he sacrifices him, what if neogriffith is the one who makes that connection…?
I think Griffith traumatised himself for losing the duel, so he simply hurt himself on the same place Gut’s sword “hit” him. It’s the pain of losing the battle.
yeah i could also see that as an explanation, and it’s actually what i used to think. like ngl i really like the idea of griffith scratching himself because guts’ sword didn’t even touch him. nicely fits the sexualized scar discussion later on between guts and casca too lol. “I too want a wound that I can say you gave me” js.
these days i’m very solidly on my tombstone of flame related explanation, but yeah yours is also gr8.
Okay, this is totally overkill, I know, but your ask has motivated me to just lay it all out, so ty!
Yeah, I can see why people look at this image and see it as one huge raised scar. It’s fairly ambiguous looking, and it’s the visual interpretation the anime went with, which reinforces this common perception:
But look at this:
You can see when he traces it that the “outline” of that “wound” fits his two fingers exactly. It’s not one scar, it’s two self-inflicted parallel scratch marks.
They’re not in the same place as the river scratches, there are only two instead of four, and they’re also older and therefore either mostly healed scabs or scars which he’s tracing instead of tearing open in that moment, which is why they’re not the same as the bleeding open wounds we see in chapter 17, but they are definitely two separate marks, not the edges of one giant scar.
Tbh I think Miura put them on his shoulder instead of his arms this time mainly for dramatic effect so Griffith is more curled in on himself when he traces them.
imo the movie is closer to the spirit of the manga in making them scratch marks and showing Griffith seemingly tempted to add to them. It’s still a little weird considering their placement further back, and idk what they expected new audiences to think since they cut out every relevant aspect of those marks being there, ie his backstory and the night Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and co. But whatever, it’s close enough for me.
And to just briefly explain those scratch marks a bit further, basically, as much as it looks a bit like a big scar in the manga, like you said, it really makes no sense for it to be.
If Guts’ sword had hit him in the second duel he’d either have a gaping wound or a discoloured bruise later that day, not a scar, and if he got it somewhere else that we never get to see then he has absolutely no narrative reason to trace it and cry while thinking about Guts. It would be nonsensical and meaningless for him to trace some random mysterious scar that has no relevance in this highly emotionally charged moment.
On the other hand we know he has a history of self-harming by scratching himself, and we’ve seen him viciously scratch himself under circumstances very similar to Tombstone of Flame Part 2 – the moment Griffith flashed back to just as we see his bare shoulder with those marks on it for the first time in that first image up there: “You believe that, don’t you?”
Griffith has done something he considers “dirty” for the sake of his dream, asks someone else what they think of him (”Am I dirty?” // “Do you think that I’m cruel?”), both Casca and Guts inadvertantly reinforce his belief that he’s dirty/cruel with their responses (”N- why… why were you alone with him before?” and “Ain’t that part of the path to your dream?”), and in the river in front of Casca he self harms while talking himself through the necessity of dirtying himself for his dream, so it feels safe to assume that sometime shortly following his conversation with Guts in Tombstone of Flame he also self harmed while telling himself it’s necessary to be cruel for his dream.
Now that Guts has left in what Griffith believes is a rejection of the “cruelty” and “dirtiness” that he let Guts in to see, he traces those old scratch marks and tries to convince himself again that it’s worth it for his dream. And the point of this moment is that he can’t convince himself this time. Instead he just curls up and sobs, because in the face of Guts’ apparent rejection, it’s not worth it.
Like I said lol, this is overkill as a response to your ask, but like I saw an excuse to explain my take on this moment in its own post, instead of buried in a much longer post, so I took it.
Great analysis, I would like to add a couple of points, if you don’t mind.
Guts didn’t want to hurt Griffith during the duel, he stops his sword before it hits him: he doesn’t have cut hair, nor clothes. No signs of bleeding whatsoever too (he didn’t change his clothes when he got to Charlotte, so he would’ve been soaked with blood).
And since Miura is very precise with what he draws, we can clearly see the hypothetical sword wound would’ve gone from his neck to his shoulder, not from his back to his collar bone:
The way the scar it’s drawn still bothered me, so I searched for it in the other chapters, and in chapter 39 it looks the same, while in chapter 40’s cover it looks like two separate scratch marks:
So either Miura changed his mind about its origin or he noticed people didn’t understand what it was supposed to be.
I’d like to think the movie got the “corrected” version, but we’ve seen they took some liberties with stuff such as Griffith’s tortured face, so who knows. I prefer the scratching as an explanation for that wound.
ty for the addition!
yeah i really wish Miura would’ve made it say, three scratch marks instead of two for the sake of clarity, but oh well.
I could even mb see an argument that maybe it’s meant to be ambiguous and deliberately looks reminiscent of a scar, maybe to emphasize that Griffith came away from that duel wounded emotionally, if not physically. Buuuut that’s a huge stretch and almost certainly not intended lol.
was that the same thing where he like described her as a medieval version of a business woman or something like that lol?
tbh… idk. as far as female characters in Berserk go Farnese is the best imo. she’s got character depth and agency and a full arc and is only threatened with rape once lmao, which is sadly v refreshing after the golden age. it’s nice that her narrative isn’t “the sad plight of being a woman,” like her gender is important to various parts of her narrative like her engagement and her early physical helplessness having never learned to fight, and probably the way Casca trusts her, etc, but she’s not solely defined by being a woman, which is also refreshing after Casca’s golden age narrative lol.
like i’ll roll my eyes at the idea that miura only added another female character to the cast because he has female readers, and if his audience was entirely men he wouldn’t’ve bothered, but w/e. Farnese isn’t written like The Token Chick or like a 2 dimensional stereotype so I don’t really mind, i love Farnese and whatever his reasoning i’m glad she’s there.
Okay, this is totally overkill, I know, but your ask has motivated me to just lay it all out, so ty!
Yeah, I can see why people look at this image and see it as one huge raised scar. It’s fairly ambiguous looking, and it’s the visual interpretation the anime went with, which reinforces this common perception:
But look at this:
You can see when he traces it that the “outline” of that “wound” fits his two fingers exactly. It’s not one scar, it’s two self-inflicted parallel scratch marks.
They’re not in the same place as the river scratches, there are only two instead of four, and they’re also older and therefore either mostly healed scabs or scars which he’s tracing instead of tearing open in that moment, which is why they’re not the same as the bleeding open wounds we see in chapter 17, but they are definitely two separate marks, not the edges of one giant scar.
Tbh I think Miura put them on his shoulder instead of his arms this time mainly for dramatic effect so Griffith is more curled in on himself when he traces them.
imo the movie is closer to the spirit of the manga in making them scratch marks and showing Griffith seemingly tempted to add to them. It’s still a little weird considering their placement further back, and idk what they expected new audiences to think since they cut out every relevant aspect of those marks being there, ie his backstory and the night Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and co. But whatever, it’s close enough for me.
And to just briefly explain those scratch marks a bit further, basically, as much as it looks a bit like a big scar in the manga, like you said, it really makes no sense for it to be.
If Guts’ sword had hit him in the second duel he’d either have a gaping wound or a discoloured bruise later that day, not a scar, and if he got it somewhere else that we never get to see then he has absolutely no narrative reason to trace it and cry while thinking about Guts. It would be nonsensical and meaningless for him to trace some random mysterious scar that has no relevance in this highly emotionally charged moment.
On the other hand we know he has a history of self-harming by scratching himself, and we’ve seen him viciously scratch himself under circumstances very similar to Tombstone of Flame Part 2 – the moment Griffith flashed back to just as we see his bare shoulder with those marks on it for the first time in that first image up there: “You believe that, don’t you?”
Griffith has done something he considers “dirty” for the sake of his dream, asks someone else what they think of him (”Am I dirty?” // “Do you think that I’m cruel?”), both Casca and Guts inadvertantly reinforce his belief that he’s dirty/cruel with their responses (”N- why… why were you alone with him before?” and “Ain’t that part of the path to your dream?”), and in the river in front of Casca he self harms while talking himself through the necessity of dirtying himself for his dream, so it feels safe to assume that sometime shortly following his conversation with Guts in Tombstone of Flame he also self harmed while telling himself it’s necessary to be cruel for his dream.
Now that Guts has left in what Griffith believes is a rejection of the “cruelty” and “dirtiness” that he let Guts in to see, he traces those old scratch marks and tries to convince himself again that it’s worth it for his dream. And the point of this moment is that he can’t convince himself this time. Instead he just curls up and sobs, because in the face of Guts’ apparent rejection, it’s not worth it.
Like I said lol, this is overkill as a response to your ask, but like I saw an excuse to explain my take on this moment in its own post, instead of buried in a much longer post, so I took it.
Oh damn I didn’t think of that either! god, Femto like, say, straight up ripping Guts’ arm off would be so good with that comparison to the first duel, I love this.
Like tell me reminding Guts of how they met and how Guts first joined him while genuinely intending to torturously destroy him wouldn’t completely fuck Guts up.
and like the idea of Femto playing with Guts like a cat w/ a mouse right up til Skull Knight saves him? Done the right way that could be v effectively horrific imo.
ugh sorry for being such a nerd lol but that scar is an anime only thing, in the manga it’s two parallel scratch marks
which makes more sense imo bc like, there’s no way he’d have a scar from a wound he got earlier that day, and it seems like Guts’ sword doesn’t quite touch him. so I basically think the anime production just interpreted the image wrong.
BUT me being an annoying pedant aside lol I think the idea of Femto personally wounding Guts is interesting and def more compelling, and it kinda makes me wish Griffith did get wounded in one of their duels because the concept of them both having scars from the other is gr8.
And tbh while I actually kind of like the silent menacing vibe we got in the Eclipse, rape aside obviously (so like… the 3 pages of Femto looking cool and badass I guess lmao), I also loved the smug asshole vibe we got in the Black Swordsman arc, and I could easily see Black Swordsman Femto dickishly goading/forcing Guts into a hopeless fight. Would’ve also had that echo of Gambino trying to kill him, and I love parallels like that.
I still hope to see a third duel at some point but having one during the Eclipse would’ve been waaaaay better than what we got, it’s a cool concept. ty!
i still can’t figure this shit out
you got luca’s statement on guts and casca, followed by, on the same page
nina being a helpless baby
then followed by nina meeting joachim again and doing a 180 which it seems we’re supposed to consider a good thing, and deciding to take off with him instead.
this is interspersed with farnese deciding to follow guts and calling him her saint and prophet.
like, is this going somewhere? unequal relationships, guts and casca, guts and farnese, farnese and casca… anything?
we’ve got guts paralleling griffith in a bunch of different ways, from gaining followers by telling them “do what you want,” to wills being admiringly compared to fire, to being compared to a hero out of a fantasy, to even very recently
but it seems like none of this is… depicted as negative really. is following guts good because he struggles to live and miura thinks that’s cool while following griffith was/is bad because ??? is it just a double standard at work?
or is some payoff coming?
what is the deal w/ the conviction arc
guts and casca being at the tower of conviction together as 2 sacrifices drawing up malicious spirits etc is what sets the mock eclipse off, kills like over a thousand people, and ultimately brings about ngriff’s resurrection.
neogriffith’s existence is a direct result of guts rescuing casca
if it was fated that neogriffith show up and and eventually defeat ganeshka and create falconia etc, and it sure seems to be, then it was fated that casca not be burned at the stake there, that guts defeat mozgus and co instead of being killed, etc etc. because if either guts or casca were killed, those evil spirits would not have been able to show up and kill thousands of people as a sacrifice to bring neogriffith into the world.
so why is skull knight’s “maybe you’re like a fish breaching the water’s surface” repeated over guts kicking mozgus’ ass and isidro rescuing casca? neither of them were fated to die, they’re not defying fate by surviving.
yk what as much as i absolutely adore guts’ total lack of rage here, i feel like this is a huge writing mistake.
and not only because miura basically used guts’ resignation upon being sacrificed to try to narratively justify the eclipse rape as a way of actually pissing him off, but also because, frankly,griffith sacrificing him should send guts into a giant tailspin of rage and hurt.
it’s a very clear replay of his childhood trauma.
like while i think it’s not necessarily ooc for guts to feel sad and wistful after griffith makes the sacrifice, rather than heartbroken and rageful, I think a) it would be just as in character for the sacrifice itself to send Guts into Black Swordsman mode, esp with watching all his friends die horribly and b) it would be thematically tighter and fit with what we see of the Black Swordsman arc better if that had been the case.
As of like, chapter 12, we know everything we need to know to understand Guts during the Black Swordsman arc. He’s a walking bundle of trauma because someone he loved essentially handed him over to a hoard of monsters and ghosts, and that reminds Guts of Gambino both calling him a cursed child who should’ve died and selling him to Donovan.
And having Guts be not really all that upset over the sacrifice, but more upset over Femto’s petty demonstration of evil afterwards completely shifts the focus from Guts’ personal trauma and feelings of betrayal to manpain over his girlfriend’s trauma.
like this?
Is extremely good shit, especially after we see his childhood later.
Guts’ frantic denial after Griffith does make the sacrifice, as he’s trying to “save” him, is also perfect set up for this in the way it echoes Guts denying Donovan’s assertion that Gambino sold him. But then instead of giving way to rage and betrayal, Guts just… resigns himself.
The rage and betrayal could’ve even be put on hold until Femto appears. All we’d need to see to justify Guts shifting from regret and dull sadness to pure unadultrated rage and pain would be something akin to what we saw in the Black Swordsman arc – Femto coldly telling Guts he should be dead/he’s nothing but a sacrifice/he belongs to the apostles/something along those lines. Ie an echo of Gambino telling Guts he sold him before trying to kill him.
(and we could have femto sic the apostles on guts + guts survive just long enough for skull knight to show up. we don’t even have to lose femto failing to kill him as he escapes.)
Imo the sense that Guts is personally very fucked up by the fact that he’s once again been traded away by someone he loves, respects, and admires is lost after the Golden Age in favour of the sense that Guts is fucked up by losing someone he loves and gaining an evil demon antagonist in his place, with a side of being mad about Casca.
On the plus side we get the sense that part of his rage comes from just missing Griffith, and I can’t deny that I absolutely enjoy the fact that Guts isn’t angry at human Griffith, but is only angry at demon Griffith. The way Guts separates the different versions of Griffith in his mind and still feels love and regret and guilt and fondness etc for human Griffith is good shit and it’s hard for me to say I’d give that up for anything lol.
But I think it would still be better writing if he was directly angry about the sacrifice, and if his feelings of love and regret and guilt were all mixed together with rage and betrayal and all aimed at all three versions of Griffith. And despite everything I would ultimately rather have that + no Eclipse rape than what we got.
I wanna improve my skills more and challenge myself by crossin’ swords with stronger and stronger enemies… If I stay there may be no lack of battles… but I’m sure there wouldn’t be enough of the battles I want. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll never entrust my sword to another again. I’ll never hang from someone else’s dream.
(for clarity’s sake this is an illustration of Guts’ dream of becoming Griffith’s equal, not a ship thing lol)
i like my femto as a manifestation of griffith’s self loathing hot take more the more i think about it, bc like, it’s a gr8 way of exemplifying berserk’s “people’s actions/choices/etc shape them” “he who fights monsters” etc theme.
which yk is everywhere from the concept of the sacrifice (choosing to sacrifice your loved ones makes you evil), to guts’ sword gaining more essence-of-darkness power the more ghosts and monsters he kills with it, to regular old non-metaphorical character progression like the black swordsman arc.
but the self loathing specifically is a great touch because what it means, which holds true in berserk, is that it’s not doing generic bad things that slowly fucks you up, but specifically doing things that you yourself find abhorrent. it’s pushing past your own limits.
eg tombstone of flame was a dark moment for griffith, because he felt guilty about the assassinations.
for guts? didn’t make an iota of difference because he didn’t care.
for griffith every battle feeds his dark side because every life lost on the road to his dream makes him feel guilty, and pushing away that guilt and doing it anyway is what shapes him and makes him capable of doing more and more, until sacrificing the hawks (guts excluded) can be framed as just another round of casualties, another scoop of bodies on the mountain.
for guts, the things that feed his dark side tend to be more along the lines of going above and beyond and torturing apostles and killing children or using them as hostages lol. or mistreating his friends eg abandoning and attacking casca. he has a very strong dividing line between people he cares about and canon fodder.
griffith didn’t have that dividing line, he cared about every death he caused, ally and enemy alike, which ironically made him more susceptible to corruption, in that it basically gave him practice burying his heart lol, until by the eclipse he was like, fuck it i’m a monster anyway, might as well make it official.
i don’t think this is the be all end all, i think there’s also a strong ‘one’s environment shapes you’ theme that intersects w/ this, particularly wrt trauma feeding ppl’s dark sides as well. plus this is only part of griffith’s reasoning for making the sacrifice lol.
but yk, it’s a good + interesting element of the story.
also somewhat relatedly i love the thought of all those little moments in their relationship that we know existed but never get to really see, at least not in detail, in like the 3-4 years they had before everything got all fucked
the little quiet moments pre and post battle, eating together, drinking together, chatting about nothing important, or griffith opening up to guts the way we’ve seen a few times but must’ve happened more than that, laughing together, sparring together, whatever. there’s just so much potential there.
but i’m glad that we got to see just enough of them to hint at the little chill unimportant-to-the-plot moments, just enough to get the sense of the casual intimacy of their relationship
like guts trying to see griffith after the zodd fight because why the hell shouldn’t he go visit him? or like corkus calling guts griffith’s favourite. or like guts casually reclining in griffith’s study paging thru the kama sutra while griffith talks about the assassination attempt.
or like owen’s memory
and some of the official art is gr8 for this too
and mb my favourite two examples:
like, i love that after the eclipse guts’ mournful memory of griffith is one we never actually saw, nothing particularly important, nothing relevant to the plot – just one instance of griffith glancing back at him before a battle.
and griffith’s last memory before making the sacrifice is also nothing relevant to the plot, nothing particularly important, just the two of them limping away after one battle out of a hundred together.
because it’s those moments that really, really define their relationship, moreso even than griffith saving guts from zodd or guts dedicating his sword to griffith or griffith’s breakdown when guts left or guts realizing he fucked up when he left, etc etc.
+ it’s those little details that rly sell their relationship even when we don’t get to see all that much of the casual pointless in-between moments imo. like the big important moments are incredibly good and why i ship them, but it’s just nice to know that those moments aren’t the only ones that matter.
oh and like, the second duel is less guts winning his freedom/equality and more guts demolishing griffith and costing him his freedom, both literally and figuratively
like we knew that already – guts left to establish their equality but it was wrongheaded and when he returned griffith had been tortured for a year was totally dependent and had just had a monologue reflecting on guts’ hold on him – but yk the waterfight is a little extra point now.
it only just occurred to me that guts doesn’t necessarily mean ‘now this waterfight is a draw’ but it’s more likely that he means ‘now you won a fight and i won a fight.’
which makes this waterfight and “now we’re even” even more meaningful than i’ve been saying lol. it’s like a negation of the first duel, meaning that guts is symbolically only bound to the hawks by his affection for everyone – which works perfectly with the scene right after this one where guts deliberately chooses to stay after rickert congratulates him and he thinks, “for now.”
also newsflash assholes you’ve been equal the entire goddamn time
technically the term “apologist” means someone who argues in defense
of something unpopular or controversial, not someone who apologizes for
the actions of someone else. so like, i myself am a huge griffith
apologist lol. i’ll argue in defense of griffith as a wonderfully three
dimensional, super interesting, super sympathetic character who shouldn’t be judged on the basis of one terrible offensive writing choice all day.
hell
i’ll even argue in defense of femto as a potentially/originally great
villain that got fucked over by the author’s love of gratuitous
misogynist grimdarkness and homophobia.
self-describing as a griffith apologist isn’t the same as saying that you’re fine with rape lol, because griffith is fictional and defending him as a fictional character doesn’t mean saying everything he did would be justified irl, sometimes it means that the writing around him was bad, and/or that he’s a good character rather than a good person, and/or that they think judgement should be aimed at miura for writing gratuitous rape rather than at griffith/femto bc he’s not real, yk?
(I mean yeah some people hate fictional characters for doing bad things, or think that if you like a fictional character that means you’d support everything they do if they were real, but plenty of people don’t respond to fiction that way and it would be nice if more people understood that lol)
and tbh i feel like “haters gonna hate” applies here lol. people are going to be assholes to fans of controversial fictional characters no matter how consciencious you are about always writing a disclaimer when you talk about liking them, so fuck it, why bother? (i say this while i have like a disclaimer in my about page lol, but yk. i don’t blame anyone for not bothering. if someone leaps to the conclusion that you’re fine with rape irl bc of which fictional characters you like, that’s absolutely their own problem.)
Like, you shouldn’t blame other fans for being enthusiastic about their love and attracting hate lol, you should blame the people who go out of their way to look for excuses to be dicks.
As long as ppl aren’t sliding into rape apologism or other offensive rhetoric when they talk about griffith, who cares? and tbqh in my time on tumblr as a huge fan of griffith i’ve never actually seen anyone defend femto raping casca or claim it’s justified or should be forgiven etc. like, maybe it happens, i’m sure there are edgy teenagers somewhere out there saying the eclipse rape scene was badass or w/e, but it sure isn’t common.
I mostly see people saying it was bad/offensive writing, or that femto is far enough removed from griffith due to, yk, the whole fantasy magical monster transformation thing that it doesn’t affect their feelings towards griffith lol.
anyway my point is that someone calling themselves a griffith apologist doesn’t mean they think his actions are justified, or would be justified in real life, because ime griffith fans tend to be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and judge the character as a fictional construct within a deeply flawed fictional work, rather than as a real person.
ok i’m sorry but in addition to the excellent way this hugely significant moment of triumph for Griffith’s dream concludes with Griffith seeking Guts out across a crowded ballroom and through a window so he can smile at him:
Contrast that to the way Charlotte keeps trying and failing get Griffith’s attention in these two chapters lmao.
Like this is just a perfect little microcosm of where Griffith’s emotional priorities now lie lol, his dream is Right There but he only has eyes for Guts.
I think Griffith is gay, even though I feel like he doesn’t know it(maybe after a while he came to realize it, especially after Guts left him) as for Guts his sexuality is a mystery to me. I know he definitely likes men(even though he probably definitely doesnt understand that or acknowledge it) attraction to women is debatable.
The way I see it we
cant really pinpoint what Guts’ sexuality is or his thoughts on women.
Griffith was the first to give Guts something that he never had and I
feel like his affection for Griffith is dominantly based on this. No one
else in the manga, both men and women, have yet to give Guts what
Griffith gave him thus why no one has yet to win over his affections.
ia tbh
for me I think Griffith is variable, like i could see him being either super repressed about being gay thanks to a) his dream revolving around marrying a woman and b) gennon being the only textually gay dude in berserk (thx miura) and griffith being taken advantage of at probably the age where he’d be just starting to realize he had feelings of attraction to men, like, that seems extremely likely to fuck him up.
But I could also see him accepting that he’s attracted to men – I mean he reads a lot, he seems fairly worldly, maybe gennon isn’t his only exposure to same-sex attraction, etc – but also not thinking it’s important because it’s incompatible with his dream.
Either way though I definitely can’t see him as anything but gay.
Wrt Guts I see him as gay too. He could be bi easily enough, but it’s just so easy for me to see his short-lived relationship with Casca as repression at work lol. Like saying she was the only person who could touch him back in the day, which was textually because she’s a woman (and also wrong bc Griffith also could) feels really suggestive of this to me. And of course the way their relationship screams rebound from their feelings for Griffith for both of them. And post eclipse, the only times he thinks of Casca sexually are when Griffith is also somehow involved, a la
And of course the entire Beast of Darkness debacle.
But yeah sexualities aside, since I mean it still could go either way from gay to bi, so w/e, that’s a really good point about Griffith being the only person in the manga who’s given Guts what he’s so desperately wanted – ie affection and attention and respect from someone Guts respects. It’s Griffith who he wants to look at him. Not Casca, not any of his rpg group or any of the other Hawks, just Griffith. It’s Griffith whose respect he feels like he needs to earn, no one else’s. It’s Griffith who he needs to feel equal to, no one else. It’s Griffith who he’s been obsessed with, no one else.
It’s why their relationship is still so extra lol, it’s shown as singular in the story, whether Miura meant that to be sexual or not.
So yeah idk, good comment basically, I just wanted to ramble on the subject lol.
(2/2) I actually see Casca being the one giving them the helpful push
they need since those two idiots won’t do it themselves. Like she would
be hurt and upset at first but being that she loves Griffith and always
puts his happiness and desires before her own and plus she cares about
his mental health, she would do what she’s to do to help him get what he
wants. In this case getting Guts to break the ice with Griffith.
Ooh I could really easily see this tbh.
I mean like, think of say an AU where Guts never heard the Promrose Hall speech, but still ended up falling off a cliff with Casca and asking her what her deal is. Casca tells him the same story, complete with talking about how jealous she is of him and it’s almost as if… as if…
except without the memory of the speech getting in the way Guts actually gets it.
And then awkwardness ensues for a while and Griffith is maybe hurt by Guts’ sudden shift in attitude (maybe Guts is avoiding him bc he’s trying to sort his own feelings out) and now that Casca and Guts have bonded a little she gets pissed off at him for accidentally acting like a dick and they talk and Guts has a revelation during their conversation. Or something. Yk, a mild version of what she tells him in canon, without the stabbing.
Or maybe for a somewhat angstier, more drawn out version, Guts and Griffith end up making out at some point for whatever reason (impulsive thank god you’re alive kiss, drunk, intimate late night talk and it just happens, whatever) but afterwards Griffith freaks out because he has a life plan and his life plan doesn’t include falling in love with Guts but if he acknowledges his attraction to him he can’t deny the rest of his feelings anymore and the sudden realization of how intense his feelings are throws him for a loop and he tells Guts it was a mistake, he has a princess to seduce and a kingdom to attain, yadda yadda yadda.
And then Griffith overcompensates. Takes a stupid irrational risk(s) to win the war/achieve the dream. Maybe it works out, maybe it’s a setback, maybe plot things ensue. Things are weird and awkward between him and Guts and everyone can see it, some of them connect the dots between that and how Griffith’s been acting lately, and finally Casca’s like, okay what the fuck, if someone doesn’t fix this we’re all screwed, and rolls up her sleeves.
lol idk why I’m throwing plot outlines out in response to this ask lol, but idk it’s a good concept that feels like something that would happen in canon, feels good feels organic.
I mean in canon Casca’s role veers from griffguts commentator/attempted facilitator to emotional/physical bridge between them, and l b r here the former role is by far kinder and less horrible to her. Let her do her perceptive thing and help them get together, and then she maintain good platonic friendships with them, grow on her own, then get a girlfriend.
win/win.
also ngl I love the trope where everyone in the immediate circle can see something’s going on between the awkward not-couple. which is another thing berserk has in canon to an extent and another reason I love it and this scenario works so well lol.
i know i’ve talked about this before lol but i s2g every time i remember this moment i’m even more taken aback by how fucking… jaw-droppingly suggestive it is
judeau, the dude whose sole goal in the latter half of the golden age is getting guts and casca together, telling rickert to shut up about how much griffith loves guts right before he overtly shoves guts at casca, starting on the very next page when judeau changes the subject to her leadership
like there is absolutely no reason for that panel to be there; rickert could’ve stopped talking of his own volition, guts could’ve had his moment, and the subject could’ve naturally changed to casca. you could remove it and change nothing else and everyone still makes sense in this scene, the dialogue still works, etc etc.
what it tells us is that judeau is being manipulative here, that he has an agenda in hooking guts and casca up (not that that’s subtle), and, the actual hugely interesting part, it means judeau has to avoid conversation about griffith’s feelings so guts and casca will get together – ie
guts and casca can only connect in the absence of griffith.
this is followed through of course when they both brood over him afterwards, and in how their sex scene is framed as a rebound for both of them through parallels to significant moments they each had with griffith, and in how their relationship such as it it starts to fall apart when they rescue griffith and eventually come to accept that he needs to be taken care of, and in how post-eclipse guts abandons her to pursue femto/griffith for 2-3 years, and in how he’s able to stick with casca after ngriff “deserts” him, and how he’s “come this far by letting go of his obsession with him,” etc etc
and mb even more interestingly, it also means that they can only connect when guts falsely believes griffith doesn’t feel strong irrational life-destroying feelings for him. hence judeau telling rickert to shut up while rickert is telling guts a game-changing truth. guts knowing how griffith feels about him is incompatible with his relationship with casca.
hence guts denying any feelings of guilt and regret when casca stabs him and putting it out of his mind when they fuck, until those feelings start creeping back during the rescue mission
AND hence guts moping and walking away with casca in tow when neogriffith flies off on zodd after telling guts he’s “free” from his feelings for him – only finally choosing to stay with her instead of pursuing revenge after ngriff deserts him.
so once again it comes back to this question:
what happens if guts finds out neogriffith’s heart isn’t frozen after all?
ok anime aside, anyone know if there’s any proof that these are guts’ thoughts, like in the original japanese wording or smthn? because they read so griffith to me in phrasing, and also if these are guts’ lines then it kills alot of my sympathy for him lol.
like kinda turns it from guts leaving without a word bc he didn’t think griffith would care, to guts leaving without a word despite knowing he was causing some amount of emotional damage, bc he’s thinking w/e griffith will get over it. like, surprise dude, he did not get over it. or, to be more cutting, he did in fact eventually stand up and start walking, and that was a bad time for everyone.
(on the other hand if i was adapting this and if it is genuinely ambiguous, i’d rly want to have both vas say these lines lol. i mean maybe it’s not completely a bad thing for guts to not be super sympathetic in his choice to leave. understandable, yes, but a mistake is a mistake and if guts gets these lines that’s just kind of underscoring it.)
honestly I never even doubted that these were 100% guts’ words, I mean now that you’re bringing it up I guess maybe they could be griffith’s (the like stumbling on a rock, a small thing part aka him lying to himself about how much it impacts him) but that makes zero sense to me considering in this very moment he’s just sitting there utterly defeated (like… even more so mentally than physically) so him internally monologuing this deeply feels really out of place. (i always considered him so completely shocked there everything else was just static to him. like he hears no sounds. doesn’t even feel the cold. can’t think. it’s just guts walking further and further away booooo) but you’re right about it killing a bit of the guts sympathy tho because yeah, why leave at all if you’re aware you’re already important enough to cause griff at least SOME form of pain. I mean isn’t that what he wanted all along like why willingly walk away if you’re semi-aware you already mean enough to someone to cause them a minor breakdown. (lol understatement of the century but then again guts at this point knew nothing of the true depth of griff’s feelings)
and this brings up another issue, if these are guts thoughts, and we then assume he was aware he was at least ‘a rock on griff’s road’ yet still left, can we then also safely assume that whatever he was aware of that griff felt for him, was not enough for him, like this whole scene always read to me as guts leaving because he wanted MORE (like yeah i know that’s the whole plot but hear me out) and steeling his resolve to go by winning back his freedom because his eventual return as griffith’s equal would magically undo the hurt and anger griff might’ve felt over guts breaking from his hold. like he had to at the very least know damn well that griffith valued him greatly as a captain and treated him different than the rest of the band, casca deadass tells him that and the only thing that stands in the way of him accepting it personally is his inferiority complex or whatever you wanna call it.
I know guts is a self-unaware idiot esp. in the golden age but cmon dude, he saw the way griff was sitting there stunned before him after that strike, he saw how he was completely shocked he’d lost the duel and thus his hold on guts. take into consideration guts’ own represses feelings for griff and you can imagine his heart must’ve ached at seeing griff so completely shook up.
BUT HE STILL WALKS OFF, monologues the above complete bs of an excuse to himself to justify why it is somehow okay for him to leave and become worthy of being griffith’s equal (that in any case, he already more than was but hnngg berserk is not a happy love story unfortunately)
Its actually good if that kills some of the sympathy because yes this is what inevitably kicked off all events that led to the eclipse and yes it was partly guts fault and YES he should feel very fuckin sorry.
and since the whole plot of berserk is in essence based on the weight of choice and how much of it is really your own or set in stone by fate this is a really good example of a really realllly reallllllly bad one with unimaginable consequences.
tldr; those have to be guts’ lines and yes its cool if you resent him alil for them lmao because this page is the arguably the worst moment in the entire manga cause it kicks off the end of all good things era.
It’s funny bc I just assumed they were Griffith’s words when I read it, since I didn’t remember the scene in the anime at all at the time, and imo it feels like something Griffith would think. Tho I do get your point about Griffith being beyond internally monologuing to himself, and idk I’m kind of torn… like I don’t rly disagree, he is absolutely emotionally fucked here lol, but the way I see Griffith, if there’s anything that would be running through his head at this moment it would be, “it’s fine it’s nbd idc at all it’s nothing” all the while kneeling frozen in the snow while the rest of the hawks there shuffle their feet and glance at each other awkwardly.
But I’m like, all about Griffith denying his feelings to himself so it’s an aspect of his character I mmmmay exaggerate a bit lmao.
But yeah wrt it being from Guts’ pov, I agree with everything you said, and like… yeah it rly does work. tbh I don’t think you’re wrong about anything there, there’s a lot of evidence that Guts at least knows Griffith has strong feelings for him and was devastated when he walked away. But omg I just… can’t handle that lmao.
Like, I need to see Guts as completely blinded by his inadequacy issues because otherwise I feel actual anger towards him and honestly I almost never get angry at fictional characters, I’m generally way more detached than that, so this is a very weird feeling lmao.
Like, it really does shift my attitude towards Guts leaving from seeing it as a
very innocent mistake since he never in a million years believed leaving would genuinely hurt griffith, to really actually
assigning him some serious blame bc he knew it would hurt griffith and
the only mistake there was miscalculating how much.
And like, that’s not just low self esteem, that’s callousness, and it’s callousness that resulted in my fave being tortured for a year and then deciding to become a monster so like, i guess that’s probably why it pisses me off lol. fuck you guts.
So tbh I still want to cling to things like Guts’ complete lack of understanding and denial when he comes back, during Casca’s tirade and his chat with Rickert, and in the tunnels on the way to rescue Griffith, etc, as evidence that Guts’ mistake was being genuinely blind to Griffith’s feelings towards him no matter how obvious they are bc of his low self esteem and inadequacy issues, rather than like, knowing Griffith cared to an extent but miscalculating how easily he’d get over it. And like, “this says to me I’m still worth spillin blood over in your eyes,” also kind of makes me hope that he thought Griffith only gaf about him as a soldier.
idk it’s a lot more palatable to me as another mistake in a big pile of golden age mistakes that no one can really be blamed for because they all have serious issues fucking them and their relationships up, alongside things like griffith failing to recognize his feelings and making his speech to charlotte, and casca running to grab griffith to stop guts from leaving, and both of them choosing to fight rather than talk, etc. And idk maybe if I was unbiased it would still feel like another one of those mistakes bc it’s not like Guts’ issues aren’t contributing lol, but idk it feels like Guts walking away goes above and beyond.
And agggh yeah like that moment is given an above and beyond treatment in Guts’ memories and related guilt issues, so that’s still perfectly reasonable… lmao it feels weird to be the one wanting to defend Guts when I was just saying that narratively everything is his fault and tbh I always feel like most of the fandom lets him off the hook way too much lol.
tl;dr I think you’re most likely right but that makes me feel negative feelings :((( and yeah ok those negative feelings fit the story but still :(((
What if Guts just meant that Griffith would survive the humiliation that he has lost or to be more precisisely lost a very strong soldier?
@chaoticgaygriffith said:
I’m on the “definitely assumed they were Guts’ words” train, and that’s
why I was so frustrated with him lol and wanted to see way more guilt
from him. But I think he thought the damage would be more like, you
know, Griffith losing a good soldier, instead of losing the man he loves
& the only person he can be vulnerable with. Let me check the
original Japanese though, just in case!
(I’m combining these responses to avoid reblogging the same long post twice in a row lol.)
but yeah lol this… really makes a lot of sense and idk I think I’m blinded by feelings here bc I can’t believe I didn’t think of looking at it like this lmao.
tho now that you’ve suggested it i’m suddenly missing all the angst and guilt involved in @ninjabelle‘s interpretation l q l
tbh
i think i could go either way depending if i’m in the mood for angst or
if i want to feel sympathy for everyone lol, guts either walking away
thinking griffith will get over losing a fight and a soldier vs guts
walking away knowing griffith cares somewhat on a personal level but
thinking of that as just more evidence that he needs to leave because
those feelings mean he’s the guy who can eventually become his
friend/equal.
ok anime aside, anyone know if there’s any proof that these are guts’ thoughts, like in the original japanese wording or smthn? because they read so griffith to me in phrasing, and also if these are guts’ lines then it kills alot of my sympathy for him lol.
like kinda turns it from guts leaving without a word bc he didn’t think griffith would care, to guts leaving without a word despite knowing he was causing some amount of emotional damage, bc he’s thinking w/e griffith will get over it. like, surprise dude, he did not get over it. or, to be more cutting, he did in fact eventually stand up and start walking, and that was a bad time for everyone.
(on the other hand if i was adapting this and if it is genuinely ambiguous, i’d rly want to have both vas say these lines lol. i mean maybe it’s not completely a bad thing for guts to not be super sympathetic in his choice to leave. understandable, yes, but a mistake is a mistake and if guts gets these lines that’s just kind of underscoring it.)
honestly I never even doubted that these were 100% guts’ words, I mean now that you’re bringing it up I guess maybe they could be griffith’s (the like stumbling on a rock, a small thing part aka him lying to himself about how much it impacts him) but that makes zero sense to me considering in this very moment he’s just sitting there utterly defeated (like… even more so mentally than physically) so him internally monologuing this deeply feels really out of place. (i always considered him so completely shocked there everything else was just static to him. like he hears no sounds. doesn’t even feel the cold. can’t think. it’s just guts walking further and further away booooo) but you’re right about it killing a bit of the guts sympathy tho because yeah, why leave at all if you’re aware you’re already important enough to cause griff at least SOME form of pain. I mean isn’t that what he wanted all along like why willingly walk away if you’re semi-aware you already mean enough to someone to cause them a minor breakdown. (lol understatement of the century but then again guts at this point knew nothing of the true depth of griff’s feelings)
and this brings up another issue, if these are guts thoughts, and we then assume he was aware he was at least ‘a rock on griff’s road’ yet still left, can we then also safely assume that whatever he was aware of that griff felt for him, was not enough for him, like this whole scene always read to me as guts leaving because he wanted MORE (like yeah i know that’s the whole plot but hear me out) and steeling his resolve to go by winning back his freedom because his eventual return as griffith’s equal would magically undo the hurt and anger griff might’ve felt over guts breaking from his hold. like he had to at the very least know damn well that griffith valued him greatly as a captain and treated him different than the rest of the band, casca deadass tells him that and the only thing that stands in the way of him accepting it personally is his inferiority complex or whatever you wanna call it.
I know guts is a self-unaware idiot esp. in the golden age but cmon dude, he saw the way griff was sitting there stunned before him after that strike, he saw how he was completely shocked he’d lost the duel and thus his hold on guts. take into consideration guts’ own represses feelings for griff and you can imagine his heart must’ve ached at seeing griff so completely shook up.
BUT HE STILL WALKS OFF, monologues the above complete bs of an excuse to himself to justify why it is somehow okay for him to leave and become worthy of being griffith’s equal (that in any case, he already more than was but hnngg berserk is not a happy love story unfortunately)
Its actually good if that kills some of the sympathy because yes this is what inevitably kicked off all events that led to the eclipse and yes it was partly guts fault and YES he should feel very fuckin sorry.
and since the whole plot of berserk is in essence based on the weight of choice and how much of it is really your own or set in stone by fate this is a really good example of a really realllly reallllllly bad one with unimaginable consequences.
tldr; those have to be guts’ lines and yes its cool if you resent him alil for them lmao because this page is the arguably the worst moment in the entire manga cause it kicks off the end of all good things era.
It’s funny bc I just assumed they were Griffith’s words when I read it, since I didn’t remember the scene in the anime at all at the time, and imo it feels like something Griffith would think. Tho I do get your point about Griffith being beyond internally monologuing to himself, and idk I’m kind of torn… like I don’t rly disagree, he is absolutely emotionally fucked here lol, but the way I see Griffith, if there’s anything that would be running through his head at this moment it would be, “it’s fine it’s nbd idc at all it’s nothing” all the while kneeling frozen in the snow while the rest of the hawks there shuffle their feet and glance at each other awkwardly.
But I’m like, all about Griffith denying his feelings to himself so it’s an aspect of his character I mmmmay exaggerate a bit lmao.
But yeah wrt it being from Guts’ pov, I agree with everything you said, and like… yeah it rly does work. tbh I don’t think you’re wrong about anything there, there’s a lot of evidence that Guts at least knows Griffith has strong feelings for him and was devastated when he walked away. But omg I just… can’t handle that lmao.
Like, I need to see Guts as completely blinded by his inadequacy issues because otherwise I feel actual anger towards him and honestly I almost never get angry at fictional characters, I’m generally way more detached than that, so this is a very weird feeling lmao.
Like, it really does shift my attitude towards Guts leaving from seeing it as a
very innocent mistake since he never in a million years believed leaving would genuinely hurt griffith, to really actually
assigning him some serious blame bc he knew it would hurt griffith and
the only mistake there was miscalculating how much.
And like, that’s not just low self esteem, that’s callousness, and it’s callousness that resulted in my fave being tortured for a year and then deciding to become a monster so like, i guess that’s probably why it pisses me off lol. fuck you guts.
So tbh I still want to cling to things like Guts’ complete lack of understanding and denial when he comes back, during Casca’s tirade and his chat with Rickert, and in the tunnels on the way to rescue Griffith, etc, as evidence that Guts’ mistake was being genuinely blind to Griffith’s feelings towards him no matter how obvious they are bc of his low self esteem and inadequacy issues, rather than like, knowing Griffith cared to an extent but miscalculating how easily he’d get over it. And like, “this says to me I’m still worth spillin blood over in your eyes,” also kind of makes me hope that he thought Griffith only gaf about him as a soldier.
idk it’s a lot more palatable to me as another mistake in a big pile of golden age mistakes that no one can really be blamed for because they all have serious issues fucking them and their relationships up, alongside things like griffith failing to recognize his feelings and making his speech to charlotte, and casca running to grab griffith to stop guts from leaving, and both of them choosing to fight rather than talk, etc. And idk maybe if I was unbiased it would still feel like another one of those mistakes bc it’s not like Guts’ issues aren’t contributing lol, but idk it feels like Guts walking away goes above and beyond.
And agggh yeah like that moment is given an above and beyond treatment in Guts’ memories and related guilt issues, so that’s still perfectly reasonable… lmao it feels weird to be the one wanting to defend Guts when I was just saying that narratively everything is his fault and tbh I always feel like most of the fandom lets him off the hook way too much lol.
tl;dr I think you’re most likely right but that makes me feel negative feelings :((( and yeah ok those negative feelings fit the story but still :(((
i think berserk is walking that “revenge will destroy you” route and im not against a kind of emotional catharsis here but that would ideally be between guts and griffith and like that kind of reconciliation (given thats the angle were taking here) would leave an awful taste in my mouth bc of the eclipse rape lol.
tbh this is why i hope berserk isn’t so much going for a ‘revenge is bad and futile’ thing as it’s going for a ‘guts getting revenge in this particular case is bad and futile because it’s not his right to get revenge for the eclipse and also he wants revenge for the wrong reasons, ie bc it’s an easy outlet for his very complex feelings, but casca’s the hawk representative who never abandoned the band and also the person who suffered most so she’s the one who should get revenge.’
kind of suggested in part here at least:
and yea youre right about the
railroading thing ughhgh that really gets me (im a broken record but it
reminds me of vriska and like that shit gets me). it feels pretty hallow
when you have to acknowledge this in the context of the whole story
especially bc griffiths helplessness to the waters of fate and destiny
isnt emphasized as overtly tragic as it really is. which is a valid
storytelling choice ic it just, again, gets me.
also femto is the consequence of guts actions and its clearly framed that way idk what people get out of insisting otherwise.
yeah i feel you, griffith’s narrative is so sad to me, but a lot of what’s tragic about it isn’t in your face.
and yeah it’s like, you can say guts didn’t deserve to experience the eclipse, which is obviously true bc v few people deserve that shit, and def not for making a mistake based on low self esteem lol, but narratively it’s the consequence of his actions bc berserk is a very dark story. guts is the main character who actively made a choice which set all the tragedy dominos falling. it’s even ironically fitting – his choice to “abandon” the hawks and griffith resulted in losing everyone permanently.
like i think ppl equate saying the eclipse/femto/griffith’s breakdown/etc is a consequence of guts’ actions to saying either a) guts deserved to suffer and/or b) if this happened in real life it would be right to blame guts for everything lol, neither of which are statements that necessarily follow the first one, and are clearly untrue. but fiction operates by different rules than reality.
though actually while i’m on this subject, I do kind of have a big issue with how this frames griffith.
cut bc this probably doesn’t really make sense lol, i’m rambling and i’m not entirely sure how to explain my thought process lol
like, if pre-eclipse griffith was a symbol of guts’ potential to have fulfilling relationships and find a place where he belongs, that guts then totally fucked up by “abandoning,” and post-eclipse neogriffith is a symbol of guts throwing away his potential to have fulfilling relationships by pursuing a stupid self-destructive dream, then there’s a bit of an awkward contradiction:
during the golden age, guts distancing himself from griffith was a bad thing that caused all his problems. after the eclipse, guts distancing himself from griffith is the narratively correct choice. this makes technical plot sense because in between griffith transformed into a demon lol, but thematically i think it’s unsatisfying.
griffith has essentially been replaced with guts’ protective relationship with casca. he fucked up and abandoned her, just like he fucked up and abandoned griffith, but now he’s making up for it by sticking around and protecting her – something he never got a chance to do w/ griffith. like, there was no magical cure to heal griffith, no long journey of personal growth, nada.
ignoring who could be
blamed for what if berserk happened in real life, bc this has nothing to do with morals or literal interpersonal responsibilities, from a fictional
storytelling perspective guts destroyed griffith when he made the wrong
choice by leaving. griffith’s year of torture and then eclipse causing
despair is the direct consequence of guts’ narrative mistake, and femto/ngriff
is an antagonist of guts’ own making.
so to then say that the right
thing for guts to do is to try to forget about him rubs me the wrong
way. it’d be one thing if griffith was dead and there was nothing guts
could do except try to avoid repeating his mistakes, but he’s alive and
currently acting on the world in a capacity that is, at least by some
standards, negative lol. the way stories work, that’s guts’ problem to
fix.
so if the thematic takeaway is that guts should just ignore
neogriffith and move on, and if he goes back to obsessing over him
that’s bad, then… i’m not satisfied with that lol.
also like, if the manga
decided to draw a very clear and explicit dividing line between human
griffith and neogriffith, essentially declaring everything human
griffith represented to guts as dead, that would also be one thing, but miura deliberately muddies the waters both by teasing the audience about
his beating heart and by guts’ emotional conflict a la “the instant I saw him I’d forgotten my
urge to kill,” and “longing,” and by continuing to utilize the light/dark imagery for their relationship, and having guts reminisce about original griffith after seeing him, etc.
so there’s this sense to me that neogriffith is simultaneously a symbol of guts’ self destructive dream (revenge, fighting stronger and stronger enemies, becoming griffith’s equal) and a symbol of guts’ mistake in pursuing that dream the first time – a symbol of what he threw away by leaving – and to me it feels unsatisfyingly contradictory.
and then on a purely emotional level lol it frustrates me that if the moral of the story really is that guts needs to move on and forget about the past and griffith and focus on the relationships he does have, then that means griffith was essentially a casualty of guts’ one step forward two steps back style character development. a character, from the perspective of his relationship to guts, who existed to be a consequence of guts’ mistake and teach guts a lesson through his destruction. and that just strikes me as unfair lol. idt guts should get to move on when griffith never had the opportunity – OR when griffith did take his opportunity ie the sacrifice, if we’re counting that, because then griffith moving on is evil but guts moving on is good.
and yeah maybe it’s a statement about moving on by suppressing your emotions vs moving on by forming new relationships, but griffith was railroaded by the narrative lol, he never got the chance to move on by forming new relationships, he was irreparably fucked the day after guts left. so if that’s the case then it’s weak.
but idk maybe i’m looking at this from entirely the wrong perspective. idk i’m just thinking outloud again rly. and until we find out what happens when casca has her mind back, it’s too early to draw any real conclusions anyway.
guts and griffith’s hetero relationships during the golden age are both symbols of their dreams, and exist in opposition to their relationship with each other
charlotte as a symbol of griffith’s dream is painfully obvious, but lemme outline casca as a symbol of guts’ quick:
guts’ dream is to become griffith’s equal and winning casca’s affection is framed as a step on that path, since casca loved and admired griffith
casca metaphorically becomes guts’ sword after they sleep together, now supporting his dream instead of griffith’s
guts tells casca all about his dream, repeating a lot of what griffith said to charlotte at promrose hall
guts invites casca along on his dream journey as long as she doesn’t get in the way of what he wants to do
casca is the one who tells guts to leave to pursue his dream instead of staying with griffith
and overhearing that completely fucks griffith up much the same way overhearing griffith talking to charlotte about his dream fucked guts up
the question is does this change after the eclipse? and i think it does – casca without her character represents a responsibility distracting guts from his dream (plus she’s the last “feeble flame” of that campfire he abandoned when he left to pursue a dream, so she represents the Hawks) whereas now neogriffith represents his dream.
however – consistently sex with casca has still been connected to his dream. when the beast of darkness taunts him, and when he assaults her, it’s “to get closer and closer to Griffith.”
i don’t have a conclusion to this or a point rly, i’m just thinking outloud
well i guess my point is “the golden age can be interpreted as a cautionary tale about heterosexuality and that’s why it’s the best arc” lol
you're the only one 