mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
lol yeah this is exactly how I feel. like idk we’re so shut out of his head after that one “oh no I’m feeling things” moment that he’s totally mysterious so I can’t really feel anything about him, because I don’t know anything about him.
I’m sure there’s something going on in his head, since the last thing we saw was his heart bthumping, but until we know more he’s pretty boring.
and his constant serenity and the way he’s so flawless is kind of annoying lol.
Well we don’t know how much of his life and general existence utilizes fate/magic/whatever so that’s fair.
Also I may not have phrased my response very well, because I def don’t think he’s acting just like an unchanged Griffith. And I totally agree that NeoGriff is super boring in comparison to Griffith in a way, because everything is easy to him.
But idk I think that NeoGriff is charismatic – like eg saying “i must ask, once again, your pardon, princess charlotte” when he rescues her is a ridiculously good line. His response to her army camp baking is exactly what she would’ve wanted to hear, he’s super pleasant and likeable, and we see the ways he makes himself that way with what he says and how he acts.
I guess the real question is whether he magically knows exactly what to say or do to get the response he wants, or whether it’s a mix of that and actual social skill, or whether it’s just skill but now that he’s an inhuman god who can’t be harmed he’s able to make full use of it without human weaknesses holding him back.
And it could be any of those options, so I don’t think you’re wrong, it definitely could be that he’s using god magic to do everything perfectly. I just prefer to think it’s 2 or 3 because it’s more interesting to me. If everything NeoGriff does is just going with the flow of fate and being able to see the future or whatever then I’d be disappointed because that’s super boring. But we know that he needs the help of his psychic to see the flow of battle, so he can’t be completely all-knowing, right?
I’m gonna answer this backwards.
I don’t think he can transform into Femto, but I think Ganeshka saw him as Femto because he’d ascended into a higher plane of existence, in which he could see NeoGriffith for what he truly was.
So when we saw him as Femto during the scene where he killed Ganeshka and broke the world, it was because that’s what Ganeshka (and probs Skull Knight) saw. Like his true spiritual form, kinda thing.
Femto is a dick, yes, but tbf NeoGriffith has a ton of charisma. The way I see it, Femto didn’t need to be charismatic because he was a god on another playing field whose only peers were other completely dickish and shitty gods lol, like, when you only have Slan, Conrad, Ubik, and Void to hang out with, there’s no point in being charismatic. But as NeoGriffith he has a reason to be charming. I’m sure magic/fate/whatever also plays a part, but I also think part of it is just his natural Griffith-ness coming back to the fore. NeoGriffith is like what Griffith wished he was – perfectly charismatic, the absolute perfect image of a perfect king. Human Griffith did pretty well in that arena, so it stands to reason that NeoGriffith retained that charisma, and is making use of it again, with the added perfection that comes from being a god incarnate.
I never really thought about Femto being modeled after Guts. In the Black Swordsman arc he’s swole as fuck lol but I think that’s just the art before Miura really figured out the vibe he wanted. Everyone was huge in the Black Swordsman arc lol. During the Eclipse he’s slimmed down a bit, and then moreso in our glimpse of him with Ganeshka. I think it’s an interesting explanation though, and I dig it as a headcanon.
And as a contrast to his fragile helpless human body when he made the sacrifice it def makes sense for him to be reborn as a much more powerful, physically intimidating figure.
Someone with the brand of sacrifice can’t be sacrificed again, but there’s nothing saying they can’t use a behelit. And since the implication is that Guts might use the behelit at some point – Flora says it could be his – it follows that Casca could also potentially use it.
She wouldn’t be able to sacrifice Guts, because in the Black Swordsman Arc the Godhand said that you can’t sacrifice someone who’s already been sacrificed, but she could sacrifice Farnese (which would suck) or I’ve suggested maybe the Moonlight Boy (which imo would be awesome but I never rly liked that kid lol).
And yeah I totally agree that Casca telling Guts to leave totally fucked Griffith up and was like, the last straw that lead to his break from reality and then suicide attempt.
I mean come on, right? Guts leaving lead directly to Griffith essentially burning down his life by sleeping with Charlotte (whether that was intentional and conscious or whether it was subconscious is up to interpretation, but either way it wasn’t an accident), then he hung onto his sanity by a thread through a year of torture solely by thinking about Guts and his feelings for him, then he was rescued by Guts who cut a bloody swathe through Midland to avenge him and killed a literal monster to defend him, and finally he was lead to believe that Guts was about to leave him again, while he was totally helpless and had absolutely nothing else in his life.
And then finally Guts’ touch caused him to feel the kind of despair that makes you to want to destroy the person causing it and become a monster just so you won’t feel it again.
Like, that’s a hell of an emotional roller coaster revolving around one person.
Goddamn don’t you just love this fucking story? God.
Idk if this is a prediction or wishful thinking lol, but if I had to lay down a bet I think she’s going to wake up, have all the Eclipse related betrayal and despair and trauma hit her, and use the behelit, then go for revenge herself. I’ve been theorizing this for a while and tbh I haven’t come up with anything better yet so I’m still going with it.
My hopes for her getting a happy ending away from Guts are essentially zero, especially since reading in an interview that Miura only had her survive the Eclipse so Guts wouldn’t be able to fully move on.
And I’m assuming that Skull Knight’s warnings are going to come to something other than Casca being prickly for a while before hooking back up with Guts or w/e, then getting killed to make him want revenge again. Dramatic shudder.
So what I really want is for her to finally, finally react to what happened to her, and for that reaction to be epic as fuck.
I also think it’s plausible because:
I think Guts hasn’t really given up on the idea of revenge yet – he was still fantasizing about going back after Griffith while on the boat – but it would be pretty anticlimatic if Casca just stuck around in Elfhelm to recover while Guts went “ok side quest over, back to the main quest now,” so I’m sure there’s going to be something more to it.
And I like the idea of Casca taking over the revenge quest and Guts maybe re-evaluating himself, his motives, etc, while fucked up once again because things went south and he did something with mostly good intentions and everything got all fucked up anyway.
Like tbh I think that the conflict as it’s set up now, ie revenge = bad, helping Casca = good, is much, much too simplistic for a story like Berserk. It’s boring lol, whether it ends up tragic and Guts backslides back into revenge, whether he continues doing the “right” thing and chooses Casca over it, it’s still black and white. In the Golden Age there were no easy right or wrong options – eg Guts thought he was doing the right thing by leaving, turned out to be a huge mistake that fucked everything up, and I really liked that. I think the current arc has the potential to be similar which would be great imo.
Guts isn’t helping Casca solely out of the goodness of his heart, he’s doing it because he wants the old Casca back despite misgivings and warnings that he might be going about it the wrong way – and he’s doing it to distract himself from revenge, and also from the fact that he’s not so gung-ho about revenge now that Griffith looks human again. Imo. It doesn’t have to be as simple as revenge = bad, magical therapy = good, and looking closely at Guts’ motivations makes me wonder and hope that, like the Golden Age, a seemingly positive choice could have negative consequences, and the secret actual right choice is dealing with your many issues, Guts, instead of running off for a dream, or revenge, or to “force” someone’s sanity back.
Pardon my bad writing English isn’t my language I’m not fluent, cheers from Ukraine.
Yes! At least that’s absolutely how I understand his character, and it’s like my favourite thing about him.
I get what you mean about Griffith being suprising, like if you assume something about him a later action will contradict it. I feel like to me he makes perfect sense, but only after reading the manga twice in a row and spending way too much time thinking about his narrative lol.
At face value he seems very contradictory because he tends to lie to himself, and the way he gets more complicated as the story goes on also tends to throw people off. Yk like we start out with this impression of him as a powerful charismatic leader driven towards a goal and willing to kill to get there, distant and above everyone else, but the more we learn about him – about his past and his insecurities and guilt and self loathing and feelings for Guts etc etc – the more layers we uncover, and the more we see that first impression is… not wrong exactly, but there’s a LOT more going on beneath the surface, and most of it is pretty depressing.
And like, he’s an unreliable narrator about himself, which can also make him hard to figure out. Imo Miura did a great job writing a character who doesn’t even understand his own motivations and emotions and making him understandable to the audience, but it’s still really easy to miss a lot of the complexities.
Also same! I really feel like we’re heading towards a big emotional reveal for NeoGriffith and I can’t wait.
tbh I’m thinking I might write a much more thorough meta post about his narrative/character soon. I want to talk about this more lol it’s like my favourite Berserk related topic. And it’s been a while since I got in-depth about something here, so keep an eye open if you’re interested!
I haven’t heard of him, but I’ll check him out when I get a chance, thanks for the rec. I’m about to head off to work but maybe when I get home I’ll watch smthn of his.
I don’t really have much to say about Charlotte tbh, nothing about her character really grabs me, but if anything comes to mind or she gets more meaty content in the story eventually, I’ll def write something. Though I don’t really think Casca’s reaction to trauma should be used as a benchmark for how strong anyone else is lol, because her reaction was v unrealistic and pretty much just Miura’s convenient way of getting her out of the way and explaining why she wasn’t around during the Black Swordsman arc despite being alive. I don’t think it means she’s suffered more than anyone else (she may have, but it’s not relevant), or that she’s emotionally or mentally weaker than anyone else.
Charlotte is pretty resilient though, totally agree.
Yeah I’m assuming we’re not far from seeing some revealing emotional NeoGriffith moments, after his interaction with Rickert, but we’ll see I guess. I have my doubts that it has anything to do with the magic baby, but again, we’ll see.
Though speaking of, one thing I can say is that I don’t think it will be a tantrum because things aren’t going his way. We’ve never seen that from human Griffith – when things get bad for him, he’s serene about it. He deals with people plotting against him easily, he uses something that could be very distressing (facing Gennon at the most important battle of the war) and turns it to his advantage, he faces Zodd with calm battle tactics and determination even when the odds of him succeeding are nil, when he’s captured after fucking Charlotte he reaches for his sword and then peacefully gives up when he remembers he’s unarmed, he smugly taunts the king after losing everything and being whipped, and the torturer even comments on how quiet and non-responsive he is during torture, at least during the first day or two.
The only circumstances we saw that made him lose control emotionally were sex with Gennon/guilt + self-loathing, and Guts-related stuff (including Femto failing to kill him and NeoGriffith’s heart going off).
So when NeoGriff does eventually show some emotion, my bets are on it being because of Guts.
seisans
replied to your post “Why do you assume Guts is gay for Griffith because he doesn’t like men…”
you’re right anon griffith did not enjoy his sexual contact with charlotte. because he is gay
unless you’re talking about gennon in which case you’re right he did not enjoy that. because it was rape
more important information for that one anon
bc it’s how i roll
I think he’s a great writer, with a lot of strengths especially when it comes to fleshed-out characters and, like you said, conceptual + thematic stuff. Like I’m def too critical of his flaws to call him one of the best, but when he’s good he’s really good.
I kinda debated writing a long response to this and just going ‘yeah i p much agree’ and tbh I’m going with the latter bc to really dig into morality and how morality is reflected in fiction and how fiction reflects or affects reality etc etc takes a lot of effort and nuance, plus I know v little about actual psychology lol so I can’t say anything useful about psychopathy either as a myth or as a misleading synonym for antisocial personality disorder.
Plus I don’t want to accidentally metamorph into a discourse blog lol
But yeah like I said, I pretty much agree. Any theory of morality that includes the idea that some people are just evil is stupid af and mainly serves to shift responsibility away from society, making it antithetical to progressivity. When it comes to fiction, in general (tho certainly with exceptions) I find pure evil villains pretty offputting.
absolutely
Yeah I’ve seen that reading and based on what little I know about BPD it makes sense to me. I tend to avoid adding it to my own Griffith meta etc just because I don’t know a whole lot about psychology and I don’t really have any personal experience with borderline personality disorder so I feel like I’d get stuff wrong if I started factoring it in to my conception of Griffith and drawing conclusions from that, but it seems to be a much more accurate assessment than psychopathy.
tbh there’s a really good takedown of this argument here, by alovelyburn. I’m no psychologist and I’m too lazy to do my research when someone else has been so thorough already. It’s a good read!
In addition to that post though, I also want to add that I have a feeling anyone applying the psychopath label to Griffith probably willfully ignores/downplays the moments where he sacrifices himself for Guts, where he prostitutes himself to save some of his soldiers, where he saves a random stranger from a rapist, where he ditches an important meeting just to see Guts and Casca, where his internal self is a child on a mountain of corpses screaming apologies, etc.
tho i am curious where they got the idea that Griffith has a poor sense of others’ emotions. His own, for sure, but he’s really good at reading people, and there are plenty of examples of things like eg putting a hand on Casca’s shoulder when she seems quietly upset.
I think on a character level it was wishful thinking on Griffith’s part. He saw that Charlotte was still enamoured of him when she took that poison dart for him, and he seized on that fact p desperately, but deep down he knew his plan to be king was fucked and he probably wasn’t going to see her again. It’s perfectly consistent with Griffith’s characterization, he fuckin loves his denial.
Plus it tells us that he hasn’t given up. He’s still him. That moment comes right before he saves them all from an explosion by pointing out the thin wall to Pippin, and it works with that to show us that Griffith is still tenacious, still smart and ambitious and sane, and he still wants to be king even if it’s an impossible dream now. And it also sets us up for his later desperation and despair after Wyald makes his helplessness impossible to deny.
On a narrative level it’s v useful foreshadowing.
In no way does it make sense that he was planning the Hawk’s sacrifice lol, he didn’t even have the behelit at that point, even if some people for some reason believe that he knew how it worked and intended to use it.
Like… I’ve seen people take a lot of little character moments like that and twist them into “proof” that Griffith is diabolically planning to make the sacrifice, and none of them ever make sense because the idea that Griffith has been planning to sacrifice them at any point before he says “I sacrifice” undermines the entire emotional thrust of the story.
Plus it contradicts many, many stated facts, like eg you can only sacrifice people you love so much it’s like they’re a part of you, the Godhand’s explanation to Griffith, Griffith prioritizing Guts over his dream several times, Griffith’s confusion when he starts seeing demons and Eclipse references, the fact that the behelit only opens in a moment of pure despair (why would he feel despair if he knew he was about to become a God), the fact that he tried to kill himself immediately prior to the Eclipse, Griffith desperately trying to catch Guts as he falls from the big hand, and Griffith’s clearly explained motivation for making the sacrifice – like the entire sequence leading up to the sacrifice where the Godhand are talking to bb Griffith in his head makes no sense if he’s been planning it all along. How do people manage to ignore that????
Anyway tl;dr that theory’s dumb, hope this helped lol.
tbh I’ve never seen Ladyhawke so I’m afraid I got nothing.
I’m going to watch it at some point so when I do I’ll reblog this again with My Thoughts. maybe it’ll be soon bc I want to be able to answer this question lol and that’s p good motivation.
this is actually a p tough question, hmmm
Of the current core cast of apostles I think he’d be fairly indifferent to Grunbeld, Locus and Irvine. They’re honourable killer types just doing their thing. He’d hate them only as much as he hates any given apostle, and less than most I think.
Raksas I think he’d hate a bit more, because Raksas is a gleeful dick who likes to fuck with people before killing them and if Guts had to fight him I think he’d get annoyed with his hiding in the shadows being creepy thing. Also if he ever found out somehow that Raksas promised to kill Griffith he’d hate him more because I think Guts would feel proprietary towards Griffith’s death lol. I can see Guts as the type of in-love-deep-down-enemy who’s like, “the only one allowed to kill you is me.” Maybe not at this point in the narrative while he’s trying to shake those feelings, but if he ever backslid, yk.
I think Zodd wins though because they have a history. I actually think he respects Zodd as an enemy, but Zodd’s gotten between him and NeoGriff a few times and is the apostle Guts has seen carrying him around, and Zodd gave him the cryptic Eclipse prophecy multiple times, and Zodd saved his ass a few times too so that he’d be around for the Eclipse and I could see Guts resenting that. Plus they’re sort of designated counterparts and Zodd is his NeoBand replacement which I could also see him resenting. Especially if he sees his own potential to become a monster reflected in Zodd.
Though the bantering familiarity they kinda sorta had when they fought Ganeshka is a point against that actually…
So idk, either Zodd or Raksas I guess lol.
lmao i was going back and doing some tag organizing and realized i read this question from 3 months ago backwards
this is actually a very easy question and the answer is locus. a mortal enemy of griffith’s who has a mutually obsessive love/hate relationship with him sounds like his actual worst nightmare.
in a canon divergent au where they hooked up, i’m gonna say yes. like okay, fine, they’re both bad at sex tbh so it would take a while for the idea to occur to them, but eventually they’d get there. they might need to re-read the kama sutra again and adapt some of the concepts in it first, but yk. i believe in them.
Yeah I pretty much agree with you. Whenever I see someone who’s like, “I would never ever sacrifice someone I cared about no matter what,” I’m like, well that seems like a v high and untested opinion of yourself.
Idk maybe they’re just a lot more idealistic than me and believe the majority of people wouldn’t choose to sacrifice someone in a moment of pure despair, or maybe they genuinely are that self-sacrificing lol, but I’m with you – I’d say most people would. Especially in the world of Berserk, where behelits generally end up with people who have extremely strong values/desires/drives that make them more likely to sacrifice one thing for the sake of another thing. Add the fact that every apostle we see (except Count Slug’s second attempt) sacrificed someone/thing they both loved and hated in that moment, and the fact that moments of despair are tailored by fate to each individual – to be their worst moment, playing on their specific fears and insecurities etc, and yeah, I’d say just about everyone would make the sacrifice under those conditions.
And tbh one thing I love about Griffith’s narrative is that I actually find it really relatable/understandable. I think Miura did an amazing job of showing us what Griffith values, what he prioritizes, what he believes, what he feels, and how his life has driven him to the point of the Eclipse. When he says, “I sacrifice,” it’s so good because it’s been completely built up to. We got to really see all the elements that come together at that moment to make him choose the sacrifice, and it’s absolutely a realistic decision for his particular character. And personally one of my favourite things about fiction is that feeling of understanding why someone does something terrible, or evil, or stupid, or self-destructive, etc etc. I find it very cathartic, and Berserk is perfect for that.
Like it’s fair if ppl find the same thing uncomfortable or off-putting. A story about relatable/realistic people making bad choices for understandable reasons is definitely not for everyone, but that’s absolutely what Berserk is, at least the Golden Age, and misreading it as the story of an evil dude doing evil things because he’s evil doesn’t change that.
hmm yeah it is kind of inconsistent with the whole schierke calling on spirits thing, the rituals, etc. good point!
maybe she will have a surprise backstory, like only being half human or something. or at least it’s a worthwhile headcanon, if we never learn anything more about her.
Enh, to be fair some warlock dude in Elfhelm kinda suggested this.
Though I definitely think this is just, like, his opinion, man.
I think we’re getting two sides to this whole Falconia thing, and we’re meant to draw our own conclusions. Like, yeah Griffith’s country is the only chill place now, which is shitty, but on the other hand it’s also 50x better than the world was even before he flooded it with monsters, and it seems that his plan is to keep expanding it into an inclusive empire.
It’s not that NeoGriff is a con man or w/e, forcing people to buy his world peace, it’s that flooding the world with monsters is the only way to make people stop being shitty and work together in a nice utopia that values equality over social status, and it’s up to the reader whether the ends justify the means or not.
Plus it’s worth noting that this is what humanity wants. The Conviction arc was largely dedicated to showing us how shitty the world is. Nobles torture and torment peasants, outcasts are miserable, the holy see sucks, the heathens suck, plague everywhere, people starving, pretty much everyone except the richies is unhappy. Griffith’s new world order is essentially a response to all the bullshit we see up close and personal in the Conviction arc, a world where outcasts are welcomed, people are valued for what they can do rather than what family they were born to, apostles no longer eat people, no inquisitions, no discrimination that we see – like it’s fitting that the prostitutes from the Conviction arc return in Falconia as tour guides/organizers.
Griffith, as “the desired” of humanity, presumably fulfills humanity’s desires. Of his own free will and for his own maybe shifty reasons, but free will and fate are not mutually exclusive in Berserk – people’s choices always play into fate’s hands. The Idea of Evil told him he’d either save or doom humanity by doing whatever the hell he wants. I kind of assume this means less saving/dooming the world and more a metaphysical Jesus-y saving/dooming people’s souls – or quite possibly saving humanity from themselves or dooming them to more of their own subconsciousness dicking with them. You know, either getting rid of the Idea of Evil by shaping humanity’s point of view, or dooming them to continue having their mass subconscious manifest in a malicious entity who controls fate.
That’s just a theory tho, we don’t really know what the Idea of Evil means afaik, and even if I’m right I have no idea if what NeoGriffith is doing is more likely to save or doom humanity lol. Or hell maybe he’s on the road to “dooming” humanity but, similar to how letting Guts go kicked off the series of events leading to his rebirth as NeoGriffith, something in his faulty, Guts-obsessed demon soul is going to cause him to do something unexpected and better/freeing for humanity. /more theorizing
ANYWAY all that said I actually fully expect Miura to come down more on Guts’ side, since he is the protagonist and all. Personally I’m into Falconia, I like the whole ‘can’t make a utopia without breaking a few eggs’ thing, but since Guts, on a more philosophical level, represents free will and raging against fate and struggling against your situation while Griffith more represents being saved by someone who comes along and makes your life easier (i think), and Berserk is all about The Struggle, I think there’s an undertone of it being better to suffer in an uncaring world than to have a happy easy life in a utopia.
You know, that’s never actually occurred to me as something that needs an origin story. I kind of just assume she’s like a naturally talented witch, like maybe some people have more innate ability to see the astral plane than others.
The fact that she’s kind of weird and off-beat probably helps tho, since the more like, boring and conservative you are the more blind you are to magic and stuff lol. She talks about feeling alone all her life I think so I figure she was never formally trained by a professional witch or anything, it seems like something she was born with.
Do you (or anyone else reading this) have any theories about her?
tbh I agree that this is part of why people respond more positively to Guts and negatively to Griffith. Griffith’s narrative ended in succumbing to despair and becoming a monster, while Guts’ nickname is “struggler” lol. People absolutely respond more positively to a narrative about fighting and persisting against all odds than a narrative about losing everything and essentially selling your soul because you feel like you’re out of options.
However, that said, I think this misses a few important points.
Like for one, to describe Griffith as embracing Femto while Guts resists the Beast of Darkness is kind of, well, loaded and not entirely correct. Griffith didn’t embrace Femto, he embraced his dream and the guilt it caused and seized the one chance he had to make tens of thousands of deaths that weigh on him meaningful.
Like, one thing I love about Griffith’s narrative is that his motivation – to ensure that thousands of people didn’t die for nothing – is heroic. In most stories that would be considered noble. Berserk twists that, because Miura likes to play with morality this way. Griffith’s noble, quite respectable goal, and his relatable and sympathetic emotional motivation (guilt) are what lead him to darkness.
Miura isn’t showing us a character who cheerfully embraces his own inner darkness, he’s showing us a character who becomes a demon ironically because of his desire to be a good person. What ultimately convinces him to make the sacrifice isn’t the promise of power, or rejuvination – it’s to ensure that so many people didn’t die for no reason.
Griffith and Guts’ narratives are different. They exist to pose different questions about what it means to be evil/human/good. But they aren’t comparable on a characterization level.
Guts hasn’t had a moment of pure despair where he’s given a choice to live out his life wholly dependant on others, mute and helpless, wracked with irreconcilable guilt and about to lose the last thing that matters to him, or sacrifice people for the sake of a goal they, among thousands of others, chose to die for, to make those deaths meaningful.
Instead, Guts has a sinister jiminy cricket telling him to murder and rape people. And Griffith doesn’t have a particularly vocal and belligerent hawk taunting him, he has a moment of despair, ordained by causality, orchestrated by the Idea of Evil for the sole purpose of having him choose to make the sacrifice.
Guts and Griffith are different people, but Guts is not inherently better or more moral than Griffith. Griffith frets about killing people for his dream, Guts tells him murder is nbd. Griffith prioritizes Guts over his dream several times before that final moment of pure despair during the Eclipse, and Guts prioritizes revenge over Casca several times before finally giving up on revenge after NeoGriffith blows him off. Griffith prostitutes himself to a pedophile at a young age to prevent as many deaths in the line of duty as he can, while Guts doesn’t really give a fuck about people dying unless he personally knows and cares about them (or if they’re children). Guts describes his dream to Casca as “I just did my own thing,” while Griffith describes his dream to Casca as, “for the sake of the dead… if there’s something I can do… that thing is to win.”
Ultimately, Griffith’s narrative illustrates a man succumbing to evil in the pursuit of good, while Guts’ narrative illustrates a man struggling to balance the good and evil within himself. The only relevant personality difference between them is that Griffith is driven towards a goal by guilt, essentially living for the dead, and Guts is living for himself and the people he personally cares about.
And to address another of your points, Guts has not had a harder life than Griffith. Maybe he’s had a harder childhood – we don’t see much of Griffith’s but it’s a fairly safe assumption – but after killing Gambino?
The narrative takes the position that during the Golden Age, Guts actually had it fairly easy compared to Griffith. Guts’ years with the Hawks are his happy place. Griffith on the other hand had a huge emotional burden on his shoulders, his guilt caused him to self harm, he had the aforementioned encounter with a pedophile bc he was driven by guilt, he had to hone himself to his limits to achieve his goal. Constantly dealing with nobles, constantly fighting at the head of his army, figuring out battle plans, carrying out assassinations that added to his guilt, maintaining an immaculate image of himself, and emotionally closed to everyone except, rarely, Guts. I mean like, the stakes of the climactic battle of the Golden Age is the risk of Griffith being captured as a sex slave lol, and he not only knows it, he incorporates it into his battle plan, like, dude is under a lot of pressure.
And of course, that’s nothing compared to a year of constant torture. Even after the Eclipse, Guts has never experienced anything on that level. Griffith was only barely sane at the end of it, totally physically helpless, mute, he’d lost everything he valued including, he thought at the end, Guts. He tried to kill himself right before the behelit opened.
Like, sorry, Guts has had a hard life, but it doesn’t compare to Griffith’s year of hell. Especially considering that, post-Eclipse, Guts had the option to bow out any time and live in relative peace and comfort with Rickert and Erika (which everyone and their dog points out to him), and now has the option to hang out in peace and comfort in Elfhelm that he probably also won’t take.
Idk basically this is a long way of saying that yeah, thanks to the thematic purposes of their narratives Griffith’s is about succumbing to evil in pursuit of good and Guts’ is about trying to find a balance between good and evil, and at a shallow glance that makes Guts look more respectable than Griffith, but that doesn’t actually reflect on their personalities, their morals, or their personal struggles.
I wrote what basically amounts to a response to this a little while ago (focused on why ppl hate Griffith more than Guts), so rather than just re-writing that I’ll link it. (tw for discussion of rape)
But like, in addition to that, ikr?
I mean one of the central premises of Berserk is that everyone is capable of great evil and humanity is kind of a hot mess, and that’s exemplified in both Guts and Griffith. Like just like Griffith always had the potential for Femto in him, Guts has the Beast of Darkness, and both manifest in violence and rape. Guts is absolutely no better than Griffith, and I’d personally say he’s worse considering that he assaults his traumatized, infantalized, sort-of-girlfriend twice without transforming into an embodiment of evil first.
like look at this
In Berserk the behelit helps certain chosen ones gain power, but you don’t exactly need it to be evil, and part of the point of Guts’ narrative is that at times he’s getting pretty close to indistinguishable from a monster, behelit or no, magic armour or no.
But he’s the protag, fans identify with him, and while Griffith’s fucked up acts lead up to a magical transformation into a monster, Guts’ fucked up acts seem likely to be leading to redemption and growth. There’s nothing intrinsic in Guts and Griffith’s characters that leads one to monsterism and one to self improvement, it’s not like one has more good qualities and the other has more evil qualities – it’s literally just circumstance and the fact that Berserk’s God chose Griffith as his jesus figure, not Guts. But it affects how readers see them and respond to them.
I mean ffs we see Guts do worse things than several apostles. Right now, based on what we see them do in the manga, fuckin Zodd is a “purer” character than Guts lmao. The idea of mixing fandom purity politics and Berserk of all things, which at the end of the day amounts to getting judgy based on which sexually abusive character someone likes more, is incredible to me.
lol so this response is going to be kind of long because you made me want to talk about her story role and speculate a bit lol, so ty for sending this.
I think there’s a difference between having whatever Casca does when she gets her mind back further the relationship between Guts and Griffith, and having Casca function as solely a plot device for the sake of the Guts Griffith story.
By which I mean secondary characters should serve the central protagonist’s story, but they should do that while also having their own satisfying arcs that serve their own characters as well. So a well-written secondary character would have her own arc, her own issues, her own stuff to work through and her own reason and way of developing, and that could still shed light on the protagonist as a parallel, or foil, or simply by weaving their stories together and playing them off each other.
When Casca was an active character during the Golden Age, there were a lot of problems I had with her writing, but she did have her own story. It was a story about being obsessed with first one man and then another, and how much it sucks to be a woman surrounded by attempted rapists, and having emotional breakdowns, etc, so like, not a great story, but she had her own issues, she made mistakes based on those issues, she changed based on her experiences.
Eg when she and Guts slept together they were both using the other as a substitute for Griffith, so at least it wasn’t just Guts using Casca, they were using each other. (And I don’t mean using in a cruel way, just in a there’s-other-stuff-going-on-for-both-of-them-than-just-wanting-each-other kind of way.) That scene didn’t only further Guts’ internal story, it also furthered Casca’s. Ofc Guts’ story was furthered by working thru trauma and starting to recognize past mistakes while Casca’s was furthered by switching which dude she’s obsessed with, so like, still a shitty story for her, but c’est la berserk.
So yeah I don’t think her writing was that great during the Golden Age, but it cleared the bare minimum bar of giving her her own motivation and character arc at least, even though her own story was pretty weak compared her more blatant, main function of serving the relationship between Guts and Griffith.
Then after the Eclipse she became a complete plot device with absolutely no story of her own, only existing for Guts to play off of and project onto.
So I guess what I think is most likely to happen is that when Casca gets her mind back, she’s going to have her own motivations and goals again. She’s going to do something active, based on what she wants. But whatever it is she does is also going to further Guts and Griffith’s story, and lbr it’s still going to revolve around her relationships with the men. So hopefully she won’t be so much just a plot device, and her own choices, goals, actions, etc might even be stronger and more central to the plot than they were during the Golden Age, but Guts is still the protagonist so Casca’s story is sitll going to further his story and his relationship with Griffith.
My guess, based on where she was when she was traumatized to insanity, and where the story has gone since then, and where I think (hope lbr) the story goes, is that she’ll come back and be similar to where Guts was right after the Eclipse. In the last 200 or so chapters Guts grew, he worked at refocusing on his own emotional growth rather than revenge, he made friends, he chilled out, he’s in a much better place mentally than he was during the Black Swordsman arc.
But the story is still about the dark places trauma and desire for revenge take you. I think it would be interesting to shift the revenge theme to Casca. It would kick the plot into gear and make things happen because Casca would have a goal, this way we could bring Guts and Griffith’s narratives back together without having Guts’ development backslide into revenge obsession again, and it would make Casca an interesting foil to Guts – if she’s at the place he managed to work past, she’d be like a reflection of himself at his worst. Now Casca would be able to drive the plot, her goals would be the ones furthering the story, and Guts’ narrative would shift in focus from his own goals (revenge, fixing Casca) to reacting to Casca’s actions.
She would still serve the main story about Guts and Griffith by being the catalyst that brings them back together, by being a dark mirror to Guts, quite possibly by embodying the dark sexual undertone to revenge in a more blatant way than Guts did (bc lbr she’s always been the one to illuminate Guts’ desires by virtue of being a woman and making them hetero), and maybe by forcing Guts into making a choice between helping her and trying to stop her (either for her own sake or because he’s still ambivalent about killing Griffith or maybe both). But now she’d be serving the story by working towards her own goals based on her own experiences and her character, rather than by being a passive mindless object for Guts to interact with.
“What will she do if she does get her sanity back?” The fact that NeoGriffith instinctively saving her demonstrates a very strong disadvantage against her. The fact that the main characters all get to kill their own rapists/attempted rapists/abusers/etc. The way Guts decided he didn’t really have the right to avenge his comrades after abandoning the Band but you know who didn’t abandon the Band? The way revenge in Berserk isn’t always a bad thing, and it could be interesting to explore how it’s bad for Guts because he was basically using it as a form of self harm, but maybe for Casca it’s earned. The behelit which, if Casca is the one to use it, would open the door for more parallels between her and Griffith for Guts to play off of.
So I guess my overall answer to your question is that yeah, I think she’s still going to exist to further Guts’ story and relationship to Griffith, since that’s still the axel on which Berserk turns, but hopefully she’ll at least get to have some agency and motivation of her own while doing it, and if we’re really lucky her own internal story might be more important to the plot now than it was during the Golden Age.
But of course there’s always a horrifying chance that she’ll wake up and just be Guts’ love interest/narrative reward for moving beyond revenge, continuing to exist purely as an accessory to Guts rather than as herself, while something else moves the plot forward, but yk, prayer circle that that doesn’t happen. And like others have speculated with dread, there’s even a chance that she’ll join Griffith and make Guts return to rage and revenge in the worst possible way. I think it’s a tiny chance, like I really don’t expect that to happen, but you never know 
(also the whole revenge speculation is just my preference bc i want casca to have the chance to get angry about what happened to her, and it seems plausible, but there are probably other routes for her story to go that would bring back her agency and have her affect the plot in satisfying ways.)
Sorry if this is a disappointing answer, but not in the slightest.
Griffith/Charlotte is a complete sham from Griffith’s side, he’s just using her to become king. His seduction of her was completely calculated, except when he was distraught after Guts left, and the way his dream and Charlotte are conjoined and presented in opposition to his feelings for Guts makes his relationship with Charlotte read as a very strong symbol of unhealthy emotional repression imo.
Also Charlotte’s obsession is so intense it seems very unhealthy, like, embroidering Griffith’s face over and over for two years is a little much lol. We don’t get much of Charlotte’s side of it but what we do get is basically a naive girl totally taken in by Griffith’s fake seduction, and it’s kind of sad to me.
As for Guts and Casca, to me their relationship reads 100% as both of them redirecting their feelings for Griffith to each other. There are very strong parallels to both their relationships with him during the scene where they hook up, they both acknowledge that they’re not over Griffith afterwards, and after the Eclipse Casca basically functions as an outlet for Guts’ feelings about Griffith.
Casca’s issues with her lack of independent identity – becoming Griffith’s sword after Griffith saves her, then becoming Guts’ sword after she sleeps with him – are not a good start to any relationship, and the licking wounds description seems very apt. It was never a grand, epic romance, but it’s not even a particularly happy or healthy hook up. They fuck right after Guts lets Casca stab him while thinking about how abandoning Griffith was maybe a bad idea, and right after Casca tries to kill herself. Then Guts has a flashback and strangles her during, and Casca is just happy to finally have someone receptive to her attempts to comfort and support them.
Afterwards Guts invites her along in as non-committal a way as possible, like ‘idk maybe you coming with me will suck and you’ll throw off my groove and i’ll end up ditching you anyway, but i want more sex so let’s give it a shot.’ Which I honestly find hilarious in how unromantic it is.
And even as a low-key licking wounds hook-up it feels very narratively forced to me (which makes sense since Miura said he had them get together just to make the Eclipse more dramatic).
Like Judeau has to practically shove Guts at Casca for him to even consider it lol.
Then of course after the Eclipse you have Guts abandoning her in a cave for two years, assaulting her twice, and redirecting his feelings for Griffith to her again – not even just in the hound scenes but also when he decides to save her directly because he compares abandoning her in a cave to abandoning Griffith in the snow, and when he decides to stick with her only after Griffith abandoned him lol.
Plus Casca is terrified of him for good reason, and the idea of their relationship turning romantic again after Casca gets her mind back is something I find fairly horrifying after how he treated her.
She’s been reduced to nothing more than a symbol of Guts trying to keep his hold on humanity, she’s suffered for it, and if she gets her mind back and gets back together with Guts as a narrative “reward” to him for suffering through a shitty life, like I think a lot of Berserk fans want, I would be extremely disappointed.
(I have a very, very long post that goes into detail on Guts and Casca’s relationship and how it largely revolves around Griffith here, if you’re interested, but I’d only recommend reading it if you’re not a fan of their romance. it’s also about griffguts and gay subtext but so is most of my blog content lol)
I feel like it’s a pretty sure bet that at least his feelings for Guts survived the various transitions, but yeah I’m still waiting to find out how much of a relation NeoGriffith has to human Griffith. I don’t really think he’ll be technically redeemed either way, especially since his narrative seems kind of outside conventional morality what with Berserk’s take on God and religion and Griffith being the saviour of humanity etc etc, but the more of human Griffith, his feelings and character etc that remains, the better and more cathartic an emotional climax to the Guts and Griffith story is going to be, so yeah. I need that.
Like if he’s totally inhuman and all human Griffith’s feelings are dead and buried and it’s just fetus feelings left, the emotional catharsis can only be one-sided on Guts’ side, and meh. I’m seriously invested in NeoGriffith revealing some remaining emotional depth, and if he does it’s going to be amazing.
But lines like “my blood should have been frozen” and “this is the crystalization of your last tear shed” seem to hint at Griffith’s lingering emotions with the potential to be reawoken imo, so I’m assuming eventually that’ll get some good payoff.
Yeah ikwym I wish there was some hard and fast canon on Griffith’s age like there is for Guts. But yeah I’m pretty sure the source for that is just behind the scenes adaptation material, so I wouldn’t call it canon. I like to think of Griffith as close to the same age as Guts myself.
tbh I don’t remember any other mention of Griffith’s age (or Casca’s for that matter) except Guts thinking Griffith is about the same age as him. But I def don’t remember everything, so I could definitely be wrong about that.
And yeah ia I don’t really like that implication either. But lol I think that’s mostly bc I like to think that Griffith’s feelings/personality/etc has the potential to be unfrozen, and “dead” sounds disappointingly final to me.
the only source I’ve ever seen for Griffith’s age is the film book. the only indication of his age we get in canon is Guts saying “he’s about the same age as me,” after Griffith’s naked speech, as far as I remember, so idk if we really do “know” that Griffith is older than them.
Of course I could be misremembering. Do you mind telling me where you got your information on their ages? I’ve been curious for a while if there’s actual canon somewhere telling us or if it’s just supplementary material from the behind-the-scenes of the adaptions.
If it is from the behind the scenes info, then it seems likely that the ppl who adapted it consider Griffith the character to have died when he transformed into Femto, if they cut his age off then. But that’s not necessarily canon.
Especially since even if you consider Griffith “dead” after going through a thorough magical transformation that destroyed most of his personality, he still experiences time so it’s kind of weird to cut his age off at 24 imo. I guess you could restart the count and call Femto 2 years old, and NeoGriffith one year old lol, since he goes through a magical “rebirth” every time, but that seems pedantic.
you're the only one 