Tag: Anonymous

I’m honestly surprised Miura didn’t over sexualize the shit out of Farnese. Sure she has her moments (ugh) but overall he really toned it down, thank god. I’m hoping he doesn’t give her the Casca treatment anytime soon

lol same honestly. 200 chapters and only one rape threat way back in the conviction arc, imagine. Plus I love her day to day traveling clothes since joining Guts, like she doesn’t even have Casca style ridiculously tight fanservice pants. Like yeah she still gets occasional fanservice moments while bathing with Casca etc, and she definitely had her moments in the conviction arc, but Miura gets the Not As Big A Jerk As You Could Have Been award for her overall.

I’m re-reading berserk and…jfc miura really is obsessed with sexualizing casca. I’ve lost count of how many times i’ve seen her naked or semi-naked at this point. Seriously though the way he treats her character is sick

God it’s just the fucking worst isn’t it? And it’s so constant, both pre and post Eclipse, and so shitty, and often straight up tonally jarring lmao.

I actually recently wrote out a whole rant about how the depiction of Casca during the Eclipse isn’t just incredibly offensive but straight up objectively, qualitatively bad writing and bad art, but then I never posted it bc I got uncomfortably specific lol. But man, and it’s not just the Eclipse either, it’s everywhere.

Actually can I just (not cut for anything particularly triggering, just me going on a brief rant anyway lol. also tits)

image

imagine drawing this. You’re an artist and writer, you’re trying to depict a thematically resonant, significant moment that’s also very sad and emotionally touching, and this is how you choose to do it. Look at those metallic looking nipples. Do you think Miura even knows that nipples usually aren’t hard?

Why does he want the het male portion of his audience to be turned on during a sad moment that takes place after an attempted rape?

Or, conversely, why are so many men so awful that it doesn’t even occur to Miura or the majority of his audience that the image accompanying this sad text is inappropriately eroticized? That a mostly naked woman with those ridiculously (and kind of racistly lbr) bright, eye-catching nipples and gravity-defying tits actively fucks with the emotional tone you’re theoretically trying to convey? Because it’s just default to them: woman = naked and sexy as often as possible no matter what the context is.

Honestly it’s infuriating, and this example is nowhere near as fucked up as the Eclipse, or even the way Miura continues to eroticize Casca’s body when she’s traumatized and regressed to like mental infancy, etc.

You can steal Jolt any time:) My video-editing skills are none-existent (~ ~)

tyvm! idk if I could do anything good with it but it would at least be a really fun song to practice with, and listening to it I immediately had a potential structure in mind which is always a good sign.

But also don’t sell yourself short! If you have the software it just takes practice. A lot of programs have a steep learning curve but once you get the hang of all the finnicky technical details everything else kind of follows ime. And honestly being able to picture a good video is like 75% of the battle imho lol.

What does “b” stand for in your tags?

oh i tag all my meta-y posts ‘a’ and all my original posts including meta ‘b’

tbh it’s kind of a holdover from when i was liveblogging, so i could read all my own posts chronologically if i ever felt like it and see what i was thinking while reading thru berserk

tho i never actually have so i’m not sure why i still do it other than habit lol. i guess it’s also handy to have a quick way to filter out reblogs if i’m trying to find something too

Imo berserk stopped being interesting when guts trauma stopped being adressed. For mb the first time in a dark shonen,its shown sexual abuse can happen even to the machoman protag, and how sexual trauma affects him and his relationships.how it makes him weak, afraid,desperate to form a deep bond wt smo and vulnerable to guenine demonstration of luv. Its so rare to have this characterisation in média,more so with a viril protag! 1/2

And then guts have sex wt casca and that stops. Now hes just a strong
character,never defeated, afraid only of himself bc ooh theres a scary
monster inside him teehee,like every shonen.He wants to defeat his evil
former bff with lingering sentiments (naruto?). His vulnerabilities, his
dependance on smo else opinion,his loneliness and lack of meaning of
his existence,which were rare traits in protag?disappeared. GA was how
life conditions impacted real ppl,now  bersek is just a shonen wt rape
2/2

Yeaaaaah I agree with a lot of this. I’ve ranted about it before but I can always go on more about how much it bugs me that Guts’ personal trauma is basically ignored during and after the Eclipse in favour of switching to being angry about someone else’s trauma (someone who didn’t even get her own reaction to it, at least not for 20 years).

Cause yeah like ia, Guts’ trauma – and not just the csa trauma but also the more overarching abuse from Gambino as he was growing up – is so vital to his entire character in the first two arcs. It informs everything about him from his insecurities, to the way he fights, to the reason he stayed with the Hawks and the reason he left the Hawks, etc. In the Black Swordsman arc, the reason he’s so angry is because Griffith sacrificing him wasn’t just a betrayal, but a replay of that childhood trauma. The ghosts haunting him and claiming him are an echo of Gambino calling him cursed and selling him to someone else. It all fits together perfectly and it’s so good.

And it is a relatively unique backstory when it comes to badass manly man action hero protagonists. I mean to be nitpicky Berserk is a seinen, not a shonen, but the csa backstories seem to be more inspired by classic shojo, based on some of the influences Miura cites (like Kaze to Ki no Uta), and combining those elements with typical seinen action stuff, especially since imo Miura did it very thoughtfully and very well up til the end of the Golden Age, does create a unique and v interesting story.

And then during and after the Eclipse Guts’ trauma is basically dropped, and he does feel more generic to me – more typically cool and badass, much less interestingly vulnerable. Like eg, his very personal, actual fear-for-himself during the Black Swordsman arc was a really compelling element! And the only post-Eclipse instance I can think of where he was shown to be genuinely afraid for his own life and well-being, rather than afraid of his own potential to do harm or afraid for the people he’s trying to protect, is when Slan shows up in the troll cave. And because there was a sexualized threat there I do think that was a deliberate reference to Guts’ own trauma. But it was one scene over a hundred chapters ago that didn’t really have any emotional resonance (unlike, say, the early Golden Age Zodd encounter which changed everything, or the Wyald encounter which imo shed a lot of light on Guts’ dream), and was far from overt.

So like I unfortunately also get the impression that Miura has largely dropped Guts’ personal trauma as a significant factor of his character and story in favour of the far more common and boring fridged girlfriend backstory.

But! I also still have hope that that’s not the case. I feel like Guts’ post Eclipse monster hunting rampage was largely a way to avoid dealing with his complicated feelings, and I feel the same way about Guts’ fix Casca quest. Like, maybe it’s not Miura dropping Guts’ personal trauma to focus on manpain – maybe it’s Guts deliberately cultivating rage to avoid confronting his more difficult feelings like fear and loneliness and longing etc.

Avoidance is kind of his thing, after all.

image

This may be (is probably) wishful thinking, but it does give me hope
that if the fix Casca quest goes pear shaped (eg Casca uses the behelit,
or something), Guts’ issues – his childhood, guilt, all his mixed feelings regarding Griffith, etc – will come back front and centre. We
have all the ominous foreshadowing about the Beast of Darkness and the
armour,

and if something makes him go wild and succumb to it it would be nice if it wasn’t just like a one-off bad event but rather a cumulation of everything he’s (I hope) been spending the last 3 years trying to distract himself from.

And then at some point after that he can be pulled back from the armour and yk, actually grow as a person by confronting his issues rather than hitting stuff with a sword, now armed with the knowledge that avoiding stuff just makes them fuck you up harder when your avoidance strategies fail you.

ofc that said, even if that is the case I think Miura’s fucked up w/ pacing. It’s been 250 chapters since the Eclipse, there’s a reason I feel like this is a vain hope even if it does make perfect sense to me as an explanation lol. Plus like… some details do seem to not be pointing in that direction. Like:

Are we meant to regard his choice to take Casca to Elfhelm to be immersing himself in sorrow? Because that is absolutely not the vibe I’m getting, but the dichotemy between chase Griffith for revenge = avoidance vs stick with Casca = positive healing is so explicitly drawn here that maybe Miura’s just half-assing the positive healing to the point where it looks like avoidance lmao. Like that is my genuine fear, is that everything from chapter 130 on is actually meant to be seen as Guts dealing with his shit lol.

But idk like there are still intriguing elements that may be evocative of Guts’ deeper issues, back even to his childhood, that pop up now and then, that I can point to as evidence that they may still be actually dealt with in the future. Like the aforementioned Slan scene, the way he’s still drawn to Griffith as his “true light,” the fact that the Beast of Darkness is personified as a dog

uhhh the self-destructiveness of the armour (the way he doesn’t feel pain and it knits his broken bones together etc) as a metaphor for the way fighting is basically a form of self-harm for him… idk like none of these things are addressed, but they’re there to be picked up on and therefore will hopefully cumulate in something more interesting eventually.

Hey,what if it femto raped guts instead during the eclipse ? I think it would be more in character for femto (embodiment of grif self-loathing aka his fear of being a monster taking what it wants wtv it takes +nice parralel of grif interior monologue during his fight wt guts aka having guts wtv it takes),and more wise story-like (echo of guts past trauma+eclipse being bout him and not casca+the following chapter wld rly be bout guts+etc).And it wld have been depicted respectfully lol

this is a dicey topic so I’m putting it under a cut, cw for somewhat casual discussion of rape

tbh yeah it probably would’ve been more tastefully depicted, both the scene and the aftermath/trauma (not that that’s a hard bar to clear, but Miura does care more about realistic depictions of men with trauma than women with trauma lbr). I mean obviously it would’ve been extra fucked up and offensive w/ that predatory gay villain shit, but it’s not like the canon version is great on that score either. And you’re right that at least the misogynist fridging of a female character + subsequent manpain wouldn’t be a factor. Idk it’s a hypothetical so it doesn’t really matter whether it’d be more or less or the same amount of offensive anyway, and it’s all subjective when it comes to comparing misogyny vs homophobia lol.

and honestly I kinda asked myself the same thing while writing my long Griffith meta, particularly the third part where, yk, I got into parallels w/ the King and his feelings for Charlotte and Griffith’s self-loathing and potentially seeing his feelings as intrinsically predatory wrt the second duel, yadda yadda yadda. Like, I could see it as an alternate version of the Eclipse. I don’t think it would necessarily be ooc for a potential personification of Griffith’s inner evil.

It would be ooc for the Femto we got though imo. Bc Femto and NeoGriffith re-enforce Griffith’s denial, they’re all about denying that they give a single fuck. If raping Guts = Femto taking what he wants, then he’s admitting to himself that he wants him, and one of his main reasons for making the sacrifice was to stop wanting him. Like while I doubt this was Miura’s reasoning lol, I do think it makes sense for him to assault Casca rather than Guts (yk assuming an Eclipse rape has to happen). It fits the pattern of how they both use her as an intermediary to repress their feelings for each other.

And I mean obviously we can talk about how rape isn’t about sex or sexual desire but rather about power and degradation, but wrt a fictional depiction where the evil version of a dude who was in love with the protag sexually assaults him, you can’t really divorce that from the human version’s feelings. Tho I suppose it could be framed as like a version of the Hill of Swords scene, ie Femto testing himself in a grotesque way, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be an admittance of lingering, now twisted and evil feelings from his pov. Idk, whatever.

Anyway it would’ve wildly changed everything post Eclipse. tbh I think it would totally destroy Guts – not like drive him insane like Casca bc honestly that’s just Miura’s cop-out to avoid writing a realistically traumatized woman, but I mean like… it’s the opposite of what his deal is now, in a way.

If post-Eclipse Guts was largely motivated by this continued need for Griffith/Femto’s attention, that connection between them, to be hated as an enemy if he couldn’t be loved as a friend, etc, and I definitely think that’s the case, then like, sexual assault during the Eclipse is a way of hurting him while giving him that attention. A corrupted + weaponized aspect of something he wants.

Like idk I can’t even rly picture what his reaction would be if suddenly Femto’s attention/that “true light” bond between them was a terrifying source of trauma rather than something to pursue. Maybe he would still try to lash out and kill him, but less a genuine attempt and more suicide by monster? Like with how much more powerful Femto is, Guts would know he’s not actually a match for him, but he’s also so driven to kill as his number one reaction to everything that scares him. I feel like he’d have much less self-preservation (and BS Guts did not have much in the first place lbr) bc he doesn’t genuinely want to find and face Femto again in this version of events, and he’d be dead 1 or 2 apostles into his revenge spree.

I suppose there’s also room to explore more complicated feelings, like how would Guts feel about human Griffith in this circumstance – still regret and guilt, or would that be overwritten? Would this reach back and ruin his memories of the old days? Basically, does he still miss human Griffith? Is there any part of him that still wants Griffith’s attention despite everything? I mean you have canon lines like “is she not precious because she’s the wound Griffith left, because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you,” after all. Like, what would the Beast of Darkness say to him now? If this AU version of the Eclipse rape was yk, the same as canon with the same focus on unwilling arousal + orgasm, how does that aspect fuck Guts up? etc etc.

But lbr those are questions more suited to darkfic than meta.

about guts being possessive with griffith in the dungeon while selfish is an interesting developement after casca told him that “griffith was no good without him right before being stabbed

Like, Guts feeling possessive of
Griffith as a response to Casca telling him that Griffith was
emotionally dependent on him? yk the knowledge that Griffith ended up
in a torture chamber because of him, whether he’s ready to acknowledge
that or not, basically making him feel like he’s allowed to express that
possessiveness bc Griffith has ott feelings for him back? Because if so I could def see that.

We see Guts musing on this fact in the tunnels on the way to Griffith too. I definitely think it’s informing a lot of his behaviour here, and in the lead-up to the Eclipse, maybe not consciously since he keeps trying to bury that realization (because guilt), but definitely subconsciously.

I also think it’s the main source of the rage that fuels his rampage through Midland, killing hundreds of soldiers and a monster. It’s a way of ignoring his guilt by turning the feeling outward onto acceptable targets. You could maybe also add that it’s why he snaps at Casca – he already has the urge to lash out at something, and a minute later the torturer shows up and then he’s able to fully express his feelings lol.

Also plz feel free to explain further if I missed something, I want to know your thoughts and idk if I interpreted what you mean right.

I would honestly be ok with Miura killing off everyone in Guts’ rpg group rn cuz tbh this whole happy happy fun times vibes isn’t the Berserk I fell in love with. Everything is going way too well for Guts rn so I hope Casca fucks some shit up. The only person I’d be sad about dying is Farnese but if Miura killed her off I’d get it

yeah i get this feeling. and like, if given a choice between guts getting over revenge/griffith and moving on and living happily ever after vs everyone dying, i would definitely take the latter lol.

but i doubt v much that miura’s gonna kill everyone off, and tbf he doesn’t actually need to for berserk to get darker again, so I’d be more than happy if casca fucks shit up and only/mostly just the minor rpg group characters die. As long as something negative (that can’t be immediately reversed or fixed or solved) happens soon and we lose the lighthearted tone. but i think that’s pretty likely.

Why do you feel Grunbeld would turn Griffith down? Are they all human in this au? (I can’t into any apostles/Griff in canon because his Godhand charm powers are… unsettling) This idea is really cool though, thank you for talking abt these characters (and getting them accurately imo)! ^^

ty! and lol yk idk, it was just my immediate thought. Maybe because of the core apostles he seems a little more above the hype? he seemed kind of disdainful about being sent after flora, and he’s got that noble knight thing going on but it seems less personal/emotional than locus’ loyalty to griffith. i guess i get the impression that he’s following griffith more because of duty than any particular attachment to griffith, unlike the other apostles who are all personally obsessed.

but i feel like i get him least out of all the apostles, which is funny bc he’s the one with a spinoff story, but yk i haven’t read it so he’s still a mystery to me lol.

I was mainly thinking modern au where the apostles are just dudes griffith does some terrible rebounding with after his (temporary in this version) break up with guts. yk zodd is guts 2.0 but more violent/less restrained, irvine is a nerd who spends weeks alone at a time, raksas is probably a serial killer, etc. But ngl I could definitely get behind straight up canon NeoGriffith/various apostles. ikwym about the godhand charm powers but tbh the idea of an army of monsters basically instinctively compelled to desire griffith works for me lol, it’s an inherently fucked up concept so it kinda fits.

reading ur interpretations and meta sometimes makes me really sad because youre pointing out soooo many parallels and facts that so many fans willfully ignore or just dont catch on to!!!!!! on the other hand im super glad i found your blog because otherwise i wouldnt be as invested in berserk, its a huge and long story and my attention span is small, so its great to read recaps from you!!

aaaaa thank you for the lovely message, I’m so glad you enjoy reading my thoughts and I appreciate you saying so ❤

and yeah ikwym, Berserk isn’t exactly the easiest story to get through or get into lol, so I’m v glad I could help you keep your interest in it up too!

I’m always gonna be pissed at Miura for making Isidro an annoying sidekick for Guts. I wish Miura would have went for a more father/son type of bond with them (although I feel that’s actually what he might have been going for in the beginning, but at this point it’s totally gone imo). There was a lot of potential there but now Isidro is really just so pointless in my eyes and it makes me kinda sad. I just feel like Miura could do so much more with his characters :/

yeah, big mood. I’ve kind of got some mixed feelings because I hate Isidro and I don’t want him to have more importance lol, and I dislike parenthood narratives in general, but it’s still so true that Guts could’ve had much more meaningful relationships with everyone in the rpg group, and it’s kind of glaring to me that he doesn’t.

idk I keep wondering if it’s just because I’m biased towards the golden age lol, if I’m willfully downplaying significant moments between Guts and his new group, or if the interesting aspects are there but subtle and I’m just failing to appreciate it, but idk I mean I’ve read the latter stuff twice or more recently and Guts’ new relationships leave me cold. imo the most interesting relationships in Guts’ narrative are between Farnese and Casca, Farnese and Serpico, and Schierke and Farnese. The one relationship Guts has to anyone that I feel any emotion about is Guts and Puck’s friendship, and that’s been almost dropped completely lol.

Like, I feel more genuine warmth and love between Guts and various random background raiders than Guts and anyone in the rpg group lol.

And I think it does actually make sense for that to be the case from a character standpoint – Guts deliberately keeping them at a distance because he’s been burned before when he lost people he cares about, because he doesn’t trust himself not to turn on them, because he still intends to drop them eventually and return to his revenge quest, etc – but if it is purposeful then I wish I could be shown that from Guts’ perspective. And not just through the Beast taunting him while he’s unconscious (eg ”make them precious to you, it’s all the more to lose”).

I want more moments of self-reflection and telling emotion from Guts, basically. Like, I would’ve loved to see, say, Guts starting to push Isidro too hard during swordfight training and then realizing what he’s doing with a bit of horror and ending it early. Or maybe Guts himself drawing a comparison between Farnese wanting to be useful and Casca wanting to be Griffith’s sword and being a little perturbed. Or in a positive direction, maybe include a scene on the boat where Guts thanks Serpico for stopping him from challenging Zodd with some similar language to the old staircase conversation. Or a million other possible examples of showing what Guts’ current relationships mean to him that I just feel we don’t really get.

do 97 anime guts comes off as less interesting to you? idk if its cuz of cutting his childhood trauma or anime not being good about expressions lol. maybe im being too harsh about the anime but anime guts is maybe closer to the dudebro interpretation.

yeah i feel this tbh. I haven’t watched the anime in its entirety for years but just from checking out a few scenes and episodes here and there i def get this impression, and I think it’s largely because of the character design/animation? like yeah cutting his rape trauma prob doesn’t help but I’m aware of that so it doesn’t affect my take on the character, but i’m still way less fond of anime guts than manga guts.

idk he just comes across as angrier, even when he has no real reason to be during the golden age, yk the happiest time of his life. his default expressions strike me as kind of dour and he doesn’t have that warmth i get in the manga ime.

like just to illustrate this w/ a minor example i picked at random (i was actually gonna look at the rooftop scene from the scene after but i didn’t actually mind the vibe guts gave off there):

image
image
image
image

doesn’t really have the same vibe, yk?

and i mean yeah you can cherry pick examples, like i mentioned there are scenes in the anime that i think they depicted pretty well, but this does seem to be a recurring problem i have w/ guts in particular, as far as I’ve seen.

i’ve pointed this one out b4 but

image
image

idk maybe it’s the angle of the eyebrows more than anything lol. he always just looks low key pissed off.

It’d actually be pretty cool if we got more moments between Guts and Serpico. It kinda surprises me that there haven’t been more tbh, they’re the closest in age rn in the new squad, and there are some similarities between Serpico and Griffith. Also Serpico’s personality balances out well with Guts’ personality imo. Maybe we’ll get some development in the future?

ia, I think Guts and Serpico have a lot of potential for an interesting relationship dynamic, parallels, contrasts, both wrt their relationships and each other as individuals. Yk in the conviction arc serpico and farnese had some griffguts vibes (well everyone in the conviction arc did lol), they both have abusive childhoods that involved taking care of a parent and eventually killing them, they’re actually both relatively chill people but guts has a force of personality and a drive that serpico doesn’t have, idk there’s a lot of interesting comparisons to make imo.

tbh their relationship feels way shallower than it could, but honestly I feel the same way about most aspects of guts’ narrative from the millenium falcon arc on. so I’d love to see more development, but I’m not like counting on it lol.

(maybe it’s purposefully shallow to show that Guts isn’t really fully connecting with anyone in his new group. like guts and serpico dueled but… guts doesn’t really give a fuck. serpico saved guts from zodd but guts doesn’t really reflect on that or care. anything interesting between them is from serpico’s point of view, eg reflecting on how being around guts has changed him. guts just gets his bland little ‘hey thanks for the help you guys’ moment in elfhelm and that’s about it.

i’d like to think that’s a purposeful contrast to guts’ actual meaningful relationships of the golden age lol, buuuuuuut yeah right lol, that’s wishful thinking. miura’s just halfassing it.

it’s like guts going to get farnese back from her family. it’s nice, it makes me happy that guts values farnese, but what does that mean for guts? how does his relationship with farnese, or serpico, or schierke, or isidro, etc, make him feel? he likes them, he wants to protect them, but how do they fit in to his complex inner life? i can come up with a million ways griffith and the hawks reflected and refracted guts’ childhood for instance, but not the rpg group.

maybe the difference is that guts is now fulfilling gambino/griffith’s role. he’s switched from needer of attention to distant giver of attention. there are parallels there in theory, yk farnese’s admiration, teaching isidro to fight, casca/shizu similarities potentially, serpico comparing guts to fire/blazing inferno that is griffith, blah blah blah. but they also… don’t seem to emotionally affect guts much. like damn imagine if guts himself was making a comparison between himself and gambino and fearing his own potential to be a shitty abusive life ruiner. instead that all gets channeled into the beast of darkness stuff, easily blamed on a magic suit of armour, without a hint of awareness on guts’ part of the potential parallels there.

uhhhh i went off on a weird tangent, sorry lol.)

How do you think Griffith and Guts would start dating? Would Griffith be the one to confess first or? What about PDA??

imo when it comes to fic and stuff like that like that I can go along with just about anything as long as it’s written well, so yk I have no hard and fast opinions on this

but i do have some sort of default concepts I keep coming back to. So like I think the easiest and most convenient way for Griffith and Guts to get together is to make it an AU where Guts never overheard the Promrose Hall speech. Everything just falls into place that way imo.

I mean you can’t tell me he wouldn’t’ve got a clue when Casca said, “It’s as if… as if…”  if he didn’t have that whole overheard speech blocking the path to understanding Griffith’s feelings. (That) + (Griffith expressing his fear that Guts has a negative opinion of him in Tombstone of Flame) – (Guts convincing himself that Griffith looks down on him) = kiss.

And along with that, I tend to assume Guts would make the first move in most scenarios.

Partially because my thinking is, well Griffith has his “I must obtain the things I desire” mentality, so if he was going to make the first move surely he would’ve done it by now. But he hasn’t, so there must be something preventing him. And I mean I generally believe that Griffith doesn’t realize he’s in love with Guts, and may not even be in a place to recognize his physical attraction to him. Or if he does know he’s attracted, at least, it’s something he dismisses as irrelevant. So what’s preventing him imo is his inability to acknowledge/understand his own feelings.

Guts conversely is the more emotionally open one, imo. He’s the one who wants to know how Griffith feels about him, he wants to know why Griffith saved him so he directly asks him every time. He reflects on his own feelings and acts on them. So I could see Guts realizing he wants to kiss Griffith and then doing it without thinking too much about possible reasons he shouldn’t. Especially if he has reason to believe Griffith might also want that (eg Casca coming this close to telling him so in the cave).

And I don’t think his trauma would necessarily have to factor in or make him hesitant (tho it could), because Griffith is Griffith, he kind of exists as a special category of person in Guts head imo lol, so I don’t think Guts’ brain would necessarily automatically leap from sex with Griffith = sex with a man = emotionally dangerous territory. So basically if you want to bypass Guts’ trauma as a giant factor keeping them apart, or delay it for a while so they can happily make out/have some kinds of sex without Guts flashbacking or w/e, I think it’s totally reasonable (tho mb something worth examining wrt Guts’ internalized homophobia).

But also I could see Griffith confessing his feelings first in an “I need you,” way, and Guts making the leap to romance. OR potentially if Griffith becomes aware or believes that Guts wants him sexually, he might make the first move while framing it to himself as just bros letting off steam together or something lol, because he wants it but can’t admit to himself how desperately he wants it. Or a million other scenarios.

But that’s just my take on Griffith and Guts. If like a fic characterized Griffith as a little more self aware of his feelings but needing a catalyst to act on them, or something like that, it wouldn’t break my suspension of disbelief or anything.

Also wrt PDA I feel like they’d be extremely touchy-feely, but the Berserk setting being what it is would prevent any blatant displays of it. Like they could spend hours cuddling in private, but in public they’d probably both be too aware to even casually touch much. Their casual touches in public might stop happening entirely because they’d second guess them.

Though ngl I could also see them forgetting themselves, letting their hands linger over each other, Guts brushing Griffith’s hair away from his face, sitting pressed together and leaning into each other while drinking around the fire, etc. Like they’d go from getting together to open secret among the Hawk commanders at least within a week. I guess if this was a fic for me it would depend on the tone. This might feel weird in a dark and v close to canon feeling fic, but it would be great in something fluffier and more fun.

Also if it was like a modern AU they would absolutely be that couple that third wheels everyone around them, sits in each others’ laps, etc.

do you think griffith have a ‘the ends justifies the means’ mentality? some people use it to describe him. but i think its just what he tells himself when he feels guilty. or people just take godhands the whole ‘you knew this would happen. you wanted this’ attitute too literal.

tbh yeah I think that’s basically his driving philosophy when it comes to his dream. A lot of people get weird about it and think that means he was born as like a cutthroat ruthless evil kid who’d do anything to get what he wants lmao, but yeah I mean his motivations are complex and interesting but you can boil his attitude down to the end justifies the means.

He does commit acts he believes are wrong in the course of achieving his dream, because he considers the goal to be worth it.

There’s also a side of his belief in fate at play, where he thinks if he achieves his dream then that’s a sign from a higher power/arbiter of these things that he was meant to do all the wrong things he does along the way to achieve it.

But it does all come back to guilt. If he achieves his dream then the deaths of all the people who died for it will be meaningful and justified. They died for his dream, therefore he must achieve it.

Also it’s worth noting that the things Griffith considers to be wrong, that make him feel guilty, are mostly things Guts brushes off and doesn’t even give a second thought to. Kill hired goons and keep the money we were supposed to pay them? Yeah that sounds fine. Fight a war, leading many people to their deaths and killing many enemy soldiers? Duh that’s just life. Assassinate people? Yeah why not they’re dicks and I like killing people. Griffith’s mountain of guilt corpses include enemy soldiers, people his Hawks killed, etc. It all fucks him up.

So yk in that sense “the end justifies the means” comes down to what the person in question considers wrong. And Guts also shares this philosophy when his ends (eg become Griffith’s equal, kill monsters) justify his means (abandoning all his friends, torturing apostles for information or fun, using kids as bait/hostages, etc). Guts just has a different standard of immoral, and he crosses it a lot too.

And I tend to think that a major aspect of Berserk is showing how this philosophy can corrupt you, until your means get worse and worse (eg Griffith making the sacrifice) because committing a constant stream of acts you yourself find morally reprehensible kind of numbs you to it and makes it easier to do worse.

Guts leading his Raiders and killing thousands of people in his life would never lead to Guts making a sacrifice, because Guts doesn’t care about the faceless soldiers he kills, he doesn’t feel guilty about being a mercenary, and he differentiates between his friends and everyone else. His friends are important, everyone else isn’t.

Griffith doesn’t differentiate. All those deaths hit him, he deliberately refuses to see the Hawks as his friends because he’s well aware that they can and probably will die for his dream, what with being soldiers, and so eventually sacrificing the Hawks starts looking like adding one more generic scoop of bodies to a mountain.

Sooo idk basically I think you’re v right, his guilt plays a major part and most people would say “Griffith thinks the end justifies the means” and use that as a reason he’s an evil conniving sociopath, but yeah imo while it’s true that Griffith thinks that way, it’s a lot more complicated than “and that proves he’s evil” lol.

I have noticed a few people shipping Serpico and Guts together. Do you think the ship is absurd or do u think it’s something you could possibly stand behind???

I stand behind just about all gay ships on principle lol, but tbh I’m actually fairly interested in Guts/Serpico specifically.

Well, kinda. Like, for me, I can’t really picture them in a committed relationship, or any kind of happily ever after thing, but I feel like there’s def physical chemistry between them, and I think there’s a lot worth exploring there.

I mean tbh griffguts is the otp, I’m generally a happy multishipper in fandom but I can’t imagine either Griffith or Guts ever moving on with anyone else, and everything I’m interested in in Berserk comes back to them, so Guts/Serpico mostly interests me as Guts exploring his attraction to men by fucking a different slim blond dude, or subconsciously searching for another connection with another person like he had w/ Griffith and finding hints of it with Serpico (eg Serpico jumping between him and Zodd, Serpico dueling him, Serpico fighting based largely on clever tactics, the appearance of calm emotional detachment, etc)

As for Serpico, I think he’s fond of and intrigued by Guts and definitely attracted to him imo and I could see him going for a non-committal thing before realizing Guts is in love with his fated demon nemesis and getting the hell out of dodge lol.

Also I like the idea of Guts replaying the entire Golden Age through a new gay lens after fucking Serpico and going “fuck this explains so much.” And Serpico maybe just wanting to get laid by the resident hot guy who isn’t engaged to Farnese and then being blindsided by misaimed emotionally intense sex lol.

Berserk was inspired, in part, by the western film Lady Hawke, in which two lovers are kept apart by their respective transformations. A woman into a hawk by day; a man into a wolf by night. Hawk and wolf (or wolf-like beast).

I’ve heard this and it’s a great little connection tbh. Like to be overly fair I think Miura has only specifically cited Rutger Hauer movies from the 80s as an inspiration, but let’s be real here Ladyhawke is one of them and the hawk/wolf alter-egos keeping two people apart stuff seems like a little more than coincidence. There’s a significant eclipse event in the movie too, isn’t there?

Someday I’m gonna have to actually watch it lol.

I don’t know if you’ve been asked this but I’m curious: what do u think would’ve happened if Griffith didnt know that guts left (ie the second duel never happened and he found out the next day) because casca didn’t think to get him or because no one saw guts leaving? Thanks and love the blog! :)

ty! and tbh no one’s asked me this before, but uhhhh this is the exact premise of a highly self-indulgent fic i’m writing so I don’t want to answer this in depth lol

out of several fic ideas i’ve been switching between depending on mood, this is possibly the one most likely to end up finished and posted at some point, so it’s got that going for it at least, and you might eventually get a full answer to this question.

I think no matter what though the answer boils down to: Griffith would probably do something very stupid and self destructive lol. And I could see an argument that it would be basically the same as canon – like he’d still take Guts leaving in the dead of night as a rejection. But things could maybe differ depending on how he found out, if he learned anything about why Guts wanted to leave (3 ppl know so it’s possible), etc.

I hope u don’t mind but I gotta rant a little bit lol Im frustrated with people thinking that Griffith is incapable of feeling/that he felt nothing about guts and only saw him as a pawn and the only reason he felt despair over losing him was because he couldn’t control him. I mean, putting aside the fact that I believe Griffith loved him, i feel like people think Griffith has always been femto and that he feels nothing. Srry I probs didn’t make any sense but I had to get that off my chest lol

Nah this makes perfect sense and ia with you.

like idk man I can say that I get why people hate Griffith and say I blame Miura (when the culprit isn’t blatant homophobia) for ppl willfully misinterpreting him because they don’t want to see him as relatable in any way due to the Eclipse rape or whatever, but god it still really bugs me lol. Like read the book! It’s not unclear! It’s not subtext, or even subtle! Saying Griffith didn’t care about Guts is a factually incorrect statement!

Literally the entire point of the Golden Age is that Griffith loved Guts. Like, it’s not just a fun extra detail, it’s built into the fabric of the story, it’s the point the Golden Age exists to make. (Or more accurately it’s the point the Black Swordsman arc exists to make, and the point the Golden Age exists to explore the implications of.) It’s not subtext, subtext comes into it when you’re talking about physical attraction between them, but the genuine and wholehearted love is absolutely undeniable text.

And yeah there does seem to be a lot of fans who think Femto is just Griffith in new suit lol. But yk, also factually incorrect, again this is something Berserk is extremely unsubtle about so it baffles me why so many people fail to understand it lol. Femto = Griffith – positive human traits associated with caring for other people + literal essence of evil. It’s spelled out in the Black Swordsman arc and while Griffith transforms. A fissure into which evil will surge. A heart is frozen. The crystalization of your last tear shed. Their deaths are pouring into me. Strange… I don’t feel anything. etc etc etc. We see him visually losing pieces of himself. We see the blood of the sacrificed feeding Femto as he transforms. The Lost Chapter (tho it’s canonicity is in question tbf) says that Femto’s body is made of the same Evil Side of Humanity that the Idea of Evil is.

I mean basically lol yeah I get you, it’s frustrating.

Idk what I’m gonna do with myself if the series ends with Guts n Casca together lol, or some shit like Guts and Farnese together. I really feel like Miura might pull some crap like this lmao I think about Berserk’s “happy ending” he mentioned every day

this is a real mood, and I’m ngl one of the bigger reasons I want Casca to use the behelit is because I feel like it’s the best way of totally destroying any possibility of them eventually getting together, while giving Casca an actually interesting role in the story.

I mean ofc my major fear is that whatever goes wrong (and something will, of that I have no doubt) won’t be enough to completely kill the ship and I’ll be stuck dreading it for the rest of Berserk.

And my other major fear is that g*tsca will be dead in the water as a potential future thing but Guts will end up 100% motivated by whatever happens to her/whatever she does/her trauma/etc, with his complicated feelings towards Griffith dropped. But I don’t think that’s all that likely.

But! I think there’s plenty of reason to maintain hope lol. Like in the context of Berserk a happy ending is probably not gonna be a return of the jedi style elfhelm party where guts and casca make out. A happy ending could be Guts dying with his humanity intact lol. It could be Guts’ whole life being a garbage fire, separated from Casca and the rest of his friends, but having a moment of emotional connection with Griffith and choosing not to kill him, thus saving his soul from hell or whatever. Or the next gen children being able to grow up in a slightly better world regardless of what happens to the adults.

Like I’m pretty sure any ending that isn’t “everyone dies and Guts goes to hell” counts as not grim.

Plus that’s from an interview back when he was still in the middle of the conviction arc

–Is it even possible that we’ll see a happy ending?

Miura: I’d say it’s possible. I used to have the
final moves planned out, but lately I’ve been thinking I’d rather figure
them out when I come to it, so now it’s hard to say what could happen.
Being the sort of person I am, though, I actually don’t think I could
let such a long grim story end with a grim ending — like, say, having
him suddenly die. I don’t really like that kind of entertainment. I’ll
leave it to my subconscious.

and it sounds pretty up in the air anyway. I feel like whatever we’ll get will lean more towards bittersweet than purely happy, especially since his example of a grim ending is “suddenly guts dies” lol. There’s plenty of room there, and Berserk hasn’t been grim for ages anyway.

Plus I think Guts and Farnese getting together at least is pretty unlikely after being overtly compared to Casca and her feelings for Griffith several times, and Guts has never expressed interest in her so it would come out of left field imo (not that that stops het ships, but yk, gives me hope).

Aaaaand lastly the vibe I get from Miura when it comes to romance is that he’s not interested in it and just gives all his female characters one-sided crushes because he doesn’t know what else to do with them lmao, so while I could definitely see a bunch of boring side pairings getting together at the last minute/children making significant eyes at each other so you know they’ll get married when they grow up, I doubt we’re gonna get anything like Guts and Casca resuming their relationship for the last quarter or so of the manga. If we do get more g*tsca content I feel like it’ll come in the form of a sad kiss before one of them dies or something.

Do you think Serpico is going to die to further Farnese’s story somehow? He’s one of my favorite characters but I can see Miura killing him off at some point.

I have this fear that Farnese is going to die in part to motivate Serpico so I’d prefer this to that ngl, tho I want both to live.

And it’s possible I guess, Serpico’s had less development than Farnese overall so he might be more expendable, and it would be kind of ironic if after Serpico being p much entirely motivated by wanting to protect Farnese, he was the one who got killed.

I wouldn’t really bet on it though, mostly bc at this point in Farnese’s narrative, I feel like it wouldn’t further her story much – she’s no longer as attached to Serpico as she had been, or dependent on him in any way, so all it would really do is make her angry or sad.

Tho actually now that I think about it what if things go wrong with Casca’s return and she ends up killing Serpico? (Uses behelit, sacrifices Farnese, apostles kill their sacrifices themselves from the looks of it so monster!Casca tries but Serpico leaps in to save Farny and dies instead, then Skull Knight bursts in like the kool aid man, does his thing w/ sealing the Godhand away, and everyone else manages to escape and survive. w/e) Like i’m js farnesca/griffguts parallels would be super fun.

Or yk it would still be kind of fitting if he died in some other circumstance by sacrificing himself for Farnese, but I think that would be pretty boring unless Casca killed him.

How do you think the story would’ve been different if Griffith could talk after he was tortured? What do you think Guts N Griffith w

oh no lol I think this got cut off. i have another message sent right after but it’s only the letter “S” so I think something went wrong/tumblr glitched and it would be great if you could resend your second question, because I’d love to answer it!

But as for the first part (and idk maybe I’ll end up accidentally answering the rest too) I think it would almost certainly change things.

And imo it wouldn’t be so much because of what Griffith would say than because of what Guts would say knowing Griffith can actually have a conversation.

Like, even despite having the relevation that he loves Guts so much his dream is dull in comparison, I find it so hard to picture Griffith actually saying anything like that outloud to Guts lol. He might, and I think that like, if someone was writing a fic eg, it’s possible to make it feel in character, so yk maybe having a tongue would fix everything because Griffith would finally be at the point where he knows what he feels and has nothing to lose by telling Guts.

But I think it’s more likely that what would actually change things is Guts starting the conversation. In canon he had that slow creeping realization that he fucked everything up, Griffith isn’t a god, Griffith needed Guts, and by leaving Guts threw away what he actually wanted. With Griffith actually available for comment, I could see Guts bringing this up.

Not like, “hey so are you in love with me or what?” lol, but more like just asking Griffith why, the way he always does when Griffith demonstrates feelings for him. He can’t come at it from an assumption that Griffith does love him, because Guts defaults to assuming he doesn’t, hence why it took him 3 days to finally accept Casca directly telling him he broke Griffith. He wouldn’t say, “is it my fault you ended up in a dungeon?”

But he might say, how did it all go so wrong? Some of the Hawks think it’s bc I left. I told them that was ridic but… then he sees the telling look on griffith’s face or something. THEN maybe the truth would smack Guts across the face and he’d tell Griffith why he left.

Conversely I could see Guts avoiding this conversation and Griffith absolutely not talking about his feelings unprompted until the Eclipse happens anyway lol. Or yk if they still got to the point where Griffith snapped and ended up in a shallow pond with a broken arm trying to kill himself, he would have screamed “stay away!” to Guts outloud, and everything would’ve come flooding out then. Considering his thoughts at that point (”I’ll never – never again with you”) I could see him just finally confessing everything he feels if he was able to, because he’s pretty far past self-restraint in that scene.

Idk if there’s anything Guts could say to avert the Eclipse tho, because at that point I think Griffith’s despair comes not so much from Guts maybe leaving again as the fact that because of how he feels Guts is fully capable of destroying him with a word. Buuut on the other hand Guts like falling to his knees in front of him and telling him he’s sorry and having his own mini guilt breakdown might assuage Griffith enough to pull him back from the brink of despair, and then they can start dealing with their shit.

I mean to be fair there’s a narrative reason Griffith had to lose his tongue, and it’s because they could theoretically talk everything out. So if Griffith could talk I think the Eclipse would be averted, though it might be a last minute thing lol bc they’re both still dumb and avoidant.

miura is open about berserks gay-influences. thought i just saw alovelyburns post i dont know how he said it in interviews. anyway when you make your protagonists’ intense feelings for each other the main driving force in your story its gonna turn into a love story lol

Oh yeah true, and tbf I don’t know exactly what he said in interviews either, since I’ve never even seen any direct translations, just paraphrases. But yeah lol regardless that last bit p much sums it up

Where do you think Rickert’s story is going? Like how is his storyline going to play into Guts’ and Griffith’s story (since the whole point of Berserk is Guts and Griffith’s relationship). Do you think he’ll meet up with Guts again at some point? Or maybe have another run in with Griffith? Sorry for all the questions lol but I’ve been thinking about Rickert’s overall purpose to the story at this point

Questions are gr8 no worries 🙂

Based on like, plot set up stuff in the last few chapters, my guess is that there’s going to be a time skip when everyone leaves Elfhelm. Rickert will have spent the last 10 or however many years in the Bakiraka village, he’ll be a cool warrior/inventor, he’ll give everyone weapon upgrades lol, and yk, village full of super intense assassins who do nothing but train + a wizard = handy canon fodder allies.

Now ofc I’m hoping really really hard that doesn’t mean we’re just going a rote route of Guts and co leaving Elfhelm to attack Falconia/Griffith and hitting up the Bakiraka and Rickert along the way for allies and power ups lol. I mean god could you imagine anything more boring?

Guts is due to go Beast of Darkness, so another possibility is that whichever of his friends survive whatever goes down trail him on his way to kill Griffith, stop at the village along the way, swap Guts stories with Rickert, get power ups and allies, and then go kick Guts’ ass and try to bring him to his senses.

Then there’s my Void (probably but hell maybe Elfhelm, I got some vague hopes there) is the actual big bad theory and Rickert and co could end up being part of an enemies teaming up to fight the worse dude plot.

Anyway I guess regardless of the circumstances my answer boils down to Rickert probably being the archetypal helpful ally who
provides weapons, maybe helps fight, and knows more about Guts and Griffith than just
about everyone else (pending Casca’s narrative future) and so can potentially provide ~wise insight~ wrt how the past could inform the future.

And also since he visited Falconia and met NeoGriffith there he could also tell Guts what happened, though I didn’t get the impression that he discovered anything particularly insightful. Unless the fact that he was able to slap Griffith goes somewhere interesting.