“Yeah babe, nbd just uh, dissociating a little bit, ha ha. How was your day?”
lmao basically
I’m going to lay out some visuals here real quick bc I just noticed another good detail lol
Griffith on a black background, Guts on a white background. Light and dark, connection and loneliness, and Guts as Griffith’s last connection to humanity before he’s carried up into darkness.
Guts and Griffith brightly lit in contrast to the surrounding darkness as they clutch each others’ hands, because this is what they are to each other. Their connection is what illuminates the darkness, what staves off loneliness.
Guts is both the source of Griffith’s despair and the only thing capable of preventing him from succumbing to it. “He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive.” Same kinda thing.
Guts falling away, lit in comparsion to Griffith blending in with the background. Griffith losing that light.
These pages are just a great illustration of Guts and Griffith as each others’ brightest things, and what they lose when they give up each other.
the combination of griffith’s casual pose, one hand hanging onto a tree branch, one hand in his pocket, and the fact that he’s crying in a tree outside Charlotte’s window is amazing and rly sums griffith up as a character lol
though idt he really promised a happy ending so much as a not completely bleak and depressing ending, so it’s not as ominous as it could be
like it sucks for me because my ideal ending is basically guts once again succumbing to his obsession with griffith, meeting with him again in a climactic manner, realizing griffith is actually still stupid in love, some kind of visual suggestion of equality or guts looking down at him bc their persistant feelings equalize them despite everything, and then guts finding some kind of emotional catharsis in that, hopefully while one or both of them is dying
but the story ending with guts still obsessed with griffith would probably be a negative ending according to like, the themes of berserk lol
i think there are ways it could be swung in a more positive direction. eg remove casca from the possibility of a romantic happily ever after with guts, lean on threatening the possibility of guts ending up like skull knight, eg stripped of humanity and lost to the armour and immortal and doomed to seek revenge forever or w/e, and put guts’ genuinely conflicting, based in love, human feelings for griffith opposite that. in this way immortality would be associated with monstrousness and death with humanity, and guts and griffith dying together, or just guts dying, or w/e would be extra perfect, particularly if one or both fail to go through with killing the other at the last minute
(the whole sacrifices doomed to hell thing kinda fucks with that but it fucks with any possible non-depressing ending no matter what lol, so miura is either going to have to go dark with guts’ ending or do what i suggest and make him not actually irrevocably destined for hell after all)
like idk i know what i want and i think there’s enough groundwork laid for it to be possible, but there’s also groundwork laid for like, worst case scenarios too. everything’s up in the air
like man i can’t help but fear the possibility that guts is going to succumb to the beast of darkness, be pulled back yet again by his friends, and then ~overcome~ his desire for revenge/to be griffith’s equal while getting with casca. and then they idk team up with elfhelm to defeat griffith/the godhand. like i believe miura is better than that but it’s only belief, not fact
You asked for top 5 but fuck it I’m doing top 10 because when I came up with 5 I felt like they were all way too obvious lol. But also these are off the top of my head and not absolute, they’d probably change depending on what I’ve re-read most recently.
And I’m containing this to single panels.
10.
Guts catching a glimpse of NeoGriff on a distant hill, shining sunrise behind him, the sadness in his eye, the symbolic darkness that surrounds him after their eyes meet and Guts is carried away in a boat… it’s good shit and, if purposeful, might be my favourite example of the bright companionship/dark isolation imagery.
9.
This is specifically Guts’ memory while running through the tunnels on the way to Griffith and failing to convince himself that Griffith is a perfect godly being bc oh shit he was in love with me and I abandoned him and destroyed him. Just, yk, with a little less self awareness than that, and a little more resolute denial.
8.
I said only one panel but I mean I can’t just have Femto there without the associated words, so w/e close enough.
7.
Holy shit a moment that doesn’t involve Griffith or griffguts?? But honestly I may hate the circumstances and everything surrounding it but goddamn Guts’ flashback and monologue here are good. And this panel in particular always gets me because of this particular illustrative detail Guts shares, Guts’ paw-like hand, the dog association as he tells Casca about killing Gambino… it’s such a good allusion to the beast of darkness ultimately being born out of Guts’ childhood abuse.
6.
😦
5.
Peak Griffith.
4.
This is absolutely everything I could possibly ask for post-Eclipse on one page.
3.
Come on. Griffith’s moment of ultimate despair is the touch of Guts’ hand.
2.
Ok this encompasses the whole moment of the sacrifice, “you’re the only one…” etc, but I’m picking this panel to illustrate it because Griffith’s expression obliterates me every time I look at it. Look at how in love he is, like, the following words are almost redundant this image illustrates the sentiment so well.
1.
Yeah this one is the most obvious, but it’s my fave for a reason. This is the purest expression of Griffith’s narrative, this is what it all boils down to: valuing Guts over the dream. This is what I’m about.
in the first orgy scene there’s a few women topping. maybe the 2nd too, but i’m too lazy to check rn lol. and tbf there are only 3 consensual sex scenes in berserk other than background orgies (more or less) and two of those involve awkward virgins so it’s not like a huge sample size.
Ok there’s a lot of opinions here coming at me so I’ll do this one at a time.
Personally I accept him sacrificing the band lol, that’s just another reason I love him.
I wouldn’t say he fell from grace because his life was manipulated by god, like tbf that’s technically true but part of what I like about how fate works in Berserk is that everyone still has free will. God created a set of circumstances that would inevitably lead Griffith to making the sacrifice, but Griffith is still the kind of dude who would sacrifice his friends under those specific circumstances. And again, I love that about him.
Yeah I sure hope it’s sunk.
Enh I don’t begrudge anyone hating any fictional character for any reason as long as they’re not offensive reasons or offensive about expressing it. Then again these are Berserk fans we’re talking about so it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a lot of sexist shit there lol. But I don’t rly pay attention though so I haven’t seen any of this personally and can’t judge for myself.
Ohh, I see. I think I dealt with a similar issue with docs and tumblr’s formatting.
yeah. plus tumblr formatting is super glitchy lol with the automatic double spacing that just occasionally stops working for no reason, eg. like there are tricks to fix it but lol @ tumblr in general
@seisans said:
yeah i feel you you
could also just ctrl+a, copy, quickly save just the text in a notepad
jic. after a few passages. or just draft the post and then re-open it
and continue
yeah i need to be more conscientious about saving more often in general, this has always been one of my major writing flaws lol. plus using google docs a lot also has the unfortunate side effect of making me even more likely to forget i need to save manually when i’m writing in other programs/sites
the other great thing about this scene is how guts wakes up for like 20 seconds just to look at the tiny speck of griffith on the horizon
like he could just sense him on that distant hill while out cold
Does it not let you copy + paste images to tumblr? I know you cant on mobile but on desktop it usually lets me?
what i just do is copypaste panels into a tumblr post directly from paint lol, bc that’s the level of my literacy w/ graphics. i can copy them into a tumblr post and i can copy them into google docs, but if i copy a post from docs to tumblr (or from a tumblr draft to docs for that matter, tho it works w/ a posted post) only the text c/ps, the images get left behind.
tbh it’s not like a huge inconvenience or anything, just mildly annoying lol
do it in notepad first and save the file immediately and keep saving it as you’re typing
i‘ve been writing long posts in google docs bc it conveniently saves automatically but then it’s also a pain in the ass bc i have to add all the pictures afterwards instead of as I go lol
and this post has so many illustrative panels because like, so much of my point is stated outright in the manga
same, that’s why I make copies whenever I progress in a text post
yeah i usually at least save more often but i’m also absent minded so lol
like remember when miura gave like a talk on writing at some thing idk and he discussed how he uses each character to draw out different emotions from guts, and one of griffith’s was ‘loneliness’
that is like the #1 thing i love about griffguts. two people, both alone in different ways, whose feelings of isolation are only fully eased by the other no matter how fucked up their thing gets or how much either of them change, whether magically or organically
similar abstract backgrounds? or am i reaching bc i’m just so into griffith and guts as each other’s brightest lights in the darkness despite everything
still tho that last shot of guts’ eye w/ darkness encroaching works so well
jokes aside, in light of our recent exchange, I thought you might find this interesting.
oh cool, ty!
damn tho anime girls rly peaked in the 80s 😦
last night i was finally making headway in this post about why guts leaving the hawks was a bad idea (it’s been taking ages bc idk i haven’t felt like writing or smthn), i was on a roll, i was like ¾ done, and then i accidentally back buttoned instead of backspaced and lost half of it
tbh I’ve been looking at it as a reference to Griffith’s torture (in addition to the obvious christianity ref). Nails in wings and tail = cut wrists and ankle tendons, and nail thru throat = loss of voice.
It’d be interesting if it was foreshadowing though.
lol well if you love Griffith and sympathize with him you came to the right place. tbh i’ve never been into the whole personality type thing so all I can do is nod along with your assessment lol, but yeah I definitely think Griffith feels removed from everyone except Guts.
guts’ monologue to judeau and corkus about why he wants to leave the hawks is literally
“fellas is it gay to leave all your friends and change your life philosophy so that a cute guy will look at you?”
more guts/griffith guts/serpico stuff lol, image heavy so under a cut
anyway i’m feeling like this is at least somewhat purposeful for the sake of illustrating the way the rpg group is replacing the hawks in guts’ life, but as far as I can tell the only characters who get actual parallels to guts and griffith’s relationship are serpico and casca so like
i wish, guts and serpico having a naked water fight would fit right in like i was just saying in that last post lol, but miura is a coward
like i’m js the golden age was significantly more popular than everything after for a reason, miura needs to stop being stubborn and return to his homoerotic roots
real talk i’ll accept guts’ narrative as being about successfully getting over griffith and moving on and eventually getting a happy griffith-free ending if and only if guts/serpico goes canon
and not just because the idea of guts moving on from his homoerotic obsession with a dude thru a hetero relationship kills me, but also because it just makes the most sense ~thematically~ lol
this moment was built up since like 40 chapters earlier when Skull Knight warned Guts that he’d have to make a choice not to pursue Griffith. Frankly I think it’s nearly comedic how hard the narrative railroaded Guts into making this choice, ie by showing that Guts choosing Griffith over getting on a boat would’ve been effectively suicide lol, and even then he still needed someone to remind him not to be an idiot – but the fact remains that this significant step on the road to moving on from Griffith was enabled by Serpico leaping in to save Guts from Zodd, a situation with a pretty significant precedent we all remember and love.
and like tbqh it’s criminal that guts and serpico’s interactions when they’re not trying to kill each other are almost always super bland bc out of the current group serpico has the greatest potential to have an interesting and intense relationship with guts imho and like, idk miura kind of tells us this a few times but never shows it.
tbh I think it might be a visual nod to how Casca was the leader of the Hawks. There was a strong emphasis on her role as the leader during the Eclipse, when Judeau was determined to save her, and to Guts she largely represents his three years of happiness with the Hawks now. She’s kind of set up as the representative of the Band 1.0, and the dress fits that.
This is a thread I like so maybe I’m overemphasizing it, but imo it would be nice if it was picked up again, and now’s the time to do it.
(or yk maybe it’s bc Danann genuinely wants to set her and Guts up and she knows Guts has a thing for ethereal figures dressed in white with wing motifs lmao.)
I’d love to see their history tbh, and yeah I hope it’s not just Void = Griffith, SK = Guts because that sounds boring af. Plus Skull Knight has strong parallels to both Griffith and Guts, so if his history with Void is in any way similar it would be cool if it was a remix rather than a repetition, where they both have aspects of both.
I mean there’s a theory of mine where Skull Knight was an earlier incarnated Godhand 1000 years ago, like Griffith, since Gaiseric was the previous ruler of what is now Falconia and has been compared to Griffith bc of it, and tbqh if Void sacrificed him along with the rest of his city to become the first of the next batch of Godhand members that would be like, rly interesting to me.
But that’s just a pipe dream lol. Not something I have evidence for other than Godhands incarnating once every thousand years, and Gaiseric appearing out of nowhere and building an empire with Falconia 1.0 as his central hub a thousand years ago, and Void looking shifty when Slan or Ubik talks about how unprecedented a sacrifice surviving is.
And yeah like I’m over here theorizing that he’s using Guts to get to the Godhand, like I definitely don’t think he’s just a chill friendly ally of Guts, helping him out of the goodness of his heart. He has an agenda. Tho as per Flora (”Old friend, I want to believe you still have the heart of a man” or whatever the line was) if he’s using Guts and co now and fucking them over he might end up making up for it later.
This is like, the fucking plan. Skull Knight and Danann are conspiring to have the behelit open in Elfhelm, by Danann’s spirit tree, summoning the Godhand, so Skull Knight can do his thing, quite probably aided by Elfhelm tree magic, and entomb them in the vortex. Probably alongside Guts and Casca and everyone else watching the show.
Also something genuinely bad and dark has to happen because of this, like say, Casca becoming an apostle, because Guts needs to feel the full weight of betrayal by SK and succumb to the armour. And this will be a heavy painful betrayal because it’s gonna remind Guts of Griffith, because of the way Skull Knight has rescued him in the past and earned his trust. (tbh more on this whenever I get off my ass and write a long meta post about Guts and what his relationship to Griffith means to him.)
But also the power of friendship is going to prevent Guts from going full Beast of Darkness forever the way it’s been suggested that Skull Knight lost his humanity to the armour. Just, god willing, hopefully not before g*tsca is laid to rest.
So. Still think Guts and Casca are pawns, still think the tree and Dragon’s Road thing are relevant, definitely think the behelit’s relevant, and I’m actually pretty confident that the Godhand are coming to Elfhelm and Danann and Skull Knight have this trap waiting for them.
Whether Danann and Skull Knight’s plan is successful is another story entirely. Whether defeating and trapping the Godhand away in the vortex is even a good idea is also another story entirely. And idk whether NeoGriff figures into this at all lol.
Oh also I know the behelit only opens when the laws of causality like, make it happen, but, a) Skull Knight referred to that in that ominous scene where Flora suggests he might be using Guts and it’s not stopping him from maneuvering things into place it’s just giving him a handy excuse b) fate works thru people’s encounters and choices and Danann and Skull Knight and Guts etc are people c) they’re high level magic users a step outside causality maybe they can tell when the behelit’s likely to open and are facilitating that for their own ends or smthn.
Also I know Miura has said he writes on the fly and doesn’t have a plan, but he must have some idea of where things are headed because he has actively been throwing foreshadowing down for 150 chapters. Maybe the details are vague in his mind but I’m quite sure he knows the broadstrokes of the story. Like after all he wrote the entire golden age knowing exactly where it would end up, give or take a few details. I’m willing to bet he’s been planning some Skull Knight shit since Flora’s appearance.
Anyway this is my theory now. I may go about it backwards, ie having a destination I absolutely want and then finding evidence for it, but yk what i want to live in hope until the next chapter so screw it.
guts and casca are pushed together because on a base level they don’t feel attracted to each other, guts and griffith are pushed apart because they are extremely attracted to each other. classic!!!
berserk is a gay tragedy and this is just more proof
but like imagine if danann actually is ~up to something~ when she puts casca in her romantic dress and pushes her towards guts at which point she immediately (and forseeably by danann, who knows she’s afraid of guts) starts flashbacking
i wouldn’t actually give miura this credit but boy oh boy i would love to take it as commentary on how outside forces have constantly had the role of shoving guts and casca together rather than either of them choosing to pursue each other without prompting, each time leading to some particularly awful consequences
ie judeau’s matchmaking leads to the eclipse, godo telling guts to stop being an asshole and stay with casca leads to him assaulting her (probably would’ve had a better result if guts stayed while the cave was intact and had rickert and erika around to help care for casca, but the way things went it went badly so), and now danann’s matchmaking seems to have lead directly to some kind of negative reaction, the narrative scope of which i guess we’ll eventually find out
liiiiike damn i wish i could believe this was purposeful lol
you're the only one 