Why I Ship It

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Okay we’re finally on the last part of this giant self indulgent monster. Here I’m going to get into why I prefer to interpret Guts and Griffith’s relationship as mutual gay pining as opposed to one-sided, how I think the sexual attraction between them fits into the existing themes, and in general what makes it really work for me.

I wrote this thing because while I feel like a lot of fans can agree that there’s at least a strong indication that Griffith’s feelings for Guts aren’t strictly hetero, even lots of fans who acknowledge the gay subtext see it as one-sided. So I wanted to put a spotlight on Guts’ side of things.

And tbh, even ignoring all the stuff I’ve talked about so far, it boils down to one point: one-sided pining just doesn’t fit into the rest of Guts and Griffith’s relationship.

For me, the Golden Age tragedy works so well because it rests not on incompatibility or irreconcilable differences, but on a misunderstanding: both Guts and Griffith fail to realize that the other loves him.

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This is just facts – you can call the love platonic if you must, since Miura never went beyond subtext with the romance, but that’s the plot of the Golden Age in a nutshell.

And if, like me, you think it’s pretty clear that Griffith the gay coded villain who irrationally risks his life for Guts multiple times, who is so gay Guts had to ask during their very first conversation and Griffith didn’t answer, so gay he thinks about Guts while having sex, so gay his feelings for Guts kept him sane during a year of torture, so gay that Guts is cheer captain and Casca’s on the bleachers, is romantically in love with Guts, then it follows that Guts’ feelings must also be romantic in nature.

Because again, this isn’t a story about unrequited love. The Golden Age is about two dudes who had a great relationship but fucked it up because they both misunderstood what that relationship was and failed to communicate. It’s not about a gay dude tragically in love with his straight bff. If attraction is part of Griffith’s feelings for Guts, then attraction is part of Guts’ feelings for Griffith.

The final arc of the Golden Age, after Guts returns from his stupid vacation, largely revolves around Guts’ slow realization that he was wrong when he thought Griffith looked down on him and didn’t care about him:

He’s realizing that Griffith’s breakdown after he left, Griffith losing his dream because he left, ultimately means that he didn’t need to leave at all, because Griffith didn’t look down on him. Griffith needed him. Griffith loved him.

Griffith’s corresponding misundertanding is that he didn’t know Guts left to become his equal, and almost certainly believed he left because he couldn’t stand to be around him after seeing Griffith’s “dirty side.”

This is a bit less straightforward because Guts gets most of the focus in the story, but I’ll do my best to briefly explain my reasoning.

Guts and Griffith’s final interaction together before the duel, that we get to see, is this night:

Griffith needs emotional reassurance in a revealing and intimate moment of vulnerability, and Guts fails to provide it. Instead of telling Griffith that no, he doesn’t think he’s cruel, he tells him something more akin to “yes but it’s necessary for your dream, remember?”

Griffith’s expression in the “You’re right,” panel is straight up the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, it might actually be my favourite image Miura’s ever drawn ngl. I love it so much.

Compare to how he looks at a dead kid before deciding the kid’s death means he has to have sex with a predatory pedophile, and then self-harms in the river the next morning while claiming he doesn’t feel guilty:

Down to framing and hair over his eyes these panels are so similar that I fully believe “You’re right,” is a purposeful call-back to this, giving us the necessary context to understand what Griffith is feeling.

This night of assassinations is Griffith’s corresponding Promrose Hall moment, imo. If only for a moment, he forgets his dream because what Guts thinks of him is more important, and when, instead of reassuring him, Guts reminds him that the path to his dream is paved with cruelty, he looks like all his self loathing hits him at once.

Also dude has a serious and depressing propensity for calling himself dirty.

So when we next see him and he’s falling apart because Guts is leaving, this is the context we have for his extreme reaction: his self loathing, the way he asks for reassurance, and the way he looks when Guts brings up his dream instead of giving him that reassurance.

Look at the moment Griffith is remembering here: “It’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.”

It’s ironic because we know exactly what Guts thought of him then, but Griffith is convincing himself that Guts hated him from the first glimpse he saw of the real Griffith, the Griffith no one else gets to see. The vulnerable, “dirty,” needy Griffith, the Griffith who questions his place in the world, the Griffith falling in love with Guts.

And like Guts, Griffith has no idea how Guts truly feels about him.

So yeah, this is why I think their feelings, all their feelings, from platonic to sexual and everything in between, are mutual. Because the point is that they’re two idiots who love each other but, thanks to their low self esteem, can’t see that they’re loved in return.

Which brings me to themes and shit, and why Guts and Griffith being sexually attracted to each other fits into Berserk like a puzzle piece.

Berserk is, at its core, about reactions to trauma. It’s right there in the title. Like every major adult character has childhood trauma that fucks them up. Serpico, Farnese, Casca, Guts, and Griffith.

When it comes to the Golden Age trio:

Casca was assaulted by a nobleman and saved by Griffith.

Griffith prostituted himself to a pedophile in a fit of extreme guilt while he was at most on the young end of teenaged, called himself dirty and self harmed afterwards.

Guts was raped by a soldier his abusive adoptive father sold him to.

Casca’s reaction to her trauma is to idolize Griffith as her saviour to the point where she has no sense of identity outside of him and helping him achieve his dream.

Griffith’s reaction is self-loathing, emotional repression (”I don’t feel guilty,” he says, while Casca begs him to stop hurting himself), and the beginnings of a vicious cycle in which he is driven to achieve his dream to make all the “underhanded” “dirty” things he does for it, and all the deaths on his head, worthwhile.

Guts’ reaction is his desperate desire to be loved and respected coupled with a mistrust of people.

All these traumas result in the bad decision pile-up that eventually leads to the Eclipse.

Guts’ desire to be loved and respected coupled with past experience making it all too easy for him to believe he’s not is why he ignores a mountain of evidence that Griffith loves him in favour of one overheard speech about how he has no friends, and then decides that it’s a good idea to abandon all his friends, including Griffith, in order to try to become his equal and earn his affection.

Griffith’s self loathing leads him to believe that Guts is abandoning him bc he’s desperate to get away from him after seeing some of his darker sides that he’s ashamed of. His emotional repression means he has no ability to understand or express his extreme emotional reaction to this. So he lashes out through a framework he does understand (”rules of the battlefield,” as Judeau says), then falls into despair, crashes and burns, and ends up in a torture chamber.

And Casca’s lack of identity leads to her transfering her obsession from Griffith to Guts – complete with sword metaphor – after they sleep together, which leads to her mistakenly prioritizing Guts’ previously expressed “dream” to go off and fight people, the same way she once prioritized Griffith’s dream, which leads to Griffith overhearing her telling him to leave, which leads to the Eclipse.

My point is that the Golden Age arc is basically the story of three traumatized people whose adverse reactions to their traumas fuck their relationships up. Because it’s a dark fantasy story ft gods and monsters and fate etc, fucking up their relationships results in the Eclipse.

This is a perfectly good story by itself. It doesn’t need sexual repression added to it, but at the same time, boy does sexual repression fit right in.

I think that, whether it’s intended by the author or not, Guts and Griffith are both extremely easy to read as repressed gay*** men.

Griffith’s got a whole narrative about his dream, a dream which he can only achieve through hetero marriage, being pitted against his love for a man. He does stupid irrational shit for Guts and Casca berates Guts for it because he could “take Griffith’s dream down with [him].” Overhearing him talking about his dream to Charlotte is what makes Guts decide to leave. Guts is the only one who makes him forget his dream. He has to sacrifice Guts, “burying his heart,” to attain his dream. Even when he becomes the saviour of the world as NeoGriffith, he still has to marry a woman to seal the deal on his dream.

The dream is associated with emotional repression and Guts is associated with emotional expression.

As for Guts, I just wrote over 10k words about his attraction to a man and 5k of those were about how his het romance revolves around his attraction to a man so I’m not going to reiterate all that. There are a few particularly noteworthy things about Guts and his narrative that scream repression to me though that I’ll mention.

The way it’s his deep, subconscious, instinctive id side, the Beast of Darkness, urging him to pursue Griffith, complete with a dark sexual undertone. (Relevant reminder: I’m only arguing that the gay is there, by accident or by design, I’m not arguing that it’s a positive portrayal lol.)

The way Guts’ statement to Casca after sex that only her touch was okay in the beginning is a) incorrect as I’ve shown earlier, and b) irrelevant bc the reason she was able to touch him was solely because she’s a woman, as we know from the way his burgeoning panic subsides when he realizes she’s not a man – and ever since then she’s been the only woman he knows. So it doesn’t feel like much of a jump to suggest that he had sex with Casca because she’s literally the only person he knows with whom sex wouldn’t automatically trigger him.

The way his matchmaking of Griffith and Casca seemed to be an attempt to get Casca to take his place, with the added layer of romance that he couldn’t envision for himself.

The way, in their first interactions, Guts seems transfixed by Griffith’s appearance, comments on his pretty face, suggests sex if he loses in a way that seems informed by his rape trauma, but then is once again entranced by Griffith, rather than angry or afraid or any other potential negative emotion you’d think he’d feel, when he does lose. This whole sequence gives me the impression that he wants to bone Griffith but can’t acknowledge it and can only relate the concept of same-sex desire to his trauma.

And, for both Guts and Griffith, the way their respective traumas are depicted is particularly relevant. I’ve explained how each formative traumatic experience gave these two a pile of issues that fuck up their relationship. But the thing is, none of those issues (for Guts a need to be loved and respected and a default belief that he isn’t; for Griffith emotional repression, guilt, and self loathing) are intrinsically tied to rape. For Guts, it’s Gambino’s betrayal of him that fucks him up, not the specific sexual nature of that betrayal. For Griffith, it’s the realization of the weight of his dream and the way he “dirties” himself for it – later examples of acts that make him feel “dirty” are assassinations, so there’s no narrative reason his first act has to be traumatic, non-consensual (as he’s a child) sex.

And this isn’t a critique of that, I actually think it’s great to see characters who have backstories involving rape without it being the sole thing that defines them. For every character it’s part of a tapestry of childhood trauma, not the only important part, or even the most important part.

But it’s really, really easy to fill in the blanks for how formative sexual trauma specifically also has a hand in informing the nature of and contributing to the destruction of Guts and Griffith’s relationship. We’re not explicitly shown or told this, but imo it is suggested when they first meet.

Guts makes the duel, and his first real meeting with Griffith in general, about sex by uncomfortably asking if Griffith’s gay and offering himself to him if he loses. Here either the narrative is choosing to deliberately point out that Griffith and Guts have some gay undertones going on in our introduction to their dynamic because this informs our understanding of the rest of their relationship going forward, or the narrative is choosing to remind us of Guts’ sexual trauma here because that trauma informs the rest of their relationship going forward. Or both.

It’s also suggested in the way we learn Griffith’s backstory with Gennon right before Casca finally expresses her jealousy of Guts and comes this close to telling Guts that Griffith is in love with him:

By revealing this backstory in the lead-up to this revelation of why Casca resents Guts, Griffith’s trauma and his feelings for Guts are tied together the same way Guts bringing up sex when he first duels Griffith ties his trauma to their relationship.

And the way these traumas may inform their relationship is that neither of them are capable of acknowledging or even recognizing their love and attraction.

Let’s be real here: if Guts and Griffith’s relationship was romantic there’d be no Eclipse.

This is what really makes the subtext and the idea that both of them are repressed dudes in love work for me. This is the number one reason I ship it: because they work so well together.

We’re shown exactly how compatible they are. The tragedy of the Golden Age is predicated on both of them failing to recognize the other’s feelings, but what makes it a real tragedy is the inherent lost potential when their relationship falls apart.

All Guts truly wanted was someone he loved, who loved him back and treated him with compassion and respect.

And he got that! That’s exactly who Griffith was to him, exactly how Griffith fulfilled his emotional needs.

Guts remembers the night he killed Gambino before dedicating his sword to Griffith. This is when Guts decides that maybe the Band – maybe Griffith – is what he’s been looking for. A home. Love. Someone to look his way – more than that, someone who cares about him enough to lay down his life for him.

This is the truest moment of Guts and Griffith’s relationship, imo. There’s no misunderstanding getting in the way and muddying the waters – there’s only Griffith admitting he had no reason to risk his life for him and casually saying he’d do it again (”each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake”), and Guts recognizing how significant that is, and dedicating himself to him in return.

Right here and now Guts has everything he’s always wanted. Later he overhears the Promrose Hall speech and re-evaluates his relationship through a false lens, but as I said back at the beginning of this post, Guts eventually realizes that he was right the first time.

Now again this is less straightforwardly stated and relies more on my own interpretation, but I think Griffith’s corresponding issue that matches Guts’ desire to be loved is his desire to be truly seen and accepted.

He wants Guts to be privy to his dirty side and to want to remain at his side anyway. In order to fulfill his dream Griffith has to constantly project an image of perfection.

His reaction to Casca seeing him in a moment of extreme vulnerability is:

There are countless references to Griffith looking like something out of a fairytale, there’s his carefully constructed perfect-fiancee image he shows Charlotte, his perfect infallible leader image he projects to the Hawks. He’s a symbol to everyone – to the Hawks and the peasants etc who love him he’s a symbol of change for the better, of soaring up; to his opponents he’s a symbol of corruption and change for the worse, a “parasite.” To his rapist(s)*** he’s a symbol of perfect beauty. People either look up at him or down on him. When he says he has no equals, in fairness, it’s because no one treats him as an equal. In their last scene together before the speech even Guts had reframed a request from a friend into an order from a superior (”It ain’t like you. Just cut to the chase and order me to do it.”)

But Guts is still unique because he wants to be Griffith’s equal. He wants to “stand beside him,” he wants to consider Griffith a friend and treat him like a real person and not a symbol. And, more than anyone else, he does.

Guts dumps a bucket of water over his head in his first week with the Hawks while they laugh together. Guts disobeys orders constantly to the point where Griffith just plans around Guts’ impulses and Casca gets pissy about how much he gets away with. Casca sees Griffith as distant and unreachable after a battle, but Guts scoffs and takes her to go hang out with him. During their homoerotic duel, Guts punches him and says, “I bet that’s the first time that pretty face’s ever been hit,“ showing only irreverence for the image everyone else is obsessed with.

And this is the one man out of tens of thousands who makes Griffith forget his dream.

This is the foundation their relationship is built on. Love and respect, and irreverence and equality. They both come closer than anyone else to providing what the other needs. And they both help the other grow:

Griffith gives Guts a supportive environment, his trust and belief, his love and affection, and Guts grows into a responsible person who leads a group of men who freaking adore him, who cares for the people around him and lets them in instead of being standoffish, who is able, until an overheard speech, to accept that he is loved and that he has value.

Guts gives Griffith attitude, playfulness, irreverence, etc, and Griffith is able to trust him, is able to allow himself to be vulnerable around him and show his insecurities. He’s able to be himself with Guts.

Plus Guts makes him forget his dream. And Griffith’s dream is bullshit, it’s absolutely terrible for him, it’s a huge weight on his psyche, it’s built on guilt and a need for validation from the universe. But after three years, it’s Guts he turns to for validation instead. Griffith asking Guts “do you think I’m cruel?” is so pivotal because in that moment Griffith’s desire for Guts’ regard outweighs his dream. Guts has to remind him about his dream, and that reminder hurts.

Griffith raises Guts up and Guts brings Griffith down to earth a little, and they come so close to meeting in the middle – but, to bring this post back to my point, they never quite do.

Guts brushes off Griffith’s attempts to treat him as an equal (asking him to help him out by killing a man and Guts telling him to order him to do it; asking if Guts thinks he’s cruel and being reminded of his dream; Guts becoming blind to Griffith’s showings of love after overhearing the speech) and Griffith doesn’t seem able to recognize or admit his own feelings for Guts until spending a year in a torture chamber.

But yk what if they could’ve just fucking boned at some point all those problems would’ve been solved. Literally. That’s my argument in a nutshell: if Guts and Griffith could’ve recognized their romantic and sexual feelings for what they are, and acted on them, they would’ve lived happily ever after. And if they didn’t both have significant trauma related to same-sex desire, not to mention all the other traumatic factors contributing to their awful emotional intelligences and self esteems, they probably could have.

Realistically of course that’s not how relationships work, there’s never any happily ever after guarantee, but this is a story, and we’re given enough information about their relationship to draw the corresponding conclusion that if they were open about their feelings with each other, if they had grown closer instead of being pulled apart by misunderstandings, they would’ve been very happy together.

And I don’t mean to say that sex would automatically fix everything either – just that the story implies that if they had both been able to recognize that their feelings of love and adoration were returned by the other, Guts wouldn’t’ve felt the need to leave to earn Griffith’s friendship through finding his own dream, the second duel wouldn’t’ve happened, and Griffith wouldn’t’ve ended up in a torture chamber for a year. And being able to take the step to turn their relationship romantic and sexual is a natural part of figuring this out.

And while there’s no real reason Griffith would have to choose between his dream and Guts, it’s worth pointing out that the driving conflict of his narrative is Guts vs the dream, and Guts effectively wins.

Guts was replacing the function of the dream in Griffith’s mind. Griffith was beginning to seek out Guts for validation instead of trying to prove himself worthy by achieving an arbitrary goal. He says Guts made him forget his dream. In the torture chamber he reflects that the dream grows dull next to Guts.

Would he have been able to give it up and find contentment in a relationship with Guts? It’s a hard sell, but we’re shown the building blocks that support this conclusion. We’re explicitly told that Guts is more important to him than his dream, so yeah, absolutely in theory Griffith could’ve quit the stupid dream given a choice between it and Guts. Hell we saw him make that choice when he risked his life for Guts during the Zodd thing. And if you believe that part of his motivation for sleeping with Charlotte, at least subconsciously, was self-sabotage, he threw the dream away then too.

The Godhand only came down to offer him the sacrifice option when Griffith believed Guts was going to leave him again, and even then he had to be physically separated from Guts, had to be totally physically helpless and mute after a year of torture, and had to be taken on a fun guilt trip by the Godhand before he sacrificed him. And the final emotional reason Griffith chose to sacrifice Guts wasn’t because the dream was more important to him, it was because Guts was. “You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.”

So yeah I think it’s absolutely possible, even plausible, that if Griffith was more self aware and capable of recognizing his feelings and acting on them he would choose Guts over the dream.

And obviously if Guts got together with Griffith – if Griffith gave up his dream for Guts, or prioritized Guts over his dream by, say, choosing him over Charlotte, or maybe even something as low-key as Griffith jeopordizing his ambition by beginning a relationship with Guts behind Charlotte’s back – Guts would know exactly how much he meant to Griffith, a la the rooftop scene. The speech would be meaningless in comparison to Griffith risking or losing the dream for him. Guts would be 100% secure in the knowledge that he is valued and loved.

But, thanks to Guts and Griffith’s traumas, they failed to recognize the possibilities in their relationship, they fell victim to self-doubt and insecurities, and they ruined everything. And that lost potential is what makes the tragedy so effective to me.

Like I said, this is already what their story is about, subtext or no subtext, platonic or romantic. Griffith could’ve chosen Guts over his dream platonically too (again), in theory. But the subtext adds another, very fitting layer to the story. It slots in neatly with the concept of missed opportunities and lost chances, and it fits with the characters’ histories and particular sex-related issues. And, having just written a 10k series of posts pointing out about half the subtext (Guts’ side), I think there’s a solid argument for considering sexual attraction part of the package.

One final thing I want to mention, from an out of universe perspective, is that one of my problems with Berserk is that every single textual instance of same-sex desire is evil and predatory and harmful. So I like the idea that the absence of gay sex between our two main characters

is what caused the Eclipse. Their mutual desire (or Griffith’s ~evil jealous~ desire) didn’t cause everything to go wrong, it was the fact that they failed to act on it that ruined everything. It doesn’t balance it out obviously, but reading the story this way just makes it more enjoyable for me.

tl;dr in conclusion Berserk is gay, Guts wanted to bone Griffith, and if he had Berserk would’ve been a much happier story.

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*** I’m saying “gay” because this is my project and I hc both of them as gay. But if you see one or both as bi, more power to you.

*** The torturer’s “we were like husband and wife” sounds pretty suggestive to me but it’s left in creepy implication so who knows.

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Thank you everyone who has read, liked, reblogged, and/or commented directly or in tags, etc ❤

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