mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
Tag: b
In the following two-part persuasive essay I intend to demonstrate that Guts and Griffith from Berserk are sexually attracted to one another.
PART ONE
PART TWO
tyfyt
Will you always be left doubting me… when I lay down my life for you?
Tombstone of Flame 2 is the best chapter and I love how it shows both extremes of Griffith’s character.
1st half:
badass
smugly kills a room full of asshole aristocrats including a queen
cool guys don’t look at flaming towers
gives minister foss a panic attack by looking at him
neatly tied up his loose ends, cooly predicting everything and completely in control
taller than the other dude on screen with him and depicted as powerful in comparison
griffith at the peak of his triumph and power
2nd half:
looks regretful and unhappy about killing the bandits he hired
leaves their money as a pointless show of compensation for his guilt
feels guilty for dragging guts into it
needs reassurance
looks like he’s gonna cry
falsely believes guts is gonna stick around, failing entirely to predict him
shorter than the other dude on screen with him, depicted as weak in comparison
griffith at peak emotional vulnerability (so far)
I love this sfm. Guts’ biggest mistakes (narratively) are abandoning people and baby Guts refusing to leave his dying mother is just so good as a moment to define him for us because of that. There’s a sense that when he leaves Griffith, eg, he’s betraying himself on some level as well.
@bthump One thing that really struck me about the sex scene between Guts and Casca was the way that he became triggered. She turns her back to him if I remember correctly and he at that moment sees himself as a child in her place and reacts violently. Her being a woman in that moment really only reminds him of both his pervious vulnerability and also dare I say the fear of the “feminine” he has in himself. I don’t know really what else to say about this and I want to to know what you think.
Hmm, from an in-universe perspective idk if it’s really because Casca’s a woman, if he happened to be fucking a man in that position I imagine his reaction would be the same.
When it comes to what Miura intended to convey, man, idk lol. Honestly I’m gonna bypass this bc I tried to write smthn about it but Miura + deliberate criticisms of misogyny + gender and gender roles + his own misogyny + homophobia, is such a hot mess, I can’t come up with anything useful to say. Like equating being raped with being forced into the role of a woman does seem in line with his deliberate portrayals of misogyny, but tbh I just don’t have the energy to add my own critique to that, it’s a v heavy topic that requires a lot of nuance. Suffice to say I have v mixed feelings.
But! On the subject of Guts’ flashback one thing I was thinking of after I wrote that last post about how gay Guts is that I should’ve added, is that after having sex with her she’s like, “that’s why you used to hate being touched by anyone, isn’t it?” “It never mattered with you. When you first saved my life. For some reason… at that time… it was fine. But only with you.”
And Miura is probably trying to re-write that scene to seem kind of romantic, but let’s be real here Guts was about to have a flashback when he woke up next to a naked person before realizing she was a woman and calming down. We know the reason he was okay with Casca then, and it’s because she’s not a man. And then ever since she’s been the only woman he like… knows. At all. With this being brought up right after sex, the overall takeaway I get from this exchange between Guts and Casca is that Guts registers Casca as extra non-threatening because she’s the only woman he knows, and therefore she’s the only person he would’ve been okay having sex with at this point in time, regardless of his actual sexuality.
(I mean granted if Guts was deliberately written as canonically gay I’d be pretty unhappy about Miura having him have sex with women because of trauma, but since I’m reaching here and I don’t think it’s deliberate and the het sex scene is there whether I like it or not, I’m still gonna grasp at this straw to support my Guts is Gay thesis statement.)
I’m having feelings about this and your essay about Griffith’s arc of being closeted. I kind of feel that you could write a parallel essay about moments like this with Guts honestly. Despite coming across generally as the one who is more willing to confront his feelings during the GA arc he feels like the less self aware of the two here. It’s interesting. The idea that he would throw himself into a sexual entanglement with someone who he does trust certainly but isn’t really in love with so
He could I don’t know
“enact” loving someone.(I’m pretty sure that was how Casca felt too. The
idea of her being kind of so soaked in compulsory heterosexuality that
she can’t really name or give herself room to think of her own desires
resonates with me a lot.) I don’t know how emotionally cavalier and
dangerous to himself and others that is while at the same time being
“easier” socially isn’t really all that different than Griffith’s
relationship with Charlotte to me. Honestly Guts being more normatively
“masculine” seems to give their relationship this veneer of authenticity
to a lot of the fans and I can’t see any other reason for it. His
behavior certainly doesn’t support those conclusions.
I completely agree. Like het in general almost always feels paint-by-numbers boring to me but Berserk goes an extra step – it doesn’t just feel like inauthentic he was a boy she was a girl bs, it feels aggressively… idk, harmful? Negative? The comparison to Griffith and Charlotte makes a lot of sense to me, the only difference is that Griffith knows his relationship is a sham.
Like @mastermistressofdesire said, a chapter later they’re getting weird and jealous and love-quadrangle-y with Griffith and Charlotte thrown into the mix, and then a short while after that Casca’s telling him to leave and Guts is trying to reaffirm his loyalty and love for Griffith, and then during the Eclipse they’re entirely separated in body and thought until it’s time for Casca to become solely a pawn of Guts and Griffith/Femto’s intense enmity.
At their most positive they never feel like more than friends trying something out – even Guts is like, yeah you can come with me and maybe it’ll suck and you’ll throw off my groove but w/e we’ll see.
And at their most negative Guts assaults her to feel a connection to Griffith.
Also to address the actual like, compulsory heterosexuality vibe from an in-universe perspective, god like, they are so gay. Casca’s crush on Griffith feels extremely like a lesbian with a “crush” on a gay dude, ie someone safe to focus on who will never return her feelings (and no you don’t have to know the dude is gay for this to be a thing lol, citation: me and quite a bit of anecdata of gay women who’ve nursed crushes on dudes who also later came out). And excuse my messiness wrt personal identification but as someone who started out as ambivalent wrt having sex with men and is now firmly Not Into It, Casca having bad sex with Guts and going ‘yeah this is fine i guess i could do this more’ because she feels like a relationship with him validates her as a person is also #relatable.
And obviously Guts is gay but has related trauma. The first time he slept with Casca he was freaked out until he registered the fact that she was a woman, which seems like a pretty relevant prelude to their “relationship” such as it is.
you said it more eloquently tho here:
I think the idea that they didn’t have
another way to imagine their intense feelings at that moment outside of a
romantic relationship tells you how deeply they don’t really understand
themselves at that moment and how much I think a part of them longs for
“normalcy.”
like tl;dr ia with yours and mmod’s convo in the comments lol, allow me to join in on the gay projection.
I mean I would totally dig the long multi chapter version Like I can never have enough of GriffGuts meta. Or yours in. particular
ty the feeling is mutual ❤
ohhhh if you don’t mind doing it, the multi part…
i’ll aim for the long ass self indulgence then, i had fun with the first part so. plus it was already going to be 2 parts (one w/ more words, one with more visuals) so why not more. tho fair warning the thing i wrote reads like the ending of clue.
(in order to help you understand how gay it is, allow me to take you through the events of the manga step. by. step.)
so a couple nights ago i was bored and spent like 3 hours re-reading some early chapters and writing a 1500 word and 20 pic post about how guts is attracted to griffith, covering just the black swordsman arc
in hindsight that seems pretty excessive when my point can be boiled down to:
it’s p gay that the way the nature of guts and griffith’s relationship is revealed to the reader is through a direct parallel to a married couple, and then immediately after that our first glimpse of their past relationship involves guts calling griffith ‘beautiful.’
i feel like the fact that guts sees the band down there, including his pseudo girlfriend, dying horribly and turns away to continue trying to save griffith long after it’s too late should be a bigger thing, both in fandom and in canon
re-reading a few eclipse chapters and it feels so striking to me that casca is down there with judeau and the hawks facing an army of demons while guts is up there with griffith, neither sparing a thought for the other. it feels like a short, rougher and more intense version of casca leading the hawks as outlaws while griffith is being tortured and guts is off trying to become his equal.
except it comes after guts and casca have slept together and seem to be having a thing, which makes it very… stark in the way it completely doesn’t fit into a romantic narrative.
plus you’d think that while guts is bemoaning his own shittiness in abandoning casca for two years and comparing it to leaving griffith in the snow he could spare a thought for that time he left her to fight a hoarde of rapey monsters because he was wrapped up in futilely trying to help griffith.
Also ngl I completely forgot that Guts actually looks down and sees the Band being eaten alive with his own eyes before deciding his best course of action is to stay up there and try to save Griffith.
speaking of the eclipse, griffith is shown this to convince him to sacrifice everyone
and this is what guts thinks of when he’s reluctantly coming to accept that griffith just agreed to sacrifice them
Guts remembers Griffith’s willingness to do underhanded shit despite feeling guilty about it, and Griffith remembers Guts telling him to do whatever’s necessary.
and while I think Guts feels guilty for driving Griffith to the point of desperation by leaving him, I don’t think he ever realized the effect his words here had on him. That thread’s probably been dropped by now but man I’d love for him to somehow realize what Griffith’s reaction was.
But this really reminded me of something either bthump or you said (or maybe it was a convo between the two of you? Bad memory sorry) about Guts’ feelings towards Neo-Griffith being complicated bc he still sees old Griffith as a victim of what happened here & still bears (badly repressed) guilt for leaving him.
Yeah I remember we talked about it a bit here, and oh man ia this moment in the movie is so good and rly does get that sense that Griffith is a victim across.
Like idt Guts wanting to save him, even after the sacrifice, means he’s naive. When Guts finally stops hacking away at the egg after remembering Griffith talking about his dream, and thinks “is this what you wanted?” he looks like he’s had the wind taken out of his sails but this is how he pulls away to fight monsters:
and
He doesn’t condemn Griffith for choosing his dream over the Hawks. He doesn’t even look angry (except at the Godhand) – he just looks sad.
Like tbh I can see why Miura had to have Femto go above and beyond in a horrific way (not saying the rape is narratively justified, like torture or some brutal hands-on murder would’ve sufficed but he definitely had to do something cruel) because Guts straight up isn’t mad about the sacrifice, and I for sure think it’s because he feels largely responsible for driving Griffith to that point.
also more of griffith’s reactions from the fight scene that i absolutely love:
casca gets grabbed and griffith tries to tear himself away from the men propping him up, looking like he’s planning to crawl his way over to try to help her
and then this when he thinks guts might be dead
and when he sees casca crying near judeau and can’t comfort her
griffith is seriously the highlight of the wyald chapters
tbh griffith’s reactions during the wyald fight are so good, lol reading your ask made me want to quickly re-read and find some:
tbh the art thing reminds me of classic simpsons vs new simpsons animation debates, to a much, MUCH lesser degree (I would never compare Berserk to recent Simpsons, god I couldn’t be that cruel).
but yk classic simpsons animation was often off-model, occasionally quite rough looking even after season 1, lots of deformities between key frames during motion, but man they killed at physical comedy and often at selling emotion too, and that lack of polish was an asset they utilized to exaggerate motion and convey comedy or feeling. new simpsons is polished and always looks on model, but i can’t look at a screen cap or a clip without cringing at how dull and placid it is, it’s unbearable.
yeah ia, it’s not actually that ooc when you think about it, just, like you said, seems out of place when you consider the rest of the story
yeah, tonally it’s way off lol. tbh i think of at least the first two arcs as a bit of a deconstruction of the 80s masculine antihero type (miura did say he was partially inspired by 80s action movies + i think he mentioned rutger hauer by name at some point) and it fits right in with establishing the archetype and then feels rly weird when you start tearing it down and getting to know guts. so i like the additional explanation to make it work a bit on both levels.
it’s clear that miura also wanted to hook his straight male audience but it’s also kind of clever bc it’s ironic and i hate it
yeah true, i have a tendency to forget the majority straight dude audience lol.
tbh it’s kind of hilarious that guts has had sex a grand total of twice and one time was an edgy opening scene with a monster. it’s so comparatively out of place as a character-establishing moment i can’t help but like it.
(otoh i’ve seen a p convincing argument that it’s actually more ic for guts than you’d think. in the sense that the way he tends to kill apostles is to let them attack him until he’s in a position to blow them up. in this case the apostle sexes victims up so yk, i can actually see it from that point of view. not cause guts is cool and hardcore, but bc guts is self destructive. ~layers~)
out of 29480239840923859 comparisons between guts and monsters, this is one of my faves
sometimes i’m just weak to the badassery
i was gonna post something that’s like, “anyone who thinks guts killing griffith and riding off into the sunset would be a happy ending needs to re-read chapter 4, because Berserk’s got something to say about the nature of revenge and it’s not subtle”
but in fairness one thing i actually really like and appreciate about berserk is that it’s not 100% anti revenge. i tend to hate narratives that are just like, revenge is bad, the end. i’m a fan of revenge lol.
guts killing donovan is not condemned. neither is griffith perfunctorily killing gennon after he’s already been defeated, neither is julius getting assassinated after trying to kill griffith (adonis is a different can of worms). even setting the queen on fire is depicted as badass and awesome, not overly fucked up. things start to get a little dicey when we get to guts slicing out a dude’s tongue before killing him, eg, and we get to see the horrified expressions of onlookers, but it’s not really condemned either – it’s dark, a little fucked up, but understandable, and the audience is probably meant to be torn between going ‘shit, dude’ and cheering him on.
what IS condemned is “living for revenge” or obsessing over the past to the detriment of your future. Guts’ revenge quest is condemned not because killing bad people who deliberately hurt you is Wrong, but because it’s actively fucking him up psychologically, harming his current salvageable relationships, preventing him from healing his own emotional wounds, forcing him to bury his vulnerabilities under a shell of darkness (the hound), and is basically a glorified years-long act of self harm.
and idk i appreciate the nuance. it’s like the best of both worlds – guts stalking around seeking revenge against griffith/femto is bad bc of the circumstances of what he’s doing and what he has to become to do it, so the final epic confrontation between them will probably be a lot more complex than guts killing him and riding off into the sunset. which is great. but it’s also great that in this story guts can kill his rapist by shooting him in the back and stabbing him through the mouth and the main reaction the audience is meant to have is “good for him.”
(incidentally this makes me wonder what the moral of the story would be if casca wakes up and ends up with the revenge torch passed to her. because i would really dislike it if she wanted revenge and got the same ‘living for revenge is bad’ message guts got, but at the same time all my good revenge examples are from the golden age and the moral of the revenge story has been pretty consistent since, so idk.)
While I’m looking for moments that demonstrate Guts’ attraction to Griffith I might as well post a few outtakes.
Like, what the fuck is this about?
I’m not including it bc Guts is wtfing at the behelit here, not (presumably) swooning over Griffith, but look at his collagen-injected lip, the forced contrast of his hair to shadowed skin, the shining eyes.
Like Griffith is supposed to be pretty, but Miura’s Golden Age art often makes certain images of him stand out as Extra compared to the rest in a scene, and when that image is from Guts’ point of view it’s a little eyebrow raising regardless of the context.
And it’s not just cause it’s a closeup either:
same scene, same distance from the ‘camera,’ same level of detail, v different vibe.
Nngh yeah. This.
I kinda noticed a little bit of a trend of Griffith looking kinda softer from Guts POV shots.
Even in the ‘inferno’ panel or that time after Guts leaves when he’s thinking of him. (The mobile app won’t let me attach pictures rn)
His features look rounder, softer. His hair is always extremely stylised, eyes exceptionally bright( bordering on the 70’s sparkly eye shoujo image) and looking away from Guts and lips are always darker, prominent and idk how else to say this but…juicier?
You mean these panels?
bc ia. I’m going thru the golden age now looking for this stuff specifically lol and tbh I’m skipping a lot that could be coincidence (like the outtake above) but in general it rly does look like Griffith gets some extra glamour when Guts is looking at him. It’s a little hard to separate bc he’s supposed to be really pretty but like, there are several scenes where the notably prettiest image of him is from Guts’ point of view.
tbh i used to think that it was a stupid out of place and out of character way to kick the story off but i’ve grown kind of fond of it
like the way it sets you up to think wow this is a super manly badass story about a big angry dude who bangs women and kills monsters sometimes even at the same time.
and then the rest of the black swordsman arc just tears that idea down piece by piece. i dig it.
yk what miura should’ve never explained this thing. i like it the way is here, completely sans origin story – a rando demon kinda haunting guts that happens to look enough like vargas to be interchangeable for him in a dream (iirc), so we can establish the thematic connection between seeking revenge and being a demon/sullying your soul/etc early on
right now this thing represents guts destroying himself through his revenge quest, and t b q h that’s way better than it being guts’ corrupted demon kid occasionally showing up to say hi, protecting casca, and then eventually being used to become neo griffith.
black swordsman arc 5ever
so the fact that griffith volunteered to take doldrey with 5000 men and his plan hinged on gennon being an idiot, clearing the castle and coming out personally means that yeah griffith absolutely knew gennon’s been throwing his resources away trying to idk get to him for the last few years.
yk there’s a very, with these he offended me vibe to how certain notorious creeps get dispatched in Berserk.
Donovan gets stabbed in the mouth because he told Guts Gambino sold him:
Torturer loses his tongue both for taking Griffith’s and for telling Guts what he did to him:
Adon gets sliced through the mouth after spending several chapters taunting Casca:
Griffith stabs Gennon through the eye for his predatory gaze:
you're the only one 