Tag: b

craigslost
replied to your post

“so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

talking like total flip au here? def black swordsman because 1.) theresia probably wouldnt be traumatized for life 2.) reaction to femto and the associated bullshit

ngl i’m kind of into vengeful casca wandering around traumatizing kids and using them as bait and hostages but i could rly see her being way colder than guts and just straightforwardly killing count slug instead of taunting him in front of his daughter first so either way you might be right

and man i’d love to see her reaction to femto. I think it’d def be less complicated by lingering feelings than guts’ bc she was already trying to move on before the Eclipse happened, and she’s just more pragmatic than Guts in general, plus she’s used to thinking of Griffith as a lost cause, so I think she’d be better at writing him off as a jerkass demon. So like she’d still try to kill him, but with less of the pay attention to me vibe mb?

craigslost replied to your post  “so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

OK DOES CASCA STILL GO THRU A LIKE? TRAUMATIC
LOSS OF BABY?  demon fetus still around?  because the burning babies in
lost children would be Murderous on the emotions

oh shit i forgot she’s pregnant. so maybe she’d be less inclined to traumatize kids when you consider that, good point. But man the Lost Children arc would be so much more fucked up, ouch. Also I could see her identifying with Rosine a little tbh – escaping a fucked up situation in childhood by joining something that seems like a fairytale…?

tho if the eclipse still caused the miscarriage but without weird magic demon corruption (fighting apostles is not that easy on the body so sure) she probably wouldn’t’ve known she was pregnant at all, so there’s a way to ignore it too if u want. choose your own preferred level of trauma lol.

tfan2013
replied to your post “so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

@bthump​ i would actually like to see her fight a hundred men buut considering her period was on at the time it’s unlikely but it still would be cool

that would be so cool and epic

anyway we could swap more stuff around. say casca’s fine but guts is sick and running a fever and falls off a cliff, bam. casca the hundred man slayer, damn i’m so into that.

oh and the more they delve into guts mind, they find memories of Griffith and feel Guts emotions during said memories and they see everything and i do mean everything including his childhood :(

Man I would love to see all the griffguts golden age drama replayed with a running commentary lol.

actually if in this au casca was the main character the whole time dealing with her own shit so we only saw all the griffguts mutual pining from an outside perspective as just an annoying additional complication to casca’s life, it would be ridiculously fun to get an up-close and personal chapter-long revisitation with all of guts’ emotions at the forefront. I mean idt i’d trade it for the story we actually got, but this is kind of a delightful idea.

god every time i remember that black swordswoman casca au i replay the entire manga from the eclipse on in my head with a bitter, pissed off, one-armed casca in place of guts and sigh wistfully

seisans
replied to your post “yk one thing i can say for the berserk ovas is that, even though they…”

god agreed the reason i love those films so much (apart from the fact that griffith looks gorgeous in them) is bc you can just TELL the people who made them get it

ooh and speaking of griffith looking gorgeous i adore all the character design, especially griffith (that lovingly animated curly hair, man) but everyone looks fantastic. it’s rly too bad they didn’t go past the golden age and we just got a few glimpses of their take on the later characters in the credits and a couple cameos. more ovas >>>>>> berserk 2016/7

chaoticgaygriffith:

buhserk:

chaoticgaygriffith:

bthump:

buhserk:

keep in mind i only read berserk the once and i don’t remember a lot, but hasn’t griffith like…achieved his dream already? does that mean he’s bored now and doesn’t know where to go from here? is he in his shining tower like an ass just all ‘okay. now what’ ???

I think it’s implied that now he’s just gonna keep on keeping on and start taking over the world bc why not. Something about soaring to ever greater heights when Guts is chatting with Elfhelm dudes.

I’d still like to think he’s bored tho, at least insofar as he has the capcity to feel boredom lol. I mean we saw how easily he kicked ganeshka’s ass, p sure building an empire is going to be about as exciting as mowing the lawn.

Though I’d like to point out that while Griffith just wanted to be king, he also wanted to change the world for the better. And things are happening on a much larger scale now, where he can make an even bigger impact on the world. But he is bored out of his mind, you can tell, and I’m honestly really enjoying that, ngl.

once again correct me if i’m remembering this wrong, but isn’t griff making his city (can’t remember the name rn. falconia? griffith land? whatev) a ‘perfect shining beacon of goodness’ or whatev by making everywhere else miserable? like live here or suffer? god i need to reread the manga. in the meantime yall think they got them adult coloring books for mr. i’m-so-great over in this universe? maybe some ‘how to come to terms with your sexuality’ self help books?

More or less, but I’m not saying that he’s doing a good job of making the world a better place, just that it used to be one of his goals. And if it still is, whether he’s actually doing it or not is irrelevant as long as he thinks he is.

I’m screaming at the thought of Griffith using adult colouring books though. Maybe Charlotte can teach him how to embroider.

I wonder if his ‘make the world a better place and rearrange the social hierarchy to be more equal-opportunity’ motivation is intrinsically tied to why he got the behelit, became a godhand, and then got reincarnated again as a messiah to fulfill humanity’s subconscious desires. Because I feel like it’s strongly suggested, esp during the conviction arc, that one of humanity’s desires is less asshole noblemen terrorizing them and more peace and equality.

also i personally believe that humanity created falconia when ngriff cracked
open the world and let humanity’s unconscious desires flood into
reality, hence why it suddenly appeared at the same time all the
monsters etc did. Which doesn’t change the fact that falconia is the only place in the world not overrun by monsters or w/e but it does make me wonder where that concept’s going

yk one thing i can say for the berserk ovas is that, even though they cut stuff out and didn’t make all the same adaptation choices i would’ve *cough griffith’s narrative cough*, i feel like they were made by people who genuinely get berserk, for the most part

eg they cut out griffith’s backstory but they still alluded to it in what I felt were very clever and understanding ways? like we didn’t see griffith self harm in the river after sleeping with gennon, but i know that the writers/director/whoever knew griffith was lying when he said he didn’t care one way or the other about gennon bc of how he backed his horse away from him to avoid his touch. Like technically in that exchange with Gennon I can get all the information I got from the scene in the river, or most of it, re: Griffith’s guilt, it’s just not very accessible unless you’re already looking for it.

it didn’t work to get the point of his character across to an audience not already familiar with the manga, but i feel like cutting his backstory is less a result of not understanding griffith as a character or why it’s important, and just choosing to cut out depth for the sake of simplifying the story and focusing mainly on griffith’s feelings towards guts moreso than his guilt issues.

which is a choice i disagree with, but i can’t say it was made out of a lack of understanding of the actual story, basically.

buhserk:

keep in mind i only read berserk the once and i don’t remember a lot, but hasn’t griffith like…achieved his dream already? does that mean he’s bored now and doesn’t know where to go from here? is he in his shining tower like an ass just all ‘okay. now what’ ???

I think it’s implied that now he’s just gonna keep on keeping on and start taking over the world bc why not. Something about soaring to ever greater heights when Guts is chatting with Elfhelm dudes.

I’d still like to think he’s bored tho, at least insofar as he has the capcity to feel boredom lol. I mean we saw how easily he kicked ganeshka’s ass, p sure building an empire is going to be about as exciting as mowing the lawn.

chaoticgaygriffith:

bthump:

chaoticgaygriffith:

Guts leaves because Griffith can’t express how he feels. Griffith has sex with Charlotte in an attempt to seize his dream, having lost Guts, (of course this act of striving for his dream is represented by heterosexual sex) and ends up trapped in a dungeon.

@bthump Didn’t wanna do this on your post but this part caught my eyes … To be honest I’ve never thought of Griffith having sex with Charlotte as him trying to quickly seize his dream because, surely he must have known what the consequences would be? He didn’t do a good job sneaking in or sneaking out, he didn’t even try to make sure they’re not caught together. Had he impregnated her he probably would have had to marry her, but the king would still hate his guts, which goes against what he was initially trying to do, that is, charm his way into the royal family. When he was caught, he didn’t seem particularly perturbed. It almost seemed like an act of defiance because he got discovered so easily and didn’t even care. That led me to believe that the sex with Charlotte was more an act of self-harm and self-sabotage than anything else. Thoughts?

Oh yeah my thoughts on Griffith sleeping with Charlotte are that it’s way more complex than I went into here. But I do think that Griffith’s like, conscious intention is pursuing his dream. I definitely think he’s subconsciously self-sabotaging, but I think a lot of his surface-level motivation is like, he cares about 2 things in the world: Guts and becoming king, and Guts just abandoned him, so he’s throwing himself into the other like he’s trying to prove it’s more important to him.

Tho btw I went into mainly the self-sabotage/self-harm aspect pretty in depth here if you’re interested. obvious warning for het applies but there aren’t any pics at least lol. though i didn’t even really say anything about Griffith’s behaviour, it’s mostly drawing parallels, so good points about how careless he is, and his non-reaction to getting caught.

Also I’ve never actually thought about the possibility of Griffith impregnating her actually tbh, that’s an interesting thought. Idk what would happen realistically in a medieval setting but I feel like it would make sense if they found out Charlotte was pregnant without knowing who (assuming she didn’t say it was Griffith) the King might theoretically be more willing to marry her off to anyone who’d keep quiet about it and raise the kid as his own, giving Griffith an in. So I could maybe see that being a possibility in his mind going in.

Tbh that does make a lot of sense. The reason my mind never quite went there, though, is because even though in that scene Griffith is in no state of mind to be strategising, the fact that having sex with the princess is a bad idea should be simple enough to occur even to someone who’s going through what he is. So my line of thought was less along the lines of, Guts left so he’s trying to quickly seize the other thing he cares about, and more like, Guts left so he’s throwing everything into the fire. Because, I get Griffith is pretty cool in a pinch, and probably, you know, didn’t want to give those guards the satisfaction of seeing him break down or whatever, but like I mentioned his reaction to getting caught was so ……… almost nonexistent. In a way, it looked like he’d given up. And of course that can be explained quite well in your scenario, but I just can’t help but feel like, even though everything is crumbling around him, his reaction to his last chance of achieving his dream being crushed right in front of him should have been a tad more explosive. (And as I’m typing this I keep thinking, but he cares about Guts more so now that he’s gone who the fuck gives a shit, but that keeps bringing me back to my original theory of him destroying everything while he’s on a roll.)

Though, having read your post on Heterosexuality as the Main Villain of Berserk, I can’t stop thinking about this one thing you said along the lines of, “sex with Charlotte represents his dream.” This is where I feel my theory falls apart because, you’re so right about that, and with that fact in my mind him having sex with Charlotte to ruin the prospects of achieving his dream seems contradictory. Just in a writing sense.

But yeah, I haven’t read the post you linked me to yet (I’m about to), so I’m super sorry if you’ve answered some of my questions there.

Nah I’m like, almost completely on board with you. I think the only way I might see it differently is that I see Griffith as like… very intellectually detached from his own emotions? He feels emotions very strongly but I don’t think he’s very capable of identifying them, maybe bc he’s so emotionally repressed. So I think he absolutely is directly sabotaging himself, he just wouldn’t think to frame his actions that way, and instead hides behind a veneer of “this totally makes sense as a thing I should be doing” to himself, even though it’s a clear lie that wouldn’t hold up to a second of self-examination.

I often see Griffith as operating under like, a duality of lying to himself to justify emotional outbursts, thinking one thing and feeling another. Like when he ripped up his arms in the river, I don’t think he was only lying to Casca, I think he genuinely believed that he didn’t feel guilt and was instead acting on pure logic lol, and he genuinely believed he was totally fine when he forced himself back under control and put a hand on Casca’s shoulder. Or like, when he saved Guts from Zodd, I don’t think he was thinking at all, and because he had no possible logical justification he just refused to think about it, or come up with any answer better than “um no reason.”

So like eg if instead of guards he’d run into Casca the next morning, a la the morning after Gennon, she could say something like, “holy shit are you so fucked up that Guts left that you’re trying to get yourself killed?” and Griffith’s response would be, “um no winning Charlotte’s affection is part of the path to my dream, I don’t care at all that Guts left, the dead kid Guts leaving right before this was just a coincidence obviously, I’m fine nbd.” But at this point his justification is so weak it’s more along the lines of his “no reason” to Guts.

So I think like, his non reaction to the guards, plus the way he goaded the king into whipping him shortly after, is because emotionally he’s past the point of despair and this is what he wanted to happen, even if he didn’t consciously recognize it.

Idk I guess I just can’t rly see him admitting to himself, at least not until later when he’s doing some soul searching in that dungeon, that fucking Charlotte is self-destruction I guess, even if that’s clearly what it is. It strikes me as too self aware and honest for him lol.

But like, idk this is basically just my headcanon lol, not rly meta or anything, and I kinda just took the opportunity you provided to talk about it. I don’t think there’s any objectively right answer bc there’s no real way to know what he’s thinking, and based on his behaviour it does make sense for him to be aware of the consequences and accepting of them. So your take also makes sense and is also less convoluted than mine. I’m just rly into Griffith’s ability to deny shit to himself lol.

mastermistressofdesire:

bthump:

yesgabsstuff:

bthump:

Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how compulsory heterosexuality is the True Villain of Berserk, but then I was like, shit this actually works surprisingly well and is kind of depressing. So now I’m doing it more seriously. This isn’t meant to be some grand unifying theory of Berserk lol, it’s not even close to airtight or anything, the story just happens to lend itself weirdly well to this particular reading.

So here’s how Griffith’s narrative works as an almost certainly accidental, yet imo somewhat relatable, metaphor for being closeted and repressed:

Keep reading

I always thought that it’s interesting that he seems to be on the precipice between childhood and adolescence (10/11) when he revived the Egg of the King in the first place.
Like you said, this is hardly a perfect metaphor but that would be around the time where he might start to notice that a) he had some kind of feelings for men b) be old enough to understand that they are not compatible with his goals/not accepted by the culture he lives it.

The situation for Guts, for example, is absolutely complicated by his experience as a CSA survivor in that I’m not sure he has a way to think of these kinds of things outside of acts of violence. The kind of implicit homophobia of this culture does nothing to dissuade him from this. Griffith has at least grown up in a similar environment and am;has probably “seen some shit”; if not suffered in a similar way by the time he has the Behelit, as well as his later experience with Gennon. What better pressure cooker to make someone utterly terrified of themselves and be willing to go to extreme lengths to repress those feelings?

I feel like there’s a really interesting character analysis waiting to happen w/ both Guts and Griffith and their relationships to same-sex desire (especially taking the official translation as a source, not one of the scanlations where Guts throws around homophobic slurs every other page. Which I mention bc those scanlations seem to be the reason a lot of Berserk fans think Guts is canonically a giant homophobe lmao).

It could be way more rooted in the actual text and authorial intention than this was bc the fact is that both Guts and Griff had non-consensual same-sex experiences at young ages that explicitly took a severe emotional toll on them, neither of them read as straight as far as I’m concerned, and you cannot tell me that it’s an accident that both of them were raped by men, they’re introduced to each other through Guts directly asking Griffith if he’s gay and wants to fuck him, and then the rest of the story is about their incredibly homoerotic relationship and how emotional repression ruins everything.

So anyway yeah you have some good points worth expanding on imo.

All of this was pretty damn excellent.

Thankyou for writing this.

I think the reading with being closeted is awfully fitting and tbh I feel that even if at age 20, Kentaro Miura wasn’t aware he was writing very gay-coded characters, after every single interviewer asked him about it and in the year 2017, he cannot still be unaware. And he’s made absolutely no tonal changes to accommodate for the fact? ( I think. Honestly i’ve been a little bummed out by the lack of griffguts feels in the most recent, post style- change chapters).

That’s just supposition though. Like I do feel that some of the inherent sexism has greatly improved over the years. And most of those issues which saw in Casca’s treatment have become slightly better with the newer characters. Just like giving credit where credit is due.

I mean it would be a greeeeat stretch to expect the same from the inherent homophobia. Like I don’t expect i AT ALL. But I think there may be at least some awareness about it.

But inspite of this the reading really makes sense.

Also you know -from how nightmarish that brief domestic dream felt, despite it seeming so superficially pleasant and ‘normal’. There was this deafening sense of -This in not you. This is not her. This is uncomfortable.

And actually for the longest time, I’d read a lot of theories about how the way Griffith saw  Casca in his dream showed that he’d actually always viewed her as this hetero-normative, submissive, potential wife figure. But I don’t think so. I think the entire sequence was about how wrong it all felt. Inclusive of Casca.

It wasn’t a dream at all. I think it was always supposed to be a nightmare, his final attempt to revert from accepting his reality a la his undeniable love for Guts with what should have been the heteronormative ideal, and the knowledge that this wasn’t his reality which forced him back into a space where he had no option but acceptance.

And then being faced with the consequences he has had to face for that reality. His body, the broken arm.

And like there’s also the added fact that immediately post this realisation he attempts to commit suicide. which is sadly a pretty common consequence.

Oh nooo man I kind of glossed over a lot of stuff so that post is a bit disjointed and one of the things I glossed over was how the domestic nightmare vision actually fits into the whole narrative I plucked out beyond being disturbing and feeling relevant, but the way you have it framed here, as Griffith trying to deny his feelings for Guts and insinuate himself into the heternormative ideal (again: “this peace and quiet… isn’t so bad”), failing, and then trying to kill himself… ouch. That’s painful, but it works.

Especially with the fact that his godhand-summoning despair is brought on by Guts’ touch soon after.

also there’s at least one GriffGuts moment in recent chapters that I dug, even though it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, which was that while Farnese and Schierke are checking out Casca’s memory of the cave with Guts Farnese says straight up that she senses “jealousy…?” I mean sure we already knew that but it’s nice to reiterate it.

chaoticgaygriffith:

Guts leaves because Griffith can’t express how he feels. Griffith has sex with Charlotte in an attempt to seize his dream, having lost Guts, (of course this act of striving for his dream is represented by heterosexual sex) and ends up trapped in a dungeon.

@bthump Didn’t wanna do this on your post but this part caught my eyes … To be honest I’ve never thought of Griffith having sex with Charlotte as him trying to quickly seize his dream because, surely he must have known what the consequences would be? He didn’t do a good job sneaking in or sneaking out, he didn’t even try to make sure they’re not caught together. Had he impregnated her he probably would have had to marry her, but the king would still hate his guts, which goes against what he was initially trying to do, that is, charm his way into the royal family. When he was caught, he didn’t seem particularly perturbed. It almost seemed like an act of defiance because he got discovered so easily and didn’t even care. That led me to believe that the sex with Charlotte was more an act of self-harm and self-sabotage than anything else. Thoughts?

Oh yeah my thoughts on Griffith sleeping with Charlotte are that it’s way more complex than I went into here. But I do think that Griffith’s like, conscious intention is pursuing his dream. I definitely think he’s subconsciously self-sabotaging, but I think a lot of his surface-level motivation is like, he cares about 2 things in the world: Guts and becoming king, and Guts just abandoned him, so he’s throwing himself into the other like he’s trying to prove it’s more important to him.

Tho btw I went into mainly the self-sabotage/self-harm aspect pretty in depth here if you’re interested. obvious warning for het applies but there aren’t any pics at least lol. though i didn’t even really say anything about Griffith’s behaviour, it’s mostly drawing parallels, so good points about how careless he is, and his non-reaction to getting caught.

Also I’ve never actually thought about the possibility of Griffith impregnating her actually tbh, that’s an interesting thought. Idk what would happen realistically in a medieval setting but I feel like it would make sense if they found out Charlotte was pregnant without knowing who (assuming she didn’t say it was Griffith) the King might theoretically be more willing to marry her off to anyone who’d keep quiet about it and raise the kid as his own, giving Griffith an in. So I could maybe see that being a possibility in his mind going in.

yesgabsstuff:

bthump:

Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how compulsory heterosexuality is the True Villain of Berserk, but then I was like, shit this actually works surprisingly well and is kind of depressing. So now I’m doing it more seriously. This isn’t meant to be some grand unifying theory of Berserk lol, it’s not even close to airtight or anything, the story just happens to lend itself weirdly well to this particular reading.

So here’s how Griffith’s narrative works as an almost certainly accidental, yet imo somewhat relatable, metaphor for being closeted and repressed:

Keep reading

I always thought that it’s interesting that he seems to be on the precipice between childhood and adolescence (10/11) when he revived the Egg of the King in the first place.
Like you said, this is hardly a perfect metaphor but that would be around the time where he might start to notice that a) he had some kind of feelings for men b) be old enough to understand that they are not compatible with his goals/not accepted by the culture he lives it.

The situation for Guts, for example, is absolutely complicated by his experience as a CSA survivor in that I’m not sure he has a way to think of these kinds of things outside of acts of violence. The kind of implicit homophobia of this culture does nothing to dissuade him from this. Griffith has at least grown up in a similar environment and am;has probably “seen some shit”; if not suffered in a similar way by the time he has the Behelit, as well as his later experience with Gennon. What better pressure cooker to make someone utterly terrified of themselves and be willing to go to extreme lengths to repress those feelings?

I feel like there’s a really interesting character analysis waiting to happen w/ both Guts and Griffith and their relationships to same-sex desire (especially taking the official translation as a source, not one of the scanlations where Guts throws around homophobic slurs every other page. Which I mention bc those scanlations seem to be the reason a lot of Berserk fans think Guts is canonically a giant homophobe lmao).

It could be way more rooted in the actual text and authorial intention than this was bc the fact is that both Guts and Griff had non-consensual same-sex experiences at young ages that explicitly took a severe emotional toll on them, neither of them read as straight as far as I’m concerned, and you cannot tell me that it’s an accident that both of them were raped by men, they’re introduced to each other through Guts directly asking Griffith if he’s gay and wants to fuck him, and then the rest of the story is about their incredibly homoerotic relationship and how emotional repression ruins everything.

So anyway yeah you have some good points worth expanding on imo.

Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how heterosexuality is the True Villain of Berserk, but then I was like, shit this actually works surprisingly well and is kind of depressing. So now I’m doing it more seriously. This isn’t meant to be some grand unifying theory of Berserk lol, it’s not even close to airtight or anything, the story just happens to lend itself weirdly well to this particular reading.

So here’s how Griffith’s narrative works as an almost certainly accidental, yet imo somewhat relatable, metaphor for being closeted and repressed:

The only way for him to realize his dream is to marry the princess. War, battles, glory, promotions, even the Eclipse, those are all stepping stones that enable him to one day marry Charlotte. Marriage is the only door to his dream. Even when he becomes saviour of the world, he’s still gotta marry a woman to make it official.

Griffith’s all-encompassing, all-important dream is embodied by heterosexual marriage.

Set up in perfect opposition to that dream, the only one who makes him forget about it, and the one he has to sacrifice to attain his dream, is Guts, the man he’s in love with.

So it should be pretty apparent how that central conflict lends itself to a closeted gay man torn between obligation and desire kinda reading, right?

The details don’t do much to counter it either. It’s Charlotte’s presence that creates the rift between Guts and Griffith – she’s there, refocusing Griffith’s attention from Guts to his heteronormative goal during their significant, romanticized staircase conversation when Guts asked why Griffith would risk his life for him and Griffith failed to give him a reason. And she’s the one Griffith directs the speech to, inadvertantly convincing Guts that he doesn’t care about him and making Guts decide to leave.

The dream is also defined by emotional repression. To achieve it Griffith has to project a perfect image of himself to everyone – the nobles, Charlotte, the hawks, everyone. When Casca catches him in a moment of vulnerability and watches him injure himself in a river he snaps out of it, represses, and acts like nothing happened afterwards. Guts is the only person he willingly allows to see him less than perfect – when he’s conducting assassinations, for instance. He opens up to him in emotional vulnerability when he asks “do you think I’m cruel?” In that moment, Guts suggests that Griffith’s emotional expression of vulnerability is incompatible with achieving his dream – “Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?”

Guts is able to walk away and abandon Griffith because Griffith can’t tell him how he feels, he can’t tell Guts why he risked his life for him and he can’t tell him that he wants him to stay. Casca even points out that they should stop and talk things out, and we the reader know that their rift is based entirely on a misunderstanding that could be cleared up so talking things through would actually achieve something – but she’s dismissed, and they duel instead.

So a dichotemy is set up between the dream/Charlotte/heteronormativity, and emotional repression vs Guts the man Griffith loves, and expressing his feelings for him.

The tragedy of Berserk is that repression wins.

Guts leaves because Griffith can’t express how he feels. Griffith has sex with Charlotte in an attempt to seize his dream, having lost Guts, (of course this act of striving for his dream is represented by heterosexual sex) and ends up trapped in a dungeon. There he both finally admits to himself that Guts is more important to him than his dream and fittingly loses the ability to communicate at all. He’s also, to top it off, locked away behind a mask modeled after the helmet he wore while pursuing his dream. After losing Guts and having sex with Charlotte he’s not just choosing not to express his emotions, he’s forced to remain silent and hidden.

After he’s rescued the mask stays on and words remain unspoken. A lot of shit happens and eventually he has a breakdown. And interestingly, it’s not just the prospect of Guts leaving again that causes him to finally break from reality. It’s also the thought of Casca staying.

After overhearing Guts and Casca he envisions himself chasing his dream again (and isn’t it fitting that it’s described as playing? ie not real, a make-believe expression of himself), and then he sees himself – and here it gets really depressing – seemingly married to Casca. He’s still helpless and unable to communicate, as though he’s caged inside of himself. In his vision Casca wears a dress, has hung up her sword, and is raising a son with him, named after the man Griffith is in love with. Griffith is dressed up and attractive again. It’s terribly picturesque in a idealistic heternormative way. Casca leans down to kiss him and then spoonfeeds him, all the while he’s silent and motionless and seems lost as all he thinks to himself is that the peace and quiet isn’t so bad.

Tbh if you’re reading Griffith as a gay man this dream comes across as a nightmarish metaphor for being trapped in repression, trapped in a heterosexual marriage and societal expectations, his voice, body, and even his own mind lost. It’s disturbing.

And in the soup made by Casca is the behelit.

The thing is that the behelit isn’t the escape from that nightmarish vision it seems to be at first – it’s an embodiment of it. What happens when Griffith summons the Godhand, sacrifices the Band and most notably Guts, and becomes a demon?

His heart is frozen. He’s later reborn with the sole purpose of becoming a wholly emotionless, utterly perfect image of himself – the image he’d tried to project as a human: a perfect saviour, a perfect leader, and a perfect fiancee, straight out of a fairytale. One half of a perfect heterosexual couple, ruling a perfect kingdom.

Femto’s new body incorporates the mask he was forced to wear in the torture chamber. The transformation doesn’t fix the problem caused by his broken body or his lost tongue, it doesn’t return his ability to express his feelings to him, it rips them out from the source – it destroys his emotions so he has nothing left to express. “This peace and quiet… isn’t so bad.”

When Griffith chose to sacrifice Guts he didn’t choose freedom or personal empowerment – he chose to remain a voiceless, tortured man in a locked cell, he just removed his ability to feel pain or long for more.

(Or tried to at least. Time will tell how his newly bthumping heart figures into everything.)

Disclaimer: I don’t think this works as like… a great, sensitive and thoughtful depiction of the effects of internalized homophobia on a gay man lol. Berserk is offensive and homophobic af and choosing to read it like this doesn’t fix that problem at all. I just kind of dodged some of the worse stuff but yk, there’s no way around the fact that griffith/femto/ngriff is a gay-coded antagonist and most of his villainy revolves around that coding.

Also I’m mostly closeted myself so there’s definitely some projection going on here. That’s partially the point of this. I don’t relate fully to this narrative but some aspects of what I wrote do hit home, and hopefully that comes across and this doesn’t feel exploitative.

@yesgabsstuff @mastermistressofdesire I’ve mentioned this essay b4 and I believe you’ve both expressed interest in a complete version so voila.

godclaw
replied to your post “I’ve actually always wondered about how much sexual experience…”

I see the kama sutra thing a lot actually tbh…like…its an awful foreshadowing in itself lmao

lmao it rly is isn’t it. but i’m glad it’s there so i can hc that griffith hasn’t slept with a woman b4 charlotte ngl.

@yesgabsstuff said:
@bthump *Shameless plug for Anna* 

honestly if a gay guy who’s dissociating and thinking about a dude at the time gets charlotte going that easily i hope anna likes her women ear-shatteringly loud in bed.

the fact that the most important sex scene in berserk (griffith and charlotte’s) is het and yet is actually the fucking gayest thing ever gives me life

mastermistressofdesire:

bthump:

lol same.

I mean one thing I def like about Berserk is that het sex scenes are extremely few and far between (not counting rape scenes here ofc :/) and in like, 1.5 out of 3 the point is Guts and Griff’s feelings for each other.

(the 3 i’m thinking of are opening scene w/ guts fucking the apostle, griffith and charlotte, and guts and casca, which gets the 0.5. I… literally can’t think of any other sex scenes in berserk lmao.

oh no wait, there’s also two orgies – nina’s pagan bash and the count’s wife’s cheating escapade. and yk what, one of those was about guts/griff too, in the form of an emotional parallel, so l m a o)

There’s like this guy on YouTube who did a manga review after the first four volumes and is pretty explicit about the fact that he’s only reading this for the art and potential romance between Guts and Griffith.

And damn that guy is so into it.

He just kept saying ‘look at that!’ pointing at every panel of their interaction. It was sort of hilarious. Because.

Man.
Same.

do u have a link? this sounds like fun entertainment when i’m bored

I’ve actually always wondered about how much sexual experience Griffith canonically has

mastermistressofdesire:

Because the scene with Charlotte it’s implied that he definitely knew what he was doing, that too pretty much on autopilot.

Like listen there was a lot of foreplay and like there was ‘higher level stuff? *Cough* eating out *cough*

I mean idk it could be another one of Miura’s ‘griffith is naturally good at everything except emotions ’ things.

But I ve wondered if there was more between gennon and Charlotte.

I could see either Griffith going out and unemotionally getting experience bc being good at sex and seduction is useful, or I could see him getting all the info he needs from his porn collection and only looking like he’s experienced bc Charlotte is just really, really vocal and easily impressed lmao.

jillresia:

#nsfw while griffiths s*xing charlotte theres a 2 panel scene of just casca?  sittin around? before the maid peeps thru the key hole and ssees the het crime.  How At All is that related.  whats she sensing?  what r u on to girl?  is this when casca was like “aw i get it, they’re fucking gay”?  did griff and casca catch on at the same time???

earlier during the sex scene (right b4 griff starts thinking bout guts) we also see her holding guts’ old broken sword and looking sad, and then here she’s sitting pining, ergo it’s totally a parallel illustrating that they’re both hung tf up on guts rn.

i just really, really love that the most direct parallel we ever see to guts’ more typically badass attributes (refusal to die despite everything like when guts stood back up and fought the wolves, and rage fueled vow of revenge) is theresia

image
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even if we never see her again i know for a fact that she’s out there becoming a more stone cold badass than guts could ever hope to be

How do you think that guts’ new party would react if they knew he sexually assaulted casca?

I actually don’t know lol. It’s a tough question because I’m not sure how much Miura thinks we should condemn Guts for it – on one hand he’s getting consequences for his actions in the form of Casca hating him and I don’t think it’s likely that she’ll forgive and forget and everything will go swimmingly. On the other I think we’re supposed to feel like he should get a pat on the back for stopping, and we’re definitely not supposed to hate him for it, we’re probably more meant to empathize with him and his loss of control and his regret, and admire the steps he’s taken to protect her from himself by travelling with people, and his willpower in keeping the hound on a leash.

So I guess ideally I’d like their idealized and infatuated images of Guts to be shattered as they realize that he’s capable of some fucked up shit even without the armour. Farnese could get protective of Casca and take off with her and Serpico and whoever in the party wants to follow, quite possibly all of them, give or take Puck and Isidro. Because she’d definitely choose Casca over Guts and that would be nice to see.

But I think it’s more likely that some of them, like Farnese and Serpico, would maybe get a bit warier of him and he might lose some of his shine in Farnese’s eyes, but overall consider it a past mistake he’s overcome and atoned for, and just another signifier of how much of a struggle it is to be Guts akin to how they feel about how Guts + Berserker armour = trying to murder them all. Yk like it makes Serpico anxious but no one blames him for it even though it’s his own inability to control his rage that leads to the armour taking over without magical hand-holding to save everyone from him.

Idk that’s at my most cynical. Don’t get me wrong I love Guts and his narrative for the most part, I just think aspects of it and the magical fantasy metaphor of the Berserk armour, hound, etc aren’t handled as well as they could be lol.

Anyway it’d probably be something between those two extremes tbf.

the fact that the most important sex scene in berserk (griffith and charlotte’s) is het and yet is actually the fucking gayest thing ever gives me life

lol same.

I mean one thing I def like about Berserk is that het sex scenes are extremely few and far between (not counting rape scenes here ofc :/) and in like, 1.5 out of 3 the point is Guts and Griff’s feelings for each other.

(the 3 i’m thinking of are opening scene w/ guts fucking the apostle, griffith and charlotte, and guts and casca, which gets the 0.5. I… literally can’t think of any other sex scenes in berserk lmao.

oh no wait, there’s also two orgies – nina’s pagan bash and the count’s wife’s cheating escapade. and yk what, one of those was about guts/griff too, in the form of an emotional parallel, so l m a o)

mastermistressofdesire:

danz99:

ベルセルク

This is interesting though.
Since every major person in Guts life has at some point been ‘weak’ and in need of care which Guts has in reality always offered with enthusiasm.

Whether with Gambino, Shisu, Griffith or Casca

I seriously love this about Guts during the Black Swordsman and Conviction arcs, bc like, he is actually a natural caretaker and… yk offerer of comfort and help. It’s the very first act that defines him when he’s 3 years old and steps up to take Shizu’s hand. He genuinely has a pressing urge to help people in need, from overworked suicidal people to tortured ex bfs to parental figures to like, flowers.

And from the start Miura wasn’t trying to show a dude just letting his inner asshole shine through bc he’s had a bad time, he’s depicting a dude actively suppressing his own caring nature partly because anyone who gets close to him is probably going to die thanks to the brand, partly because it’s a distraction from his goal of revenge, and partly because he has some serious issues revolving around betrayal that got reawakened recently and he’s guarding his heart.

Like the second chapter when he decides whatever he’ll let this priest and this kid give him a ride and who gives a fuck what happens to them feels like a deliberate attempt on his part to Not Care About Them that totally fails.

And it’s why it’s so fitting that the very last thing he does in the Black Swordsman arc is instinctively save Theresia even after telling her to kill herself, and then cry about the fact that he just ruined this kid’s life and turned her into a proto-him.

Ooh actually to take that a step further, the hound is basically something he actively created himself, out of the darkest parts of his nature, as a form of self-protection. So it’s like, super fitting that it got transplanted into a living suit of armour.

craigslost
replied to your post “do we ever get any hint about how old griffith is other than guts (at…”

i’ve read the wiki timeline enuf times to remember that he’s apparently 3 years older than casca and guts? idr what in the manga points to that that tho, time to do some skimming

lol yeah i’ve seen that 3 years older number mentioned but ihni where it would’ve come from

3 years older than casca i could see, since he looked visibly older than her when she was like 8 or w/e, but then i wouldn’t necessarily think guts is the same age as casca

eta: oh just noticed your 2nd reply lol. that’s weird if it’s not on the wiki bc 3 years is def what i’ve heard so i’m sure it was thrown around somewhere.

do we ever get any hint about how old griffith is other than guts (at age 15) thinking “he’s about the same age as me,” a weekish after they first meet?

idk i feel like i’ve seen an assumption that he’s older than guts quite a few times but i never got that impression and i wonder if i missed something