mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
Tag: berserk meta
There is really something to be said about the significance of physical contact between Guts and Griffith.
Like the fact is that this intense moment of Guts racing for Griffith, wondering what on earth he can possibly do, is a lead-up to a single touch that sends Griffith into despair. This touch is what causes the Eclipse.
A similar physical touch marks the moment Griffith thinks of when he wonders when Guts gained such a strong hold over him:
Their first duel is the only fight either of them ever engage in, as far as I recall, featuring direct physical contact rather than swords (or other weapons) clashing, and moreover, the scene depicts the sense of a gradual physical pull between them. Before the duel, Guts wakes up from a nightmare featuring his childhood trauma, falling into a near panic as he wakes up and feels a body on top of him, until he realizes she’s a woman, not a man.
Touch is highlighted as a concept to take note of here, particularly Guts’ aversion to it.
Guts remembers Griffith as the figure on a horse that he couldn’t reach before collapsing, gazing down at him:
Then they duel. The fight begins at a distance, with swords. Griffith nearly wins without touching him, and again while on a higher plane than Guts bc goddamn Miura gets a lot of mileage out of that imagery:
But then Guts bites Griffith’s sword, they lose those swords, roll down a hill, and Guts just starts punching. We get significant commentary from onlookers highlighting the uniqueness of this fight bringing Griffith down from his heights of untouchability:
As well as from Guts:
Griffith wins with a hold, and finally:
The sequence leads up to this intense moment of physical contact: Griffith pulling him up and gazing into his eyes.
Throughout the Golden Age there aren’t a lot of casual touches between them, but when we do see them touch (pre-torture) it’s usually during a very significant moment.
(Or once, casually, right after Griffith has reminisced about this particular fight:
Not particularly emphasized, but still during a nicely fitting and illustrative moment.)
Griffith remembers another moment of physical contact between them while thinking about how he loses his composure when it comes to Guts:
And this is the scene that leads to the highest point in their relationship, when Griffith admits he had no logical reason to save Guts and Guts dedicates his sword to him in turn. Plus Casca’s outrage also serves to highlight touch as a feature of the closeness of their relationship – and that relationship’s potential to destroy Griffith(’s dream):
And of course, at the climactic moment of the arc as a whole, we get this moment:
Griffith reaches down to pull Guts up to him at the beginning of the first scene we see between them (a contrast to Guts looking up at a distant Femto at the top of the stairs):
We get a nice close up of their handclasp the first time Griffith saves Guts’ life (again, pulling Guts up):
A full page the very last time Griffith saves Guts’ life:
And we get another panel of their hands when Guts lets him go and falls away from him:
Which brings me to the way there is also a particular emphasis given to the lack of
touch between them, compounding the impression that the physicality
between them is significant.
For instance, in contrast to their first fight where they lost their swords, swords – which each represent their respective dreams here – uh… come between them in chapter one, foreshadowing how dreams tear them apart and also highlighting Guts’ more immediate concern that Griffith is growing distant as he gets promoted and draws closer to attaining his dream:
(also i love having an excuse to post those 2 subsequent panels)
Eyes meeting across a vast ballroom and through a window as they smile at each other, after another reminder that Guts is planning to leave very soon:
Guts’ sword falling where we later see Griffith with self-inflicted scratch-marks:
I obviously can’t skip over Griffith thinking about Guts’ departure at the exact moment he
penetrates Charlotte, followed by Charlotte reflected in his frantic
eyes, emphasizing Guts’ absence here in contrast to Charlotte’s presence. All on the same page in 4 subsequent panels. While he’s fucking Charlotte.
Like, this is by far the gayest hetero sex scene I’ve ever seen.
Guts reaching for him fruitlessly here:
Frankly, and not fun but still unfortunately significant to the story, Femto raping Casca while staring at Guts, later compounded by the Beast of
Darkness telling Guts to do the same to get closer to him.
There’s also Femto’s use of telekinesis rather than physical force to keep Guts away from him in the Black Swordsman arc, and the aforementioned staircase of inequality between them.
And of course NeoGriffith’s distance. Both literally:
And symbolically:
Physical touch emphasizes their closeness. It punctuates the strong emotions between them. It pulls Guts up and brings Griffith down until they meet together in the middle, illustrating the fact that their emotions for each other make them equals despite their predetermined + false notions of what equality is.
Again:
It’s highlighted during the moments of their relationship that signify their emotional closeness:
It’s a contrast to the distance which signifies their relationship falling apart:
For instance, Guts holding Griffith throughout like half of the post-torture content shows us that he doesn’t want to leave again long before the story tells us that directly.
Griffith asking for his armour rather than taking off his mask, placing a physical barrier between them, shows us that he wants to keep some emotional distance from Guts, because their closeness is devastating to him. And that foreshadows his choice to sacrifice Guts to escape his vulnerability. His demon form incorporates his mask and, so far, they never touch again.
Basically physical touch is one of the tools Miura uses to illustrate their intense relationship, either through its presence or its pointed, painful absence, and I just wanted to take a moment to illustrate some of that, bc I dig it.
said:
What are your thoughts about the current Griffith? In my eyes he has
become like the Snow Queen – Beautiful, yet cold and empty. Practically
unable to experience emotion and lacking in any humanity. A pretty
doll. A shell. A walking facade. What do you think?
My answer to this ties into the other thing you asked me to expand on, re: Griffith and contrasts, so I guess I’m just kind of doing both answers at once.
Basically I agree, but I think there’s more to NeoGriffith (ie post Femto, resurrected, godlike Griffith) than that.
Griffith as a human is so interesting to me in part because he’s full of contrasts, which is one of those hooks that really get me interested in a character. And those contrasts mostly stem from this attitude right here:
He hides away all of his weaknesses, his negative thoughts, the truth of what actually drives him on (guilt), his self-loathing, even from himself. He smiles and portrays an image of perfection so well that he essentially believes it himself most of the time.
So you have things like the Promrose Hall speech, where he’s fully embodying that image of himself:
vs Casca’s flashback, which is a glimpse of his darker, much more fucked up self underneath, and directly contradicts the above:
So you have the contrast between the perfect leader, the guy who can take down an army of 30,000 with 5,000, the guy who waxes poetic about how great dreams are, the guy who is this fucking cool while burning a queen alive:
And the guy who self-harms after prostituting himself to a pedophile to prevent as many deaths of his followers as possible despite claiming he doesn’t feel responsible for them, the guy who falls to pieces and destroys his own life when Guts leaves, the guy who hates himself and desperately wants to be told he’s not a monster:
And both are Griffith. Griffith isn’t just faking his confidence, he genuinely is that confident. He genuinely believes that his dream is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself, and he can’t call any of his followers friends because they’re clinging to his dream rather than finding their own dreams.
He’s portrayed that image so fully that it’s a real part of him. But at the same time, sometimes it shatters and reveals the exact opposite underneath: the self loathing, the fear, the fact that he’s in love with Guts and has nearly lost his dream because of that love multiple times (ie nearly dying while trying to save him from Zodd, burning his own life down after Guts leaves, even going back and rescuing him personally that first week).
And that brings me to NeoGriffith, because what NeoGriffith is, is that image, and only that image, with none of the very human weaknesses behind it.
He’s described as a painting, as untouchable, etc, like fifty million times.
He’s basically become the impression he used to leave people with.
If Griffith contradicted himself – confidence vs insecurity, conviction vs self loathing, unwaveringly pursuing his dream vs Guts making him forget his dream, etc – then NeoGriffith is one side minus the other. Confidence, no insecurity, conviction, no self-loathing, the dream, no Guts.
And it’s uncanny too. He’s pursuing the dream, but he’s no longer motivated by his very human feelings of guilt (and also fear/insecurity, which we’re shown here:
I got this whole argument about dreams in Berserk being essentially shitty coping mechanisms lol, which I won’t get into now but is worth mentioning as another aspect of human Griffith that NeoGriffith lacks)
He’s lost his human flaws, and that makes him kind of disturbing imo, because those human flaws drove him, and now he’s driven by nothing, he just is.
And, just as a side note, it’s also worth noting that Femto is the other side imo – the self-loathing, the insecurity – in the sense that Femto is the embodiment of the monster Griffith believed himself to be deep down, the monster he believed Guts saw him as too, after this exchange (and then Guts leaving):
I mean it’s ultimately the final puzzle piece that makes him agree to the sacrifice:
And I 100% believe that NeoGriffith is referencing that here with his “you, of all people”:
So like, tl;dr Griffith is a land of contradictions, and that’s embodied in 2 magical fantasy transformations that make those disparate elements of him literal personifications.
NeoGriffith is the side of himself that he showed the world as a human, stripped of his humanity, and Femto is basically a personification of his own self-loathing, in which he became everything he feared himself to be, everything Guts failed to tell him he wasn’t.
But this is just like, the thematic take lol. This is what I think NeoGriffith essentially represents. But it’s also more complicated than that, because
But when it comes to like, NeoGriffith as a character, rather than a construct, who potentially still has emotions and ties to his previous life, I guess I’ll leave you with links because I don’t really have much new to say:
Basically I think there’s plenty of indication that Griffith failed to entirely purge himself of emotion and isn’t quite the serene image of perfection he seems.
ohhh man re-reading those chapters in particular and like
there’s such a clear little mini-arc. This isn’t brand new information at all, but I love seeing it laid out like this so I’m going to talk about it.
Chapter 6 starts with Guts trying to visit Griffith while brooding about Casca’s “it’s your fault!”
He’s prevented by social status.
Casca punches him out and Guts leaves and sulks, and the rest of the Hawks have this exchange:
So we start with the statement that everyone’s feeling a little distanced from Griffith thanks to his promotions, and this is very much affecting Guts too, which is why he threw a couple guards down the stairs and made an ass of himself while trying to visit him.
Then we go straight to Guts angrily swinging his sword on the staircase.
He’s pissed off about Casca making him feel like an outsider. This is a dude who has clearly defined issues when it comes to being blamed for bad shit happening. See, eg, Gambino blaming him for the death of Shizu, calling him “cursed,” along with the rest of his first mercenary band.
Three years with the Hawks, and Guts is mostly content and happy, but there’s still this doubt, still this sense that he’s a little on the outside looking in, a little distanced, and Griffith more recently drifting away from everyone puts that background feeling into sharp relief. This is why we begin our narrative, after the three year gap, when Griffith gets promoted into the nobility.
Guts angrily swinging his sword, alone, probably brooding over Casca accusing him of not caring about his comrades since this scene is placed right after that confrontation, while Griffith gets promoted, rising away from him.
Chapter six returns us to Guts swinging his sword angrily and alone while brooding over his feelings of being an outsider. His place is with the Hawks, but is it really? When it’s “his fault” Griffith nearly died, when he’s accused of not caring about anyone but himself?
And then Griffith seeks him out, joining Guts at the midpoint of a staircase, for that extra bit of symbolism.
He talks about how much he hates the other nobles, talks about how nightmarish their encounter with Zodd was, but how it was also interesting theologically lol. A bit of philosophy, a bit of personal connection and emotional opening up. Guts asks the question.
And the turn of this little mini-arc is, of course, this:
The end of chapter six.
It’s Griffith completely assuaging those fears of being an outsider, of losing him to the nobles, of being looked-down on. It’s Griffith negating his deep-seated belief that his only worth is as an asset.
Three years ago Guts began this sentence:
And now, in chapter seven, he’s finally reached a place where he can finish it.
Idk basically this is the pinnacle of Guts’ search for belonging, and I love how well it’s built up to by emphasizing Guts’ outsider status first, through Casca’s angry tirades and through Griffith’s promotions.
Which ofc also provides a solid foundation for the dissolving of Guts’ feeling of personal fulfillment in another few chapters. Honestly it provides a solid foundation for literally everything that comes after. This is the skeletal structure of Berserk – Guts’ longing for love and acceptance vs Guts never quite feeling like he has it. Except right here and right now.
“Even so, incidentally, I found someone I really wanted… to have look at me.”
That feeling goes as easily as it came, with a few words, but it’s what motivates Guts at least until chapter 130 (potentially til chapter 182), after which trying to forget that feeling and focus on what he does have is what motivates him (”I came this far by letting go of my obsession…”) And we’ll see how that goes.
welcome to controversy country
Griffith’s decision to sacrifice the Hawks was perfectly reasonable not just taking into account Griffith’s own values and priorities, ie ensuring the thousands of dead posthumously achieve the thing they died for, but taking into account the Hawks’ own attitudes towards their lives, including Guts’.
It’s all there in Requiem of the Wind.
“More than half of us’ve been killed…”
These are the core group of Hawks. These are the ones who believe in Griffith so strongly that they’re willing to spend a year living as outlaws, dying in raids, so they can rescue him – so Griffith can lead them again.
There were lots of deserters over that year. People who didn’t think it was worth risking their lives for a chance at achieving Griffith’s dream. They’re presumably out there living happily ever after.
These Hawks are the ones who are willing to risk their lives, not out of friendship or loyalty to a man, but out of loyalty to what the man symbolizes for them, what he can bring them, the success that comes to them when they follow him. Out of loyalty to the dream.
Corkus is the only one throwing a tantrum, but he’s voicing all their thoughts, as we can see when his words are placed over their depressed faces.
Wyald spells it all out.
This is who Griffith is to them. He’s the facilitator of their dreams, dreams that each and every one of them is willing to risk their lives for.
And when he can’t be that to them anymore, what happens? He becomes a burden to them.
Judeau offers to take care of him because it’s the least he can do, because he owes it to him, but mostly because if he doesn’t he thinks Casca will, and he thinks it will be a life ruining burden for her. His offer is a personal sacrifice.
Casca offers to take care of him because it’s the least she can do, he’s so small now, he needs someone, and because if she doesn’t Guts will, and she thinks it will be a life ruining burden for him. Her offer is a personal sacrifice.
Guts’ offer is probably the only one based on a genuine desire to stay with Griffith.
Now, Guts doesn’t see Griffith as the guy who can grant him his dreams. Guts is the exception to that. He sees Griffith as a guy he wants to be friends with.
But here’s Guts’ take on the situation:
Finish the battles you start.
Well, that’s exactly what Griffith chose to do. The Eclipse is, in part, a narrative rebuke of Guts’ stubbornness lol, it happens because he seized on the concept of finding his own dream and couldn’t let it go until it was a moment too late.
When Guts finally drops his own “battle” in favour of staying with Griffith, ie makes the right choice contrary to his dogged nature, it comes too late because he’d successfully convinced Casca that he was dedicated to his dream at the expense of his friendships with the Hawks. “I want to draw a line, keep things separate.” He told her he didn’t want to stay with the Hawks, and she believed him, and that attitude is what ruins everything.
And ironically that’s the exact path Griffith chose when he agreed to the sacrifice. Drop his friends and relationships in favour of renewing his committment to a dream, and finishing his own battle.
For the rest of the Hawks, the Eclipse is a rebuke of their choice to live and risk their lives for tomorrow’s success rather than today’s existence.
Now, this absolutely isn’t me arguing that the Hawks deserved to die or anything lol, this is just me saying that Requiem of the Wind is largely set-up for the sacrifice, and I think it’s a clever way of like… depicting the sacrifice not just as a random tragedy that befell a group of people, but as a darkly fitting end to the way they live their lives.
It shows that the sacrifice is consistent with everything the Hawks profess to believe in.
They are all willing to lay down their lives for a victory they may never see.
The Eclipse is the fucked up yet logical conclusion to the Hawks’ very existence as a mercenary band that fights for an ideal, a dream, rather than just day to day living. They agree to potentially sacrifice their lives in every battle. The Eclipse is just one more battle, by this logic, and it’s one they win by losing their lives in it. By dying, they achieve their ultimate victory.
And I think by taking this whole philosophy of dedicating one’s life to a dream to its logical and horrific conclusion, Berserk is basically critiquing the concept of living for an ideal. In making the sacrifice, Griffith gave the Hawks what they wanted at a cost they’ve already agreed to by choosing to risk their lives for Griffith’s victories and the success he can bring them.
Of course, in the moment, knowing that death was inevitable, they would have preferred to live. None of them would knowingly trade their life for a future they won’t live to see. But that’s essentially what they’re doing by fighting battles for future hopes and dreams.
At the end of the day, the moral of Berserk’s story is really simple and basic: live for the sake of being alive. Guts had it right during his three years with the Hawks, before overhearing the Promrose Hall speech: no grand dream, no living for a potential future, nothing but doing the job of a mercenary with a group of people he considered family, enjoying life day to day, fighting just to live a life he considered worthwhile.
Personally I have mixed feelings about this message, but I’m pretty sure that’s basically the point of Berserk.
Black Swordsman: living for revenge (and, for extra irony, Guts’ own dream of fighting stronger and stronger enemies) is bad, living day to day with those “irreplacable things” – friends – is good. Golden Age: “I was too stupid and stubborn to notice it, but what I really wished for back then was here.” Guts left for a dream and by leaving threw away what he truly wanted – companionship. Conviction arc: the people who survived the shadow Eclipse were the people who acted to save their own lives, rather than out of a conviction, their faith in a higher power. Millennium Falcon: “Dreams can make for courageous challenges or opportune escapes” – emphasis on escapes. Troll village dude wanted to escape the darkness of life through a dream as a child, but eventually found greater fulfillment just living an ordinary life in his village. etc etc. Stop dreaming, focus on living.
And essentially the despair we see from the Hawks upon their realization that the fight is over and Griffith is no longer able to lead them to a greater dream leads directly to the Eclipse and gives it a layer of dark irony.
Huh, I’ve never rly seen that opinion tbh, maybe we hang out in different parts of fandom. Well, I’ve seen a few people expressing worry that Casca might forgive Griffith, but honestly if Miura writes that I will like, personally fly across the ocean to salt his garden. And I definitely don’t think it’s likely.
As for Guts… hm I’m just going to go all out and explain my take on Guts’ reaction to NGriff bc you gave me an opening lol.
I don’t think forgiveness for the Eclipse rape is on the table. But I definitely think his feelings towards NeoGriffith are very complex and he’s absolutely emotionally conflicted towards him, not just surprised by his appearance.
But yeah I don’t think his emotional conflict stems from wanting to forgive Griffith. What he wants is for Griffith to be or contain the version of himself that like, doesn’t require forgiving, because the only thing human Griffith did that hurt Guts was sacrifice the Band – and Guts never seemed to really blame him for that anyway.
Like when we’re talking about a dude who has undergone two (2) magical transformations and basically exists as three versions of himself, each with apparently very different internal emotional lives, it’s hard not to be conflicted about him.
Guts differentiates between human Griffith and Femto, and Guts does not hate human Griffith. We never ever not once see Guts direct an iota of rage towards Griffith as a human. Not even during the Eclipse, after he sacrificed everyone.
Very consistently, every time Guts thinks about human Griffith it’s with regret, sadness, a sense of loss. He regretfully thinks about Griffith kneeling in the snow like a million times, and never expresses anger about how Griffith sacrificed everyone and turned into an evil demon a year later. He thinks about Griffith among the dead Hawks during his run through memory lane, right after the Eclipse, and cries. Griffith is the most prominent shining light Schierke sees in his subconscious. Griffith is a part of the “campfire from those days” that still burns in his chest, and prevents him from being fully consumed by hate. etc etc.
He thinks about demonic-looking Femto when he’s feeling rage and hate, never human Griffith.
And I’m going to suggest that there are three main, related reasons that Guts feels emotional conflict in regards to NeoGriffith.
One is that it’s another change. Guts doesn’t know what exactly to expect from this third version of Griffith, who looks human again rather than demonic. He knows that he’s not “his” Griffith, because Skull Knight told him the fifth Godhand would incarnate, because he flew away from the Tower of Conviction on Zodd, and because the brand bleeds around him, but there’s a reason Guts rather desperately searches for a hint that NeoGriffith has regrets or feels remorse. Deep down he’s hoping that he’s closer to human Griffith than to Femto, basically, or that more of human Griffith is in there and reachable, or however you want to phrase it.
He lets Rickert hold him back from attacking until NeoGriffith directly says he’s free from his emotions, and then doesn’t actually try to strike until NGriff reiterates that sentiment with “I’ll not betray my dream. That is all.”
If NeoGriffith had feelings, if he felt regret, if he was no longer a malevolent demon, then Femto could be considered an anomaly that would carry sole blame for the Eclipse rape. Like, when we’re talking magical transformations that affect your mind as well as your body, the concept of blame is kind of nebulous. If NeoGriffith basically had all of human Griffith’s emotions and was horrified by his actions as Femto, and wanted to regain his relationship with Guts, then tbqh Guts would probably be able to go “oh well it wasn’t really you anyway.”
Yk, kinda like a Berserk fan who doesn’t consider Guts to be responsible for “the beast of darkness” assaulting Casca, but with the handy addition of a literal transformation. You can argue fictional moral philosophy wrt the morality of magically transforming into a monster and back again lol, but I definitely think Guts would seize the opportunity to write Femto off.
So, to split hairs, it’s less about potentially forgiving him, and more about potentially not holding him responsible. But yk, unfortunately for Guts NGriff turns out to be an apparently emotionless asshole who still won’t give him the time of day and says straight up that he regrets nothing, so that’s not an option for him.
The second reason is that, well, he looks like the dude that Guts felt such ridiculously intense feelings for that he rearranged his entire life and abandoned the people he considered his family just to feel like he was worthy of being his friend.
It’s a whole lot easier to feel rage against an aspect of someone you’re p much in love with when they look like a bona fide monster, rather than exactly like the person you love. You’ll even notice that, except in moments that emphasize the potential Guts has of following in his footsteps, Griffith’s face tends to be obscured or completely nonexistent when Guts thinks about Femto.
And the third reason is that he was already very emotionally conflicted over Femto. Femto raping Casca did not make him retroactively hate human Griffith, but his love for the man Griffith once was absolutely complicates his feelings with regards to Femto.
We see this in the way becoming a rage-fueled monster is framed as a temptation because he still wants to be his friend and equal, as per Griffith’s Promrose speech.
It’s also there in how Guts blatantly wants his attention and regard after everything.
He “threw away” Griffith’s love, so if he can’t have that then he wants Femto’s hate. He wants to be seen and acknowledged, even as a threat, so when Femto says that Guts doesn’t even register to him as an enemy, it pisses him off so much it gives him the strength to climb a flight of stairs with like half his bones broken and potentially-fatal pain in his brand, and swing his giant sword at him.
And we see it when he still thinks of him as a shining light in the darkness, despite everything.
Basically, on some emotional, irrational level, he still wants this:
Like, to reiterate, imo Guts’ emotional conflict isn’t about whether he can forgive Femto/NeoGriffith. It’s about the fact that Femto and NeoGriffith are both aspects of a dude that Guts had incredibly intense feelings for. They are distinct from Griffith but also inseparable from him, and that’s really, really hard to reconcile emotionally.
Hence, eg, a bunch of this maudlin shit:
Idk basically no I don’t think Guts is going to forgive NeoGriffith, but I do think that he is still very conflicted about him. He wants to want to kill him lol, but just as much, he wants to be seen by him, he wants his attention, he wants his love, he wants to be his equal, and he also wants to completely move on and just forget all his painfully fucked up and conflicting feelings towards him.
And I guess time will tell whether he achieves any of that.
Okay, this is totally overkill, I know, but your ask has motivated me to just lay it all out, so ty!
Yeah, I can see why people look at this image and see it as one huge raised scar. It’s fairly ambiguous looking, and it’s the visual interpretation the anime went with, which reinforces this common perception:
But look at this:
You can see when he traces it that the “outline” of that “wound” fits his two fingers exactly. It’s not one scar, it’s two self-inflicted parallel scratch marks.
They’re not in the same place as the river scratches, there are only two instead of four, and they’re also older and therefore either mostly healed scabs or scars which he’s tracing instead of tearing open in that moment, which is why they’re not the same as the bleeding open wounds we see in chapter 17, but they are definitely two separate marks, not the edges of one giant scar.
Tbh I think Miura put them on his shoulder instead of his arms this time mainly for dramatic effect so Griffith is more curled in on himself when he traces them.
imo the movie is closer to the spirit of the manga in making them scratch marks and showing Griffith seemingly tempted to add to them. It’s still a little weird considering their placement further back, and idk what they expected new audiences to think since they cut out every relevant aspect of those marks being there, ie his backstory and the night Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and co. But whatever, it’s close enough for me.
And to just briefly explain those scratch marks a bit further, basically, as much as it looks a bit like a big scar in the manga, like you said, it really makes no sense for it to be.
If Guts’ sword had hit him in the second duel he’d either have a gaping wound or a discoloured bruise later that day, not a scar, and if he got it somewhere else that we never get to see then he has absolutely no narrative reason to trace it and cry while thinking about Guts. It would be nonsensical and meaningless for him to trace some random mysterious scar that has no relevance in this highly emotionally charged moment.
On the other hand we know he has a history of self-harming by scratching himself, and we’ve seen him viciously scratch himself under circumstances very similar to Tombstone of Flame Part 2 – the moment Griffith flashed back to just as we see his bare shoulder with those marks on it for the first time in that first image up there: “You believe that, don’t you?”
Griffith has done something he considers “dirty” for the sake of his dream, asks someone else what they think of him (”Am I dirty?” // “Do you think that I’m cruel?”), both Casca and Guts inadvertantly reinforce his belief that he’s dirty/cruel with their responses (”N- why… why were you alone with him before?” and “Ain’t that part of the path to your dream?”), and in the river in front of Casca he self harms while talking himself through the necessity of dirtying himself for his dream, so it feels safe to assume that sometime shortly following his conversation with Guts in Tombstone of Flame he also self harmed while telling himself it’s necessary to be cruel for his dream.
Now that Guts has left in what Griffith believes is a rejection of the “cruelty” and “dirtiness” that he let Guts in to see, he traces those old scratch marks and tries to convince himself again that it’s worth it for his dream. And the point of this moment is that he can’t convince himself this time. Instead he just curls up and sobs, because in the face of Guts’ apparent rejection, it’s not worth it.
Like I said lol, this is overkill as a response to your ask, but like I saw an excuse to explain my take on this moment in its own post, instead of buried in a much longer post, so I took it.
Ok, this is my long and thorough explanation of how Guts’ decision to leave the Hawks was ultimately shown to be a mistake.
I’ve been kind of meaning to write this for a while because I tend to take this statement as read in a lot of my meta and I wanted to have something to point to for the sake of clarification whenever necessary lol. Also jsyk this isn’t quite as long a read as it looks bc there are a lot of illustrative images.
And before I get into it I just want to make something clear: when I say it was a mistake I’m not saying that it’s a decision that reflects badly on Guts. It reflects many of Guts’ issues, and it stems largely from growing up with an abusive father figure, but based on the information Guts had at the time, and based on his personality and his values it was a reasonable decision to make from his perspective.
It’s just one that he ended up wholeheartedly regretting for very good reasons.
This basically rests on three premises:
1. Guts was happy and felt personally fulfilled with the Hawks.
2.
Guts chose to leave for one reason and one reason only: Griffith’s Promrose Hall speech made him feel inadequate.
3. Griffith’s speech absolutely didn’t reflect either his actual feelings about Guts or a particularly worthwhile life philosophy, and eventually Guts comes to understand this.
So let’s demonstrate the first part, starting from when Guts joined the Hawks.
Cue the waterfight scene with Griffith. And afterwards:
Then Rickert knocks him off the step and congratulates him on already having ten men under his command.
Guts is happy with the Hawks. After only a week with them he’s already chilling out about being touched, he’s feeling accepted, he’s responsible for others and he’s rising to that responsibility. He reflects on the night he killed Gambino and fled his first home, thinks “I still don’t have an answer to that question [of where am I going?]…” but then when Rickert congratulates him he thinks, “for now…”
For now, he’ll make his home with the Hawks. He tells Rickert to call him Guts and their clasped hands get their own panel. He’s forging new relationships and bonds with people, beginning to heal from past trauma, and growing as a person. He’s no longer swinging his sword just to survive, but as part of a unit, to help his friends and comrades survive and thrive too.
Three years later, when Casca accuses him of not changing since he joined them, of not caring about his comrades, he’s incensed.
He’s proud of having changed. He’s proud of his place in the Hawks, of being their raider captain, of Griffith’s faith in him. Casca’s words wound him because he has deep seated insecurities related to being an outsider.
His rivalry with Casca draws these insecurities out but overall he is very happy with the Hawks, he does care about them, and Casca insinuating otherwise pisses him off for good reason.
When Griffith nearly dies saving him from Zodd and then says he did it for no reason and implies he’d do it again without question, Guts like, basically reaches the pinnacle of his life.
And like, it is straightforward textual canon that this is everything Guts has desperately wanted all his life, thanks largely to his big pile of issues stemming from his fucked up childhood:
That is exactly what he has, and more importantly, what he understands and recognizes he has, after this staircase conversation.
When he first joined the Hawks we saw him remember that question he asked himself the night he killed Gambino and ran from his first (shitty) family: “where’m I going?”
After this conversation he remembers that night again:
He’s chosen to replace that first family, the abusive father he killed, the first mercenary band he grew up with, with the Hawks and Griffith. He has an answer to why he’s swinging his sword, and it’s not just to survive – it’s “for his sake.”
For now…
That little “for now” is important. It’s what he thought when he joined the Hawks three years ago, and it’s what he thinks now, because frankly, he is terrible at committment. This is an important part of Guts’ character. He’s slow to trust that others care about him because of his terrible childhood, and he’s very quick to believe he is unloved and unwanted. That “for now,” sets us up for the way one overheard speech makes Guts decide to rebuild his entire life from the ground up.
But hey, for now, he’s happy. He knows he’s cared for, he knows people, particularly Griffith, love and respect and value him. That to Griffith he’s worth risking his life for. He’s ready to dedicate himself to Griffith in turn. This is huge for Guts.
So yeah, he’s content and feels personally fulfilled with the Hawks and Griffith at this point in his life.
But then comes the speech.
This completely wipes away Guts’ assurance that Griffith loves, values, and respects him.
It changes everything for Guts and inarguably informs his choice to leave:
The real question worth asking isn’t why Guts decided to leave the Hawks, but why did one overheard pretentious speech about how Griffith has no friends affect Guts so profoundly that he immediately stopped viewing Griffith as a fellow human who would happily risk his life for him and began seeing him as a distant and perfect godlike figure who Guts would do anything to reach?
Like this speech comes after Griffith has literally died “for [his] sake.” In the encounter with Zodd, Griffith was dead because he instinctively ran into danger to grab Guts personally – it was only an unforseen twist of fate that allowed him to survive. And Guts knows this is significant, which is why he questions him about it, gets his answer, and dedicates himself to Griffith in return.
The speech erases that.
Afterwards, he has this incredibly unsubtle conversation with Casca:
Casca is laying down some basic facts here that add up to a confirmation of everything Guts believed when he said “I’ll wield my sword… for his sake,” on that rooftop.
Guts is the first person Griffith has ever said he wanted. Casca
hoped it was for his strength as an aid for achieving his dream, but
that is clearly not the case since he has nearly sacrificed his life –
and dream, Casca specifies – for Guts twice.
Griffith values Guts even above the dream he’s dedicated his life to, as is thoroughly demonstrated by his actions.
But Guts
completely disregards this. Casca straightforwardly tells him that
Griffith feels some unique and irrational emotions for Guts, and his
actions are proof of that, but Guts never stops to consider that maybe
Griffith’s actions speak louder than his words. At the most, what Casca’s angry monologue might do is give Guts the confidence that he’s capable of becoming Griffith’s friend, and therefore inspires him to leave.
But it certainly doesn’t make him rethink the truth or the value of Griffith’s speech to Charlotte.
I’m not going to get heavily into Griffith’s point of view here, I’ve done that very thoroughly in the second part of this giant thing
for anyone rly curious, but suffice to say his Promrose Hall monologue doesn’t have a
damn thing to do with how Griffith actually feels about Guts lol.
Guts doesn’t fit his weird and narrow definition of friend, Guts is actually far more important to him than this definition leaves room for. A friend is someone who has his own dream and would prioritize it over friendship, allowing Griffith to prioritize his own dream as well – Guts, conversely, has already taken priority over Griffith’s dream when Griffith risked it for him twice.
Griffith isn’t about to consciously admit to himself that his dream is no longer his number one priority, but our trusty commentator of their relationship, Casca, knows the score, and explains it to Guts, and completely fails to get through to him.
And the reason Guts prioritizes the speech over actual evidence of what his relationship with Griffith actually is, both in the form of Griffith saving him and Casca explaining things to him, comes back to his abusive childhood:
He is convinced that Griffith looks down on him because this is what he’s grown up expecting from people he respects and loves. He expects to be seen as worth nothing more than the money he can bring in and the fights he can win, he expects to be ostracized and seen as “cursed,” so Griffith’s speech overrides Griffith risking his life and dream to save Guts twice, it overrides Casca’s jealousy of their relationship, it overrides Griffith freaking out and refusing to let Guts leave without another duel, hell, for a while it even overrides both Casca and Rickert telling him that Griffith destroyed his life because Guts left.
He’s gone from feeling like a trusted, respected, and valued friend to feeling like nothing more than an asset to Griffith’s dream.
Remember, he did not feel discontent before the speech. In his three years with the Hawks before overhearing the speech, he felt like he’d found the place he belonged. He felt worthwhile, he felt valued as a person and not just as a soldier, and moreover, he was right to feel that way.
The Hawks do love, respect, and value him, and Griffith demonstratably values him even over his dream whether he’s able to admit that to himself or not.
And it’s only after overhearing the speech, overhearing that Griffith can only see someone as a friend and equal if they have their own obsession to pursue, that Guts starts feeling once again like he’s only fighting to survive, as we see him ponder during the 100 man fight, and here:
Before the Promrose Hall speech he felt like he was fighting for his friends and comrades, for Griffith, and he was proud of that, but now he feels like he’s worthlessly fighting for nothing. It’s incredibly depressing imo. This is straight up a result of Guts’ low self esteem, thanks to his abusive childhood.
This is Guts’ tendency to feel like an outsider rearing its ugly head. This is because he grew up being told he was cursed, used only as a source of income for Gambino, and turned on and nearly killed by Gambino and then the rest of the mercenaries. This is Guts feeling like he can’t trust any companionship to be genuine other than his sword.
Basically what happened is that Guts overheard Griffith’s speech in a moment of particular vulnerability. He’d just accidentally killed a kid and he was feeling like a monster about it. He was trying to find Griffith, probably to feel that same sense of acceptance and love he felt during the staircase conversation – he needed reassurance, and instead his world came crashing down around him and his feelings of worthlessness resurged hard.
And because of his outsider issues he extrapolates Griffith’s speech to his feelings about being part of the Hawks as a whole. Every Hawk has a dream except him, therefore he’s an outsider and doesn’t really belong.
And on some level, Guts knows this is bullshit.
It’s been one day and, now feeling the full weight of being alone again and apart from what Rickert pointedly calls his family, he’s already having second thoughts, reflecting on the warm companionship he’s giving up and acknowledging that his goal is inherently contradictory.
He wants to find his own dream so he can live for himself, when his entire reason for wanting that is to become Griffith’s equal. He’s not going out to find a dream for the sake of his own sense of independence, or because he personally also believes that a person is only worthwhile if they’re pursuing something.
He’s doing it because he overheard Griffith say that’s the only way to be his friend.
As he declares his independence from Griffith he is literally parroting Griffith’s speech here lol; it’s a giant contradiction and proof of what he mused on the night he left – he got this idea in his head by overhearing Griffith’s words, therefore he’s not actually doing it for his own sake.
Guts left for the sole reason of fulfilling Griffith’s weird and specific friendship criteria.
And after Guts comes back his whole narrative pretty much revolves around his slow and painful realization that Griffith’s speech was functionally meaningless, and yeah it turns out he did end up throwing away something irreplacable that he’ll never have again by taking off.
Like, just to underscore how significant it is that Guts lets Casca stab him as he internalizes this information, this is a huge sign of guilt. We see Guts do the same thing when the possessed kid stabs him all the way back in chapter 2. He denies feeling responsible both times, but the fact that he let himself be stabbed contradicts those words.
It takes him several days and several pretty huge anvils dropped on him before he finally accepts the fact that not only was leaving entirely unnecessary because Griffith did not actually look down on him or consider him unworthy, but by leaving he destroyed the thing he left to obtain in the first place: he left to become Griffith’s equal and when he came back, by any standards these two idiots would use to define power and worth, Guts is by far Griffith’s superior now. Entirely because Guts left Griffith is now disabled, helpless, voiceless, dreamless, powerless, and dependent.
And let’s be real, it’s a pretty damn harsh thing to accept that you not only rearranged the focus of your entire life and left your found family for no reason, but by doing so you lost the thing you rearranged your life and left your family to try to get. It’s no wonder Guts holds out for so long.
He keeps telling himself that Griffith is above the kind of emotion that would lead to him being declared a traitor one day after Guts left, that Griffith is untouchable, that Griffith has always had everything under control and always will. He insists to himself that Griffith is perfect and soaring distantly above him, because his reason for leaving is to become just like him. He has to believe it to justify his decision.
Since before he left:
to after he comes back:
But his ability to deny not just Griffith’s flawed humanity but also his devastatingly powerful feelings for him is growing weaker. Guts is beginning to realize that the fact that Guts was able to destroy him by leaving is itself proof that he didn’t need to leave.
Guts already had as strong a hold over Griffith as Griffith had over him. They were already functionally equals in this way.
Then I’ve made a huge mistake.
To make a long story short (too late), this is why Guts left:
And this is how Griffith really feels about Guts:
These two monologues exist to play off each other. Guts monologuing about his feelings for Griffith, how dazzling he is, how he needs to leave so he can be Griffith’s equal instead of feeling like Griffith is looking down on him. And Griffith’s monologue about his feelings for Guts, how the dream he’s spent every waking moment of his life pursuing pales in comparison to him, how strong Guts’ hold on him is, how he’s the sole sustenance keeping him alive.
It’s a point/counterpoint. Griffith’s monologue directly states that Guts is wrong about his reasons for leaving.
And again, I don’t think Guts’ decision to leave was actually stupid, or that it reflects badly on him. Griffith himself didn’t properly recognize his feelings for Guts until it was too late, and Guts had good reasons, both internal (a history of abuse) and external (Griffith’s stupid speech), for believing Griffith looked down on him.
But nevertheless he was still wrong, and here’s where Guts finally, finally realizes it properly, without pushing that realization away and denying it some more:
Unfortunately he realizes this about 30 seconds too late, which is what makes Berserk a tragedy.
Anyway, that’s about it. It may be worth noting that his regret over leaving informs significant chunks of the rest of his narrative, such as realizing he’s been being a dick by leaving Casca in a cave for two years:
And refusing to leave her again:
“Don’t abandon what you can’t replace. Weren’t those Godo’s parting words?”
Guts realizing he fucked up and shouldn’t’ve left the Hawks informs his most significant moments of personal growth over the series. Realizing he’s repeating that mistake is what finally sways him from the self-destructive path of rage and revenge to putting his energy into protecting Casca.
The fact that companions and loved ones are more important and genuinely healthier things to prioritize than dreams is one of the central themes of Berserk, and Guts choosing to leave the Hawks, his family, to pursue a dream, thereby losing all of his friends and loved ones, is the main illustration of this theme.
Also worth noting: the dream Guts eventually landed on was to just keep swinging his sword, getting better and stronger and fighting better and stronger enemies, except alone this time, instead of among comrades and friends. You know what that describes to a tee? The Black Swordsman arc, as is neatly pointed out after the Eclipse:
Guts would’ve been much, much better off staying with the Hawks and continuing to find personal fulfillment in his relationships and feelings of being loved and valued, but years of being told his only worth is as an asset, rather than as a person, blinded him to the truth and made it too easy for him to believe he’s looked down on.
Part of the tragedy of the Golden Age hinges on Guts’ low self esteem and inability to see that he’s loved because of it. This is what happens when you’re the protagonist of a really well-written, really tragic story: you make some wonderfully disastrous, character-revealing mistakes.
In the fourth and final part of this exploration of the tug of war between Griffith’s dream and his love for Guts, I’m going to look at how Griffith ultimately ends up choosing the dream over Guts despite the fact that Guts is more important to him – or, more accurately, because Guts is more important.
I’m starting by diving right into what is, hands down, my favourite part of Berserk.
The small battles we fought on the cobblestone when we were still young. The small victories we achieved. The many sparkling junk spoils we plundered.
In the evening… staring up from the back alley of brothels and taverns, where the sun never shines, I saw something. Shimmering against the setting sun, it was the brightest thing I had ever seen.
I made up my mind. The junk I would get for myself… would be that thing.
Darkness.
Deep darkness without even a trace of light.
How much time has passed since I was cast into this darkness…?
An eternity… but it also seems like an instant… All my senses are numbed and I can’t feel a thing. What of my body? It’s like it’s floating in mid-air. Have I retained my sanity? Did I go insane long ago?
Only him.
Like lightning on a dark night, he rises up within me, blazing. And again and again like a tidal wave, an infinite number of feelings surge upon me. Malice, friendship, jealousy, futility, regret, tenderness, sorrow, pain, hunger… So many recurring, yearning feelings. That giant swirl of violent emotions in which none are definite but all are implied. That alone is the bond which keeps my consciousness from vanishing amidst the numbness.
I know that I’m different from other people. Those I’ve met can by no means disregard me. They always view me with either a look of good will or animosity. I know that the good will forms into trust or fellowship and the animosity into awe or possibly dread. Thereby have I grasped… the hearts of so many in these hands.
…But why is it when it comes to him I always lose my composure?
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive. Out of so many thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies, why just him…?
How long ago did someone I was supposed to have in hand… instead gain such a strong hold on me?
Because you’re in love with him, oh my god.
At the end of the day, that’s what it boils down to. That’s the difference between Griffith shutting Casca out and letting Guts in. That’s why Casca has been jealous of Guts. Casca wanted to be Griffith’s emotional support, something indispensible to his dream – she wanted to be the one to “change him that way” – and learning that her feelings for Griffith were romantic all along points pretty conclusively imo to envying Guts for being the person Griffith loves, rather than her.
I’m going to be honest here: as much as I’ve been taking it as read that Griffith is in love with Guts (and, tbqh, vice versa) I wasn’t actually planning to make it a central point of this meta. I genuinely thought, going in, that I could focus on Guts as an emotional crutch and shield against his self loathing, as I’ve been doing so far. Yk, Griffith allows himself to become dependant on him because he loves him, but the point is the emotional dependency, not the love, right?
Fuckin wrong.
The climax of Griffith’s narrative can’t be understood without not just acknowledging that Griffith is in love with Guts, but recognizing it as the whole point and his central motivation.
This is going to be important later, but for now I’m stating that up front and I figure this is a good place to do so because, between Casca’s confession to Guts and Griffith’s monologue, it’s basically Miura spelling out the fact that this love is Griffith’s strongest motivating factor.
(And, just as an aside, despite the fact that it’s never explicitly defined, I’m calling it romantic love because a) it is, b) like, it just fucking is lol. I feel like you have to jump through hoops and twist yourself in knots to call it platonic. Without assuming that straightness is the default, saying Griffith is in love with Guts is genuinely the most straightforward, clear and concise way of reading this relationship to me. All my points hold true if you call it platonic love so ultimately you do you, but if I called it that I’d be being disingenuous.)
This monologue is our re-introduction to Griffith after a year of nothing but torture, darkness, and self-reflection. It’s the definitive statement on his relationship to Guts and how it compares to the dream now, after he’s lost both.
And the dream barely rates a mention. The matching visual of the shining/vivid thing, and the way Griffith opens the monologue by describing the dream as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, prime the reader to expect that the one vivid thing is the dream. That after losing Guts, Griffith has returned to obsessing over the dream in deluded desperation, or is maybe lamenting its demise.
But it’s a pure bait and switch because Guts is all-important to him now. Despite Guts’ rejection, despite the loss, despite the fact that he’s partially blaming Guts for having been tortured for a year, next to him the dream grows dull.
A core point of this meta was basically to show how this has been true from the very start. It’s not that Guts only outshines the dream when the dream has been lost to him, it’s that, after losing both the dream and Guts and being forced to confront himself, stripped of all those defenses that help keep him in denial, Griffith is finally able to understand, too late, what has been most important to him all along.
And this remains true. From Guts rescuing him to Griffith choosing to sacrifice him for the dream, Guts is still more important.
But if Griffith’s story up until Guts leaves has been about how his relationship with Guts had begun to replace his dream as the thing he turns to in order to shield himself from his weaknesses – guilt, self-loathing, the weight of lives on his shoulders, etc – then his story when Guts returns follows the opposite trajectory:
it’s about how he returns to his dream as his armour against his feelings for Guts.
And the place we’re starting from is Griffith letting go of his dream.
Back near the beginning Zodd gave Guts a prophecy:
If you can be said to be a true friend of this man… then take heed… When his ambition collapses… death will pay you a visit! A death you can never escape!
Because Zodd is a dramatic asshole. But the thing is, Griffith’s ambition has collapsed. His dream’s dead. The closest he can get to it before literal magic intercedes in his life is in moments of self-delusion, like when he told Charlotte he’d return to her, and when he snapped and chased a hallucination. But in the cold light of day, aware and relatively sane, he knows his dream is gone. Charlotte could still be over the moon for him and it’s not going to help him gain her kingdom without a tongue or working limbs, and he does know it.
And when Griffith watches the castle disappear over the horizon and lets the flowers in his hands go as his symbolic child self runs away from the brightest thing he’d ever seen rather than towards, when Griffith lets go of his dream, he’s… okay.
The Godhand don’t make an appearance. The behelit doesn’t come back and start screaming. Griffith is continuing on. This is acceptance. We’ve already seen the monologue about how the dream barely matters to him in comparison to Guts after all, so this isn’t too surprising either.
And then fucking Wyald shows up.
This fight’s significance to Griffith’s narrative is in his distance from the others, his alienation in being the only one who can’t pick up a sword to fight, and his helplessness as he desperately tries to do something to help Casca and Guts and can’t even manage to tear himself away from his minders, particularly in contrast to the fight against Zodd.
Eg:
Guts compares this fight to the Zodd fight a lot. When he’s briefly knocked out we see a flashback to a discussion with Erica where he talks about Zodd and Erica suspects he wants to fight him again. We see Guts thinking about Zodd as his only other frame of reference for a real live monster. And we see him think about Zodd when it comes to his and Griffith’s partnership specifically.
This emphasizes the difference between that fight and this current fight. Namely:
Whereas when Griffith tried to rescue Guts from Zodd they then squared off and faced him together, when Guts saves Casca he tells her to get lost and insists on taking Wyald one on one, because he’s got a score to settle.
Compared to the fight with Zodd, which led to the most positive and hopeful moment of their relationship – Griffith admitting he had no rational reason to leap into danger and save Guts, and Guts realizing he may have found what he’s been looking for ever since he killed Gambino – this fight with Wyald is a showcase of Griffith’s enforced distance and isolation from everyone, especially Guts.
If Griffith saving Guts from Zodd was the pinnacle of their relationship, the truest and most revealing moment of how Griffith feels, leading to Guts’ subsequent acceptance of those feelings and dedication to him in turn, then Guts pointedly fighting Wyald alone highlights the low point they’ve entered where they’re forcibly separated by Griffith’s broken body and voicelessness. They’ll never be a team again.
The chapter right after the fight is a heartbreaking mix of hope and despair. It begins, very appropriately, with Charlotte telling Anna that Griffith said he’d come back to her. Logically, like I’ve said, Griffith was deluding himself at that point. He accepts that his dream is gone a few hours later when they make it out of the sewer tunnels.
But by bringing it up and explaining that moment here, at the beginning of this chapter, it serves handily as ominous foreshadowing, and, even better, it’s a reminder that Griffith has always clung to his dream as emotional self-defense, and it still “smoulders from the bottom of [his] heart.”
The thing is, the comparison between Wyald and Zodd isn’t solely for the sake of contrast. It’s also a reminder of that pinnacle of their relationship, of
Griffith risking his life and dream for Guts, of Guts feeling like he’d found that indefinable thing he’d been searching for ever since he killed Gambino. It’s a sign of hope that the potential for their relationship isn’t lost. They’ve lost their ability to fight side by side, but their relationship isn’t predicated on just being able to fight together, or Griffith’s leadership, or the structure of the Hawks. It’s based on genuine love and mutual respect, and that isn’t gone.
Despite everything, they can still smile at each other. This scene demonstrates the potential they have just as two people who love each other, and gives readers vain hope for their future as it simultaneously sows the seeds for the destruction of their relationship.
The mask/helmet is a symbol of his former role as the leader of the Hawks, and hence, a symbol of everything that entails: the dream, repression, isolation, the image of perfection, everything I’ve been talking about for way too high a wordcount now. All those defense mechanisms.
Guts saying it’s okay for Griffith to take off the mask since it’s just the two of them is, therefore, an extremely loaded statement. Guts is offering Griffith the opportunity to be vulnerable, to be himself, no image, no mask, no leadership position, just the two of them, as equals, in each other’s company. He’s offering acceptance of Griffith, weakness and vulnerability and physical damage and all.
Instead of accepting, Griffith asks for his armour. It’s a way of reinforcing the barrier between them, and hiding his vulnerability.
The great thing about this chapter is that I don’t have to work to justify any of this because it’s literally called, “Armor to the Heart,” lol. Telling Charlotte he’d return was denial for the sake of guarding his heart against the reality of having lost everything he’d once strived for, and asking for his armour is a more literal version of that. Once Guts puts it on him he starts awkwardly denying reality too – such as telling Griffith he’ll be able to swing a sword soon.
Rather than Griffith being able to accept the truth of what’s happened – that he’s vulnerable, he’s helpless, he can no longer win for the sake of the dead, everything he’s worked for is lost – and maybe find consolation in Guts’ acceptance of him and love for him despite that, he tries to keep hiding behind the old image of perfection, the way he used to. This is basically a futile version of Griffith smiling and telling Casca, “it’s nothing.”
When Wyald returns like a bad penny, he really gets to the heart of what it means for Griffith to manufacture this image of himself to hide his vulnerability behind, and boy is it devastating:
Griffith is a symbol. He has deliberately cultivated that ideal image of himself as the perfect leader, a knight in shining armour. It keeps him distanced and detached from everyone except Guts, who has been allowed to see through it. His allies see him as a symbol of hope and change for the better, his enemies see him as a symbol of corruption in the system and change for the worse, Gennon sees him as a symbol of perfect beauty, Charlotte sees him as a symbol of a perfect relationship, and his Hawks see him as a symbol of their rise to glory.
And, of course, it all leads back to Griffith’s dream. It’s the reason it’s necessary to become this idealized image, rather than a real person. It’s an intrinsic part of his ascent to the throne.
And it’s part of how he convinces himself that he’s all right, “it’s nothing.” It helps him deny his emotions and bury them. If he can convince everyone else he’s perfect, he can convince himself. That mask of perfection is an intrinsic part of his defense against his self-loathing.
This is what he tried to hide behind when he asked Guts to dress him in his armour, and this is what Wyald strips away from him now.
He’s lost nearly every defense he has against his own self-hatred. His dream is dead in the water and he failed to prove that everything he’s done and all the lives lost in his wake were worthwhile sacrifices. He’s not one of the mover shakers of the world, he’s just an ordinary person who wanted to be special and couldn’t stand the weight of guilt on his shoulders.
Now he’s helpless and dependent; not only did he wholly fail the people who follow him, he is now reliant on them, without anything even to offer in exchange. Wyald pretty much takes away his last lingering ability to deny this.
To Griffith, this is as close to hell as you get without dying first. He didn’t keep winning for the sake of the dead, he lost, for good. He failed everyone, dead and alive, and his very existence is worse than worthless, it’s a burden on others (from his point of view).
I’d say that this couldn’t be a more perfectly tailored hell for Griffith if someone designed it that way, but, well, someone did design it that way.
Then the next scene just doubles down.
Honestly there are a shitload of possible readings of this scene, many of them not even mutually exclusive, and I think there are a number of complex factors that feed into it, but I’m landing on one for the purposes of this meta.
Based on what I perceive of Griffith’s own feelings of self-worth and his current headspace, and particularly the way the scene with Wyald right before serves as a literal and metaphorical stripping away of everything that gives Griffith a sense of worth, I think one solid reading is that he’s offering himself to Casca here because it’s the only thing left of himself that potentially has worth to someone.
Like I’ve seen other Berserk fans call this an attempted rape as a matter of course, which couldn’t be further from the truth, and not only because he literally stops when Casca says stop, and is physically incapable of even taking his clothes off. It’s not a sneak preview of the Eclipse rape, it’s a huge, pointed contrast.
This is Griffith at his lowest. He’s broken, desperate, and he feels worthless. He’s not trying to fuck Casca because he wants to, it’s because at one point that’s what she wanted.
He moves on her right after overhearing her tell Guts that she just wants to be held, after she contemplates her shaking hands and remembers how Griffith had once been able to comfort her with just a hand on her shoulder. Contextually the set-up of this scene points to Griffith desperately wanting to be that person who could comfort Casca once again, instead of being the person who needs comfort.
I also think there’s a precedent that sets this scene up with Casca comforting Guts sexually and thinking, “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.” The difference between giving and being given to is a recurrent theme, and I think this scene draws on it.
But he is the one who needs to be comforted. He no longer has the power or the position to be the one offering comfort. Casca refuses his sexual offer, and as he trembles above her, she lays her hand on him, in a role-reversal that just highlights everything of his past self that he’s lost.
If Griffith’s ability to once put on the mask of perfection and comfort Casca even in the midst of his own despair was a demonstration of strength, this is a humiliating demonstration of complete and utter weakness and uselessness. It seems that now he’s nothing to Casca, once his most devoted follower and admirer, except a victim who needs to be taken care of.
Guts’ hand on his shoulder in Tombstone was a sign of his emotional vulnerability to Guts specifically, because of the unique nature of their relationship. It was a symbol of Guts’ hold on him and Griffith’s weakness in loving him. Casca’s hand on Griffith’s back now is a sign of Griffith’s vulnerability in general. His armour’s been stripped off, his dream is gone, everything he once relied on to help him repress his self loathing has been ripped away, and now he can’t offer Casca anything; he can only accept her comforting hand.
Griffith has one thing left: Guts, and the possibility of absolution to be found in his love, if Guts does still love him. If Griffith needed to hear that he wasn’t cruel back in Tombstone of Flame, now he desperately, desperately needs to hear that he’s worth something to someone. That he isn’t just a cruel monster who piled up a mountain of corpses and then couldn’t even climb it all the way, who is now just a useless inconvenience to everyone with the weight of thousands of bodies on his shoulders.
And I believe, despite everything, that Guts would’ve been enough. Narratively, we’re told that he could’ve been enough. Griffith’s torture chamber monologue, Griffith letting his dream go, the way “I’ll st-” is placed on a panel of Griffith sleeping through it, conveying a sense of missed opportunity perfectly:
And the way Guts realized he fucked up by leaving only seconds after Griffith has overheard them.
Note that this line is a conclusive call-back to Guts musing on this statement a few pages earlier, making it clear that it refers to his regret over leaving, and how by leaving he threw away the thing he wished for in the first place:
If there wasn’t at least the possibility for Griffith to find some kind of happiness in a life with Guts at his side despite losing everything else, none of this would matter. Guts finally making the right choice by deciding to stay just as Griffith thinks he’s going to leave again would be dramatically pointless.
And this is a tragedy, so despite all these hope spots, this happens:
And Griffith just fucking breaks.
What do you fear in this place? asks the version of Griffith who still has a dream, and then he points to another place, a place where Griffith could leave his fears behind.
Like this is literally right after he overhears Casca telling Guts to leave. This was the part I struggled with until I just went with my gut, backed up, and realized that this isn’t actually about Griffith’s self-loathing, or his fears of being worthless or a burden. It’s not about being stripped of his coping mechanisms.
This is about being in love with Guts. This is about the visceral fear of Guts leaving him again, not because of how it might reflect on Griffith as a person with or without worth, but because he loves Guts so much he can’t bear the thought of a life without him.
Griffith’s dream is a coping mechanism. This page conveys that concept as clearly as anything. “What do you fear in this place?” Run away from it, towards your dream, your kingdom, the safe place you’ve fantasized about all your life, the place where you have the power to make things better.
He desperately chases his hallucinatory vision of his dream, and then he has a vision of a potential future:
And, true to form, the defining aspect of this short, three-page sequence isn’t the loss of Griffith’s dream or his helplessness and dependency. It’s not about his self-loathing or being unable to hide his weakness behind armour and a mask of perfection. It’s Guts’ absence. The point is that Griffith is here, with Casca, and Guts is elsewhere.
“With you and the boy… just the three of us.” Like their kid is even named after Guts, just to highlight the actual Guts’ absence as emphatically, and depressingly, as possible. The first image is Griffith surrounded by Miura’s patented black panel of symbolic isolation, Casca brings up Guts and wonders where he is, then reiterates that it’s “just” the three of them. In a total of three pages containing almost no other information what we’re given is Griffith with Casca and a nightmare kid named after the man he loves, Guts gone, and Griffith’s total mental and emotional detachment from the world.
And then he wakes up and immediately tries to kill himself.
What does Griffith fear in this place?
The first time Guts left him he ran to Charlotte, the means of achieving his dream, for comfort, denial, escape from reality, and self-destruction.
This time he tries to turn to his dream again, but it’s nothing more than a hallucination that segues into a nightmare in which Guts has left him behind, and with no dream to escape to, no armour or mask bury his heart under, no coping mechanisms left, he loses himself. “This peace and quiet isn’t so bad,” he thinks, barely even aware, his life stretching out ahead of him, without Guts.
That is, after all, the one difference between now and the torture chamber. He’d lost his dream, his tongue, the use of his limbs, his self-worth, ability to hide behind an image, and Guts then, too, and the Godhand never showed. But Griffith thought he would eventually die in the torture chamber – even if the King specified that he live through a year, that’s a lot less than a lifetime. Now he’s faced with a full life in this state, apart from Guts.
And I want to make this distinction clear. The prospect of losing Guts is what sends him into suicidal despair. It’s not the loss of his dream or the stripping away of the persona he hid under – in other words, it’s not the loss of the coping mechanisms he used to rely on that drives him to despair. Losing those is likely what makes suicide, and then sacrifice, seem like the only possible escape from his despair, hence the set-up with Wyald and Casca hammering home the fact that he’s lost all his ways of guarding his heart, but it’s not the source of that despair. The source is Guts.
Guts was replacing the dream as Griffith’s defense against self loathing. But that does not make Guts just one more coping mechanism to lose. He’s not the final straw that broke the camel’s back, he’s the whole bundle of hay.
The premise of the first three parts of this meta was that his relationship with Guts helps Griffith deal with the immense weight of everything he’s done on the path to his dream, and had the potential to fully replace achieving the dream as Griffith’s way of not hating himself.
Well the premise of this part is that the reason Guts could’ve replaced the dream is because Griffith is in love with Guts, incredibly, all-consumingly in love with him, and now that is what he needs help coping with. There’s no getting around this lol, and no way of downplaying it either.
We know this because of how his nightmarish vision of a life with Casca highlights Guts’ absence instead of, eg, his self loathing, or his lack of an image to hide behind, or his guilt, or being a burden to Casca (hell, in his imagination she’s explicitly content.) We know it because it’s the words, “even if it’s alone, you have to go,” that make Griffith snap. We know it because the entire narrative of the Golden Age has largely been devoted to establishing that Griffith feels unprecedented, incredibly powerful feelings for Guts, and this is the payoff.
We know it because Berserk thoroughly foreshadowed the Eclipse during the Black Swordsman arc, and it was absolutely not subtle about about love as a motivation:
I’ve written a post fully explaining this already so I’m not going to be that thorough here, but suffice to say, through images like Femto there on “so that you could bury your fragile human heart,” through Puck’s direct questions and statements, through the entire point of this scene being to hint at Guts’ backstory, etc, it’s made very clear that the Count and Griffith/Femto are parallels.
And we know it because of what drives Griffith past that final point of despair that opens the behelit.
Sorry for posting practically the whole scene, but damn, don’t you just want to bask in it?
After everything – the loss of his dream, the torture, the loss of his voice and working limbs, the loss of his image, of his escape, of his denial, of his pride, and the loss of Guts – what finally plunges him into the kind of despair that creates a demonic demigod is the touch of Guts’ hand. Specifically his hand on Griffith’s shoulder.
What does Griffith fear in this place? What drives Griffith into despair?
Love.
It’s the understanding how utterly fucking gone he is for Guts. That hand on his shoulder signifies Griffith’s vulnerability to Guts because of his feelings, and it’s that touch that finally opens the behelit.
To split hairs, what drives him to despair is not believing that Guts will leave him, it’s knowing that if Guts leaves him, the loss will destroy him.
After all, it already happened once.
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive.
And Griffith’s vision of the future shows us a version of what he believes will happen: if the first time Guts left his body was destroyed, the second time the rest of him will follow. We saw him existing in a seemingly permanent state of semi-dissociation, maybe living entirely in daydreams (”daydreaming again…”), barely aware of the present.
Love is the source of Griffith’s despair – the overwhelming, horrifying, life-destroying vulnerability of love.
So Griffith turns back to his first defense mechanism to escape it.
Now, I don’t want to downplay the role Griffith’s guilt plays in the sacrifice. I didn’t write three posts about Griffith’s issues only to completely ignore them at the climax of his arc just because love happens to take centre stage.
So let’s briefly recap.
Griffith is filled with guilt and self-loathing; his dream was a way of repressing those feelings with the belief that one day his very existence, and everything he’s done during that existence, would be justified. One day Guts came along and instead of continuing to live in repression and emotional denial he fell in love and started opening up. This made him vulnerable and “weak,” so when Guts seemingly rejected him because of everything Griffith hates about himself, his dream was no longer enough for him to retreat to. So he crashed and burned. Now he’s stripped of all his defenses and the horror of that vulnerability to love has sent him into pure despair.
And now some cenobite looking assholes have joined the party and they’re telling Griffith ex-fucking-zactly what he’s spent most of his life desperately hoping to one day hear, in some form or another:
And despite being plunged into crimson-behelit-opening despair by his love for Guts, despite already being told everything he wants and needs to know – that he’s been chosen by God, all is not lost, he has another chance, and to take it what he has to do is sacrifice the Band – he still irrationally, desperately prioritizes Guts when his life is in danger yet again:
This is such a tragic moment, because this is the last time Griffith chooses Guts over the dream. And, once again because he loves Griffith, Guts is the one who lets go of his hand, falling away from Griffith into darkness like a lost beacon.
So, separated from Guts, the Godhand bring Griffith up to the palm of the hand and then they proceed to play him like a fiddle, knowing exactly which buttons to push, in their exploration of his self-loathing and guilt.
Like, they’re not lying to Griffith, technically. What Ubik and Conrad are doing is playing to Griffith’s shame and guilt. They are showing Griffith his own image of himself:
Griffith sees himself as a stupid kid scaling a mountain of corpses to get to a castle. He’s consumed by guilt, which is why he can’t stop – because if he does, if he apologizes, if he repents, everything will come to an end, and that mountain of people will have died for nothing.
We already know this, of course.
The Godhand show Griffith his own perception of himself, and tell him that it’s completely accurate.
So of course, of course we have to revist the moment Griffith asked someone if they see him the same way he does, in the hopes of getting a different answer:
With Guts, Griffith could’ve taken a different route. He could’ve learned not to see himself as a monster. In showing Guts the worst of himself and being accepted, he could’ve accepted his own self-worth, independent of achieving a dream.
I mean, let’s be real here: Griffith has no real reason to feel as guilty as he does, or as driven for the sake of the dead as he does. He’s right when he says that the Hawks chose to follow him. The only people whose deaths he forced were enemies trying to kill him, give or take a pedophile who wanted to capture him as a sex slave rather than kill him, and a kid whose death was an accident and not on his orders, even if it did work out great for him. He’s a military leader, but so is Guts, so is Casca, hell so is Rickert technically, and none of them feel any guilt about the people they kill in battle, or the men they send to their deaths.
It’s heavily suggested that Griffith wants a kingdom in order to create a place of equality, where people’s lives and bodies aren’t bought and sold. (”What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth even a single piece of silver.”) When he eventually does get a kingdom that’s exactly what it is, and it exists to grant the deep desire of humanity as a collective – in other words, the people who fought and died for it considered it worth fighting and risking their lives for. It’s not just Griffith who wants this kingdom, according to the narrative, it’s humanity – certainly the non-elite majority of humanity.
Griffith thinking of himself as a monster, and the Godhand calling him one, is Griffith’s own personal self-loathing bullshit talking, not an objective moral judgement, or Miura’s moral judgement.
Like, Miura deliberately shows us that the Godhand are fucking with him, telling us that chapter 77′s magical mystery tour through “the reality within his conscious realm” is highly manipulative and far from objective:
If Guts – any close, intimate, revealing, and genuine relationship really, but Griffith’s with Guts is the one this is about – was Griffith’s potential to see himself differently, to judge himself less harshly through the eyes of another, then the Godhand is a reinforcement of Griffith’s self-loathing.
Guts could’ve told Griffith he wasn’t cruel, wasn’t a monster, that he genuinely loved and admired him even while knowing all those things Griffith is ashamed of, and left so he could be more like him and become a friend to him. But he didn’t, and now the Godhand are using his words to tell Griffith that he is cruel, he is a monster – and that it’s necessary to be.
(And, just to be clear, this isn’t a judgement of Guts. He has his own giant pile of issues contributing to this world-destroying misunderstanding, and I feel like I fully understand his reasons for every mistake he made, and I love him for them lol, just like I love Griffith for his contribution of issues to this enormous fuck up. But this is about Griffith’s side of things, not Guts’.)
So, if Guts could’ve been a healthier way for Griffith to be absolved of guilt by altering his perspective of himself, the Godhand absolves Griffith of guilt through the method I described way back in part one of this thing:
by giving him a divine seal of approval.
If it be reason that destiny transcend human intellect and make playthings of children… it is cause and effect that a child bear his evil and confront destiny.
This is your destiny, kid. You’re not responsible for anything, you have no reason to feel guilty. You’re a horrible monstrous person piling up corpses to reach a castle, but hey, it’s okay – that’s your predetermined role in life. So you’re absolved, just as long as you roll with fate, add some more bodies to the pile, and double-down on that whole monster thing.
This is everything Griffith has always wanted.
Turns out he’s special after all. Everything he’s done that he hates himself for is justified because in the end he was meant for greatness. All those dead people can still achieve the thing they died for, all the dirty things he’s done were worthwhile, even his torture and despair was part of the wheel of fate and has meaning. All he has to do to sign off is agree to sacrifice a group of people who already pledged their lives to him, who he led and fought beside in full knowledge that they might one day die on his orders, for the sake of his dream, anyway.
And also Guts.
I don’t think I need more evidence that Guts is special and stands alone among the rest of the sacrifices, but I do want to point out that right before the Eclipse Miura emphasizes that Guts is no longer a part of the Hawks.
Guts fights his own battles. Unlike the rest of the Hawks, he has very deliberately removed himself from Griffith’s dream so he can be Griffith’s friend and equal instead of his underling. Back with Casca he said he wants to, “draw the line… keep things separate.” And, “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll never entrust my sword to another again. I’ll never hang from someone else’s dream.”
This distinction between Guts and the rest of the Hawks is significant because he is not being sacrificed for the same reason as the rest of the Hawks. He’s not being sacrificed as an underling, as one more necessary evil on the path to his dream. Once again, Guts stands apart to Griffith.
I tend to think of the sequence from Griffith reaching the palm of the hand to “I sacrifice,” our very last scene with original, fully human Griffith, as a mirror to our very first scene with Griffith in structure.
That first scene was much shorter, but similarly 90% of it revolved around Griffith’s dream and the philosophy of fate and vindication behind it, building up to the moment that he said, “it’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.”
90% of this sequence revolves around Griffith’s dream, his guilt issues, his self-loathing, and Void validating it all and vinidcating him, telling him he’s one of those keys that shape the world after all. And it all builds up to this:
Among thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies… you’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.
Griffith has a lot of very good reasons to say yes to the sacrifice. I sure hope somewhere in this fuckload of words about those reasons I’ve managed to show that it makes perfect logical sense for him to take the Godhand up on their offer.
And yet, the final, climactic reason given – the moment all this logic builds to, is emotional. You made me forget my dream.
Ultimately Griffith has two reasons for making the sacrifice:
1. achieve his dream, pile up some more bodies, reach the castle, let fate absolve him of guilt.
2. fuck you, Guts.
Griffith overhearing Casca telling Guts to leave, Guts’ hand on Griffith’s shoulder sending him into despair, the Count parallel, the sheer amount of Griffith’s narrative that revolves around his life-destroying, irrational feelings for Guts, the final conclusive statement from human Griffith… I feel like, given everything, it’s impossible to deny this aspect of Griffith’s motivation.
Again, the dream is an escape. In making the sacrifice, Griffith is falling back on all of his defense mechanisms to escape the pain in his heart, the pain of love.
“You’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream,” is a tender, tragic statement of love, and it’s also an accusation. How dare you be necessary to me, how dare you be able to destroy me just by leaving, how dare you make me love you.
It’s because of that love that Griffith lost everything, because he needed Guts, Guts made him weak, and Guts abandoned him. It’s because of that love, because he thought Guts was leaving again, that Griffith felt the worst despair of his life and tried to kill himself.
GOD he’s so in love. And that’s what he’s he’s trying to carve out of himself and escape from, by making the sacrifice. His fragile human heart.
It’s another form of self-destruction. The way he “destroyed himself,” by throwing himself at his dream when Guts left the first time mirrors the way he’s destroying himself now, with the exact same motivation behind it.
He becomes the monster he’s always believed himself to be. His armour and the mask – the one he wore in the torture chamber, the one mockingly modeled after his White Hawk persona – become an exoskeleton. Femto embodies Griffith’s self-loathing. Every part of himself Griffith hated, every reason he thought he was cruel, every assassination he was ashamed of, every body paving the way to his dream, is what Femto is made of, and his shame, his self-hatred, his love, his guilt, his despair, have all been shattered and torn away.
And if Femto is Griffith’s self-loathing, then NeoGriffith is the image of perfection.
In making the sacrifice and burying his heart, Griffith became the embodiment of everything he hated in himself, and everything those who never truly knew him admired about him. The cruelty, the monstrosity, the ruthlessness, the filth; the beauty, the immaculate perfection, the charisma, the sense of singularity.
He destroyed himself and became the false conception of Griffith.
Give or take.
Welp, that does it. I’m not going to really get into anything Femto or NeoGriffith has done or said, because this is about human Griffith’s character and narrative. Griffith’s final act as a whole person was choosing to sacrifice Guts for his dream, and lbr you couldn’t ask for a more narratively satisfying send off, so that’s where I’m ending this. And tbh if I went any further it’d lean way more towards critique than analysis anyway.
Ultimately the Golden Age is Griffith’s story. Guts may be the protagonist, but it’s Griffith’s feelings, actions, and choices that drive the plot. Griffith kickstarts the narrative and he ends it. And Griffith’s story is about falling in love. It’s about how love can strengthen you and help you overcome the worst of yourself, and it’s about how love can make you weak, vulnerable, and desperate for an escape. And, because it’s a tragedy, it’s about how and why Griffith chooses escape and succumbs to the worst of himself rather than overcoming his flaws through a mutually supportive relationship with Guts.
tyfyt
ty everyone who’s commented or said things in tags, liked these posts, etc, i really appreciate it and it’s v heartwarming to know people enjoyed reading this ❤
To Griffith, the dream is emotional security. It’s assurance that if he’s dirty, then it’s because it’s necessary to be so, so he can keep winning for the sake of the dead. It’s a way for him to repress his guilt and self loathing, because when he gets that kingdom-shaped seal of approval, it will have been worth it.
So when I say that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is beginning to replace the dream, that’s what I mean – rather than relying on the dream to reassure himself that everything he’s done, even his very existence, is worthwhile, he could rely on Guts for that. He starts opening up to Guts, rather than repressing through his dream.
Despite Griffith’s Promrose Hall speech, nothing actually changes on his end. He prioritizes Guts above the dream again when he sends a search party after him and Casca despite the nobles he’s trying to suck up to telling him he shouldn’t. He drops everything during the Battle of Doldrey to have a quiet panic attack when Guts’ sword breaks. His first reaction upon achieving a huge milestone on the path to his dream when the Band is officially integrated into the royal army is to find Guts and share the moment with him.
And boy I love how the chapter that depicts Griffith’s moment of triumph for his dream ends with Griffith just smiling at Guts across a vast ballroom.
The story between Promrose and the end of the war is filled with little moments that are suggestive of Griffith’s reliance on Guts. Another of my favourites:
I just hope he stays calm and composed.
Casca worried that volunteering to defeat an army of thirty thousand with five thousand men might be an act of recklessness because a predatory pedophile who took advantage of Griffith’s extreme self loathing when he was like fourteen is the leader of that army? Naaaaaah impossible, Griffith would never let that faze him. Oh and speaking of Griffith being calm and composed, this is my last battle, it’s almost time to leave.
But those moments are just for spice. Tombstone of Flame is where the real meat of this analysis is.
This is the second night of assassinations, and it’s a neat mirror to the first. Where Guts came away from Julius’ assassination consumed with inadequacy, self-loathing, and generally feeling like a monster, now it’s Griffith who comes away totally fucked up and filled to the brim with self hatred.
Between Promrose and Tombstone we learn Griffith’s backstory. This adds to the mirror image effect between these assassinations by revealing Griffith’s insecurities to us so we can understand his perspective, and it serves as its own parallel to this scene.
And this is the scene where we see that not only does Guts surpass the dream in importance to Griffith, but he could have potentially become a much more emotionally healthy alternative to it. This is where we see how Griffith could have not just prioritized Guts, but replaced the function of the dream with his relationship with Guts.
And I want to emphasize the emotionally healthier part. One of Berserk’s most consistent themes imo is that relationships with others are a superior way of dealing with your issues compared to dreams and swords.
eg, Godo, our favourite dispenser of wisdom, has some pretty telling lines to that effect.
You
were right beside those irreplacable things… yet you couldn’t bear to
immerse yourself together in sorrow with them. So instead… you ran
away so that your own malice could burn inside you.
Guts’ personal growth post-Eclipse is associated with making friends; his backsliding and mistakes are associated with going off on his own to fight monsters; he begins to overcome his revulsion to touch when he becomes part of the Hawks;
on the rooftop after the Zodd conversation Guts recalled the night he killed Gambino and wondered if this was the answer he’d been searching for since then (family) before dedicating his sword to Griffith; part of his healing process for his childhood trauma is talking about it to Casca; etc. And Guts and Griffith’s relationship is very much included, even though it’s far more of a tragic missed opportunity.
The second half of Tombstone of Flame Part 2, aka my favourite chapter of Berserk, abruptly shifts tone from triumph and pure badassery to quiet, contemplative vulnerability halfway through. As a chapter I feel like it really encompasses the highs and lows of Griffith’s character, from defeating his enemies and cooly predicting Foss’ actions to wrap everything up in a neat little bow, to highlighting his guilt, self-loathing, and emotional dependency on Guts.
Here, Griffith opens up to Guts in an intensely vulnerable moment.
I involved you in this filthy scheme… and I didn’t even get my hands dirty. I left all the dangerous, taxing work to you…
Idiot! What kinda question’s that for the guy who killed a hundred men?
This is another scene the significance of which cannot be overstated. There’s so much to unpack here I hardly know where to start. Like… this is the moment. This is what Griffith flashes back to when he’s fucking Charlotte and burning his life down around him. This is a moment Guts remembers when slowly realizing that Griffith loves him. This is exactly what the Godhand shows Griffith to get him to agree to make the sacrifice. Guts remembers this after Griffith makes the sacrifice. This moment is the linchpin of Berserk.
This is both a mirror to Guts overhearing the Promrose Hall speech, and a call-back to Griffith in the river after Gennon.
So first, the set-up of this chapter recalls Promrose Hall strongly. It’s the second night of assassinations, Promrose Hall took place on the first night. When Guts assassinated Julius he came away from that encounter wracked with guilt over accidentally killing Adonis as well, strongly and traumatically reminded of his childhood, and basically thinking of himself as a monster in a way inseparable from his own childhood trauma:
Guts is consumed with self-loathing, comparing himself to monsters like Zodd overtly, and like Donovan symbolically. He’s also reminded of killing Gambino, like, basically this event just brings a pile of old issues crashing down on Guts’ head.
In a concussed daze he wants nothing but to find Griffith, presumably for reassurance. I don’t want to get too heavily into Guts’ side of things here, but remember that this is shortly after he dedicated himself to Griffith when Griffith told him he risked his life for him for no reason. I think it’s safe to say that he wants that reassurance again, he wants to feel the same sense of being valued and respected that he got during that staircase conversation.
And instead he overhears Griffith telling Charlotte that he has no friends. More to the point, what he gets is Griffith’s dream blocking the emotional bridge that Guts is trying to cross like a damn troll.
In Tombstone, Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and this time it’s Griffith who turns to Guts for emotional reassurance in a moment of vulnerability.
The way killing Adonis reminds Guts of his many, many issues is echoed in the strong parallel between Tombstone and Griffith in the river. We don’t get to see what’s going through Griffith’s head the way we see into Guts’, but we can infer an awful lot based on this comparison.
In the river, Griffith asked someone for reassurance after doing something he considers shameful for the sake of his dream.
Casca’s response isn’t all that reassuring.
She cuts herself off in the process of automatically reassuring him and instead she asks why he was with Gennon. This is totally understandable and not at all something I blame Casca for lol. She’s a kid, she’s understandably disgusted at the thought of Griffith having sex with Gennon willingly knowing that he’s a pedophile, and she’s out of her depth in a highly charged, difficult discussion. But that doesn’t change the fact that Griffith probably took her answer as a “yes.”
Griffith then goes into his self-harming dream spiel, as he reiterates to himself exactly why it was worth it to dirty himself for his dream while tearing open his arms. What may have been his first attempt to open up to someone else in a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability was shut down, inadvertently, so he violently returns to his original justification and defense measure, his dream.
The saddest thing about Tombstone, to me, is that this time Guts brings up the dream for him.
Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?
Guts’ answer is a depressing double-whammy of both implicitly agreeing that Griffith is cruel, and reminding him that the cruelty is necessary to achieve his goals. This second time we see Griffith try to open up to someone is also shut down, inadvertently, and the fact that Guts is the one to bring up his dream this time rather than Griffith tells us that the dream wasn’t even on his mind. Guts’ answer comes as a very painful reminder.
Like, imo this is huge. In the first part of this meta I tried to show how wholly reliant Griffith is on his dream. It’s what he clings to as his shield against his intense self-loathing and guilt. It’s a way for him to tell himself that everything awful and dirty that he’s done was worth it, and that one day he’ll be able to prove that.
Well this moment shows Griffith forgetting all that in the face of Guts’ potential acceptance, until Guts reminds him and his self loathing comes crashing down on him all at once.
If his dream was what he turned to for validation from fate or some higher power, then now Guts is who he turns to for validation. He needs Guts’ reassurance that he isn’t cruel. He needs Guts to see his “dirty side” and continue to remain by his side – that is all the validation he needs now. Not fate, not a kingdom, just love.
The same way the only thing Guts needed in order to feel like he was where he belonged wasn’t his own dream, but the knowledge that Griffith loved him, the knowledge that he had after their staircase conversation about Zodd, and which dissolved after Promrose.
But instead Guts, with Griffith’s dream on his mind getting in between them again, says the wrong thing and Griffith looks the exact same way he looked when he felt like he was responsible for a kid’s death.
So, to sum up, Griffith feels self-loathing, tries to open up to other people to assuage his sense of self-loathing in the hope that, having seen him at his worst, they don’t see him as filthy/cruel the way he sees himself, and each time his self loathing is only reinforced. The first time he clings to his dream in lieu of Casca’s reassurance, while the second time Guts is the one who brings up his dream, in so many words pushing Griffith away and telling him to cling to the dream instead of him.
Each time the dream serves as a replacement for real human connection and love.
The first time Griffith was able to close himself off, place a hand on her shoulder, and tell Casca, “it’s nothing,” when he realized how emotionally vulnerable he was in that moment. But when it comes to Guts, he’s much too far gone to separate himself and play the perfect leader.
Now, as opposed to putting the mask of perfection on and saying, “it’s nothing,” with Guts he says:
Unlike Promrose Hall, Guts putting the dream in between him and Griffith and thwarting Griffith’s efforts to open up to him and take comfort in his potential reassurance doesn’t immediately ruin their relationship. I’d say that Griffith is very accustomed to seeing himself as a monster by now, so while Guts’ implicit confirmation of that fact is incredibly fucking depressing considering what could have been, it’s nothing Griffith didn’t expect to hear.
Guts remains the man allowed to see behind the mask and into the real him.
And then there’s this contrast:
This is depicted as a cute moment, but it’s also indicative of how utterly weak and emotionally vulnerable Griffith is now that he’s let Guts in. With Casca he was still able to step back and remove himself, put the mask back on, and be the one to comfort her despite clearly needing it more.
Now Guts is the one to put his hand on Griffith’s shoulder. It’s not depicted as a hugely significant and character revealing action the way this moment in the river is, but it’s a perfect illustration of what Griffith finally realizes after it’s too late:
And it’s exactly the moment Miura uses to show us how emotionally vulnerable Griffith has become to Guts. Griffith couldn’t separate himself when he tried, and now he doesn’t try, he just accepts Guts’ assessment that his cruelty is necessary with a sad smile, and intends to continue on with Guts at his side.
Finally, there’s seemingly one thing missing from this comparison between Griffith in the river and Griffith in Tombstone of Flame: the self harm.
But, well, it’s not actually missing, we just don’t get to see it until a month later:
And the reason we’re not shown Griffith’s self-harm scratches*** until this scene is because it’s actually another big contrast between Griffith’s reaction to Casca and his reaction to Guts.
Presumably, based on the other parallels I drew between Tombstone and Casca’s flashback, and based on the placement of these panels – Griffith’s memory of Guts reminding him about his dream and questioning Griffith’s resolve followed immediately by our first glimpse of those scratch marks on Griffith’s shoulder – Griffith self-harmed at some point closely following the assassinations.
One can imagine it following exactly the same pattern we saw with Casca: Griffith asks someone if they think he’s X thing he hates about himself, doesn’t hear a no, and then some time following he reinforces his resolve, tells himself that it’s ok, it’s necessary for him to do these dirty, cruel things for the sake of achieving his all-important dream, for the sake of the people who have given their lives for it, for the sake of making their sacrifices meaningful, etc, while self-harming. Just like he did in the river.
The contrast comes now, after Guts has left.
Griffith could probably convince himself after Tombstone that the things he does for the sake of his dream are necessary and important and it’s worth becoming a monster to achieve his goal. “You believe that, don’t you?” Guts had to remind him, but Griffith agrees. “You’re right.”
But after Guts leaves him?
When Guts leaves, Griffith takes it as a rejection. Those little moments that by themselves never ruined their relationship or amounted to more than mild rebuffs have probably turned into wholesale condemnations in Griffith’s mind. Guts saying, “just order me to do it,” goes from a mild reminder that they don’t have an equal relationship to, “I won’t dirty myself voluntarily, but I’ll do it if you order me to because that’s my job.” Guts saying, “ain’t this part of the path to your dream?” turns into, “your dream is paved with cruelty and I’m sick of being dragged through the dirt with you.”
Griffith winning Guts’ loyalty in a fight turns into Guts being forced to associate with him, and leaving as soon as he’s accomplished what he thinks Griffith wanted him for, thereby fulfilling his end of the bargain.
The moment Griffith is remembering here is our first glimpse of them together. “It’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” It’s a memory of Griffith choosing to open up to someone and share his innermost thoughts for the very first time. And he’s convincing himself that Guts was disgusted by him from the very first glimpse he got of the Griffith underneath the perfect image, and wanted to escape him since the beginning.
Ironically, we know exactly how Guts felt in this moment: “At that time he shone before me as something beautiful, noble, and larger than life.” It makes the choice of this particular memory all the more painful.
The other thing this particular memory signifies is Griffith’s driving motivation behind his dream. This is the scene where he tells Guts all about his belief in fate and his desire to know what he’s destined for – it’s our first indication of what Griffith’s dream means to him. It’s a contrast: Griffith then, just beginning to open up to Guts and explaining the pragmatic philosophy behind his dream, and Griffith now, falling to pieces because he believes Guts is rejecting him.
In other words, Griffith then, reliant on his dream, vs Griffith now, reliant on Guts.
The very fact that Griffith is the one challenging him, refusing to let Guts go without a fight demonstrates how far the dream is from Griffith’s mind. Remember how important it is for the Hawks to choose to follow him? How even when Guts first joined, the duel and the stakes were chosen entirely by Guts and Griffith just went along with it? Now that’s not even a factor. The feelings of guilt lying just below Griffith’s surface don’t matter at all in the face of Guts leaving. Griffith is now so far beyond distancing himself from Guts with reminders that he may die for his dream that he’s willing to risk killing him directly, in an irrational attempt to negate Guts’ rejection.
“I guess it’s because they themselves chose to fight,” is a careful rationalization, and Griffith is no longer anywhere close to capable of rationalization in this moment. This is what happens when the emotions he buries and spends his life denying burst to the surface. Despite being more emotionally open with him than he’s ever been with anyone before, he’s never put a label on his feelings for Guts and never even identified them to himself. He asks Guts, “do I need a reason each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake?” he tells Guts, “it’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this,” he tells Guts, “you’re rough enough to share this with. To the end,” he tells Guts, “you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this,” but he never tells Guts that he cares for him, prioritizes him, trusts him, loves him, and I don’t think he’s ever told himself either.
Having ignored and rationalized away his emotions for most of his life, now he’s finally run out of logic and rationalizations. He has no experience dealing with feelings like this because he lives in denial of them; I genuinely don’t think he himself understands what he’s feeling or why as Guts announces that he’s leaving, so he ends up lashing out through an established framework that he does understand, that Guts himself once suggested as a way to win his loyalty, that, might I point out, Judeau, Corkus, and Pippin all think is reasonable, and Guts is reassured by lol.
Griffith won Guts in a fight, so Griffith will keep Guts through another fight, because he can’t bear the thought of Guts rejecting him.
Which brings me back to the scratch marks on his shoulder.
He remembers the moment Guts implicitly agreed that Griffith is cruel and called his resolve into question. “You believe that, don’t you?”
A month earlier his answer was yes. He scratched himself and told himself that everything was necessary for the sake of his dream.
Here’s his answer now:
No.
He doesn’t scratch himself – he traces the marks, trying to remind himself that yes, it’s worth becoming a monster for the sake of his dream, even if it drove Guts away… but it isn’t. Now instead of self-harming he curls up and cries. No blood this time, just tears.
Griffith scratching himself is tied to affirming his dream and repressing his feelings of self-loathing, and the pointed absence of scratching here tells us that he can no longer affirm his dream or repress his self-loathing. It’s not worth dirtying himself for, it’s not worth the deaths on his head, it’s not worth becoming a monster, because that, he believes, is why Guts left, and nothing was worth losing Guts, not even his dream.
This whole sequence with Charlotte*** is Griffith’s attempt to fall back on his dream after losing Guts. Charlotte represents his dream perfectly – Judeau even reminds the audience of that fact in the chapter preceding the second duel (chapter 34). The key to his dream is Charlotte, and Griffith showing up at her window is an irrational attempt to attain his dream now, no matter how premature it is, because he is in dire need of the emotional reassurance his dream provides him.
Guts is gone, seemingly having rejected him, and Griffith retreats to his dream the way it’s always been a defense against his self-loathing and a way of repressing his emotions.
Take all the frightening and sad things… and cast them into the fire.
But again, it doesn’t work this time – it’s not enough to cope with the loss of Guts.
I think there is also a strong component of self-destruction here. Griffith knows how risky sleeping with Charlotte is, she even points it out while he’s standing in a tree outside her window. The King alludes to Griffith “destroying himself,” as well, and everyone and their horse except Corkus, stubbornly, connects Griffith’s meltdown after Guts left to the way he and the Hawks are declared traitors the next morning. It may not be a planned suicide, but it’s an act of self-immolation just the same, and something Griffith did knowing the risks full-well.
It’s no surprise when he lands himself in a dungeon.
Oh this chapter. This chapter this chapter this chapter. I’ll admit, it’s been giving me some trouble, not because it doesn’t fit with my point, but because it fits too well lol. I debated for a long time whether I’d try really delving into it or whether I’d omit some stuff and just like, ignore the fact that I genuinely believe this is the meaning behind it.
But lbr I’m taking the first option, as hard as it’s been to find a way to talk about this shit that doesn’t like… give entirely the wrong impression, because it’s basically the capstone to this part of Griffith’s character arc, and therefore this part of this meta, and it encapsulates everything about Griffith’s self-loathing perfectly.
Everything he calls the King out on is something he hates about himself.
You’ve lived on by resigning yourself to the monster [war] you envision. But you’ve by no means tried to harness that monster.
The second part is fairly obvious. The King was born to the throne and didn’t even bother to use his power for anything worthwhile. Griffith wasn’t born into that power but he spent his life trying to attain it, and just as he was about to succeed he threw it away, ultimately accomplishing nothing. “This is… worthless.”
The first part, the mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, was the part that tripped me up for a while, because frankly, it’s such a parallel to Griffith’s feelings for Guts, to the point where when I tried to write this section while ignoring it it felt like a really glaring omission, but oh man, let’s be real here, it’s unpleasant as fuck.
I’m choosing to give Miura the benefit of the doubt because while I don’t think he’s above comparing gay pining to incestuous rape, I do think, as I’ve said, that this scene is about Griffith’s self loathing, and Griffith considering his own feelings to be just as pathetic and grotesque as the King’s lust for his daughter makes a depressing kind of sense to me.
First I want to explain why this parallel is so clear to me because I’d hate to look like I’m making this up. First of all, once we’re agreed that the King bemoaning the weight of lives on his shoulders and assuming Griffith has no idea what that’s like, and getting a very knowing look from Griffith in response, is as clear a parallel as you get, I feel like it’s impossible to ignore how neatly obsessive love for someone fits in as well.
Griffith’s feelings for Guts have been defined by giving himself in exchange for him, risking his life and his dream/kingdom for him, as Casca points out at every possible opportunity. And now he finally has given up a kingdom for him – or at least, because of him.***
We know why Griffith is in that dungeon. Griffith knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness”) Casca knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“Because you left us! Because you abandoned Griffith!”) Rickert, a little kid, knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“What I think is… it must’ve been over you, Guts.”) Eventually even Guts gets a clue. (“Was I the one who brought all thisupon you?”)
Like, just to reiterate the main point of this meta, Griffith’s narrative so far is about becoming emotionally reliant on Guts as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders, instead of the dream which had been his defense until Guts. This scene is about the King’s emotional reliance on Charlotte as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders instead of using the “sword called the throne” to defend himself against that weight by doing something worthwhile with it – something to justify what the King’s subjects have been dying for.
And it’s no coincidence that the throne is described as a sword.
In Berserk, swords are coping mechanisms. Griffith is mocking the King for his emotional dependence on someone else to shield his heart rather than using his “sword” for that purpose, which is, of course, exactly what led to Griffith ending up in a dungeon.
The King goes on this diatribe:
I would give myself… even this kingdom in exchange for her! She’s my whole life!
What value is there in this world? Wars rage on and the people’s lives are lost like they were insects! After how many decades of war and how many tens of thousands of corpses, we’ve finally built a time of remembered peace, but it’s only for an instant! On the underside, the monster named war is always seeking new blood, starting to brew itself anew! In the face of that monster, the will of one land’s king is powerless! The wisdom of one man is folly! And yet I cannot cease being king! There’s no way I can stop! In this… blood stained, meaningless world… if there is one single ray of hope to be found… it is… warmth. Only warmth covers and protects me from this world.
You’ve taken that one flower that gives me that warmth… and plucked it! Unforgiveable!
Alas, my poor Charlotte. I’ve brought her up for seventeen years. She knowing no impurity… now that she’s given herself up to the sport of a commoner… I’d rather that… rather that…
Directly from the King lamenting that monster called war and the lives lost to it, to declaring Charlotte his one defense against the world. His one means of protection from the weight of “the lives of all the people, all on [his] shoulders.”
Again, Guts was becoming Griffith’s defense against his feelings of guilt. A large portion of Griffith’s story revolves around how his relationship with Guts is in part a coping mechanism, a defense against self-loathing.
And not in a negative way – remember, compared to dreams and swords as coping mechanisms, finding emotional support in a connection with someone else is by far the superior option, according to Berserk as a whole.
Griffith’s expression of his feelings for Guts wasn’t altogether healthy, because Griffith is not altogether emotionally healthy lol. He’s an extremely repressed guilt-ridden obsessive dude who self harms and thinks achieving an arbitrary goal will justify his existence, and who fell in love, had no way to understand those feelings, and became very emotionally dependent without even noticing.
Hence freaking the fuck out, challenging Guts to a duel and thinking as he strikes that he’d rather kill him than let Guts reject him. But despite that, overall, we’re shown that Griffith’s feelings for and relationship with Guts could’ve helped him grow as a person, had their relationship been given a chance to flourish without misunderstandings getting in the way.
I’m pointing all this out because I’m trying very hard to avoid coming across like I’m saying that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is at all equivalent to the King’s relationship to his daughter.
Griffith and Guts’ relationship falls apart because of a failure to communicate and because neither realize that their feelings are mutual. Griffith believes that Guts is rejecting him when he leaves, but we the readers know that in reality Guts is leaving entirely because he loves Griffith and wants to be worthy of his friendship.
I believe that the parallel here between Griffith and Guts and the King and Charlotte is so utterly loathsome because it reflects how Griffith feels about himself, not because it’s anything close to an objective parallel or a commentary on relying on relationships with other people as a means of emotional support.
The King is nothing more than a lonely, miserable man who can’t find any reason to live beyond the one person he loves, while Griffith threw his life away over Guts’ perceived rejection, and he knows it. As much as he represses, he can’t deny this – when he curls up and weeps beside Charlotte, that’s Griffith failing to deny his feelings for Guts, and he later describes him as the reason he’s been thrown into the darkness of the torture chamber, and the sole sustenance keeping him alive. Griffith is realizing that somewhere down the line his life had switched from revolving around the dream to revolving around Guts, and he thinks it’s pathetic.
The distinction Griffith makes between the King wanting Charlotte to have him rather than having Charlotte is relevant too. I used to take this line as little more than Miura feeling like he needed to justify why the King eventually flees instead of continuing his sexual assault attempt – ie because Charlotte’s rejection was too much to bear – but it works within the framework of Griffith’s feelings for Guts very well, particularly in light of the second duel.
I mean
And again like, ngl I hate to do this lol, like I said I’m not thrilled by this parallel, but fuck, it works perfectly and I do think it’s deliberate:
The King attacking Charlotte is a parallel to Griffith challenging Guts to the second duel. In a way. Again, not an objective way, not in a way that’s truly comparable – hell, we get Guts’ inner monologue and he’s literally comforted by Griffith’s challenge while Judeau and co think it’s perfectly reasonable as former mercenaries – but within Griffith’s self-loathing mindset where he sees himself as a rejected monster, he sees himself in the King and his fucked up attraction to Charlotte. The King’s subsequent attack and “rejection” by Charlotte mirrors Griffith’s perception of attacking Guts and then being left, rejected, in the snow.
Griffith makes the distinction between having and wanting to be had because everything about his own breakdown revolves around Guts’ perceived rejection of him. Griffith thinks Guts sees him as a monster, and, through their duel, from Griffith’s perspective, Griffith was trying to keep Guts with him despite that rejection, against Guts’ will. In hindsight, removed from the heightened emotions of the moment, he believes his actions to be as pathetic as the King’s lust for Charlotte. He tried to “have” Guts against his will, when what he wanted was to be “had” by him – wanted by him, loved by him, accepted by him. He wanted Guts to want to stay with him, not to be forced to stay.
And of course, the supreme irony is that Guts did love Griffith, and that’s exactly why Guts was leaving. He wanted Griffith to want him, he just didn’t recognize Griffith’s irrational actions as a show of desperate need until it was too late. This is directly stated in the text several times, so I’m not going to try to justify this statement through a big tangent about Guts’ decision to leave. Here’s one of the most self-explanatory moments where Miura tells us what happened from Guts’ perspective:
So, again, the King attacking Charlotte is not an actual objective parallel; it’s a parallel when filtered through Griffith’s false framing of what happened between him and Guts as a vicious rejection, which makes sense because Griffith is the one bringing it all up and condemning both the King and himself.
At the end of the day I don’t particularly care whether “If I can’t have him, I don’t care,” is taken as a super dark moment or barely a drop in the pond when it comes to dark things people do in Berserk. Judge Griffith harshly for it or go ‘meh people try to kill each other in Berserk all the time, he wasn’t even trying so much as accepting the possibility,’ I just want to draw a clear distinction between that and a father trying to rape his daughter, which I think is fair.
And now the King’s final condescending judgement.
“Such a worthless matter.” We know what that worthless matter is. The King thinks it was lust for Charlotte that landed him there, but we (and half the cast of Berserk, vocally) know that it was his feelings for Guts.
And on the very next page we transition to the King’s assault of Charlotte. The King is doing some projecting himself here – he mocks Griffith for destroying himself over lust for Charlotte (Guts) which is what the King immediately proceeds to do. This attempted rape decimates him as a person; the next time we see him he looks like he’s aged thirty years, and he’s growing senile – just as Griffith is tortured to irreversible physical damage after Guts’ rejection.
After Charlotte wakes up and screams a horrified no, we return to Griffith for the last page of the chapter:
Charlotte’s assault is perfectly bookended by Griffith in the dungeon, and the repetition of “worthless,” a word used three times in this chapter.
The first time it refers overtly to the King not utilizing his power to justify his existence and assuage the guilt on his shoulders, instead comforting himself with Charlotte, with the implication that this is how Griffith feels having thrown away his dream over Guts.
The second time the King uses it to refer to the matter that Griffith destroyed himself over, ie stupid, impulsive actions based on feelings for another person. The King thinks it’s Charlotte, but we know it’s Guts.
The third time is how Griffith feels about himself, a final conclusive statement after his mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, the King’s accidental mockery of his feelings for Guts, and Charlotte’s assault. The way this chapter is structured essentially tells us that the attempted rape scene applies in some way to Griffith’s final declaration of his own worthlessness, and hopefully I’ve made a convincing case for how it’s an illustration of his self-loathing regarding his feelings for Guts.
Griffith, thrown into the darkness of the dungeon, may as well have been plunged into his own self-loathing. “Worthless.”
SO! What’s left? The torturer rips off Griffith’s behelit a short while later, nicely symbolic of the lost dream. A year passes. Guts returns. And Casca neatly condenses this enormous meta into the four sentences I stole for titles and writes the conclusion to this section for me:
Griffith had to make himself strong – remember, that refers to the way he represses his emotions and projects his image of perfection, the way he smiled at Casca and put his hand on her shoulder after violently self harming.
Guts made Griffith weak because Griffith was starting to open up to him rather than repressing those emotions and relying solely on his dream to defend against everything that haunts him. Do I need a reason? It’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this. Do you think that I’m cruel?
After being rejected by Guts and believing that Guts sees him as a monster, the promise of his dream was no longer enough for him to rely on, and he crashed and burned in an implosion of self-loathing and feelings of worthlessness.
Griffith’s no good without Guts anymore because his feelings for Guts made him weak. He came to rely on Guts to sustain his heart, because people need other people, and Guts was the person Griffith needed.
Wish Casca could’ve written this whole thing for me, it would’ve been a lot shorter and neater lbr.
That’s the end of Part Three. The next and final part is going to explore how Guts growing more vital to Griffith than the dream leads, contrary to expectations, to Griffith sacrificing Guts for his dream.
*** There is a common misconception that this is one big, thick scar rather than scratch marks, probably thanks to the anime depicting it as such, but frankly, the anime got it wrong. There is zero reason for Griffith to have a scar there, and it would have no significance – Guts’ sword didn’t touch him, and if it had he’d have either a bruise or a gaping wound lol, not a scar. They are two parallel lines that you can see Griffith trace with two fingers right as he starts crying, and since we already know Griffith has a tendency to scratch himself, this leaves no doubt to me that they are two scratch marks, not one big mark of unknown origin.
*** I think the scene with Charlotte is deeply flawed, and I’m treating it as consensual sex in this analysis because I believe that’s what Miura intended it to be read as, despite shitty, misogynist, tropey writing. More on that here, if you’d like a further explanation.
*** I remember an old conversation I had with I think @yesgabsstuff and @mastermistressofdesire where one of you suggested that Griffith burning his life down by fucking Charlotte could be interpreted as a childish act of bargaining, at least subconsciously. Griffith trying to trade his dream for Guts. And I’m js, that rang true to me and this comparison made me remember it.
I think that, from the very start, Griffith’s feelings for Guts are at least as strong as his feelings for his dream. I say this because Griffith doesn’t have a pattern of desiring things or people and doing what he can to have them. Til now he’s had one thing he wants and that’s a kingdom, and now after meeting Guts he has one more thing he wants, and as soon as he’s given an opening he pursues him with equal fervour.
And from the very start, his feelings for Guts have a tendency to make Griffith forget about his dream.
“I don’t feel at all responsible for my comrades who have lost their lives under my command. I guess… it’s because they themselves chose to fight.”
This is what Griffith says when he begins self-harming in the river. This is the number one way he rationalizes away and buries his guilt. He repeats it to the Godhand later too – “I never forced anyone to come along.”
Remember how he recruited Casca? “Whether you come along or not is your decision.” The fact that his Hawks freely choose to follow him is extremely important to him.
Now, he didn’t press-gang or kidnap Guts lol. He didn’t even suggest dueling for his loyalty – Guts himself suggested it, and I can only assume that if he hadn’t, Griffith would’ve let him walk away. But when Guts did suggest a way to win his loyalty, Griffith seized on it hard, instead of allowing Guts the same perfectly free choice to follow him the rest of the Hawks had.
Guts is explicitly the first and only person who Griffith has expressed desire for, Guts is therefore presumably the first and only person Griffith tried to sweet-talk into joining him, and it seems safe to assume that Guts is probably the only person he’d so eagerly agree to fight a duel for. His rationale of giving his followers a free choice, which is necessary to allieviate his guilt, is forgotten here – therefore his guilt is forgotten.
This is the beginning of a war between Guts and the dream in Griffith’s subconscious, that we see again and again throughout his narrative.
A week after Guts joins the Hawks, Griffith risks his life for him for the first time. The reaction to his actions here handily tells us how unprecedented this is.
Griffith ditching this dude in the hat – quite likely the guy who hired them – mid-sentence to immediately check on losses, ie whether Guts made it, to vocal surprise from both hat man and Casca.
Then he leads a back-up team to rush to Guts’ defense. And it’s geuinely risky – they escape death here by like an inch while Guts frets about the two of them weighing down the horse.
And of course Guts questions him directly while Griffith avoids answering:
And we get more helpful commentary on how surprising Griffith’s actions here are from the peanut gallery:
The next morning Guts broaches the topic again, after accepting Griffith’s initial brush-off.
This scene starts with Guts and Griffith’s first real bonding experience, and it ends with Griffith’s grandiose and iconic “I will get my own kingdom. You will fight for my cause, because you belong to me.”
The first time we read this it comes across as a kind of really off-putting and over the top statement of ownership. Guts is dazzled by it, because he’s dazzled by everything Griffith does, but it’s not surprising that so many Berserk fans see this moment as sinister and threatening to an extent. Frankly, it’s a fucking weird thing to say lmao. As Eclipse foreshadowing it’s great, but as a character moment it raises a lot of questions.
But here’s the thing: Casca’s flashback tells us exactly why he says it.
Two things happen right before this moment. First Griffith and Guts have a naked water fight and bond. Then, after an exchange about the behelit, Guts asks Griffith that question once again.
This time Griffith has an answer.
Now remember, Guts thinks this is bullshit. He directly says so three years later when he has to ask the same question yet again. This line Griffith gives him is a lie – a lie that Griffith himself may very well believe, and tbh I personally think he does, but it’s not the reason Griffith saved him.
And this fun naked bonding experience?
It’s a subtle parallel to the scene with Casca. The tone and circumstances are obviously very different, but the point of this comparison is the emotional intimacy. Both Casca and Guts are shown glimpses of the real Griffith underneath the armour, underneath the veneer of perfection he puts on. It’s not a coincidence that he’s naked in both either.
Casca’s glimpse is dark and depressing while Guts’ is just light and human – a glimpse of the child Griffith still is, entirely Guts’ equal in every relevant way. Same age, same vulnerability to buckets of water, and in the end, Guts dumps a bucket on his head and says they’re equal even. Then he asks why Griffith saved him.
After each scene, Griffith shuts them both out – he clams up and puts the mask back on when Casca tries to comfort him, and with Guts, he does this:
This happens on the very same page that Griffith makes his “excellent soldier” excuse. He segues immediately from that into his elegant statement about his dream and how Guts is totally going to die for it – when he chooses.***
What I’m saying is that it’s a distancing tactic. Somewhere deep down Griffith knows his answer to Guts’ question is bullshit. He knows he’s already prioritizing Guts over his dream, and he knows how utterly dangerous that is to his entire life plan. He represses that fact and reminds himself here that his dream is all-important and he’s probably going to send Guts to his death for it someday, and he saved Guts’ life simply because it’s his perogative to decide when, and he decided that last night wasn’t the time.
Because let’s be real here, for a mercenary leader, “I will choose the place where you die,” is a factual statement. It’s more than likely that he’ll send Guts to his death someday simply by ordering him into the battle that eventually kills him. And as we learn in the later flashback, it’s a fact of his life that takes a serious emotional toll on him. He viciously self harms while monologuing about people dying for his dream.
Like, again, it’s an incredibly weird thing to say outloud to someone, but no less true for that, and knowing what we learn about Griffith, him saying it in these specific circumstances – after bonding with Guts, after being treated like an ordinary kid rather than the symbol of success he makes himself out to be, after being questioned about something irrational and dangerous he’d just done to save Guts’ life – strongly suggests to me that he’s using the dream as a way of repressing and denying his feelings for Guts, feelings that have already taken precedence over his dream once, after only knowing him for a week.
But while he was able to keep Casca at an emotional distance, he fails entirely where Guts is involved.
Three years later the first notable plot event we see after one chapter of establishing off-screen character development and where-are-they-now-ing is Griffith risking his life for Guts again, to an even greater, more irrational extent this time.
Like, this is what defines their relationship. It begins with Griffith putting his life and dream on the line for Guts despite consciously telling Guts and himself that Guts is expendable, and three years later we pick the story back up when Griffith does it again.
And this time it’s not Griffith and Guts escaping an opposing force by the skin of their teeth together – this time Griffith and Guts lose. Guts is up against a monster, Griffith sees this, he tells the rest of the Band to run when he realizes that a volley of arrows does nothing, and he stays behind himself to try to rescue Guts. He doesn’t even order someone else to run in and grab him, he just automatically, instinctively runs to him while telling the rest of the Band to escape to safety.
There’s a reason this is the moment he recalls when thinking about how he loses his composure around Guts.
Like okay, we all know that Griffith is in love with Guts, I figure I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s important to understand how huge this is. Fate ensures that they survive the encounter – Zodd sees the behelit, lols, and leaves – but Griffith didn’t know that would happen. For all intents and purposes, he’s dead here. And he’s not just laying down his life for Guts, he’s laying down his dream. Casca even makes the distinction when she yells at Guts for it in the cave later – he can go die himself on some battlefield, but she won’t let him take Griffith’s dream down with him.
When they talk about it on the staircase afterwards their relationship takes a huge turn. Guts asks again why Griffith risked his life for him, and like the previous instance three years ago, this is also the second time he questioned Griffith after failing to get an answer.
Here’s the final time Guts asks the question:
And here’s Griffith’s new answer, now that Guts has called him out on making shit up:
This time Griffith’s got absolutely nothing. He doesn’t fall back on a convenient rationalization because it simply wasn’t a rational decision, and this is the closest he can get to admitting that.
He doesn’t admit the truth either – that he risked his life and dream for Guts because he loves him and prioritizes him above the dream – probably because he himself still doesn’t realize, because he’s so disconnected from his feelings after spending most of his life burying them that he can’t recognize and identify them. But imo this is still the closest to self-aware Griffith gets before the torture chamber, so like, give him a pat on the back.
Now, I see a strong through line from this moment to another scene: the night he asks Guts to kill a man for him.
The way he asks is unusual enough for Guts to comment on it. He explains the risks, explains why he suspects Julius, and asks Guts to help him.
I’m gonna throw something out there that people joke about but is actually totally relevant:
It’s dirty work. Failure isn’t permissible at all, nor is your face being seen. It’s for those reasons… that I’m asking you to do this.
The assassin can’t be recognized and can’t fuck it up, so Griffith specifically asks a huge dude with a huge sword who’s never stealthily killed anyone in his life and who immediately fucks it up to do it. Like, I’m thinking Judeau might’ve been a more solid choice for this particular mission, yk?
But those aren’t the reasons he picked Guts. The reason he picked Guts is the very first sentence: “It’s dirty work.”
This is the first time we see Griffith toss around the word “dirty” but it sure as hell isn’t the last. This is Griffith revealing a side of himself that he hasn’t revealed to anyone before, except Casca, accidentally – a side of himself that he’s ashamed of. And Guts is who he wants to reveal it to.
And this is Guts’ response.
Griffith is treating Guts like an equal in this scene, not like a soldier. In a way it’s a reversal of the waterfight scene: Guts treated Griffith like an equal and friend, and Griffith reminded himself that he’s Guts’ commander. Here Griffith is treating Guts like an equal and friend, and it’s Guts who reminds them that Griffith is the boss and he’s the subordinate.
I don’t think Guts intended to distance himself – it reads like a tension-breaking joke to me, but it’s a joke based on truth. They are a commander and subordinate, and this is a gentle rebuff and reminder of that fact to Griffith because, after risking his life for Guts and finally admitting it made no sense to do so, their actual unequal relationship has slipped from the forefront of his mind.
It’s a minor misunderstanding, and imo it wouldn’t be very important in the grand scheme of things, if it wasn’t for the next time Guts sees Griffith:
“They are… excellent troops. Together we have faced death so many times. They are my valuable comrades, devoting themselves to the dream I envision… But… to me, a friend is… something else. Someone who would never depend upon another’s dream… someone who wouldn’t be compelled by anyone, but would determine and pursue his own reason to live… And should anyone trample that dream he would oppose him body and soul… even if that threat were me myself… What I think a friend is… is one… who is my equal.”
Guts has just reminded him that while Griffith may want Guts to be his friend and equal, whether consciously or not, and may even be already subconsciously thinking of him that way, it’s not the nature of their relationship. Griffith is still his commander. He’s still the one who orders him into battle, and Guts could still die in service to his dream.
And like the waterfight to speech sequence three years ago, this is another instance of Griffith pulling back and trying to re-prioritize his dream over Guts, pushing down and repressing his actual feelings for Guts to focus on dreams.
Personally I don’t think Griffith is at all consciously aware of what he’s doing lol. I don’t think he planned to treat Guts like a friend and equal while asking him to assassinate someone, and I don’t think he actually thought to himself, “oh right, I’m his commander, not his friend.” I think it just came naturally for him to ask Guts instead of ordering him, and I think it came naturally to pontificate about how he doesn’t have friends while talking to Charlotte, and Guts reminding him that he’s his boss is at least partly why, even if Griffith himself doesn’t make that connection.
There’s a war raging between Guts and the dream in Griffith’s subconscious, and in light of being reminded that Guts views him as a superior and takes orders from him, the dream is rallying, basically.
During this whole speech Griffith is building the dream up, making it seem significant just for existing. What it does is show us how he sees himself – or, maybe more accurately, how he wants to see himself. He wants to believe that his dream is inherently noble, he needs to believe that it’s a worthy pursuit. Griffith isn’t lying to Charlotte here, so much as he’s lying to himself.
For no other’s sake vs for their sakes.
It’s easy to take the speech at face value at first, but it’s impossible when you learn more about Griffith.
The speech is about an abstract ideal, the same way his monologue about destiny was in his first scene, and it’s transformed when we learn more about him in five chapters, and are shown that the reality beneath it is much more complex. Dreams devouring dreams like storms, a life spent as a martyr to the god named Dream, Griffith finding the idea of being born and living just to live abhorrent – these are all framed as pretentious philosophical ideals. But looking back after Casca’s flashback once again gives this speech depth.
It’s his way of insisting to himself that he is what everyone believes him to be – an idealistic philosopher king waiting for his throne, justified in everything he does because it’s his perogative as a person to pursue a dream and achieving it is its own validation and proof that it was a worthy venture, rather than a monster walking a path of corpses.
I’d go so far as to argue that this is the point of Griffith’s wonderfully sinister smile when he finds out Guts killed Adonis too.
Again, it’s only five chapters before we learn that he has serious dead-child-related guilt issues, so what’s the deal? Well, the deal is that Griffith is even better at denial than he is at waging war. It’s the polar opposite of his reaction to First Kid’s death entirely for the sake of highlighting that difference.
The only two conclusions you can draw are that either Griffith has completely changed since the events Casca relates and no longer feels any guilt, or that he’s so thoroughly buried his guilt in this moment – this moment where he’s pontificating about his dream to Charlotte and building it up to her and himself – that his reaction is pleased. It’s similar to “I will decide the place where you die,” in the sense that it’s Griffith repressing his feelings by owning the inevitable cruelties of his dream.
And we know it’s not the first option, because first of all it would make that entire flashback comedically pointless, and because we see his guilt and self loathing surface again in significant moments, such as when he asks Guts, “do you think I’m cruel?”
Put another way: The dream signifies burying his heart and accepting that he’s cruel, while Guts signifies opening his heart and desperately not wanting to be a monster.
And again, we know that there’s more to this speech than what Griffith is actually saying, because we learn Griffith’s actual motivation soon after, and the entire point of Casca’s Griffith history lesson is to add those layers of guilt and self loathing and repression and let them colour everything we thought we knew about Griffith.
So now, to get back to his feelings about Guts, I want to examine Griffith’s definition of a friend in light of those guilt issues we learn about in the flashback.
To Griffith a friend is, ”someone who would never depend upon another’s dream… someone who wouldn’t be compelled by anyone, but would determine and pursue his own reason to live…”
To Griffith a friend is someone who would never depend on his dream, would never cling to his dream, would never die for his dream.
A friend is someone he cannot order into battle to die for him.
Furthermore, I want to suggest that Griffith’s, “he would oppose him body and soul, even if that threat were me myself,” clause adds another aspect to his criteria for friendship: a friend is someone who would never force Griffith to choose between him and his dream. A friend is someone who prioritizes his own dream, who understands that dreams come first and friendships come second, who can expect to be opposed if he stands in the way of Griffith’s dream, and vice versa.
Look at it this way: Guts has already forced Griffith to choose between him and his dream by nearly getting killed twice, and Guts won resoundingly both times. Because of this Guts represents an enormous threat to Griffith’s dream, because Griffith is willing to risk it for him. Three years ago Griffith said, “I will choose the place where you die,” to try to distance himself from Guts, but after Zodd he doesn’t even try to distance himself. He just tells Guts that he has no reason to put his own life on the line for Guts’ but that’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s gonna be.
Because Guts isn’t his “friend” by these standards, he’s at risk of dying for his dream. Because Griffith loves him, his dream is at risk of getting trampled for Guts.
The characters, of course, aren’t framing their decisions this way, but essentially, Guts’ answer to this conundrum is to leave to figure out a dream and become Griffith’s equal. He chooses to follow Griffith’s weird friendship criteria to the letter. But Griffith’s answer is to start replacing the dream with Guts.
This started as an attempt to explain my take on why Griffith is so utterly dedicated to his dream, and then it evolved into a monster when I decided to apply that reading to the rest of Griffith’s narrative. This is basically an examination of the dream, and how Griffith’s relationship with Guts comes to not only take precedence over it, but functionally replace it.
Now, while this is essentially a Griffith character study, I’m coming at him from a very specific angle so this is by no means definitive or all-encompassing. There’s so much to say about Griffith, his role in the story, his characterization and motivation etc that I just can’t fit into the purview of this meta – like, hell, I don’t even talk about class issues lol – but hopefully this serves as a thorough exploration of the aspects I did choose to focus on.
And, of course, it goes without saying that this is just my own interpretation. I’ll make the best case I can, but at the end of the day so much of Griffith’s story is left in subtext that there’s plenty of room for other interpretations.
Also, I want to lead off with a warning/advertisement:
I fucking love Griffith. I think he’s a fantastic character with a ton of depth and humanity who gets reduced to a two dimensional caricature in fandom way too often, I’m sympathetic towards him, and I take it as read that he’s blatantly in love with Guts, and indeed, that his narrative is almost entirely about being in love with Guts. I’m also writing this for a presumed audience of people who don’t need to be convinced first that Griffith is more complex than “conniving sociopath,” but if that’s your starting point you’re more than welcome to read anyway and see if anything I have to say resonates despite that.
Basically, if you’re into really really long, really gay character analyses, enjoy!
This is divided into four parts:
Part One is an analysis of what I feel are the relevant aspects of Griffith’s dream and why he’s so dedicated to it.
Part Two explores the way Guts immediately takes precedence over the dream.
Part Three explores how Griffith comes to rely on Guts more than the dream.
And Part Four explores why Griffith ultimately chooses to sacrifice Guts for the dream.
And lastly, I’m using the word “explores” deliberately because this isn’t really an argument. I don’t have to argue that Guts takes precedence over the dream, or that Griffith becomes emotionally reliant on Guts, etc, because this is all pretty clearly stated in the text. Rather, I want to use the tension between Guts and the dream as a jumping off point to dig into Griffith’s character arc. I’m not just saying that Griffith’s dream pales in importance compared to Guts, I’m trying to explainwhy,how Miura shows us, and what it tells us about Griffith’s character and narrative.
Ok that’s it for the preamble, let’s dive the fuck in.
I’m going to start us off by examining two sequences which, together, tell us pretty much everything we need to know to understand Griffith and his relationship to his dream, at least as far as this meta is concerned.
The first is his very first scene in the manga, all the way back in chapter eight, during the Black Swordsman arc. This is our introduction to pre-demon Griffith.
Martyrdom for a merciless god. What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t even worth a single piece of silver. In today’s world, most people’s lives are subject to the whims of a handful of nobility and royalty. Of course, even a king himself can’t live exactly as he pleases. We are all at the mercy of a great tide… fate, or whatever you wish to call it… And we all disappear in the end… our lives spent… never even knowing who we were.
In life, unrelated to one’s social standing or class as determined by man, there are some people who, by nature, are keys that set the world in motion. They are the true elite, as dictated by the golden rule of the universe. That’s what I want to know! What is my place in the world? Who am I? What am I capable of? What am I destined for?
This tells us Griffith’s driving philosophy. It tells us that he believes in fate, that he wants to push himself as far as he can and attain the most he can in the hopes that he is fated to be one of the few significant people who can change the world.
And it tells us that Guts is special to him. Griffith’s monologue here builds up to “You’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” We learn significant information about Griffith’s philosophy – along with some fun dramatic irony because, as we already learned by seeing Femto, Griffith is one of those keys – but the true point of this brief flashback is this moment of connection with Guts, with Griffith freely opening up to someone for the first time.
The second sequence is, of course, Casca’s flashback. From the kid’s death to Casca expressing her jealousy of Guts, these chapters are the real key to understanding Griffith’s character. That first scene is like the surface look with hints of depth, but Casca’s flashback recontextualizes everything that came before and informs everything that comes after. Like, I can’t stress enough how important this flashback is to understanding Griffith lol, it’s the axis around which his character revolves.
Miura even points out through Casca that learning what we learn about him should make us take another look at Griffith and further our understanding of what we’ve already seen, and what we’re going to see.
So I’m going to go through it and explain exactly what this flashback tells us about him.
We learn that the deaths of those who follow him weigh extremely heavily on him and fill him with guilt. Given the way the boy returns during the Eclipse this was likely a wake-up call, maybe the first instance of a death in the line of duty hitting him this hard. However, whether it’s the first time he’s been fucked up by one of his Hawks dying or whether he makes a habit of brooding over them doesn’t matter – this is the example we’re given to tell the reader how Griffith feels about the deaths of those fighting for him.
We learn that Griffith deals with this guilt through a pretty fucked up combination of self harm, rationalization, and denial. “I don’t feel at all responsible for my comrades who have lost their lives under my command,” he says, and then tears the shit out of his arms until Casca’s crying and begging him to stop. And I mean, if this scene isn’t clear enough, Miura uses self harm as an illustration of immense guilt despite denial a lot.
And not to belabor the point, but the dead kid’s relevance is demonstrated by the simple fact that Miura decided it was narratively important to include him, Griffith’s reaction to his death, and Casca making the connection and looking blatantly skeptical when he denies that the boy had anything to do with his decision to have sex with Gennon. We are absolutely supposed to understand that Griffith is lying when he says he doesn’t feel responsible, both to Casca and himself.
We learn that his dream is intrinsically tied to emotional repression. Griffith making himself strong means Griffith denying his emotional weaknesses, burying his heart, and putting on a mask of perfection at all times so he can embody the correct image for the Hawks and be what they need from him. It’s not that he can easily bear the burden of his dream and what he does for it, it’s that he forces himself to do so by repressing the emotional toll it takes on him.
By putting on this mask he is able to repress his feelings – or by repressing his feelings he is able to put on the mask. Either way, the knight in shining armour image he projects and his refusal to acknowledge his feelings of guilt and self loathing are intrinsically tied together and referred to by Casca as a sign of strength.
We also learn why Griffith is devoted to his dream.
We began with the assumption that his reasons are philosophical, theoretical, and self-serving. He wants to be special. Hell, if you really boil down the keys that set the world in motion speech, it means he wants proof that he’s special, and if he achieves his dream then it’s a sign from God or the universe or fate or whatever force beyond human knowledge that it was meant to be – that he was truly destined for great things all along.
But when we learn how driven by guilt he is, that motivation is transformed and complicated. He wants to be special, he wants fate to prove that he’s special, because that means he’s been doing the right thing all along. It means the deaths on his head were necessary. And if he achieves his dream he proves that it was worth it, that the dead didn’t die for nothing – that they were right to follow him even though it lead to their deaths, because he made the thing they gave their lives for a reality.
It makes it worth it to “dirty” himself too. If he achieves his dream then sex with Gennon was worth it, the assassinations were worth it, that hidden underbelly of his rise to power that he feels ashamed of was worthwhile after all.
If he achieves his dream, then he has no reason to feel guilty. If he achieves his dream, then he has no reason to hate himself. It was all just part of the wheel of fate.
I truly believe that this is what motivates Griffith more than anything else, and why his dream is paramount to him. And I think that when he gave the keys speech to Guts (among other instances of Griffith talking about the dream) it was also a form of rationalization and denial – a half-truth that obscures his real motivation, even to himself.
Finally, as Casca’s story concludes with Guts’ arrival in their lives, we finish with Casca coming as close as possible to saying that Griffith is in love with Guts without actually saying it. Griffith relies on Guts. Guts changed Griffith. Guts makes Griffith irrational. Griffith has never said anything like, “I want you,” to anyone else, ever. Presumably Griffith has never actually wanted anything or anyone but his dream before. In risking his life for him, Griffith also risks his all-important dream, and Casca won’t let Guts take Griffith’s dream down with him. It’s as if… as if…
So, let’s summarize what we know about Griffith now.
He needs to achieve his dream for the sake of the dead. In doing so, he can prove to himself that he has no reason to feel guilty, or dirty, or ashamed, because it was all meant to be. And he himself has no real understanding of this – he denies and rationalizes it. He would never think of himself as someone consumed by guilt or self-loathing, he’d just let a child predator fuck him so he can feel like he’s sacrificing something of himself too, then justify it with cool logic while calling himself unclean and tearing his arms up the next morning, and then bury all of that under that mask of perfection so no one else ever knows and he can even deny it to himself.
And we know Guts has changed him, to the point where Casca sees Guts as a direct threat to Griffith’s dream.
This is who Griffith is. He exists and functions in this state of guilt and self-loathing, and he is constantly repressing it for the sake of the image of a perfect leader he shows the Hawks, except in the few self-destructive moments when it seeps out. His dream is a self-perpetuating coping mechanism. He manages to live with himself through the belief that if he achieves it, it means fate is putting a seal of approval on everything he’s done on the road to achieving it, but in the meantime the bodies and the dirty deeds pile up and the emotional toll on Griffith continues to rise.
But Guts makes him forget that dream.
So let’s see what happens when Guts is introduced into his life.
Time to finally lay out my thoughts on these parallels and contrasts between Gambino, Griffith and Femto/NeoGriff.
Ok so starting with Human Golden Age 100% Certified Organic Griffith, even tho the parallels start off strong in the Black Swordsman arc, whatever, we’ll go chronologically.
Griffith is everything Gambino never was, but that Guts needed him to be. Dude has daddy issues, let’s be real here, and Griffith was a bigger, better, brighter Gambino who actually loved him. Who risked his life to save him and didn’t even have a reason. To Gambino he was p much only worth the money he brought in, but to Griffith he was worth risking his life for, for no reason or reward at all. Griffith in turn is similar to Gambino in that he’s a mercinary leader with a hold over Guts, but he’s otherwise superior in every way. More noble than Gambino in that he’s driven by ideals rather than money, has greater ambitions, greater skill, better manners, better morals, etc.
He was another person Guts respected, admired, and looked up to, and another person who Guts desperately wanted to have look at him, with some v explicit comparisons drawn by the manga:
After the Zodd debacle but before the Promrose Hall speech is a period of just about limitless potential for them. Guts accepts that Griffith loves him, or at least feels some kind of strong emotions for him – he recognizes the significance of the words “for your sake” here – and returns the sentiment by pledging his sword to him.
I don’t know if this is the answer I was searching for or not… but for now… For now I’ll wield my sword. For his sake.
Look at that – recalling the night he killed Gambino just before he pledges his sword to Griffith. Replacing one man with a new, vastly improved version.
This is also why the Promrose Hall speech hits him so hard, imo. Because for a brief period here Guts knew some extent of Griffith’s feelings, and the speech ripped that knowledge away and made him feel insignificant in Griffith’s eyes. We the audience know perfectly well that Griffith is head over heels regardless of the speech, but all Guts knows is he isn’t seen as Griffith’s friend/equal and he desperately wants to be. Because he needs him to be that better version of Gambino who actually loves him, not Gambino all over again.
Of course unlike Gambino, Guts’ perception of Griffith is based on a misconception, likely fueled and heightened by his own issues. Guts doesn’t get to see Griffith crash and burn when he leaves and then contemplate how brightly he shines within him, even compared to his castle, but we do.
Anyway so Guts inadvertantly breaks everything, fast forward a year and Griffith, like Gambino was for a time, is now disabled and dependant and really fucked up about it. Like Gambino he blames Guts, though unlike Gambino he still loves and almost immediately forgives Guts, and also unlike Gambino Griffith’s state actually is in part because of Guts (ofc you can’t blame Guts for Griffith’s own shitty decision-making, but you also can’t dismiss the fact that Guts leaving without explanation caused Griffith to have a breakdown lol). And, finally, like Gambino, this culminates in lashing out at Guts.
Gambino irrationally blames Guts for the death of his lover and all his bad luck since, Griffith blames Guts for making him fall in love with him (”only you made me forget my dream.”). Very different reasons, very similar result.
Now, and this isn’t a direct parallel imo but it’s one that I feel may be somewhat suggested, Guts blames himself for both Gambino’s death, and Griffith’s “death.”
Gambino was a terrible person who Guts killed accidentally in self defense, and he still has serious guilt issues because of it. When he has a flashback his panicky explanation to Casca ends with him crying and saying, “I’m sorry Gambino. Father…” Guts acknowledges and understands that Gambino betrayed him but that doesn’t make his feelings about him simple, and it doesn’t lessen his guilt.
I think this is also a large part of the reason Guts takes ages to stop hacking at Femto’s egg and trying to save Griffith after “I sacrifice.” Because he does blame himself. And even after he admits to himself that Griffith did betray him, this is how he looks back before leaving and fighting more monsters:
Anyway this brings me to Femto I guess.
In a way the Black Swordsman arc is a version of Guts’ missing years between Gambino and the Hawks: cursed and a bad omen, but now very literally because he draws evil spirits who kill people who get too close. “You should have died eleven years ago beneath your mother’s corpse!” = you should’ve died when you were sacrificed during the Eclipse.
Routine fighting to survive vs literally fighting every night to survive thanks to the brand.
Continuing on after killing Gambino vs continuing on after Griffith becomes Femto, with hints of survivor’s guilt all around, and strong visual comparisons:
But the real parallels are in how he responds to Femto.
Guts still craves acknowledgement.
His first reaction isn’t raaaagh I’ll kill you, that’s what he does after Femto dismisses him to focus on the issue at hand. His first reaction is hurt followed by, straight up, a need to be acknowledged. This scene starts with Guts basically fighting for attention, powering through his attack on Femto while the rest of the Godhand cheers him on until Femto knocks him into a wall and they move on to the Count’s backstory. Void even tries to get them back on track and then has his ‘…okay ANYWAY’ moment lmao (Enough of the sideshow.)
Same thing happens when he meets NeoGriff for the first time. His initial reaction isn’t to swing his sword at him, it’s to let Rickert hold him back while he pleads for him to acknowledge his betrayal (which, as this post points out, is similar to his morning confrontation with Gambino).
In fact, there’s a pretty interesting contrast drawn just in the Gambino
chapters – when Gambino lashes out and gives him the scar on the bridge
of Guts’ nose, he admits he might’ve been a dick and gives Guts
medicine for it. “Perhaps it was for no other reason than to soothe his
guilty conscience.” When Gambino sells him to Donovan, he doesn’t even acknowledge what he did let alone regret it, and even throws it in Guts’ face to hurt him a couple years later.
But this comes back after Guts’ flashback.
Despite just violently reliving the worst thing Gambino did to him, the last thing he thinks of is his seemingly contradictory mild kindness.
NeoGriffith never gives him the regret he wants him to feel either. But despite that:
My point is that Guts’ feelings are just as complex towards Femto/NeoGriffith as they are towards Gambino. He feels betrayal and rage, but also inadequacy, guilt, and a continuing desire to be looked at and acknowledged. He’s still driven by a v basic need to make Gambino proud – it transferred to Griffith during the Golden Age, and now it’s still there, complicating his hatred.
Which ties into the larger themes of Berserk, the good and evil in the heart of humanity. Gambino demonstrates this subtly – he’s a dick who shows just enough complexity and v mild compassion for Guts to crave more kindness from him. He’s very human in a very negative way. Griffith is the larger-than-life fantasy equivalent, who starts out as a positive version of Gambino – loves and is interested in Guts, behaves selflessly for him, is admirable in a fantasy-hero kind of way, etc – and literally transforms into a personification of evil, becoming a more heightened version of all the negative humanity in Gambino.
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