ok so i went looking for those pages and when the beast of darkness bites casca’s neck while telling him to r*pe her to get closer to griffith
it says something which the official translation team translated as “you desire this”
but the old fan translation says:
it’d be interesting to see if the original japanese wording here is the same as the “what you wish for may not be what she wishes for” or w/e line
ooooh ngl it would be a p interesting twist if ‘your wishes may not be her wishes’ is ominious not necessarily because casca’s wishes are going to fuck shit up but because skull knight is referring to the fact that guts still wishes to be griffith’s friend/equal, and it’s guts who’s going to cut and run or go beast of darkness or w/e
like i’d still vastly prefer for casca to do something epic but i wouldn’t say no to guts leaving casca behind again and going griffith hunting. like honestly anything that separates guts and casca and gives them different or even clashing goals/motivations/narratives/etc is all right in my book
all plot, no substance. any heart bthumpy emotions NeoGriff is feeling are actually the fetus’ feelings. it’s his weakness™ and if Guts and Casca defeat NeoGriff they’ll be able to magically separate it out and fuse it with its soul, the Moonlight Boy, achieving a Happily Ever After™ as a Picturesque Family™
Or possibly if they defeat NeoGriffith they free their child’s soul to go to swirly soul heaven, and the ending is bittersweet™
Miura retcons Femto letting Guts go, and all the hints that NeoGriffith feels things that are entirely unrelated to whatever tf the fetus might care about are red herrings/misdirection.
In a flash forward we find out that Rickert and Erika are happily married in a terrible Guts/Casca parallel.
ummm what else… NeoGriff is defeated through a power-up/Elfland magic after a volume long physical battle.
Guts bones Casca and thus conquers his obsession with Griffith and is finally able to move on™ but NeoGriff attacks Elfhelm, forcing the final battle.
possibly the other godhand are there too, what with fusing the physical and spiritual worlds and miura hinting that void’s gonna be important yadda yadda yadda. it turns into Good Spirit Elemental Guardians against Evil Godhand in the most boring fight ever while Guts and NeoGriff fight.
Oooh Casca experiences some strong negative emotions upon regaining her sanity, but the Moonlight Boy appears to her and her maternal feelings™ soothe her.
Guts kills NGriff, rides off into the sunset with casca.
oh also there’s undertones of falconia being a naive fantasy while guts’ ‘just struggle your way through everything instead of finding/creating a safe happy paradise’ philosophy is touted as more mature and better
ok that’s enough dwelling on the negative
BEST CASE ENDING
the fetus is affecting Griffith only insomuch as being fused with its physical flesh makes his heart start beating because he’s corporeal and thus subject to those worldy emotions he’d thought he’d left behind.
The shot of it at the end of this chapter shows that Casca is kind of obsessed with it, and therefore when she wakes up with all her sanity and memories she demonstrates that her wishes were not Guts’ wishes and falls into despair and sacrifices that little fucker. I mean, half the apostle sacrifices we’ve seen have been parent/child, it’s possible right?
this destroys Moonlight Boy, aka the essence of the fetus, and whatever hope the audience had for a happily ever after family with Guts Casca and child. it’s meant to be seen as a tragic low point. I cackle gleefully.
I wouldn’t actually enjoy this but i think it would make sense: along with that low point Miura hints that NeoGriff’s feelings are gone thanks to Casca’s sacrifice – oh no, his one weakness! now he’s unstoppable! etc – but psych later on it turns out the feelings were his own all along.
casca, now an apostle, leaves to get revenge on neogriff. guts goes after her to either help or stop her, he’s not sure which. also if casca steals guts’ armour, i will die of happiness, but that + being an apostle might be overkill.
we get casca’s point of view, and it’s quite similar to black swordsman guts and full of parallels. guts has now achieved some character development which is why he’s torn between helping casca get revenge vs trying to just save her because she’s no match for neogriff (vs deep down wanting to save neogriff and/or stick his own sword in him because his feelings are still all fucked up. undertones of guts and casca’s old griffith-related romantic rivalry but dark)
thematically, Elfhelm is soured – the whole magical therapy for Casca thing turned out to be a terrible idea, the people there are unwilling to help clean up their mess because they’re isolationist dicks, AND maybe there are hints that the four spirit guardians schierke calls on for protection are other forms of the godhand?
however it happens, ultimately the thematic takeaway is that rather than there being a good vs evil thing going on in the spirit world, good and evil are two sides of the same coin and what you perceive really depends on what you’re calling on the spirit world for, and most things are both at once. yk, aren’t gods and devils the same thing?
i’m skipping over plot stuff and more theme stuff because i’m willing to accept a lot of possibilities and i really don’t care much.
the important thing is that guts and griffith have a final emotional confrontation after the dust of the big action climax settles, and it comes in the form of a 3rd duel.
also at some point in the lead-up to it, they figure their shit out. possibly this involves schierke’s or sonia’s or both’s magical mind exploration magic. we see griffith’s unemotional facade starting to crack. we see guts’ ambivalence towards griffith – does he want to kill him or plead with him or fuck him or reject him entirely?
and guts realizes that griffith’s heart is beating again for him, and everything he wanted – griffith’s respect admiration and love is still there, residing in his worst enemy. and griffith realizes that guts admired and loved him and never once saw human him as the monster he saw himself and allowed himself to become.
tragically idk how you could depict both without looking really silly, but either guts’ residual guilt for his part in the lead up to the eclipse gets the better of him and he lets a still-repressed griffith kill him, the way he always lets himself get stabbed when he feels bad about something, OR neogriffith’s irrational love gets the better of him and he lets guts kill him – guts ends up sticking him in the throat in a mirror of how he killed gambino.
either way there’s a lot of crying and cradling a corpse.
tbh i’m leaning towards griffith killing guts for that devilman ending, and this way casca gets to play the role of angry god by swooping in and killing him. if that’s the case griffith lets her because his irrational emotions have finally truly burst free and taken hold over him after he kills guts. his crying is a call-back to his ‘last tear shed.’
(maybe casca becomes zodd 2.0, living for battle and becoming a sword just for herself. kind of a darkly fucked-up “happy” ending for her lol.)
BEST CASE ENDING WITH NO FUCKS GIVEN FOR PLAUSIBILITY
all of the above but after finally understanding each other they make out instead of dueling and then casca kills neogriff and an adult theresia kills guts, and they both ride off into the sunset with their respective girlfriends, farnese and jill.
there’s a lot in this scene and tbh it’s one of the things in the story I have trouble with– why does griffith do this? is he grasping like he was with charlotte when guts left? that’s my best interpretation, but there is A Lot here, including some pretty grim foreshadowing.
i can think of like so many possible explanations for this depending on what u want to be emphasized, it’s frustrating lol
eg
griffith seeing sex as transactional + emphasizing his vulnerability/fear of being tossed aside = trying to get casca to stay with him by offering her something he knows she wanted at one time
emphasizing griffith’s desperation and irrationality = trying to return to the status quo by returning casca’s attention to him
griffith overhearing casca saying to guts ‘i just wanted someone to be near me’ + casca reflecting on how griffith used to be able to comfort her at the start of this scene + casca clumsy and shaking + casca comforting griffith at the end = griffith trying to physically comfort casca, emphasizing his patheticness when he’s the one who needs to be comforted and held instead
or maybe it’s a combination of everything, idk. i think the eclipse foreshadowing works best as a contrast – here he’s helpless and weak and maybe offering himself in desperation or unable to even comfort or entice casca or whatever, w/e it is it’s humiliating, whereas when he becomes femto he establishes his power and control thru rape.
I don’t think I could find a panel where she seems attracted to Guts, partially because I agree with you and partially because my memory of the het interactions in Berserk is not the greatest lol.
But yeah I think part of the reason I find her relationship with Guts so unconvincing, and part of why I find it really easy to hc her as gay, is because her relationships to men are based around wanting to be needed, rather than her own desire.
With Griffith she wants to be something indispensible to his dream, a “sword” he can’t do without. Later on we get Judeau saying, “If she loves him… shouldn’t she want to be held by him?” And Casca saying, “Griffith’s not a god… and I am a woman.” And it’s like, if you’re going to describe a woman’s attraction to a man in terms of falling into the natural hetero order of things, it makes it easier to see it as internalized homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality lol. Casca like, hmmm my feelings for Griffith are extremely strong, he’s a man I’m a woman, this must be attraction? Without realizing there are other possibilities.
I’m sure Miura didn’t mean it that way, but that’s why it’s a headcanon.
And anyway it’s the same with Guts – it’s all about Casca’s desire to be needed, to be able to comfort someone and feel necessary to them. And I think partly it’s an obligation to her, pay back for being rescued, by Griffith, by Guts in the 100 man fight. She notices Guts’ scars from that fight before they have sex and says she wishes for a wound from Guts. And it’s what she thinks about while they have sex: “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.”
I think that’s purposeful on Miura’s part. That’s a consistent part of Casca’s characterization that seems to stem from her childhood trauma and being rescued by Griffith, and it’s what informs her two major relationships. She only started warming up to Guts after he rescued her. Miura wants us to see it as attraction, but he didn’t really show us any actual desire from Casca, it’s something the characters, and the audience, take as read just based on the fact that she’s a woman and they’re men lol, and since I don’t agree that woman + man = automatic sexual attraction it’s pretty easy to take another route imo.
ALSO can I just say “I don’t know what’s ahead. Whether bein with you will get in the way of what I want to do… or the opposite… I can’t tell now.”
Well what Guts wants to do is fight stronger and stronger enemies, like Wyald. He’s been thinking about fighting monsters since he left and decided he was sore about losing to Zodd.
And then he does get to fight a monster, and this is what happens when Casca’s with him:
so like, you’re telling me they would’ve lived happily ever after pursuing Guts’ monster-fighting dream together if Griffith turned out to be fine and fit to lead the Hawks after all?
Bc this is directly telling me that Guts would see Casca as a liability to that dream and Casca would probably stop supporting it pretty quickly if Guts kept on going the way he’s going.
(same anon) on second thought maybe the nose treatment allusion after
sex could refer to him being comforted, but not wrt Griffith but his
childhood trauma? Like of course Casca can’t help him there but she
alleviated the pain for a bit. This still doesn’t let me glimpse at
Miura’s intentions. I truly agree w your meta I am just getting mixed
signals. No disrespect or anything, feel free to ignore/delete since I’m
basically rambling in your inbox!
no worries, i always love getting messages and I have no problem clarifying my thoughts!
lol
sorry this took a while to answer, first I almost wrote an essay in
response but then I decided to clean up a post I already had in my
drafts that addresses some of this instead.
But to address
your message in more detail than that post does, tbh I think it’s kind
of meant to be a little contradictory. Miura tends to write in a way
where he presents the positive and negative aspects of something and
trusts the audience to make up their own minds. The narrative could def
lean one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean a decision/an event/a
character/etc is wholly negative or wholly positive. It’s usually some of both.
When
it comes to Guts and Casca hooking up I think there are positive
aspects. Guts opening up and telling her about his past is a good thing.
Casca deciding to try to move on from her obsession with Griffith is a
good thing. Despite the violent flashback and the virginal fumbling both
of them consider sex together to be a positive experience.
But
despite that, I think the narrative itself depicts Guts and Casca
hooking up to be ultimately a mistake. Not a mistake you can blame Guts
or Casca for because they should’ve known better or smthn like that, but a mistake in the
sense that it lead to a lot more bad than good happening, the same way
Guts leaving the Hawks was ultimately the wrong call even though he had
the best of intentions and it arguably seemed to have a positive affect on him as an individual.
And like, tbh I don’t think Miura really
gives much of a fuck about Guts/Casca as a romantic relationship lol. I
think what happened is he went with it as a way to make the Eclipse more
dramatic/give Guts a stronger reason to want revenge bc frankly
Griffith just sacrificing the Band isn’t nearly enough to make Guts that
angry lol – but he’s actually a pretty good writer when he wants to be
so rather than pushing it as a more generic and pasted on True Love Ruined By Tragedy thing he
added it as a two people on the rebound thing and incorporated it into
part of the pile-up of bad decisions and things going wrong in the lead
in to the Eclipse.
It has to be a little sweet, a little positive,
the audience has to believe Guts genuinely cares for her and they had
potential in order for the Eclipse bullshit to have the effect he
wanted, but at the same time the main thing Guts and Casca’s short lived
relationship adds to the story, other than set-up for a prolonged rape
scene, is reinforcement of Guts’ stupid dream imo.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that, rather than being
depicted as burgeoning true love ruined by the Eclipse for the
sake of extra tragedy, Guts and Casca getting together is depicted as a mistake from the start.
Let’s look at Guts’ conversation with Judeau, where he seems to consider the possibility of Casca as a romantic interest for the first time.
“The one who has her eye… is Griffith. That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this.”
I see two possible ways of interpreting this statement. Either the narrative and Guts just reframed Guts entire raison d’etre, his whole motivation for leaving and the reason he wants to be Griffith’s equal, thanks to a few leading statements from Judeau, or Guts is framing a potential relationship with Casca as another step on the journey of becoming Griffith’s equal.
The former defies belief. We just spent 22 chapters knowing exactly why Guts wants to leave and become Griffith’s equal. There’s no mystery there, there’s no detail left to be uncovered. Suddenly doing a 180 and saying actually, he wants to leave so he can be worthy of Casca, even though he never considered Casca a romantic possibility until approximately 30 seconds earlier, would just be impossibly bad writing from an otherwise extremely solid story.
But the latter, well, that fits right in.
After they have sex, Casca symbolically becomes Guts’ sword instead of Griffith’s:
To Casca, Guts is a more open, emotionally available replacement for Griffith, as I’ve discussed in detail in this post. Guts is in fact coming closer to his goal of becoming Griffith’s equal by sleeping with Casca, because after this Casca begins to transfer her obsession with Griffith and his dream to him.
And Casca isn’t an endgame for Guts. She’s not the goal, she’s not the motivation – she’s an addition to his overarching desire to have Griffith see him as an equal. He still plans to leave to continue fighting stronger and stronger enemies after they hook up. He invites her along – just so long as she doesn’t get in the way of his more important dream:
Non-committally inviting her along mollifies her, but it doesn’t address her point lol – he’s still selfishly prioritizing his dream. She’s become support for that, just the way she supported Griffith’s dream as his “sword.” Eventually that is exactly what leads to everything crashing down around them – Casca telling Guts to leave, because his dream is all-important.
And while we then leave Guts and Casca on a sweet moment where they kiss, that very same page shifts to pure ominousness to end both the chapter and Guts and Casca’s newly changed relationship on:
Cue snake man walking around and the Behelit floating down a river on its way to a date with Griffith.
And then the next chapter returns us to Griffith, a year since the last time we saw him, and his monologue about how his feelings for Guts are so strong and bright they make even the dream fade into dullness.
Guts is trying to “unbind” himself from Griffith. In his dream speech to Casca he says he can’t stay with the Hawks because he refuses to ever swing his sword in service to another again. And Casca tells Guts that she can’t continue defending the almost broken dream of someone who may not even be alive. Both he and Casca are trying to move on from Griffith in their own ways, and they try to do this through a connection with each other.
But the thing is, if you’re writing the kind of relationship triangle where two people help each other get over a third, if you want it to really feel satisfying and right, wouldn’t you want to establish that they both should be getting over Griffith, and that a relationship with each other is a more positive step for them?
The problem is that Guts’ whole thing, his whole desire to leave to become Griffith’s equal, is motivated by wanting to be closer to Griffith lol. He wants to be someone Griffith can call a friend. And it’s based on a falsehood: he thinks Griffith looks down on him.
When this is how Griffith feels about him:
Guts trying to unbind himself from Griffith doesn’t feel satisfying when we’re immediately reminded through a passionate monologue that Griffith is just as bound to Guts as Guts is to him, and that Guts only wants to become independent of Griffith because he doesn’t know that.
As for Casca, her obsession with Griffith came at the expense of
herself. Spending a year fighting for Griffith’s dream
and leading the Hawks while he was in a dungeon drove her to the point
of suicide.
But her encounter here with Guts doesn’t solve any of
that, she just transfers her obsession and her dedication to someone
else’s dream to Guts, as we see clearly through that sword metaphor,
through the parallels I linked to earlier, and through Casca telling
Guts he has to leave because his dream is the most important thing.
Casca trying to get over Griffith and move on doesn’t feel satisfying when she immediately falls into the same self-destructive patterns with a new person at the centre of her obsession.
Guts and Casca’s romance has
its postive aspects – Guts opens up to her about his childhood trauma,
eg, and is comforted. But there’s
dissonance beneath the surface. They have sex right after Guts let Casca
stab him because a part of him realized she was right about Griffith needing him. Casca had just tried to kill herself after telling Guts that Griffith doesn’t need her, as though she can only live in relation to someone else. In
deciding to leave the Hawks together, Guts continues suppressing his
eventual revelation that leaving in the first place was a mistake.
And
Guts recalls
Gambino giving him medicine – the one act of kindness from him which
Guts latches onto to help him deny the rest of Gambino’s abuse – while Casca is compared to a sword, which to me seems like a strong, not all that positive statement on their relationship: it doesn’t fix their underlying issues, it doesn’t change anything, it just helps them live in denial of those issues – Casca’s lack of independence, Guts’ dream being a mistake*** – for a while longer.
Basically, rather than moving forward and truly healing with each other, they’re revisiting the past, repeating negative patterns, maintaining denial, and essentially, well, licking wounds.
And by trying to move on from
Griffith by taking solace in each other, they only add to Guts’ original
mistake, which is failing to realize that there was no reason for him to move on in the first
place. Guts couldn’t stand the thought of Griffith looking down on him,
but this is who he is to Griffith, as we are told immediately before and
after he has sex with Casca:
And this is when Guts finally acknowledges his mistake, about 10 seconds after Griffith overheard Casca telling him to leave:
We know that Miura didn’t
intend Guts and Casca to get together from the start, let alone for it
to be a grand true love style romance. He’s said that he hooked them up
for the sake of more Eclipse drama. And I think that the way he framed
their relationship, from its placement in the narrative to the details of the scene itself to the way it goes hand in hand with Guts’ dream, makes it feel like it’s contributing to the series of unfortunate fuck ups that lead to the Eclipse, rather than just being an incidental casualty of it.
It’s a mistake the
way Miura writes mistakes – not obviously so, with no ill intent or
obviously misguided motives behind it. Their relationship isn’t meant to
be unpleasant, it’s shown as sweet and maybe not epic, maybe not
lasting, but overall more positive than negative for them. But so was
Guts’ year long sabbatical, and we’ve seen how much he regrets that:
In Berserk characters can make the wrong decisions despite having the best of intentions, despite some good coming out of those decisions, despite doing the best they can based on what they know. And I think Guts and Casca’s relationship is shown to be one of them.
*** I think both Casca’s lack of independence and Guts’ focus on his own dream of fighting stronger and stronger enemies are at least in part poor coping mechanisms for their respective childhood traumas, which makes the sword and medicine metaphors even more apt. But to get fully into that would take its own post, and it’s not necessary to my point here, so this is just a minor aside lol.
I originally had this as a second part of my last response but tbh it’s not actually all that related and it seemed silly to reply with a giant wall of text explaining an opinion that the person never asked for lol. So I’m just throwing it out separately.
Like I complained that Casca’s reaction to the Eclipse trauma is unrealistic but that doesn’t actually have much of anything to do with why I hate it.
Bc the
thing is, even if I assume that it is totally possible for
someone to regress to a state of infanthood due to trauma, or if I just
assume that Casca’s mental state is a result of fantasy magic, the way
Miura portrays it is still uncomfortable and worth criticizing, imo,
and he certainly doesn’t seem to care about making it feel grounded in
reality or depicting her trauma with care and respect.
For
instance, the way we don’t get to experience Casca’s point of view ever
again (even now we see her mind through Schierke and Farnese’s points of
view), the babyish mentality combined with Miura’s art still
sexualizing her adult body a whole lot, the way her current mental state
(the result of horrific rape) is often used as comic relief (eg
grabbing Puck and sticking him in her mouth in the background), the way
it totally strips Casca of agency as a character and turns her into a
plot device, the way Miura has said that he had her survive the Eclipse only to keep her around as a reminder to Guts that he wants revenge, etc.
It
seems much, much less like a genuine and thoughtful exploration of
Casca as a traumatized individual and much more like a convenient way of
reducing her to an object for Guts to protect and project on.
Even
now that we’re in her mind doing some magical therapy it seems really
half assed to me. We see Schierke and Farnese fighting dick monsters in
her mind, they’re collecting shards of her and sticking them back
together… I mean, when you compare it to, say, the absolutely
heartwrenching portrayal of Guts’ ptsd flashback during sex and his
subsequent panicky breakdown, it just doesn’t seem like Miura really
cares about selling Casca’s trauma as realistic and making sure the
audience empathizes with her. It really seems like he just wanted to
make her a cute and helpless non-entity for the sake of furthering Guts’
narrative.
It’s such a shame to me because I really like
Casca as a character but she gets such a raw treatment
from the narrative pretty much consistently, and it sucks.
I mean, if you want my two cents on the regression, I don’t buy it? Like she would have been 100% entitled to lose her shit but I don’t think she would have I guess? I was talking to @berserkerlover221 and I was just thinking that if that was the response women had every time a man they trusted raped them there would be a hell of a lot more completely regressed people.
like i’m no psychiatrist but i’m pretty damn sure casca’s reaction is 100% unrealistic fictional bullshit miura threw in to remove her from the narrative. you could argue that no one irl has ever been gangraped by monsters and an immortal demon god with powers of evil so maybe it’s fantasy magic at work, but then again miura also did the exact same thing when guts’ mother had a miscarriage so…
idk how one dude can write some traumatized characters so well and others so badly lol. like there is such a world of difference between guts griffith casca farnese and serpico’s reactions to their childhood traumas, and current casca’s generically ~wacky and childish insanity that it floors me that one guy wrote it all. i mean casca is a funny cartoonish background event throughout most of the last couple arcs. it’s just incredible.
All of that being
said, that seems to be something that he’s returning to thematically so
it might not be 100% sexisim and not knowing what to do with her. Maybe
just 90%
yeah i’m hoping he plans to do something with her after she gets magical elfhelm therapy, and hopefully that something is awesome and epic and relevant enough to justify even a fraction of how she’s been reduced for 20 years. idk, cross my fingers I guess.
The way Miura wrote the story I’d say Guts is by far the stronger and more relatable character. Unfortunately Casca really gets the “the token chick” treatment where her whole story and all her issues and half her personality is about being a woman surrounded by men, and written by a dude, so yk, I don’t blame anyone for being unable to relate to her lol, and personal preference is whatever, so it’s not like you should have to like her just because you’re a girl.
And I definitely agree that Casca should develop on her own, away from Guts. The way she jumped straight from being overinvested in Griffith and his dream to being overinvested in Guts and his dream was pretty fucked up imo, and a sign that she needs to get independent.
But I’d have to disagree with you about their respective feelings, because while I think they both felt genuine affection for the other, neither of them felt genuine love, and I’d say even moreso than Casca did, Guts consistently prioritized/s Griffith over her.
cut for length
Rather than staying and supporting her he still wants to go out to become Griffith’s equal, and this is how he invites her along when Casca is outraged by his priorities:
which is pretty far from romantic or commital lol.
While Casca is jealous of Charlotte during the rescue, Guts’ reaction is basically, well that kinda sucks but lbr I got it even worse than she does so it’s not like I can blame her:
When they find Griffith this is the next thing he says to Casca:
During the Eclipse this is what Guts does when he sees the Band, including Casca, about to be eaten by monsters:
And of course after the Eclipse he dumps her in a cave for two years to pursue Griffith/continue pursuing his dream of fighting stronger and stronger opponents and therefore being Griffith’s friend/equal, once again prioritizing Griffith:
When he finally does end up sticking with her to take her to Elfhelm, this is how he makes that decision:
This is what he’s thinking about when he starts off on his journey:
and of course i’d be remiss if i didn’t mention how Griffith grabbing Guts’ attention away from rescuing Casca is framed:
AND then there’s the whole Beast of Darkness fiasco.
And even when they’re on the boat, he’s still planning to run back to Griffith once his sidequest with Casca is over:
Idk basically I would argue that Guts is by far shittier to Casca than Casca is to Guts, and neither are genuinely all that invested in their potential relationship. It’s a rebound for both, an attempt to get over Griffith that doesn’t work for either, but in fairness to Casca she tried, and even when she decided to stay with Griffith she told Guts to leave because she was prioritizing his stupid dream lol, while Guts’ investment in becoming worthy of being Griffith’s friend had him refusing to stay and suggesting Casca come with him only insofar as she doesn’t fuck up his dream from the very start.
Someone with the brand of sacrifice can’t be sacrificed again, but there’s nothing saying they can’t use a behelit. And since the implication is that Guts might use the behelit at some point – Flora says it could be his – it follows that Casca could also potentially use it.
She wouldn’t be able to sacrifice Guts, because in the Black Swordsman Arc the Godhand said that you can’t sacrifice someone who’s already been sacrificed, but she could sacrifice Farnese (which would suck) or I’ve suggested maybe the Moonlight Boy (which imo would be awesome but I never rly liked that kid lol).
And yeah I totally agree that Casca telling Guts to leave totally fucked Griffith up and was like, the last straw that lead to his break from reality and then suicide attempt.
I mean come on, right? Guts leaving lead directly to Griffith essentially burning down his life by sleeping with Charlotte (whether that was intentional and conscious or whether it was subconscious is up to interpretation, but either way it wasn’t an accident), then he hung onto his sanity by a thread through a year of torture solely by thinking about Guts and his feelings for him, then he was rescued by Guts who cut a bloody swathe through Midland to avenge him and killed a literal monster to defend him, and finally he was lead to believe that Guts was about to leave him again, while he was totally helpless and had absolutely nothing else in his life.
And then finally Guts’ touch caused him to feel the kind of despair that makes you to want to destroy the person causing it and become a monster just so you won’t feel it again.
Like, that’s a hell of an emotional roller coaster revolving around one person.
Goddamn don’t you just love this fucking story? God.
Idk if this is a prediction or wishful thinking lol, but if I had to lay down a bet I think she’s going to wake up, have all the Eclipse related betrayal and despair and trauma hit her, and use the behelit, then go for revenge herself. I’ve been theorizing this for a while and tbh I haven’t come up with anything better yet so I’m still going with it.
My hopes for her getting a happy ending away from Guts are essentially zero, especially since reading in an interview that Miura only had her survive the Eclipse so Guts wouldn’t be able to fully move on.
And I’m assuming that Skull Knight’s warnings are going to come to something other than Casca being prickly for a while before hooking back up with Guts or w/e, then getting killed to make him want revenge again. Dramatic shudder.
So what I really want is for her to finally, finally react to what happened to her, and for that reaction to be epic as fuck.
I also think it’s plausible because:
there’ve been a lot of ominous shots of the behelit recently
flora specifically suggested guts might be carrying it for someone else
guts revenge quest was bad for him partially because it wasn’t his right to avenge the hawks after abandoning them, but if anyone earned some vengeance it’s casca
griffith instinctively acted to save casca once, giving him a huge weakness against her
“What will she do if she does get her sanity back?” Just sounds so delightfully ominous and suggests Casca actively doing something Guts wouldn’t like.
guts’ revenge quest is played out imo, time for something new. also seeing casca decide to go full monster in her rage would probably fuck him up and wake up the beast of darkness, so it would still motivate him to do something
honestly there’s some great stuff with morality and apostles just waiting to be explored and seeing a beloved character turn into one would be really interesting
Casca’s strong, badass, and her anger manifests in violent lashing out making her a perfect candidate to take over the revenge stuff.
I think Guts hasn’t really given up on the idea of revenge yet – he was still fantasizing about going back after Griffith while on the boat – but it would be pretty anticlimatic if Casca just stuck around in Elfhelm to recover while Guts went “ok side quest over, back to the main quest now,” so I’m sure there’s going to be something more to it.
And I like the idea of Casca taking over the revenge quest and Guts maybe re-evaluating himself, his motives, etc, while fucked up once again because things went south and he did something with mostly good intentions and everything got all fucked up anyway.
Like tbh I think that the conflict as it’s set up now, ie revenge = bad, helping Casca = good, is much, much too simplistic for a story like Berserk. It’s boring lol, whether it ends up tragic and Guts backslides back into revenge, whether he continues doing the “right” thing and chooses Casca over it, it’s still black and white. In the Golden Age there were no easy right or wrong options – eg Guts thought he was doing the right thing by leaving, turned out to be a huge mistake that fucked everything up, and I really liked that. I think the current arc has the potential to be similar which would be great imo.
Guts isn’t helping Casca solely out of the goodness of his heart, he’s doing it because he wants the old Casca back despite misgivings and warnings that he might be going about it the wrong way – and he’s doing it to distract himself from revenge, and also from the fact that he’s not so gung-ho about revenge now that Griffith looks human again. Imo. It doesn’t have to be as simple as revenge = bad, magical therapy = good, and looking closely at Guts’ motivations makes me wonder and hope that, like the Golden Age, a seemingly positive choice could have negative consequences, and the secret actual right choice is dealing with your many issues, Guts, instead of running off for a dream, or revenge, or to “force” someone’s sanity back.
@metalbutter that’s the going assumption but i have an extremely unlikely pipe dream that maybe she could sacrifice moonlight boy
it
would feel more symbolic of losing whatever romantic family potential
w/ guts there theoretically was, whereas sacrificing farnese just feels
like the only possible choice available and therefore not significant
enough on a narrative scale, since Guts can’t be sacrificed twice. plus
there’s this sequence of panels way back when:
i mean that’s kind of ominous right?
plus apostles sacrifice some weird shit sometimes, like eggman sacrificing “the world.” a ghost kid doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch after that.
god every damn time i think of that wyald scene i see red, ugh
like, guts pauses while fighting wyald to crack wise, sexualize casca and then yell at her to go away, and then afterwards when the fighting is over and done it’s casca getting teary over guts’ wounds, rather than guts showing any compassion or empathy at all.
like this is a narrative problem, casca doesn’t even get a reaction to her own assault there, and when judeau comforts her it’s while she’s crying over guts fighting wyald, not what happened to her, so it’s hard to hate guts for this when it’s more of a miura problem, but still. it’s so so so bad.
(funny enough the closest thing we get to acknowledgement of casca’s assault was griffith trying desperately to tear himself away from the men holding him to somehow help her as soon as wyald starts stripping her. so like, incidentally, there’s another point to throw out there when people start going off on their griffith is a sociopath arguments lol)
I don’t really have much to say about Charlotte tbh, nothing about her character really grabs me, but if anything comes to mind or she gets more meaty content in the story eventually, I’ll def write something. Though I don’t really think Casca’s reaction to trauma should be used as a benchmark for how strong anyone else is lol, because her reaction was v unrealistic and pretty much just Miura’s convenient way of getting her out of the way and explaining why she wasn’t around during the Black Swordsman arc despite being alive. I don’t think it means she’s suffered more than anyone else (she may have, but it’s not relevant), or that she’s emotionally or mentally weaker than anyone else.
Charlotte is pretty resilient though, totally agree.
Yeah I’m assuming we’re not far from seeing some revealing emotional NeoGriffith moments, after his interaction with Rickert, but we’ll see I guess. I have my doubts that it has anything to do with the magic baby, but again, we’ll see.
Though speaking of, one thing I can say is that I don’t think it will be a tantrum because things aren’t going his way. We’ve never seen that from human Griffith – when things get bad for him, he’s serene about it. He deals with people plotting against him easily, he uses something that could be very distressing (facing Gennon at the most important battle of the war) and turns it to his advantage, he faces Zodd with calm battle tactics and determination even when the odds of him succeeding are nil, when he’s captured after fucking Charlotte he reaches for his sword and then peacefully gives up when he remembers he’s unarmed, he smugly taunts the king after losing everything and being whipped, and the torturer even comments on how quiet and non-responsive he is during torture, at least during the first day or two.
The only circumstances we saw that made him lose control emotionally were sex with Gennon/guilt + self-loathing, and Guts-related stuff (including Femto failing to kill him and NeoGriffith’s heart going off).
So when NeoGriff does eventually show some emotion, my bets are on it being because of Guts.
fandom needs to give Casca more credit for her earnest, premeditated murder attempt here. Like Griffith’s was a split-second decision to make a move that had a risk of potentially killing Guts, while still aiming only to wound, and it’s taken as proof that he’s been evil all along. Casca’s straight up aiming to kill here, but no one takes her seriously.
Which is partly Miura’s fault for not taking Casca seriously as a threat to Guts, but the intent is here I’m js and I like it because it’s dark and fucked up and shows Casca’s very own interesting inner darkness. I don’t want to just condemn her for it bc I’m into Casca’s violent rage, but I hate how she gets infantalized both by Guts not even bothering to draw his sword and by fandom treating this less like a murder attempt and more like a cute hissy fit.
She went full force on him taking out all her anger on him because she EXPECTED him to dodge her attacks, and also EXPECTED not to hurt him as a result. And that’s also why she was so shook when she did:
I mean: If she REALLY had the SERIOUS intention to kill him she wouldn’t have cared about him getting hurt like this. I think she intended to use Guts more as a punching bag to let out her frustration on (Remember, she prevented Guts from drawing his sword)
She did hate him and the situation with the hawks made her frustration even worse. And part of that hate was because she cared so much about both Griffith and Guts.
She’s also the third best fighter in the Hawks who we’re told can take on ten men at a time. We’re certainly not shown it here, which is one of my issues with this scene, but her threat to Guts should be more significant and dangerous than any other non-monstrous threat, aside from Griffith and Boscogne.
Yes, she was shocked when she did stab him, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was actively trying to and from what we’re told about her skills she had a decent shot at it.
Guts’ running commentary tells us “she’s serious,” she’s really trying to kill him, so Guts at least, based on her fighting style, believes she’s aiming to kill, and I see no reason to doubt him. Her shock and the way she immediately ends the assault when she lands a hit tells us that obviously she’s not committed to killing Guts and she was just irrationally lashing out in anger, and it throws some freezing water on her rage, but nothing about her attack to that point was half-hearted or feigned.
And from what I could tell she didn’t prevent him from drawing his sword at all – she tells him to draw his sword twice, she aimed at his neck, and he barely deflected with his blade still partly in its hilt. He eventually does draw his sword to defend himself.
I’m not saying she’s evil lol, especially in the world of Berserk mercenaries where friends fighting each other seems to be par for the course, based on Judeau’s reaction to Guts and Griffith’s fight and also Casca’s knife-throwing when they’re in the cave being treated as comedy and not drama, but it’s still a very dark, very fucked up outlet for her rage that shocks and does endanger Guts, and it’s a disservice to Casca’s character that it’s not given any weight on either a narrative or a fan reaction level, imo.
So anyway I stand by semi-seriously describing it as a premeditated murder attempt even if she didn’t follow through, because Casca’s hardcore and her skills shouldn’t be dismissed, despite Miura’s writing often doing just that. It’s not a cold “I want you to die,” it’s an emotional “I am going to fucking kill you,” but it’s also not spur of the moment since she lead Guts to this clearing specifically to hack at him with a sword.
Also I’m not trying to say she hates Guts or anything? My point is only that her anger manifests in legit trying to kill people, and I love that as a dark and intense character note, but it’s unfortunately downplayed and brushed off which disappoints me.
“the only woman guts ever loved” as if guts has ever come within breathing room of any other woman since the only one he knows personally is on account of her being his coworker and thus forced to share space with his smelly b*tch ass….
lmao true
also luv that w/ het ships ppl can declare shit like this with utter conviction despite guts never speaking or thinking of casca in terms of love, and despite the writer saying that casca and guts hooked up for extra eclipse drama and casca’s only around now so guts can keep being bitter.
but anything gay? clearly fake and just reaching
so it’s been stated that casca didn’t die literally to fuel guts angst (which, let’s leave aside how disgusting THAT is for a second) and bitterness, which leads me to believe that basically
without casca there as a very heavy reminder
guts would have 100% just forgiven griffith pretty much asap after seeing him again? ha
lmao right?
I mean yeah if Casca died with the rest of the Band during the Eclipse then sure Guts absolutely 100% would forgive Griffith/Femto immediately because it’s pretty clear that he never blamed him for sacrificing everyone in the first place lol. He was sad, sure, but he wasn’t angry about Griffith choosing to make the sacrifice. If anything he’d’ve blamed himself. But if say Casca died during the Conviction Arc, should we assume Guts would’ve gone ‘ok w/e fuck it idc anymore’ and moved on?
Actually yk what considering his “forgot my urge to kill” moment and how sad he was about NeoGriff ditching him it’s actually not that hard of a sell.
But damn either way I wish Miura would do something with Casca’s character other than continue making her an accessory to Guts’ desire for revenge.
I spend months talking about this damn manga and Griffith and his need for validation and self loathing etc etc and I only just fucking noticed that Casca doesn’t actually say no here. She starts to say “no” automatically, then cuts herself off and asks what he was doing with Gennon. Like damn that’s actually a pretty clear “yes.”
Not that I think Casca meant it that way ofc, her heart’s in the right place and she’s a kid who’s totally out of her depth, but still, ouch. That’s like, “no! wait were you sleeping with him? bc actually my answer is dependant on your answer to that question.”
Like add this to the list of reasons Griffith sucks at opening up to people.
character: hate them | don’t really care | like them | LOVE them | THEY ARE MY PRECIOUS
ship with: FARNESE!
brotp: tbh all the Hawks, I love what we see of her relationship to the Band in general. I love the theoretical concept of her being bffs with Guts instead of hooking up with him and just removing all sex from their relationship, but in canon as is, nah get them far away from each other.
general opinions: I love her, I think she had a ton of potential as an interesting character that unfortunately we only ever got to see brief glimpses of, I really really wish the story was kinder to her, and I want her to raise hell when she gets her mind back.
Hey there! I’m always happy to get asks and I’m so glad you enjoy the blog :”)
** rape mentions below, obviously.
I think what you’re proposing is a really safe guess as for what the phallic monsters are supposed to represent. Her rape by Femto is definitely supposed to be the “capstone” to what lead to her regression, and so the phallic monsters being a reference to that experience is more than likely. However, I personally (am hoping, really) that it’s not such a narrow reason. There’s the obvious fact that she was raped by multiple apostles before Femto during the Eclipse, but there’s also how being treated as a sexual object by men has resulted in her molestation throughout her entire character arc.
I tried to compile a list of men who have tried/succeeded in assaulting her throughout Berserk off the top of my head, but I think I’m missing too many instances to even post it, LOL. I’d try to go through and do a definitive count, but that’s… so depressing. I don’t think I need to explicitly count and name every man to harm Casca for anyone who’s read Berserk to understand that Casca has endured endless abuse at their hands. Men have regularly viewed Casca as a sexual object, at whether she be young or old, mentally “there” or not, shitty background characters, villains, and protagonist alike. While the Eclipse is the most likely and perhaps largest contributor to these phallic visions that haunt her subconscious, it would be unfair to call that her only instance of major trauma. GOD would I love for a callback to wow, that one time when regressed!Casca killed three men who tried to assault her, just to be held down and touched (cough and bit cough) against her will by Guts? Her expressions once he “comes out of it” are genuinely heartbreaking.
Casca has been through a LOT of bullshit at the hands of specifically men* and so I really hope the dick monsters are representing that as a whole (and that said “coverage” is a topic broached in upcoming chapters). We’ll see whether or not Miura will take that route, or act like it never happened like he did with Guts’s CSA trauma post-Eclipse.
Disclaimer because admin isn’t cis: yeah a dick doesn’t determine manhood but I don’t expect anything woke from Berserk when we can’t even get basic feminism, so I’m leaving it on the assumption that all of the individuals depicted to have assaulted Casca thus far are cis men and have dicks
I’m not the most eloquent writer without half a dozen drafts first, so I’d like to direct this ask at @bthump as well, in case she has a different take or any extra input! ❤
I 100% agree and tbh this is probably a better, more thoughtful response than I would’ve given. Casca’s entire narrative existence is defined by rape, rape attempts, and rape threats, and honestly it’s kind of fucked up how utterly fitting the damn subconscious dick monsters are.
I would be very glad if they represent not just Femto’s attack, and not just the apostles during the Eclipse, but the way her entire life revolves around sexual violence, from her first kill to her current mental state to her fear of Guts. I mean the dick monsters are a helluva crass way of showing it, but this is Berserk. The most I hope for is acknowledgement lol, to ask that it be treated with care and respect is way too high a bar to clear lol.
And at the very least Miura definitely knowingly used Casca as his commentary on misogyny and how hard it is to be a woman surrounded by rapey men, so I don’t think it’s unlikely that all her other experiences with assault will be taken into account. I thought some of those phallic monsters might’ve been purposefully based on Wyald, eg.
casca knowing what’s what
consider the following:
Until that day. The day you showed up.
vs
Until Guts overheard Griffith’s dream speech.
Casca had her place at Griffith side, nursing her crush on Griffith, then Guts showed up and took that place with much greater success than Casca had. Then Guts overheard the dream speech, decided to vacate his place and hand it back to Casca, which he does by encouraging Casca and Griffith to get together romantically.
And idk this is just a good parallel to illustrate some of that.
lol so this response is going to be kind of long because you made me want to talk about her story role and speculate a bit lol, so ty for sending this.
I think there’s a difference between having whatever Casca does when she gets her mind back further the relationship between Guts and Griffith, and having Casca function as solely a plot device for the sake of the Guts Griffith story.
By which I mean secondary characters should serve the central protagonist’s story, but they should do that while also having their own satisfying arcs that serve their own characters as well. So a well-written secondary character would have her own arc, her own issues, her own stuff to work through and her own reason and way of developing, and that could still shed light on the protagonist as a parallel, or foil, or simply by weaving their stories together and playing them off each other.
When Casca was an active character during the Golden Age, there were a lot of problems I had with her writing, but she did have her own story. It was a story about being obsessed with first one man and then another, and how much it sucks to be a woman surrounded by attempted rapists, and having emotional breakdowns, etc, so like, not a great story, but she had her own issues, she made mistakes based on those issues, she changed based on her experiences.
Eg when she and Guts slept together they were both using the other as a substitute for Griffith, so at least it wasn’t just Guts using Casca, they were using each other. (And I don’t mean using in a cruel way, just in a there’s-other-stuff-going-on-for-both-of-them-than-just-wanting-each-other kind of way.) That scene didn’t only further Guts’ internal story, it also furthered Casca’s. Ofc Guts’ story was furthered by working thru trauma and starting to recognize past mistakes while Casca’s was furthered by switching which dude she’s obsessed with, so like, still a shitty story for her, but c’est la berserk.
So yeah I don’t think her writing was that great during the Golden Age, but it cleared the bare minimum bar of giving her her own motivation and character arc at least, even though her own story was pretty weak compared her more blatant, main function of serving the relationship between Guts and Griffith.
Then after the Eclipse she became a complete plot device with absolutely no story of her own, only existing for Guts to play off of and project onto.
So I guess what I think is most likely to happen is that when Casca gets her mind back, she’s going to have her own motivations and goals again. She’s going to do something active, based on what she wants. But whatever it is she does is also going to further Guts and Griffith’s story, and lbr it’s still going to revolve around her relationships with the men. So hopefully she won’t be so much just a plot device, and her own choices, goals, actions, etc might even be stronger and more central to the plot than they were during the Golden Age, but Guts is still the protagonist so Casca’s story is sitll going to further his story and his relationship with Griffith.
My guess, based on where she was when she was traumatized to insanity, and where the story has gone since then, and where I think (hope lbr) the story goes, is that she’ll come back and be similar to where Guts was right after the Eclipse. In the last 200 or so chapters Guts grew, he worked at refocusing on his own emotional growth rather than revenge, he made friends, he chilled out, he’s in a much better place mentally than he was during the Black Swordsman arc.
But the story is still about the dark places trauma and desire for revenge take you. I think it would be interesting to shift the revenge theme to Casca. It would kick the plot into gear and make things happen because Casca would have a goal, this way we could bring Guts and Griffith’s narratives back together without having Guts’ development backslide into revenge obsession again, and it would make Casca an interesting foil to Guts – if she’s at the place he managed to work past, she’d be like a reflection of himself at his worst. Now Casca would be able to drive the plot, her goals would be the ones furthering the story, and Guts’ narrative would shift in focus from his own goals (revenge, fixing Casca) to reacting to Casca’s actions.
She would still serve the main story about Guts and Griffith by being the catalyst that brings them back together, by being a dark mirror to Guts, quite possibly by embodying the dark sexual undertone to revenge in a more blatant way than Guts did (bc lbr she’s always been the one to illuminate Guts’ desires by virtue of being a woman and making them hetero), and maybe by forcing Guts into making a choice between helping her and trying to stop her (either for her own sake or because he’s still ambivalent about killing Griffith or maybe both). But now she’d be serving the story by working towards her own goals based on her own experiences and her character, rather than by being a passive mindless object for Guts to interact with.
“What will she do if she does get her sanity back?” The fact that NeoGriffith instinctively saving her demonstrates a very strong disadvantage against her. The fact that the main characters all get to kill their own rapists/attempted rapists/abusers/etc. The way Guts decided he didn’t really have the right to avenge his comrades after abandoning the Band but you know who didn’t abandon the Band? The way revenge in Berserk isn’t always a bad thing, and it could be interesting to explore how it’s bad for Guts because he was basically using it as a form of self harm, but maybe for Casca it’s earned. The behelit which, if Casca is the one to use it, would open the door for more parallels between her and Griffith for Guts to play off of.
So I guess my overall answer to your question is that yeah, I think she’s still going to exist to further Guts’ story and relationship to Griffith, since that’s still the axel on which Berserk turns, but hopefully she’ll at least get to have some agency and motivation of her own while doing it, and if we’re really lucky her own internal story might be more important to the plot now than it was during the Golden Age.
But of course there’s always a horrifying chance that she’ll wake up and just be Guts’ love interest/narrative reward for moving beyond revenge, continuing to exist purely as an accessory to Guts rather than as herself, while something else moves the plot forward, but yk, prayer circle that that doesn’t happen. And like others have speculated with dread, there’s even a chance that she’ll join Griffith and make Guts return to rage and revenge in the worst possible way. I think it’s a tiny chance, like I really don’t expect that to happen, but you never know
(also the whole revenge speculation is just my preference bc i want casca to have the chance to get angry about what happened to her, and it seems plausible, but there are probably other routes for her story to go that would bring back her agency and have her affect the plot in satisfying ways.)
like lbr here the reason guts and casca hated each other for 3 years is they were fighting for griffith’s attention
they finally warm up to each other only when guts figures he lost and decides to leave, so he’s able to be magnanimous and throw casca at him
like casca is so obviously a substitution for himself while guts is doing his weird matchmaker thing. hey casca you have a dream, you’re worthy of griffith, so you should ask him to dance.
guts may not have consciously realized it like casca did, but they were such romantic rivals, that’s their dynamic
hell they hook up after casca goes over point by point the ways griffith isn’t available: first guts, but then princess charlotte, then in a dungeon, now may not even be alive. and as soon as griffith becomes maybe possibly available after all, the jealous rivalry starts mounting again.
like i’ve talked about how casca telling guts to leave in requiem of the wind is bc she’s prioritizing his dream now and telling him to fulfill it, and i think that’s still the case buuuuuuut i can definitely see an interpretation where she tells guts to leave because now charlotte’s out of the picture, now griffith is dependant, now she can give back to griffith and comfort him the way she always wanted to and never could, and she doesn’t want guts to get in the way.
that’s kind of what the scene between her and griffith in the wagon is about rly, come to think of it. afterwards she cries about how weak he is and how there’s no way she can leave him like that, and before she muses about how his strong hands used to comfort her but they’re so small in actuality. whatever griffith’s motivations for literally flinging himself at her, it’s casca’s reaction that’s most important, casca putting her hand on his shoulder and realizing he needs her.
say she tells herself and guts that he needs to leave because his
dream is just So Important but deep down it’s bc she knows they’re still
rivals, the three of them together would get fucked up and destructive real quick, and if she can’t leave griffith and try to move on with guts then she wants to be the one to stay with him.
like it’s not a flattering interpretation for casca but i don’t want flattering interpretations for casca, i like flaws and selfishness etc in my female characters, especially as opposed to casca being a stupid selfless martyr for guts’ dream bc she slept with him so now that’s what she cares about.
In this post I’m going to discuss how Casca’s narrative role as a love interest overlaps with her narrative role as a substitute for Griffith, how those roles ultimately serve the main story that is the love/hate relationship between Guts and Griffith, and how Miura utilizes her as an emotional/sexual conduit between the two while also conveniently no-homoing them. Plus some additional straightforward stuff on Guts and his crush on Griffith here and there.
Advance warning: this is long. Looooooong. Also be warned that I do touch on the hound and the Eclipse, but only in one section of this post.
I also want to make clear upfront that I love Casca but I dislike the Guts/Casca romance subplot, for many reasons including my general dislike of most het, Guts’ awful treatment of her, and the sense I get that she’s been inserted as a buffer between Guts and Griffith, but mostly because I think the romance was added almost entirely to set up the destruction of Casca as a character for the sake of Guts’ manpain.
So yeah going in you should be aware that this is Guts/Casca negative. I don’t consider their romantic feelings for each other a valuable part of Berserk, and I spend a lot of time calling the legitimacy of those feelings into question. If that sounds like it’ll piss you off but you still want more Guts/Griffith content, you can totally just skip to part 4 without missing any necessary information for that part.
Ok that said, let’s get into it.
We’ll go back to the Golden Age eventually but I’m going to jump ahead first and start at chapter 130, during Guts’ night of self-reflection after he returns to Godo’s cave and finds Casca missing.
Guts is basically having an internal debate about whether or not his revenge rampage was worth abandoning Casca. He eventually emphatically concludes that it was in fact not worth it and he fucked right up when he draws this connection:
Again again again again. I’m starting here because it’s one of the most clear and straightforward examples of Guts viewing Casca as a replacement for Griffith. The connection is drawn explicitly – he considers abandoning Casca to be the equivalent of abandoning Griffith and drawing that parallel is what motivates him to save her.
But despite wanting to start atoning for past mistakes, he still intends to abandon her in a cave again after he gets her back.
“Actually, I only half mean it.”
Cue this #iconic page:
Now I talk about this page all the damn time because of how off the charts gay it is, but more importantly right now is that it draws a strong contrast between Casca and Griffith. It begins with “Just as I got her back… no, in the middle of swinging my sword to get her back…”
In the middle of getting her back… he… saw him. By framing Griffith’s appearance as an interruption that rips his attention away from rescuing Casca, Guts expresses the feeling that he’s torn between them. And of course he is, we see this throughout the rest of the manga, in his internal struggle not to toss Casca aside (or worse) and run after Griffith to, “give him… a heap of raw iron.”
We also see this inner conflict during NeoGriffith’s appearance when this happens:
But as of right now, Griffith has won the fight for Guts’ attention.
Guts’ half truth, as far as I can tell, is that he’s going to help make the damn cave a little homier and then take off again after Griffith.
As we saw in chapter 130 he decided to dedicate himself to getting Casca back, and we can assume that he fully intended to give up his revenge quest at that point. Godo tore him a new one over abandoning her to fight monsters, Guts realized he’s been being a dick, and he’s figured that maybe staying and helping take care of Casca is a better way of dealing with his issues than going back on a rampage, especially since last time he saw Femto he couldn’t even come close to touching him.
But then Skull Knight tells him the Godhand are going to be around, there’s going to be another version of the Eclipse, and we see Guts conflicted again:
Anyway Isidro ultimately saves Casca, she and Guts are reunited, and Griffith appears. Maybe Guts’ original plan was to stay with Casca and forget revenge, but now Griffith is reachable, he’s on the same plane of existence, and to top it all off, he’s hot again!
And no I’m not joking, I absolutely think that Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith is, for the first time since Promrose Hall, being clearly visually conveyed again. I already posted that iconic page in which Guts pictures Griffith’s ass and gets distracted from revenge, but there’s more where that came from.
Griffith’s sexiness is genuinely an important plot and thematic point lol, but it’s Guts eyes we’re shown that through, and holy shit does his gaze get a lot of attention in this scene. And why? Because Griffith’s reachable again. When he’s monstrous and demonic he’s out of reach on a whole nother plane of existence and shown as distant and untouchable:
When he’s incarnated as a physical being again he’s said to be “the desired,” he’s so beautiful no one can shut up about it, and imo Guts’ temptation to pursue him now that he’s “where [his] sword can reach,” is tied to the sexual temptation on display here.
Basically, while he’s certainly not intending to pursue Griffith so he can literally fuck him, there are blatant sexual undertones to his desire for revenge that ramp up hard and fast real soon, and they start with Griffith’s sexy as fuck rebirth.
And to elaborate on how the depiction of Griffith is a huge contrast here to the depiction of Casca:
Casca is shown at her least sexualized. She’s wrapped in a shapeless cloak and mirroring Erika, depicted as utterly childlike.
And this is Griffith:
Griffith is the temptation, he’s the one Guts wants to pursue, and Casca is the responsibility, and this is shown loud and clear through Griffith’s intense desirability and Guts’ enthrallment at the sight of him vs Casca’s desexualized childishness.
As for the Hill of Swords reunion
“More like someone out of a fairytale.”
Not overly relevant but it’s a fun detail that “He was so pretty” is on Guts’ face while “someone out of a fairytale” is on Griffith’s image.
That sound – like Griffith’s apparent acknowledgement, at long last, is a physical blow. Love it.
But of course then Griffith’s like, I came to see you to test my capacity for emotion, and it looks like this whole emotionless demon thing was a success. And this is Guts’ reaction – not rage, or at least, not solely rage, but so much hurt too:
Look at those sad eyebrows man. This scene thoroughly shows us how emotionally conflicted and confused Guts is. He’s angry, he’s hurt, he’s full of longing both for revenge and for “the way he he used to be,” and after everything he still wants acknowledgement, he still wants Griffith to look at him.
“I’ll not betray my dream. That is all.”
And it’s now that Guts finally attacks. So far he’s let Rickert hold him back, then shoved him away only to scream “you don’t feel anything?!” instead of rushing him. But when NeoGriff tells Guts in no uncertain terms that his dream is not only more important, but his sole priority, Guts snaps.
I do think it’s really easy to read this scene as Guts looking for a hint that Griffith still cares about him, along with the hope that he feels regret for what he’s done. Guts had a lot of misconceptions about Griffith’s feelings, but by the time of the Eclipse he’d realized that Griffith loved him – he’d left to seek something (love and respect and affection, friendship and equality) he already had and, in leaving, lost it.
Scroll back up to that first picture I posted, he says it right there: “Did I lose something before I even noticed it again?! Without even realizing I’d thrown it from the palm of my hand!” There’s a small part of him that was still hoping, now that Griffith is un-demonized, that his heart and his love had returned with his human body, that it’s not lost forever. But in declaring that he’s free, NeoGriffith shoots that hope down.
Anyway big fight, cave collapses, Griffith’s heart starts doing shit unbeknownst to Guts, he mysteriously saves Casca and takes off, and Guts
says he won’t abandon Casca again and decides to escort her to Elfhelm, with his dickish reluctance handily pointed out by Decent Person Puck lol.
Now look at this shit:
“Weren’t those Godo’s parting words?” Says Guts to Rickert to convince him to stay with Erika.
“You should have known. This is the man I am.”
Don’t abandon what you can’t replace. He finally learned that lesson when he compared abandoning Casca to abandoning Griffith. He frames his choice to stay with Casca as making up for it. Guts once deserted Griffith, now Griffith has deserted him, so he’s promising not to desert Casca. Given that Guts’ mind is solely on deserting and being deserted by Griffith, as opposed to that time when he left Casca in a cave for two years and she wandered off, “I won’t desert you anymore. This time… I won’t lose you,” is given a double meaning of applying to Casca while also referencing losing Griffith.
But what’s with that interlude up there of Guts remembering Griffith saving Casca? The man Guts “knows” NeoGriffith is, the man who dgaf about anything except his dream, isn’t the man who would randomly decide to save Casca from falling rocks. Guts is shown thinking about that apparent contradiction immediately before “I won’t leave you behind. I won’t… desert you anymore.”
Taken all together, to me this scene comes across as so utterly Griffith centric that it makes Casca feel like an afterthought, conveniently there so Guts can take some form of action in response to his extremely Griffith-centred emotions.
Guts charlie brown walks away because Griffith “deserted” him. Guts draws a comparison between abandoning Griffith and abandoning Casca, and being abandoned by NeoGriffith and refusing to abandon Casca. Guts remembers NeoGriffith saying he knows what kind of man he is right before recalling him saving Casca.
Then he declares he won’t desert her again – and I have to wonder if part of what gives him the willpower to take a break from his revenge quest despite NeoGriffith residing so temptingly in his plane of existence now is the ambiguity of NeoGriffith’s actions here, casting “the kind of man” he is now into doubt and deflating Guts’ rage boner the same way he says seeing NeoGriffith looking “so human… the way he used to be” makes him forget his “urge to kill.” It hardly seems like a stretch given how much of Guts’ decision here is explicitly shown to be about Griffith.
So far, post-Eclipse, Casca’s been treated as a prop for Guts’ internal conflict between revenge and not being a dick – a symbol of his lingering humanity. She exists to be put into peril so Guts can decide to save her and then waver between her and Griffith. She’s the poster girl for failing to pass the sexy lamp test. It’s real depressing, and it’s about to get worse.
Enter Beast of Darkness.
Now we’re at the really bad shit, but also the actual most explicit verbal suggestion of Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith, so it’s impossible to skip in a post on the topic. Plus there’s no point pretending that Casca isn’t done incredibly dirty by both the narrative and Guts.
It’s important to understand that the Hound is Guts. It’s not an evil malicious spirit trying to manipulate and possess Guts (which I have seen suggested before), it’s simply Guts’ dark emotions given substance. Just on the off chance this statement requires support for you, here’s a post on the subject. This scene is pretty much Guts arguing with his id.
And the way it’s framed with “dreams of him?” “let’s go to him” coming first on the image of an eager, excited puppy, followed by the teeth and “heap of raw iron” feels so deliberate to me. Guts wants violent revenge but it’s a feeling complicated by the fact that he loved Griffith, that he once strove to be his equal, to be considered his friend, and now he strives to kill him.
Like Guts facing Femto in the Black Swordsman arc, like Guts pleading for a shred of regret from NeoGriffith, there’s still an element of Guts wanting Griffith’s acknowledgement here.
More direct comparisons between Casca and Griffith and how Guts feels about them. Who’s more precious, your love interest or your arch nemesis?
And I’m not here to say that Guts doesn’t care for Casca and only cares about Griffith. As this scene shows, he’s torn between them, but he’s chosen Casca now, and he’s trying to get his doubts and his rage and his suppressed attraction to Griffith that’s now coming to the surface, coloured by hate, to shut the fuck up. But these are his own doubts.
“The wound Griffith left, because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you?” Okay, certainly an eyebrow raising description here but all right, this is about Guts’ motivation to kill Griffith. The Hound is suggesting he values Casca only as fuel for his rage. Which certainly seems like a relevant suggestion after Guts’ “I’d forgotten my urge to kill. And that… can’t be.” His rage needs fuel. So while that’s surely not all there is to his feelings for Casca, the Hound isn’t making shit up. Again, this is essentially Guts internally debating what his true motivations are.
Longing. Hell of a word choice. Granted I can’t double check the translation with others because I’m incapable of tracking down old raws (tho I did a cursory search on skullknight.net to see if anyone had criticized the translation of this scene and didn’t find anything) but this is such a boldly romanticized choice of phrasing that I feel it’s safe to assume the undertones are there in the original Japanese. You don’t accidentally describe someone’s urge to kill a dude as “longing” for him. That’s a blatantly deliberate double entendre.
And on top of that it fits right in with the Hound’s first eager, excited words to Guts in this scene. Again, it’s an illustration that Guts’ vengeful feelings are complex, and intertwined with his original feelings for Griffith.
And then the Hound tells Guts to rape Casca so he can get closer to Griffith and I throw up my hands.
There’s so much innuendo and homoeroticism in the lead up to this (including earlier, w/ Griffith’s sexy rebirth scene and the reunion on the Hill of Swords, ft Guts thinking about Griffith’s ass), and then this scene just doubles down as hard as possible. “Let’s give him… a heap of raw iron,” “because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you,” “she’s a sacrifice so you can continue longing for Griffith,” “you’ll get closer and closer to Griffith.”
The innuendo in this scene makes it one of the most homoerotic scenes in the manga.
Like, tl;dr Guts’ vengeful pursuit of Griffith is tied so thoroughly to sex in this
nightmare that tbh I have a hard time calling this subtext.
And while it is absolutely homophobic for one of the gayest scenes in the manga to basically tie Guts’ desire for Griffith to his desire for revenge and a suggestion to rape and kill Casca, it’s also worth noting that this isn’t exactly Guts’ desire for revenge being given a dark sexual element.
This is the Beast of Darkness using Guts’ pre-existing desire for Griffith to try to tempt him into sticking a sword in him. Still fucked up, obviously, but it’s at least deeper and more interesting than the alternative.
The earlier parallels I described, Guts comparing leaving Griffith and leaving Casca, etc, draw an emotional connection between Guts and Griffith through Casca as, essentially, a bridge. Guts is assuaging his desire to go back and fix his mistakes by replacing Griffith with Casca and refusing to leave her. Casca has become an outlet for Guts’ feelings about missed opportunities with Griffith.
This chapter draws a very direct sexual connection between Guts and Griffith through Casca as a bridge. By raping the woman Femto raped, Guts can get closer to him.
And it is, of course, not the first time the manga has done this. Femto’s unwavering stare into Guts’ eye(s) during the Eclipse rape scene isn’t subtle, though I don’t intend to go into it in detail as this is about Guts’ sexual desire, not Griffith/Femto’s. I feel like the stare (the fucking stare omg) speaks for itself.
I mention this only to make the point that there’s an established precedent for Casca bearing the brunt of these dudes’ repressed feelings for each other, whether it’s genuinely intended to be interpreted as repressed sexual desire or whether it’s meant to be platonic spite/longing to get closer and closer to Griffith no homo. It’s not fair, it’s bad writing on several levels, it’s both misogynist and homophobic, but there you go.
Ultimately my main takeaway here is that Berserk would be about 500x less fucked up and offensive if Guts and Griffith just cut out the middlewoman and fucked each other.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Let’s go back to the Golden Age.
So far I’ve done my best to show that, post-Eclipse, Guts’ relationship with Casca largely revolves around his feelings for Griffith, both regretful and vengeful, and the fucked-up sexual component of his relationship with her also relates to the sexual component of his relationship with Griffith. So what about pre-Eclipse? Does the same principle hold true then, back when Casca was an actual character and not just a plot device and projection screen for Guts?
And I would argue that it does. It’s less in-your-face about it, but tbh not by a whole lot.
Casca and Guts start off as romantic rivals for Griffith’s affection. Only Casca is aware of this, since Guts’ attraction to Griffith is subconscious and repressed imo, but that’s their early dynamic. Their first emotionally intimate scene together, when they finally stop hating each other and start to bond as friends, is when Casca tells Guts her backstory, which happens to be almost entirely about Griffith.
The Casca chapters end with Casca crying about Griffith having fallen in love with Guts and not her (”Why… why did it have to be you?”), but all Guts manages to get out of Casca’s story is that she’s into Griffith, so after he decides to leave he starts trying to be a good bro and set them up. Finally, right before Guts leaves, Judeau introduces him to the concept of hooking up with Casca.
During the course of this conversation Guts does a kind of 180:
to
“The one who has her eye… is Griffith. That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this.”
This is presented like part of Guts’ motivation for becoming Griffith’s equal is to be worthy of Casca, but we’ve seen his thought process for wanting to be Griffith’s equal, and Casca has never figured into it. He’d completely written her off before this chat with Judeau, as we see at the start, and he certainly never seemed to be consciously aware of the possibility of getting with her.
He’s been trying to set her up with Griffith for several chapters – pushing her into his arms, mentioning her dress to him, suggesting she ask him to dance, carrying her down to see him after Doldrey, saying “good luck with Griffith,” to her as he heads out, and now telling Judeau he expects them to get together.
There are three possible explanations for this behaviour:
1. Guts just wants to be a good bro and help his friends be happy together. 2. Guts is sublimating his unconscious desire for Casca into trying to hook her up with Griffith. 3. Guts is sublimating his unconscious desire for Griffith into trying to hook him up with Casca.
I think maybe Miura wants us to think it’s #2. Hence Guts’ awkward sweatdrop when Judeau brings her up, hence Guts complimenting her dress before mentioning it to Griffith, hence Guts carrying her down to him bridal style after Doldrey, hence Guts swiveling from “Less a woman I see her as… a comrade,” to “That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this,” within seconds.
Yk, he’s subconsciously attracted to her now and acts on that attraction by trying to hook her up with Griffith to make her happy, but once Judeau tells him that’s not an option, he can admit that he’s attracted to her.
(And, just to throw something out there, once we establish that Berserk has subtextual, repressed sexual desire in this love triangle it only adds more validation to the other combinations. Even if we are genuinely meant to read Guts as unknowingly attracted to Casca, it puts unknowing attraction on the table. Who else might he be unknowingly attracted to? Casca also apparently took some time to recognize her feelings for Griffith as potentially romantic. Lots of subconscious desire wrapped up in this love triangle, I’m js. But lol I digress.)
That said, I’m here to argue that, whatever Miura’s intentions may be (and hell they may be exactly this), it comes across as option #3.
I’ve already gone through the first part of the Golden Age to highlight how Guts looks at him and how visuals suggest attraction. After Promrose, that fades away because Guts no longer views Griffith as reachable, rather, he puts him on a pedestal. Enter Casca, right at the point where Guts is deciding what to do with the “fact” that Griffith doesn’t give a fuck about him.
Suddenly he gets invested in setting Griffith up with Casca, who he views as more worthy of Griffith because she has a dream (be Griffith’s sword) and he doesn’t.
This is when Guts starts pushing them together. He’s encouraging Casca to take his place at Griffith’s side, whether he realizes the implications of that or not – at the very least he knows that Casca believes Griffith feels things for him she wishes he felt for her, even if Guts doesn’t believe that Griffith truly values him.
“Until that day. The day you showed up…”
What’s interesting to me is that Guts recognizes that Casca wants to fuck Griffith lmao. He’s hooking them up romantically, even though Casca never directly says she’s in love with Griffith, and only alludes to her feelings in terms of being pissed off at Guts for stealing Griffith away from her side.
Guts doesn’t believe he himself is close to Griffith after overhearing the Promrose speech, but he seems to realize that Casca is jealous of him, manages to interpret that (correctly) as Casca wanting to bone Griffith, and yet still doesn’t realize that Griffith’s feelings for him may be a lot more significant than he thinks. Feels like repression at work to me.
Guts wants Casca to take his perceived place at Griffith’s side, except Casca’s theoretically able to do so romantically bc she’s a woman, so there’s plenty of heteronormativity at work too, though whether that’s coming from Miura or Guts I can’t say.
So yeah after Judeau explains the plot of Berserk to him and keeps nudging him towards Casca, Guts agrees that maybe he could hook up with her… but only if he becomes Griffith’s equal first.
So the other way of looking at this is that, rather than suddenly changing Guts’ entire motivation out of nowhere from “become Griffith’s equal to be his friend” to “become Griffith’s equal to get with Casca,” and generally being bizarrely terrible writing, this instead neatly situates a future relationship with Casca, in which she sees him as just as good for her as Griffith, as proof that he’s on the road to achieving his goal of becoming Griffith’s equal.
Which holds true later on – Guts and Casca’s relationship is not an endgame for Guts, it’s not his goal, it’s another step. He still intends to go back out and keep pursuing his own dream. He’s still motivated by wanting to be Griffith’s equal.
So yeah, Judeau’s like, whatever, I tried, Guts ducks out, and shit proceeds to go down.
Fast forward a year.
Guts comes back. Casca, interestingly, has taken over Griffith’s most notable narrative role as leader of the Hawks. Everyone sits down around the campfire.
Rickert tries to explain things to Guts:
Look what Judeau does! He’s telling Rickert to shut up.
Judeau is… weirdly invested in Guts and Casca getting together. Setting them up is largely his motivation in the latter half of the Golden Age, as far as I can tell.
After this moment he changes the subject to:
Subtle, Judeau.
I think it’s telling that Guts never comes up with the idea of hooking up with Casca on his own. He’s led to it by resident shipper on board Judeau, every time. The same dude trying to avoid any mention of Griffith’s feelings for Guts now. Why? Because he wants Guts and Casca to leave together after they rescue Griffith, and he has a feeling Guts won’t want to if he figures out how Griffith actually feels about him.
Hey here’s something interesting about this scene:
This is when Guts first starts trying to fix his mistakes by substituting Casca for Griffith, imo.
Casca attacks him while screaming that he ruined Griffith by leaving. As the point finally hits home, so does the point of Casca’s sword as Guts, shocked, lets her stab him.
Before Guts can really draw a useful conclusion from Casca’s diatribe, she offers a distraction from the subject at hand by trying to kill herself while bequeathing Griffith to him.
“I couldn’t be a woman. Or something invaluable. To keep on protecting the almost broken dream of someone who might not even be alive…“
Guts didn’t save the last Hawk leader who had a self destructive breakdown after dueling him.
Presented with another person who seems to need him, who is desperate and lost and needs comfort, this time he does something.
And what really makes me believe this is actually, for real the correct reading of this scene – that, to Guts, Casca is a substitution for Griffith here – is that Casca is doing the exact. Same. Thing.
Griffith is (seemingly) unreachable, (seemingly) emotionally and romantically unavailable, but Guts and Casca aren’t.
And they kiss for the first time right after Casca tells Guts how Griffith felt about him, right after Guts lets Casca stab him because of it, right after the memory of Griffith kneeling in the snow, and the beginnings of
the realization that by leaving he lost what he set out to earn, hit him, right after Casca tells him that Griffith is his responsibility now. It’s hard not to take that as Guts using Casca as a substitution for Griffith, giving her what he’s now very slowly beginning to realize he should’ve given Griffith.
Guts and Casca getting together here is two people obsessed with the same person trying to offer the other what they couldn’t offer him: comfort. And sex.
Once again a scene that looks like it’s going to be about Casca and
Guts, that should be if this was a typical romance, turns out to revolve
around Griffith.
And on the subject of Guts leaving Griffith in the snow instead of
kneeling down and kissing him the way he responds to Casca much later, how about Griffith going out and getting
self-destructively laid while thinking about Guts after the duel?
Thematically there’s a very well-defined empty space where Griffith and
Guts connecting romantically would’ve fit, is what I’m saying, but they
didn’t. They both sought out other sexual connections to compensate for the
loss of each other.
Finally, here’s the straightforward account of how Guts and Casca are feeling three days later with Griffith’s imminent return to their lives. Casca confesses to Guts that she’s still jealous of Charlotte, Guts gets pissy, but then thinks:
I hate that you’re still hung up on Griffith but I’d be a huge hypocrite if I got mad because I’m even more hung up on Griffith.
Which pretty much sums it up.
And I think I can stop there. There’s a lot more to say in the lead-in to the Eclipse about Guts’ intense feelings for Griffith, but when it comes to sexual attraction specifically, and how Casca figures into it, I think I’ll call it a day.
I hope I’ve made a decent case for Guts’ feelings for Casca, both positive and hugely fucked up, being largely built out of redirected feelings for Griffith. Whatever the reasons for this – actual authorial intent, intended redirection of Guts’s platonic bro feelings but adding sex bc Casca’s a woman so it’s obligatory without realizing how gay that looks, me totally reading into a half-assed het subplot created for the sake of more Eclipse drama, whatever – this is earnestly how Guts’ relationship with Casca reads to me.
In the final part I’m going to conclude this epic adventure in homoeroticism with what is essentially a “why I ship them,” going into why I think it makes perfect sense, from both a character and a thematic perspective, for Guts to be sexually attracted to Griffith. Stay tuned.
shout out to @mastermistressofdesire bc we’ve had a few conversations about this subject and some of your ideas really helped me coalesce these thoughts. Ty!
Guts: tbh… his tenacity – his
attitude that you have to see things through to the end, and how in most
stories this would be shown to be a virtue, but in Berserk while it is
often shown as admirable, it’s also one of his biggest flaws at times.
It’s there in touching moments, like when teenage Guts risks his life to
take a flower to a hill, and it’s also there when he vows revenge and
abandons Casca and Rickert to go off on a two-year monster hunting
spree. It’s there when he insists on getting Casca magically healed
despite Skull Knight’s warnings and his own musing that things could
turn out very bad if her sanity is forced back. It’s there when he
becomes obsessed with becoming Griffith’s equal, explicitly ignoring all
evidence that Griffith already cares for him. It’s there every time he
refuses to die.
The closest Guts came to abandoning a course
of action once he’d decided on it is when he switched from his “dream”
to realizing he wants to stay with Griffith, right before the Eclipse,
and that would’ve been the best thing Guts could’ve done, if he’d had
the chance. Switching from revenge to helping Casca is close too (and
pretty explicitly paralleled to leaving Griff vs returning and staying),
but he’s doing it with the thought in his head that it’s temporary
(”when this journey ends, I’ll…” [pictures Griffith]), and his
tenacity is still there in how he’s not letting doubts and warnings
deter him from fixing Casca, so it’s a bit of a double-edged sword.
Idk man I love Guts’ doggedness, both as a virtue and a flaw.
My
favourite Guts moment though, now that’s difficult. I’ll go with one of
the best early moments, during the Black Swordsman arc, for the sake of
making things easy. It’s my first favourite moment, at least:
Like
half his bones are broken, he couldn’t do more than crawl on his
stomach and beg for attention before this when faced with the object of
his revenge obsession, but he stands up and marches up the stairs with
his sword when Femto says he’s beneath his notice. I love him.
Griffith:
Griffith is one of my all-time favourite characters period so narrowing
it down to one thing is hard, but I think if I had to settle on one it
would be his emotional repression? The way he doesn’t realize he’s in
love with Guts until it’s too late, the way he refuses to acknowledge
his feelings of guilt and self-loathing, the way he comes so close to
getting more emotionally healthy and open with Guts at his side but then
Guts leaves without a word and everything falls to pieces, the way he
falls back on the fact that he “won” Guts in a duel and fights for him
again because he can’t articulate why he can’t stand the thought
of Guts leaving, the way he self-sabotages himself into a dungeon
because he’s so unfamiliar with his own emotions that he can’t deal with
his feelings after Guts leaves, etc.
Funnily enough, in contrast
to that, I think my favourite Griffith moment (lbr my favourite Berserk
moment) is probably his moment of greatest self-awareness:
But like the reason this monologue is so effective is because
he’s so emotionally repressed, and it took him a year of nothing but
torture and self reflection for him to recognize his feelings. It makes
this moment really, really shine.
Casca: I love that
she genuinely commands respect among the Hawks. It’s one of the few
really satisfying aspects of her character role and her treatment by
other characters to me – from Corkus getting scared and apologizing when
she threatens him, to Griffith giving her the most important job in his
capture Doldrey ploy, to the Hawks stepping back so she can take out
Adon herself and cheering her on, to being able to rally the Hawks as
their leader in the most panic-inducing circumstances, etc etc.
I think my all-time favourite Casca moment is this:
God she deserves this moment of glory.
Farnese: I love
her “you just have to become a storm yourself” thing. The way her
reaction to fear is to join the thing that frightens her and become the
frightening thing. I loved it when it lead to her doing terrible things
like burning people alive and I loved it when it lead to her doing great
things like joining Guts and learning to defend herself and Casca and
becoming a witch.
My favourite Farnese moment is a pretty obvious one but what can I say it’s so good:
Fighting
off a demon tiger taking out whole crowds with a swipe of its paw, with
a candlestick, at a fancy ball, man, how can you not love her?
Serpico:
I like the contrast between his chill and diplomatic
go-with-the-flow-ness vs how solid and immovable he is when it comes to
protecting the people he loves, and how what ties those contrasts
together is a willingness to be hurt for their sakes, from dueling
people to a draw to avoid feelings of resentment towards Farnese, to
standing between her and Berserker Guts.
My favourite Serpico moment is:
Putting
himself in danger while defusing a tense situation with that chill
diplomacy. And not even for Farnese, but for Guts this time.
tbh I love the way this fight is structured so that Casca’s appearance on the scene gives me chills
Like you’re with Boscogne as the audience, wondering what the fuck Griffith’s plan is and how he hopes to win a fight against 30,000 men or whatever. Throughout the first half of the fight you’re going, okay what the fuck is going on, how is Griffith gonna capture this fortress???
The main force regroups with their backs to the river to put their lives on the line in a straightforward fight against a hopeless number of enemies, and Griffith’s like, ok but if we don’t die we’ll win, and you’re like, ….? doesn’t seem like a gr8 plan man.
And then bam suddenly it’s revealed that Casca’s the hinge on which Griffith’s plan turns, as she leads her troops in a surprise infiltration, and idk basically the way it cuts from the hopeless battle to Casca making it work is just rly delightful to me.
yk I’ve been thinking about it and tbh I find Casca a surprisingly compelling character, and I think it’s because there’s like this tension to me between character traits she has that I absolutely love, and a narrative that utterly fails to utilize them and diminishes her at every turn
it engages my inherent obstinancy that makes me want to argue with a story lol, and I get this with a lot of characters who I like, but I feel are treated unfairly by the narrative, which makes me want to like them even more.
In Casca’s case it’s not that I feel like the narrative/author wants me to dislike her, but that he wants me to like her for the wrong reasons. I liked her when he wanted her to be disliked, and I disliked how he tried to make her likeable, basically lol. So I get invested in what I liked (leadership, petty cruelty, fighting skills, overinvestment in something, practicality, occasional stubborn stupidity, etc) often despite how it was narratively presented, and I de-emphasize the “likeable” bullshit (hey if casca had matured a few more years she’d grow more comfortable with herself and not be self conscious about being unfeminine; she’d realize quickly that guts is not a solution to her core problem if she had the chance; w/e she can beat ten men at once apparently so fuck miura if he’s only shown her at a disadvantage, it’s still true; etc)
And Casca has enough character depth imo to support different, better
interpretations than what the narrative was pushing and make it
worthwhile to explore other options, like, eg, Casca moving from
Griffith to Guts being an understandable and sympathetic character flaw
she could’ve overcome rather than a step in the right direction that the narrative wanted me to see it as.
Basically I don’t mind reading against the text if it’s more fun that way. It’s not something I’d base srs analysis or w/e off of, it’s more of a thing u base fanfiction on lol, and I’m aware when I’m doing it, but it definitely affects how much I can like a character.
AU where Guts never overheard Griffith’s speech to Charlotte, nothing went wrong, Griffith eventually married Charlotte and became king, managed the whole famine and plague situation competently and is beloved, started hooking up with Guts on the side, Casca became the highest-ranked general in Midland, Gaston’s got his shop, everyone’s living their best lives
And then Ganeshka and his unstoppable demon army shows up, and regular old human king Griffith doesn’t have apostles on his side
So Griffith tries to stop Ganeshka but it’s unquestionably hopeless ofc
Anyway this is ultimately a What If Griffith became king and fulfilled his dream all according to plan but 3 years later had to flee his kingdom (or get knocked out and hauled away over Guts’ shoulder depending on how reluctant he is) as it’s about to be taken over by a demon emperor kinda thing. Or maybe he chooses to flee because Guts is determined to stay and die with him if he stays. Because I like the idea of Griffith being forced to pick Guts’ life over dying for his dream.
Either way bam suddenly he’s back to where he was when he was 12 with a group of rag tag friends roaming the countryside trying to survive and he’s gotta deal with that.
This is an excellent concept.
I really love this. Also seeing as Griffith’s and Guts relationship in this version has Been allowed to run it’s natural course and I’d really like to see how that would play out. I actually think, since Griffith and Guts hooked up, Griffith sometimes wishes he could just run away from the kingly stuff once in a while to be with Guts.
What if he isn’t actually averse to running away after the initial clashes against Vanishes prove that it’s futile. But I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t actually. Maybe because the guilt for his soldiers hasn’t quite gone yet and he rationalises that he can’t surrender something so much blood had once been spilled for, PLUS since Guts’ is known for his “finish what you started” attitude- Griffith feels that Guts will not respect him anymore if he runs away.
Guts for his part, thinks Griffiths decision is non negotiable, so he’s just determined to save him from as much damage as he can. Guts refuses to come in the way of what Griffith wants. And he reasons that’s well, it’s always been in his nature to fight rather than flee. And if he has to die, nothing better than now, when he’s found somebody who looks at him and CARES.
PLUS since Guts’ is known for his “finish what you started” attitude-
Griffith feels that Guts will not respect him anymore if he runs away.
oooh nice, gr8 point i didn’t consider at all.
also ironic if they both die bc they think that’s what the other wants lol, but that’s so them. maybe casca could intervene w/ some sense + save their asses as per usual.
Like with all the Casca thoughts which have been accumulating.
You Know this bit- “ Maybe Casca could intervene w/ some sense + save their asses as per usual.”
This is OUR version of Casca. This is our take on what she could have been if the narrative didn’t constantly screw up her characterisation. Because this action and characteristics makes sense to us, seems like a reasonable expectation and we or rather I (I’ll only speak for myself here for now) would like to believe it to be true- because I really want to like her.
And of course this is us talking about AUs anyway. So we will fill it with what seems reasonable.
But really I can’t help but think how cannon never explored this possibility. In canon Casca never saved their asses or talked sense into them. She made the connections. Yes. She had the information necessary to. Yes. She had the opportunity to. Also yes.
But canon didn’t care about making us like Casca as anything more than either a worthy (and projected as slightly annoying) rival or a love interest.
We’re never made to empathise with any particular or specific actions she takes or roles she plays. It seems like There’s no particularly thing Casca has done in the entire goddamn narrative which defines her. Like HER. Not someone else.
So when we say ‘as per usual’ we’re really just comparing with different versions we have been forced to create on our own.
There’s unfortunately no as per usual we can compare with in the source material.
Which is so frustrating.
Lol yeah this is true and I was kind of thinking when I wrote it that I should’ve said like she always tried to do, and might’ve done if anyone actually listened to her. (Like “just talk to each other!” can you imagine if judeau shut the hell up and they were like, actually yeah casca has a point let’s try words before swords). But I went with less accurate pithiness instead lol.
Also like… I do pretty much agree with you – the narrative is so bad about defining Casca in relation to the men in her life rather than as herself independently that I’ve come to hope it’s her central character flaw that will one day be explored as unlikely as that is lmao, but in fairness despite doing things for Griffith’s sake or for Guts’ sake, she does show a lot of character as she does them.
Taking command of the Hawks, leading the charge to infiltrate Doldrey, rallying the troops in dire situations, jealousy, pettiness, bravery, practicality (one moment I love for her, even if it is just to give Guts a moment of ‘wow she’s so cool’ (ugh), is when she tells the Hawks to stop freaking out at the start of the Eclipse because it’s not going to change the fact that shit just got really weird, so they might as well hold formation and stay calm), foolhardiness due to insecurity (going to battle on her period lol), perseverence even after almost giving up, loyalty ofc and her attempt to navigate between loyalty and what she feels is a betrayal of it albeit a timely and necessary one (even if the ‘betrayal’ is fucking guts, like, the feelings there are still complex despite the shitty plot imo), etc.
I hate almost all of Casca’s narrative and ofc it’s steeped in Miura’s misogyny, and she has a few character moments that are total offensive bs (acting cuter when she warms up to guts, maybe my place is at this man’s side, her non-reaction to Wyald’s attempted rape which just underscores that whole awful thing as pure shock value and titilation, etc) but there are also lots of moments she has that I think are revealing, endearing, and interesting. Like misogyny is one of Miura’s big flaws but shallow characterization sure isn’t and imo while his flaws are seriously on display in Casca’s character his strengths are still there.
So yeah like I don’t disagree with you bc her narrative absolutely sucks and I know that’s p much what you’re talking about, but your response did make me kind of want to talk up her likeability as a character a little lol. Like it’s not enough to make up for her awful narrative role, but it’s enough to make me want to explore her as a character and feel sympathy and empathy for her and relate to her in some ways, which is not a high bar but tbh it’s more than a lot of designated-love-interest-female-characters have.
Casca babe. I still don’t know why the fuck you would say that. It makes zero sense.
Tbh at this point I felt things were happening, only because they had to happen, even if it made no sense to anyone to act like this. Like Casca saying this, as if it still mattered what Griffith saw as a equal. Like Guts acting as if not realizing how severe Griffith’s injuries were and saying he will swing that sword again. Like the Band throwing a fucking tantrum how their future is ruined, while Griffith was 5 steps away and probably listening. Like even Guts and Casca having this talk there, as if he wasn’t sleeping nearby… the amount of moments, where everyone was being inconsiderate was so huge, that it felt kind of…. forced to me 😮 Either this or at this point they had all stopped seeing Griffith as a person already.
And tbh, there was no going back from there on in my opinion, even if he had never been offered to sacrifice them, even if he had accepted living in a broken body, he wouldn’t have accepted being their mascot.
Yeah, I completely agree actually.
Like of course at this point Miura was trying to take the plot to the eclipse so maybe everything doesn’t make sense from character consistency point of view.
But really if we leave that aside this arc really was evidence that both of what Wyald said and what we knew of Griffith’s apprehensions were almost completely justified.
Like it really just came across as if nobody actually gave a shit about griffith as a fucking human being. And it was upsetting because all this while, we were thinking how Griffith was wrong and being pessimistic and he should maybe stop distancing himself so much. But then griffith was absolutely right all along.
It really just seemed like everyone was waiting for griffith because of the usefulness he’d have to their lives. The moment it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to do that, they immediately ran to Guts to leave with him instead.
Like notice how no one else even tries to visit him after that, I mean yeah okay, you were throwing around words like love before, but okay.
yes , they most probably wouldn’t have abandoned him but that would most probably be because such a thing would be ‘distasteful’ rather than anything else. I mean you might be right about the fact that they’ve already stopped seeing him as a person at this point.
And honestly even with Casca, like this really rubbed me the wrong way- but she has this little bit of internal monologue where she says “Yes now it’s my turn to fulfill this duty. ” And that sense of duty is repeated when she tells Guts that she can’t leave with him. And wow. So it’s DUTY now ? Like a couple of chapters ago you were wondering why he’d chose Charlotte to bed instead of you and were being jealous of the fact. And now it’s only your sense of duty holding you back. Like honestly I thought you loved this person? Wow for consistency.
I mean I remember Griffith saying in the lake, while hurting himself that the only thing he can do for his men is to keep winning.
And really he was right.
That’s all they want from him and that’s all that he’s good for in their eyes.
tbh this never bothered me from a writing perspective because it felt very realistic to me
it’s not good and it doesn’t reflect well on the hawks, but it seems consistent because none of them ever gave a fuck about griffith as a person except guts and casca. judeau practically flat out said it during his first chat with guts, when he said everyone followed griffith for his charisma but he couldn’t really say what kind of a man he is.
and it’s partially griffith’s fault for distancing himself. you can’t expect people to care about you as a person if they only know you as a flawless leader. but it’s also definitely dickish of the hawks – but the kind of dickish that doesn’t seem out of place imo, especially in berserk’s shitty world where if you’re accepting that half the men casca runs into want to rape her, ableism doesn’t seem like a stretch.
also in fairness, only corkus made a scene when casca announced the news, and that’s pretty in character for him, and there was only like, maybe a couple hours between that and the eclipse, during most of which griffith was asleep, so there wasn’t much opportunity for people to visit him, or even sort out their feelings beyond abject disappointment that their hopes are dashed.
i actually love casca and judeau telling guts to leave while he’s trying to say he wants to stay, because they are treating griffith as an inevitable burden someone has to deal with, and guts is the only one who isn’t. judeau has his, i’ll take some hawks, start a thieves gang and take care of him, because it’s the least i could do for all he’s done for us. plus being ‘self sacrificing’ for casca’s sake lol.
casca’s feelings are more complex but they also work for me – because she wanted to leave with guts after rescuing griffith and try to move on from her feelings for griffith, and now he needs her, and she’s someone who wants to be needed, so it’s like just as she had hope that she could move on she’s back to square one. also tbh her attitude strikes me as more evidence that she never really loved Griffith, just admired him.
and they both expect guts to view him as a burden so they encourage him to leave – because according to those rules of the battlefield judeau likes to cite so much, he’s no longer a hawk so griffith isn’t his responsibility.
and guts partially wants to stay out of guilt probably, but based on his actions at the start of the eclipse it seems clear that he, more than anyone else in the hawks, still just genuinely likes griffith and wants to be with him in some capacity. he’s the one who speaks out when the godhand says griffith is one of them, he supports and holds him until they’re forcibly separated and then he climbs up to griffith to try to save him, and he refuses to believe griffith sacrificed everyone for quite a while.
idk basically it’s harsh and depressing but it works for me largely bc i never got the sense that anyone except guts genuinely liked griffith as a person, even casca. well charlotte i guess, but w/e. even she believed he’d recover when she wanted to stay with him.
Hmm yeah.
Of course it makes a lot of sense from the writing perspective. And from character perspectives. And everything makes sense with everything else because that’s just how Berserk is. It’s brilliant. And all that is precisely the reason I love it so much.
I don’t think my issue was with character consistency actually, like tbh I don’t have an issue at all, -that’s what makes for good story telling and that’s what I’m here for.
I have zero issues with the Hawks not giving a fuck about Griffith. Because it makes sense. And because realistically that’s how people are.
Same with Casca.
I think what I had a not very objective, reaction to^ up there was the fact that the fact that the Hawks or Casca may be didn’t give a fuck is very rarely recognised
Which makes for very one dimensional analysis. And THAT is frustrating.
The thing with Casca is I have very mixed feelings about her in general and that just spills onto every time I mention her so. Yeah.
And like hey I liked griffith so sometimes there’s an emotional ‘why you do this?’, but intellectually yes, makes sense, sign me the fuck up, sweet angst God yes.
Like the fact everyone is equal parts nice and low-key assholeish is amazing?
But sometimes people are not nice to someone you like (Even if that makes perfect sense to you )and you are like ‘hey!’
yeah i know what you mean. casca is such a difficult character in some ways for me bc i love her in theory but i feel like i’m constantly mentally compensating for the way miura writes her.
like eg i’d infinitely prefer if instead of casca switching gears bc now she loves guts instead of griffith, she was telling guts to leave because she believes she’s being self-sacrificing but deep down she wants griffith to herself and she still isn’t over her jealousy of guts. i don’t feel that’s the case, that’s not the vibe i get from this scene at all, but man i’d be into that, and i kind of headcanon it that way.
like i like petty jealous casca whose “love” for griffith is a flaw (and a defense mechanism she uses to avoid self-examination) she needs to overcome to come into her own as a person. i don’t like casca just switching from griffith to guts and this being treated by the narrative as a touching and significant development for her lol. same like, i like casca as a badass responsible and respected military leader, i don’t like casca as someone who “had to give up being a woman” (wtf does that even mean lol) and is conflicted about that, it sucks.
enjoying casca as a character to me is like navigating a minefield of miura’s shitty misogyny lol. there’s lots i love and it’s worth the effort of downplaying the shitty aspects of her writing imo, but man i wish i didn’t have to.
Casca babe. I still don’t know why the fuck you would say that. It makes zero sense.
Tbh at this point I felt things were happening, only because they had to happen, even if it made no sense to anyone to act like this. Like Casca saying this, as if it still mattered what Griffith saw as a equal. Like Guts acting as if not realizing how severe Griffith’s injuries were and saying he will swing that sword again. Like the Band throwing a fucking tantrum how their future is ruined, while Griffith was 5 steps away and probably listening. Like even Guts and Casca having this talk there, as if he wasn’t sleeping nearby… the amount of moments, where everyone was being inconsiderate was so huge, that it felt kind of…. forced to me 😮 Either this or at this point they had all stopped seeing Griffith as a person already.
And tbh, there was no going back from there on in my opinion, even if he had never been offered to sacrifice them, even if he had accepted living in a broken body, he wouldn’t have accepted being their mascot.
Yeah, I completely agree actually.
Like of course at this point Miura was trying to take the plot to the eclipse so maybe everything doesn’t make sense from character consistency point of view.
But really if we leave that aside this arc really was evidence that both of what Wyald said and what we knew of Griffith’s apprehensions were almost completely justified.
Like it really just came across as if nobody actually gave a shit about griffith as a fucking human being. And it was upsetting because all this while, we were thinking how Griffith was wrong and being pessimistic and he should maybe stop distancing himself so much. But then griffith was absolutely right all along.
It really just seemed like everyone was waiting for griffith because of the usefulness he’d have to their lives. The moment it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to do that, they immediately ran to Guts to leave with him instead.
Like notice how no one else even tries to visit him after that, I mean yeah okay, you were throwing around words like love before, but okay.
yes , they most probably wouldn’t have abandoned him but that would most probably be because such a thing would be ‘distasteful’ rather than anything else. I mean you might be right about the fact that they’ve already stopped seeing him as a person at this point.
And honestly even with Casca, like this really rubbed me the wrong way- but she has this little bit of internal monologue where she says “Yes now it’s my turn to fulfill this duty. ” And that sense of duty is repeated when she tells Guts that she can’t leave with him. And wow. So it’s DUTY now ? Like a couple of chapters ago you were wondering why he’d chose Charlotte to bed instead of you and were being jealous of the fact. And now it’s only your sense of duty holding you back. Like honestly I thought you loved this person? Wow for consistency.
I mean I remember Griffith saying in the lake, while hurting himself that the only thing he can do for his men is to keep winning.
And really he was right.
That’s all they want from him and that’s all that he’s good for in their eyes.
tbh this never bothered me from a writing perspective because it felt very realistic to me
it’s not good and it doesn’t reflect well on the hawks, but it seems consistent because none of them ever gave a fuck about griffith as a person except guts and casca. judeau practically flat out said it during his first chat with guts, when he said everyone followed griffith for his charisma but he couldn’t really say what kind of a man he is.
and it’s partially griffith’s fault for distancing himself. you can’t expect people to care about you as a person if they only know you as a flawless leader. but it’s also definitely dickish of the hawks – but the kind of dickish that doesn’t seem out of place imo, especially in berserk’s shitty world where if you’re accepting that half the men casca runs into want to rape her, ableism doesn’t seem like a stretch.
also in fairness, only corkus made a scene when casca announced the news, and that’s pretty in character for him, and there was only like, maybe a couple hours between that and the eclipse, during most of which griffith was asleep, so there wasn’t much opportunity for people to visit him, or even sort out their feelings beyond abject disappointment that their hopes are dashed.
i actually love casca and judeau telling guts to leave while he’s trying to say he wants to stay, because they are treating griffith as an inevitable burden someone has to deal with, and guts is the only one who isn’t. judeau has his, i’ll take some hawks, start a thieves gang and take care of him, because it’s the least i could do for all he’s done for us. plus being ‘self sacrificing’ for casca’s sake lol.
casca’s feelings are more complex but they also work for me – because she wanted to leave with guts after rescuing griffith and try to move on from her feelings for griffith, and now he needs her, and she’s someone who wants to be needed, so it’s like just as she had hope that she could move on she’s back to square one. also tbh her attitude strikes me as more evidence that she never really loved Griffith, just admired him.
and they both expect guts to view him as a burden so they encourage him to leave – because according to those rules of the battlefield judeau likes to cite so much, he’s no longer a hawk so griffith isn’t his responsibility.
and guts partially wants to stay out of guilt probably, but based on his actions at the start of the eclipse it seems clear that he, more than anyone else in the hawks, still just genuinely likes griffith and wants to be with him in some capacity. he’s the one who speaks out when the godhand says griffith is one of them, he supports and holds him until they’re forcibly separated and then he climbs up to griffith to try to save him, and he refuses to believe griffith sacrificed everyone for quite a while.
idk basically it’s harsh and depressing but it works for me largely bc i never got the sense that anyone except guts genuinely liked griffith as a person, even casca. well charlotte i guess, but w/e. even she believed he’d recover when she wanted to stay with him.
you're the only one 