mmmmmh really tho i don’t think griffith was fragile, not before he was broken at least
oh no you gave me an opening to talk about griffith. tbh it depends what you mean by fragile, like I might not even be disagreeing with you at all, but I have Strong Opinions on Griffith being a hot mess all his life and I can’t not take the opportunity to talk about them lol.
Basically overall I feel like this kinda sums it up:
I don’t think Griffith was fragile exactly – when Casca says he made himself strong, it’s not just a facade, he genuinely has the confidence to take 5,000 men and conquer an undefeatable fortress guarded by an army of 30,000, burn a queen to death while looking her in the eye, etc. Griffith is badass, and the fact that he basically deliberately chose to be as hardcore as he could to achieve a goal makes him extra badass imo. So if it’s a case of faking it til you make it he’s definitely made it.
But he makes himself that way by not just hiding but denying his vulnerabilities. Casca says Griffith had to make himself strong the first time after telling Guts about how he pretty much had a breakdown in front of her before smiling and telling her he’s fine.
imo Griffith is a giant self-loathing mess of guilt issues that he just almost never ever reveals or admits to himself, and while he uses his dream to help bury his weaknesses, Guts brings them out. It’s like, the dream is his emotional crutch, how he denies his guilt and self-loathing by telling himself it’s all necessary. But then Guts becomes an alternative to that – by the time they’re assassinating queens together Griffith wants Guts’ to assuage his guilt by telling him he’s good more than he wants to prove he’s doing the right thing by succeeding in his goal lol
And imo his emotional reliance on Guts starts as early as when he first met him, but we see the self-hate that he needs to build his defenses against even before that, during Casca’s flashback.
Oh also I say all this but I feel like Puck’s statement here is kind of a more universal statement on humanity than specifically calling the Count extra fragile. Everyone’s got issues, and got defense mechanisms to help deal with their issues, and everyone’s heart is fragile when they lose that armour.
Tho I def think Griffith has more than his fair share of issues.
(i promote this big griffith meta thing at every possible opportunity lol but it’s extra fitting for this topic so if anyone feels like reading this exact same point but in a whooooole lot more words, i got you covered)
i actually kinda like how unconcerned griffith is. he’s just like, welp what can you do casca, naked man + naked woman = acceptable, naked man + naked man = bad, that’s just the natural way of things and I got way too much internalized homophobia to fight it. (“warming a man is a woman’s duty, he said.”)
lol i seriously cannot read griffith’s narrative as anything but dream/heteronormativity vs guts/living ur gay truth.
like i’ve seen this scene described as just tone-setting casual ye olde sexism, but it feels too significant for that. it just fits their whole messed up love triangle dynamic so perfectly, it’s like, an ideal establishing action that just sums it all up.
Guts’ slow realization that
he had Griffith on a completely unrealistic pedestal and
destroyed him because of his belief that Griffith is distant and untouchable and above him is perfectly mirrored, foreshadowed, and summed up by this statement of Casca’s:
Except yk Guts never gets that moment of realization that his feelings have a sexual component.
And it’s just so easy to read this as a statement on that lol, on how if Guts did have that realization maybe the fact that Griffith isn’t a god would’ve followed. Or if he’d had another few minutes between this
and the Eclipse.
Like I’m js you equate removing Griffith from his pedestal and seeing him as a fallible human to recognizing your buried attraction to him w/ one character, I’m obviously going to follow that thread through to the other character and his paralleled feelings towards Griffith.
Maybe it’s a bit much to equate Guts swinging his sword several hundred times until his hand is covered in blisters to Griffith scratching himself, but hey both are forms of self-harm associated with their dreams. (Plus the blisters work as a solid symbol of Guts’ typical self-destructive way of fighting, letting monsters stab him so he can shoot them, that kinda thing).
Anyway I just noticed that Guts’ hand was bandaged the morning he left the Hawks despite it having been a month since he had to kill anyone, and was like, hmm.
lol this just sums up the guts-griffith-casca love triangle so perfectly.
Like… it sets up both the way Guts and Griffith use Casca as an intermediary for physical (and emotional) intimacy with each other, making her life a living hell, and the way Casca’s whole existence revolves around her gender in contrast to the men surrounding her, and ties those two things together.
Plus, with Guts’ nightmare and subsequent relief that it’s a woman rather than a man with him, it adds trauma to the mix. It ties everything together.
And man it is thematically neat as fuck.
Like what I’m saying is that if you choose to believe this is purposeful, then what the Golden Age is about is two dudes who are both attracted to each other and can’t act on it thanks to internalized (trauma)*** and externalized (heteronormativity) homophobia, and this fucks up both the dudes in question, and the woman/en (? Charlotte isn’t shown to suffer from this, but I imagine being in a one-sided relationship will eventually take its toll on her) they end up turning to instead out of that internalized and externalized obligation.
Casca’s story is almost entirely about dealing with misogyny, and this makes heteronormativity a part of that. It’s not just a woman’s duty to warm a man – another man can’t. Men can’t be physically intimate with each other, only with women, and more, they have to be physically intimate with women to attain like, an artificial sense of self-actualization – in Berserk, their dreams. And this harms both the men in their enforced isolation from each other and the women in their enforced intimacy with men.
Like, Guts even references Casca warming him here after they have sex, again, tying physical intimacy with her to his trauma.
And while Charlotte is Griffith’s means to achieving his dream, Casca is Guts’ – because attaining Casca’s affection, being “good” for her, means he’s more like Griffith, and closer to his goal of being Griffith’s equal.
I mean Guts leaving Griffith because they couldn’t share their feelings with each other, and Griffith sleeping with Charlotte as a means of denial (“take all those sad and frightening things and cast them into the fire”) and then Guts sleeping with Casca as a means of denial (”don’t think about those things. Right now all you need is to feel alive”) both lead directly to Griffith choosing to destroy his feelings so he can live solely for his dream. Draw your own conclusions about how this culminates in the most destructive display of heterosexuality in the story.
Once the nature of Guts’ dream switches from abandoning Griffith to pursuing him in rage things get murkier on Guts’ side, but this reading still works if you consider that Guts’ problem isn’t exactly his lingering, twisted feelings for Griffith, but his refusal to actually examine and untangle them, with revenge as just another distraction.
And to be perfectly crystal clear I’m not saying this is purposeful, or that even if it somehow is purposeful Miura doesn’t still go about it as offensively as possible. Like, by this reading internalized homophobia is essentially positioned as a result of evil gay pedophiles, to a much greater extent than any vague reference to societal norms. Both these dudes succumb to inner darknesses and assault a woman explicitly because of their feelings for the other dude. I’m not giving him a round of applause here lmao. It’s probably actually less offensive if it’s all accidental.
And lbr it’s probably a side-effect of writing a) a female character whose life revolves around misogyny, b) a homoerotic relationship between 2 dudes and c) a half-assed het subplot between one of those dudes and the aforementioned woman
But like still, it just fits together so freaking well. It’s ridiculous how neat this reading is during the Golden Age.
***to be clear i’m not saying internalized homophobia is always a result of trauma lol, I’m saying that’s how the story does it.
lol despite this being a gr8 essay prompt I’m just going to brainstorm and list a bunch of stuff.
parallels:
larger-than-life figures often compared to storybook characters.
self-harming
while denying feeling responsible about people’s deaths. (Guts does
this a couple times in the Black Swordsman arc lol)
obsessions/dreams (castle vs revenge/becoming griffith’s equal/killing a bunch of stuff)
in
both cases dreams are defense mechanisms/escapes from the pain of the
world. “what do you fear in this place?” *points at castle* vs “when I’m
swinging this sword I don’t have to think about anything.”
personified inner darknesses (maybe you can become a real monster, like your friend)
guts deserting griffith vs neogriffith deserting guts, complete with maudlin comparison from guts
guts picking up the behelit in the black swordsman arc
farnese’s feelings for guts vs casca’s feelings for griffith
guts
similarly gathering followers with the phrase, “do what you want,”
maybe even things like griffith’s “blazing inferno” vs say serpico
musing on being affected by guts’ heat.
ok it’s a stretch but possibly both of them currently doing their damndest to forget the other?
denying feelings of guilt by rambling about their dreams in front of
Casca while dripping blood as Casca screams at them to stop hurting
themselves.
nightmares/visions of being children screaming apologies to corpses? i mean you could sum this up with “guilt issues” I guess lol:
ooh I’d argue the way both their dreams are based in childhood desires, a la:
this
this
(re: dude’s son who died in battle)
this
this
this
Contrasts:
Well there’s the surrendering to fate vs defying fate thing. Griffith embracing destiny by making the sacrifice. Relatedly ofc, defying God vs becoming the messiah.
I
have a post here that kind of boils down to saying that Griffith’s
narrative is about succumbing to evil in pursuit of the good, while
Guts’ narrative is about balancing the good and evil within himself. In a
way you could maybe say that Griffith is about harsh contrasts while
Guts is about shades of grey.
Guts allowing Casca to comfort him vs Griffith shutting her out.
Potentially the way Guts deliberately attempts to “let go” of his obsession with Griffith vs Griffith choosing his obsession,if
Guts’ revenge quest is meant to parallel Griffith’s kingdom. imo the
waters get muddy thanks to Guts’ dream sabotaging his relationship with
Griffith in the Golden Age vs Guts dream being the remnants of his
relationship with Griffith and sabotaging his “relationship” with Casca
post-Eclipse. Like, you could at the same time argue it’s a parallel in that they both try to let go of their obsession with the other by fixating on a goal (kingdom/fix casca). I mean the former is more likely, but fuck it I prefer the latter lol. (Hey Guts didn’t get the ominous armour of inner darkness until choosing Casca and since then his warnings about losing himself to it have gone hand in hand with warnings about Casca’s wishes not being Guts’ wishes. So in a way sticking with Casca is actually subtly tied to his inner darkness even if it is telling him to chase down Griffith. Hey you never know.)
Their Golden Age narratives parallel each other but in opposite directions which makes for a contrast: Griffith shifts from his dream as the most important thing to his relationship with Guts as the most important thing, while Guts shifts from his relationship with Griffith as the most important thing to his dream as the most important thing.
I guess there’s the obvious black vs white colour scheme thing lol. Which goes hand in hand with Griffith’s image as a knight in shining armour vs Guts’ scary black swordsman image. Tho I think it’s an oversimplification to say that eg NeoGriffith is evil with a good image and Guts is the opposite, which I’ve seen a lot lol.
Guts as a human struggling with his inner monster, NeoGriffith as a monster struggling with his inner human?
both struggle with loneliness and isolation but Griffith is social and Guts is a loner.
strategy vs… instinct? not quite the right word, but yk Griffith’s way of fighting is more intellectual and strategic and while Guts utilizes strategy a lot it’s more subconscious – like when he caught Silat’s chakrams because he didn’t overthink their trajectories.
Hmm I’m probably missing some obvious ones ngl, but I have to stop at some point and I feel like I’ve started scraping the bottom of the barrel lol.
lol tbh I’ve been overthinking this question which is why it took me a while to answer. Like, weighing pros and cons, does the Eclipse rape count as bad character writing for Griffith/Femto/NGriff or does it at least make sense as long as you accept Miura’s premise that people’s inner darknesses are gonna be rapists 99% of the time, or is it a mistake that reflects on the character writing because of the weird tonal issues it raises with NGriff’s narrative? Like, is it a flaw more because it disaligns the way the author wants to portray Griffith vs the way the audience responds to Griffith? How is that weighted against Guts losing so much of what made him interesting through sometimes good, sometimes poor character development? If it’s believable character development is becoming less interesting still a flaw or just like, my opinion man?
And honestly fuck all that, idc. Griffith is the best written character because his highs are higher and more consistent and I find his lows easier to ignore bc they’re wrapped up in other bad writing, and there’s no way to give an objective answer to this anyway so I might as well let my opinions fly and gush for a while.
I just love his narrative.
From his first appearance as Femto taunting Guts by saying he’s beneath his notice to the hints that he certainly didn’t always feel that way to the first flashback of Griffith telling Guts he’s “the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this,” he’s introduced in such an interesting, intriguing way. Then in the Golden Age the way his apparent easy superiority and confidence eventually gives way to the reveal that he’s a giant mess of insecurities and guilt – and the way this reveal sheds so much interesting light on everything that came before, like his dream speech to Charlotte, his “I will choose the place where you die” speech to Guts, risking his life to save Guts, asking Guts to assassinate Julius, etc.
And the way all these apparent contradictions manage to come together to perfectly depict a man who hides behind an image so well that he believes the act himself, except in occasional moments of vulnerability when the truth seeps out.
Like there are so many interesting subtleties to dig into and so many contradictions to navigate but at the same time this one page tells you everything you really need to know to understand him:
This is a dude who will prostitute himself to a pedophile to prevent as many deaths as possible and then the next morning claim he doesn’t feel responsible for those deaths.
He will bury his guilt so hard that his reaction to a kid’s convenient death is triumphant delight, and then fret about killing hired goons and ask if Guts thinks he’s cruel, because Charlotte/his dream reinforces his image – his conviction – and Guts/love unravels it.
Also like, in general it’s fantastic how our impression of Griffith begins with the impression he leaves on everyone:
and then that is like, turned over and examined in the way Miura does, by showing how fucked up you have to be to embody a cool fictional archetype. (Incidentally I love how he does this with Guts’ antiheroism too. Like, hey turns out you gotta have a pretty fucked up life to become a cool monster fighting badass. tho even so Griffith’s is a little better imo because we spend more time with the image before revealing what’s underneath, whereas Guts didn’t even get a full chapter of tricking the audience into thinking he’s just a surly badass b4 the cracks started appearing.)
THEN his feelings for Guts come into it and complicate everything and we’re shown that there’s an internal war in Griffith between Guts and the dream that Griffith himself doesn’t even seem to realize until it’s too late. Which is just delightful bc god knows my favourite literary device is dramatic irony and idk if knowing more about Griffith’s inner conflicts than Griffith himself understands counts but damn it’s fun. And the moment when he does finally acknowledge it (”as he shines so glaring within me… the junk grows dull.”) is just intensely satisfying because we’ve been waiting for it since at least Casca’s “it’s as if… as if…” in chapter 18.
And the way everything cumulates so utterly perfectly in the sacrifice. Everything we see, everything in Griffith’s narrative, every moment leads directly to “I sacrifice,” and it all fits together immaculately. The dream as a defense mechanism, guilt, shame, emotional denial, “take all the frightening and sad things and cast them into the fire,” his desperate search for like, absolution, the way in the build up to the eclipse he’s stripped of everything he ever relied on as a defense, fucking love as the determining factor
the fact that he’s not sacrificing guts because he values the dream more, he’s sacrificing guts because he values guts more. like that’s just so fucking good, come on.
Honestly, Femto and NeoGriffith are both great as symbols too – Femto as everything Griffith was ashamed of but without the shame; NGriff as pure conviction, as the perfect image with none of the driving guilt. I can’t exactly say they’re great characters since the whole point of them is that they’re not fleshed out or relatable or understandable as humans one can empathize with, but they’re great conceptually. It’s cool to see the fully fleshed out, contradictory Griffith and then see him divided and carved up into representational aspects of himself.
Also the few hints of more are super satisfying with the full weight of Griffith’s human narrative behind them – Femto letting Guts escape, the unfrozen heartbeat, you know what I’m about.
And idk at the end of the day with Griffith Miura successfully (IMO) depicted a dude who would choose to sacrifice a group of people I really liked and become a demon for the greater good, for petty reasons, and out of fear of his own feelings, all at the same time, and make me empathize with that decision, and that seems like it would be hard to do. I mean granted, I’m in the minority when it comes to empathizing with him, but idk I can only answer this from my perspective lol.
Anyway to wrap this up I’m plugging this thing again because really could I have ever given any answer other than “the dude whose character arc I wrote over fifteen thousand words about”?
oh man. ok i’m sorry this is honestly a terrible answer, i got really carried away when it came to griffith lol.
i have a more thoughtful, meta-y answer to a similar question here and i’m linking it to sort of compensate for just answering this with a picspam lol.
under a cut bc it’s long.
Guts:
standing up w/ like 50 broken bones and marching up a staircase with his giant sword to try to kill his ex bc he said he’s beneath his notice:
this one might actually be my favourite guts character moment:
Guts finally getting close to moving on and recovering:
sums it tf up:
i wanted one moment that shows guts’ like, tender, caretaker side, and this is the most painful:
a purely self-indulgent choice bc i love that “he’s back” feeling so much lol:
and how could I not include this:
Casca
love the concept of casca being invested in the dream:
her proud smile here:
physically lashing out with her sword in a rage:
in a good au casca went on to lead the still-undefeated band of the hawks:
sure it’s ruined two pages later, but man i love her attempt at a last stand:
Farnese
i love her early black and white thinking tbh:
this is my favourite character establishing moment for farnese:
stabbing a demon tiger in the eye is probably my fave farnese moment overall:
Serpico
I love this early moment where he tells a dude he doesn’t even know his tragic life story while vaguely hitting on him and makes him uncomfortable:
like he’s a weird but enjoyable combination of diplomatic and offputting:
preventing guts from getting himself killed the same night he tried to kill him himself:
And finally a more dramatic, serious moment because the first three moments there rly don’t do him justice and I love his backstory:
Griffith (I will try to show restraint but I could spam almost every panel he’s in honestly)
I’m including Femto and NGriff:
what an introduction:
getting himself killed for guts:
somehow simultaneously maintaining denial while essentially confessing his feelings:
this:
but especially when paired with this:
there’s a lot to love about this scene but this is the best moment imo:
every single second of chapter 17 but let’s sum it up with this:
this whole exchange but especially this first panel here:
he just heard that he’s achieved one of the most important steps on the way to his dream and this is what he fucking does:
sorry but this is the coolest moment in anything ever:
again literally all of tombstone of flame really but let’s go with this moment in particular:
all of the second duel as well:
of course:
obviously the whole monologue but it always comes back to this:
fuckin ripping my heart out:
and again:
and again:
i’m gonna keep going like this:
The Moment Of Despair Is The Touch Of Guts’ Hand:
and then:
i’m sorry i really did mean to be more restrained than this lmao:
the entire moment of the sacrifice but i’m picking this panel to illustrate it:
can you believe:
OBVIOUSLY but this also includes Griffith blaming it on the fetus because that is so in character:
you, of all people:
aaaaaand let’s call it a day w/ this:
As a sacrificial offering for the Invocation of Doom, not just any lump of flesh and blood will do. It must be someone important to you, part of your soul… someone so close to you that it’s almost like giving up a part of you.
@bthump literally the conclusion i came to when i was thinking about scenes in which he was, to some degree, relaxed
i want to like brainstorm personality traits that he didn’t deliberately manufacture to help him achieve his dream now lol.
like yeah, playful. i think he’s naturally confident, charismatic, and a leader type. competitive, but still a graceful loser. empathetic too tbqh, he’s very aware of ppl’s feelings and he genuinely cares, and you’d see that way more if he didn’t constantly bury it lol. also a bit of a mediator? he doesn’t like real interpersonal conflict (his reaction to guts and casca’s rivalry, or casca being pissy at corkus, etc). he still cares what people think of him, dream or no dream imo. but he might take pride in being hated by awful people. i don’t think he’d necessarily try to get everyone to like him – just the people he likes.
would he still be ambitious? if he didn’t have the one dream, would he find another, maybe less soul destroying goal to latch onto? I think he’d still feel a need to prove his worth as a person, to justify his existence by contributing something to the world. but if he didn’t get people killed when he first started maybe he’d be more chill about it. maybe he’d volunteer at a non profit or something instead.
would he still be a complete idiot about his own feelings or would he be more self-aware if he didn’t need to bury his emotions for the sake of his dream? i could def see him being more self-aware, but that’s not as fun lol.
lol i’m actually writing a thing right now that gets into that a little, tho it’ll be a while b4 i can post it
but yeah like femto specifically I would argue is essentially griffith’s guilt and self-loathing personified, just as the beast of darkness is guts’, and those feelings relate back to trauma for both of them.
For Guts it’s Gambino selling him and later telling him he’s cursed and evil and deserved it + the guilt of killing Gambino. This is v strongly visually suggested during his sewer nightmare right before he overhears Griffith’s promrose hall speech. Watches a monster kill gambino, then child!guts, then turns out the monster is himself. Voila. (also the trauma of the eclipse, buried guilt + self loathing wrt abandoning griffith leading to the eclipse, and his black swordsman sadism, traumatizing and killing children, etc, all makes the beast of darkness grow)
For Griffith it’s the guilt of the deaths of everyone who follows him and tbqh the deaths of people he kills too, and his self-loathing wrt “dirtying” himself in pursuit of his dream, so yk there’s trauma there too with Gennon. Also I think there’s a case to be made that the year of torture had a significant contribution to Femto’s existence, even if the psychological trauma of it isn’t rly discussed like the physical trauma is – I mean the mask he was forced to wear is incorporated into Femto’s design, that’s a big sign at least, plus the talk of darkness and feeling numb at the start of his torture chamber monologue which is echoed during his transformation into Femto.
idk basically strong yes imo, and i’m probably gonna come back and revisit this topic in greater detail eventually
ty! God I really, really want Guts to be shown as Griffith’s equal at some point. I feel like it’s the only way to satisfactorily conclude their whole… thing. Guts letting go of the desire to be Griffith’s equal just isn’t satisfying to me.
But that said I don’t think becoming an apostle is the way to do it. For that literal equality Guts would have to become a Godhand, and unless there’s a 200+ year timeskip after Elfhelm that’s not possible according to the rules of the world. An apostle is a follower of NeoGriff so becoming one wouldn’t make him Griffith’s equal, it would put him back in that position of looking up at him/feeling looked down on.
Ofc one could say that those technical details don’t really matter, what matters is that Griffith succumbed to his superpowered dark side so if Guts does then that’s still equality in a sense, even if he’s a “lesser” monster. But then, he has the armour to represent his dark side, which makes the behelit kind of superfluous now, and it’s been foreshadowed a lot that he’s going to lose himself to the armour at some point.
And since it’s suggested that Skull Knight became a walking skeleton because he succumbed to the amour himself, I think it’s a lot more likely that we’ll get more Skull Knight comparisons and there will at least be a danger of Guts becoming like him – powerful but… lacking humanity I guess, if he doesn’t overcome the armour. And that could potentially lead to ~the beast of darkness~ and ~the hawk of light~ regarding each other as equals in a confrontation.
BUT! What I want more than that is acknowledgement that all these standards of literal equality are essentially a smokescreen obscuring what actually made them equal from the beginning, which is the fact that they both loved each other and they were both emotionally vulnerable w/ the other. So honestly acknowledgement that they’re still hung up on each other despite everything is what would work best here imho.
Guts learns that NGriff failed his test on the Hill of Swords and started getting emotional about Guts again, and NGriff learns that in addition to hate Guts still feels residual love, and guilt and regret etc. Followed by an emotionally charged third duel, their strengths (magic superpower, inner darknesses, fate vs not being beholden to fate, whatever) and weaknesses (emotions, love and regret) equally matched.
this is one of those grand thematic statements that applies to a lot of berserk, like guts’ nearly obsessive need to fight monsters, or like, well, most sacrifices imo. But I’m thinking about how it applies to Griffith – the reverse, I mean. Griffith doesn’t really express fear, like he doesn’t really express most of his feelings, but what does he strike out?
Well, here he’s assassinated a bunch of would-be assassins, including the Queen. Gennon. Tyranny/the natural order of things in general lol.
And Guts.
Or maybe more accurately, his feelings for Guts.
tbh one of my major criticisms of Berserk is that as far as I can tell the theme of fear has been mostly dropped, like, i’m pretty sure the last time we saw a suggestion of Guts being afraid for himself rather than of himself was 150 chapters ago with Slan, and that was like the only time post-Eclipse at all lol.
So I can’t exactly say that Guts surviving the Eclipse and then Femto/NeoGriffith pointedly failing to strike Guts out suggests his narrative is gonna end with falling under the wing of what he fears, but screw it that’s what I want and I’m using that panel up there to justify it.
I will never be over the way these two monologues play off each other as a point, counterpoint.
There are few things I love more than how the early chapters of the Golden Age reflect, build on, deepen, inform, and contrast the Black Swordsman arc.
Griffith’s decision to sacrifice the Hawks was perfectly reasonable not just taking into account Griffith’s own values and priorities, ie ensuring the thousands of dead posthumously achieve the thing they died for, but taking into account the Hawks’ own attitudes towards their lives, including Guts’.
It’s all there in Requiem of the Wind.
“More than half of us’ve been killed…”
These are the core group of Hawks. These are the ones who believe in Griffith so strongly that they’re willing to spend a year living as outlaws, dying in raids, so they can rescue him – so Griffith can lead them again.
There were lots of deserters over that year. People who didn’t think it was worth risking their lives for a chance at achieving Griffith’s dream. They’re presumably out there living happily ever after.
These Hawks are the ones who are willing to risk their lives, not out of friendship or loyalty to a man, but out of loyalty to what the man symbolizes for them, what he can bring them, the success that comes to them when they follow him. Out of loyalty to the dream.
Corkus is the only one throwing a tantrum, but he’s voicing all their thoughts, as we can see when his words are placed over their depressed faces.
Wyald spells it all out.
This is who Griffith is to them. He’s the facilitator of their dreams, dreams that each and every one of them is willing to risk their lives for.
And when he can’t be that to them anymore, what happens? He becomes a burden to them.
Judeau offers to take care of him because it’s the least he can do, because he owes it to him, but mostly because if he doesn’t he thinks Casca will, and he thinks it will be a life ruining burden for her. His offer is a personal sacrifice.
Casca offers to take care of him because it’s the least she can do, he’s so small now, he needs someone, and because if she doesn’t Guts will, and she thinks it will be a life ruining burden for him. Her offer is a personal sacrifice.
Guts’ offer is probably the only one based on a genuine desire to stay with Griffith.
Now, Guts doesn’t see Griffith as the guy who can grant him his dreams. Guts is the exception to that. He sees Griffith as a guy he wants to be friends with.
But here’s Guts’ take on the situation:
Finish the battles you start.
Well, that’s exactly what Griffith chose to do. The Eclipse is, in part, a narrative rebuke of Guts’ stubbornness lol, it happens because he seized on the concept of finding his own dream and couldn’t let it go until it was a moment too late.
When Guts finally drops his own “battle” in favour of staying with Griffith, ie makes the right choice contrary to his dogged nature, it comes too late because he’d successfully convinced Casca that he was dedicated to his dream at the expense of his friendships with the Hawks. “I want to draw a line, keep things separate.” He told her he didn’t want to stay with the Hawks, and she believed him, and that attitude is what ruins everything.
And ironically that’s the exact path Griffith chose when he agreed to the sacrifice. Drop his friends and relationships in favour of renewing his committment to a dream, and finishing his own battle.
For the rest of the Hawks, the Eclipse is a rebuke of their choice to live and risk their lives for tomorrow’s success rather than today’s existence.
Now, this absolutely isn’t me arguing that the Hawks deserved to die or anything lol, this is just me saying that Requiem of the Wind is largely set-up for the sacrifice, and I think it’s a clever way of like… depicting the sacrifice not just as a random tragedy that befell a group of people, but as a darkly fitting end to the way they live their lives.
It shows that the sacrifice is consistent with everything the Hawks profess to believe in.
They are all willing to lay down their lives for a victory they may never see.
The Eclipse is the fucked up yet logical conclusion to the Hawks’ very existence as a mercenary band that fights for an ideal, a dream, rather than just day to day living. They agree to potentially sacrifice their lives in every battle. The Eclipse is just one more battle, by this logic, and it’s one they win by losing their lives in it. By dying, they achieve their ultimate victory.
And I think by taking this whole philosophy of dedicating one’s life to a dream to its logical and horrific conclusion, Berserk is basically critiquing the concept of living for an ideal. In making the sacrifice, Griffith gave the Hawks what they wanted at a cost they’ve already agreed to by choosing to risk their lives for Griffith’s victories and the success he can bring them.
Of course, in the moment, knowing that death was inevitable, they would have preferred to live. None of them would knowingly trade their life for a future they won’t live to see. But that’s essentially what they’re doing by fighting battles for future hopes and dreams.
At the end of the day, the moral of Berserk’s story is really simple and basic: live for the sake of being alive. Guts had it right during his three years with the Hawks, before overhearing the Promrose Hall speech: no grand dream, no living for a potential future, nothing but doing the job of a mercenary with a group of people he considered family, enjoying life day to day, fighting just to live a life he considered worthwhile.
Personally I have mixed feelings about this message, but I’m pretty sure that’s basically the point of Berserk.
Black Swordsman: living for revenge (and, for extra irony, Guts’ own dream of fighting stronger and stronger enemies) is bad, living day to day with those “irreplacable things” – friends – is good. Golden Age: “I was too stupid and stubborn to notice it, but what I really wished for back then was here.” Guts left for a dream and by leaving threw away what he truly wanted – companionship. Conviction arc: the people who survived the shadow Eclipse were the people who acted to save their own lives, rather than out of a conviction, their faith in a higher power. Millennium Falcon: “Dreams can make for courageous challenges or opportune escapes” – emphasis on escapes. Troll village dude wanted to escape the darkness of life through a dream as a child, but eventually found greater fulfillment just living an ordinary life in his village. etc etc. Stop dreaming, focus on living.
And essentially the despair we see from the Hawks upon their realization that the fight is over and Griffith is no longer able to lead them to a greater dream leads directly to the Eclipse and gives it a layer of dark irony.
lol i posted the whole scene bc the context makes it better, but Griffith’s expression in this panel in particular is underappreciated.
right after guts calls him out on lying 3 years ago and before he turns away, smiles, and throws out the appropriately vague ‘no reason in particular’ denial.
like he’s uncomfortable at being called out on his distancing bullshit lol. this combined with “for your sake” *smoulder* seems like a good example of griffith being unaware of his own feelings. like i always feel like that moment, the bedroom eyes, the “for your sake,” nearly contradicts my reading of griffith as totally in denial and unaware that he’s in love, because it’s so pointed lol. it’s hard for me to read that moment and come away thinking griffith is unaware that he’s in love.
but i mean if that’s the case then griffith’s discomfort right before that is less of a “shit he’s got a point, why the hell did i save him?” and more of an “i know why i saved him and i resent my inconvenient feelings.”
Which doesn’t work because he does get genuine and personal enough immediately after for Guts to take it as a sign that he’s found the place where he belongs. It would be weird for Griffith to be thinking “because I love you(/feel very strong feelings towards you) and that could ruin everything” right before saying “for your sake” and giving him that sultry look.
so “for your sake” *smoulder* could just be a genuine expression of feelings regardless of whether he fully understands them. like it doesn’t have to be deliberate, it could just be an accidentally revealing choice of phrasing. i mean like, that’s how i default to reading it anyway, i just think that panel of griffith’s contemplative frowny face backs me up.
idk i’m just kinda bored rn and thinking outloud rly.
i mean i guess to be fair the scene w/ casca and griffith in the wagon confuses everyone, and if you add that to the (absolutely nightmarish) dream sequence i could… maybe kinda sorta see how some people come away not knowing what else to think if they’re the kind of person who defaults to man+woman=attraction lol.
But I mean come on even if you can’t make sense of some of it it’s so clearly about Griffith’s helplessness and powerlessness. Like, the nightmare of living with Casca while Guts is off doing his thing is his worst case scenario and he tries to kill himself right after! How do you read that and think, ah yes clearly Casca is the person Griffith wants.
I mean I’d say a solid potential throughline from Griffith and Casca in the wagon to that nightmare is Griffith grasping at straws for some kind of life, since he’s dependant now and has no choice but to rely on someone else to take care of him (which Wyald helpfully made absolutely clear a chapter earlier), and then realizing that he’d rather kill himself than live that life if Guts is absent from it.
I mean there are romantic feelings there, but they sure aren’t directed at Casca.
like i think the reason i love griffith so much is that he’s made up entirely of huge contrasts lol, because his whole thing is denying his weaknesses and pretending to be perfect so hard that he basically convinces himself, except in occasional moments where all his insecurity and guilt and self loathing comes seeping out.
“It’s not that he’s strong. Griffitih had to make himself strong.” Like this line is in reference to this
and it’s such a perfect summarization of Griffith’s character.
So idk like when it comes to pondering Griffith’s characterization in AUs and stuff, or even not in AUs, just in general, I basically think that like 90% of what we see is essentially a facade… but complicated by the fact that it’s a facade Griffith himself buys into most of the time.
So idk it’s a weird line because you can’t say he isn’t, eg, confident, because he walks the walk as well as talking the talk – this is a dude who defeated an army of 30,000 with 5000, who went from street kid to nearly becoming the next king of Midland through sheer force of will – but it’s like, manufactured confidence that can be shattered, yk? That occasionally cracks and reveals the exact opposite underneath.
people assume that griffith saw guts as a tool or whatever tbh…i tend to lean towards the ignorance one but like self aware griffiths are valid to some extent i just feel like the first makes all his actions more romantic and im a glutton.
lol i should’ve phrased that as ‘what do most people who have even the tiniest understanding of griffith as a character think’
yeah i think even if he is aware that he’s in love by this point like, that’s still after a year of torture and lying in the dark thinking about his life and his choices lol, for me it’s hard to see him as aware of his feelings before this point at all. Like I think he could be, I could see an argument where he’s known he’s in love for three years and just steadfastly refuses to deal with it/compartmentalizes, but idk I like totally-disconnected-from-his-own-emotions-Griffith lol. Griffith like, buying his own con, portraying his distant leader/knight in shining armour image so well that he believes it himself, shocking himself by his own irrational actions wrt Guts, etc. ia it does seem more romantic that way too.
tho now i’m thinking about if griffith is still unaware that he’s in love – he knows he feels overwhelming things for guts but doesn’t associate that with romantic feelings – even up to and including the point where he sacrifices him, what if neogriffith is the one who makes that connection…?
I think Griffith traumatised himself for losing the duel, so he simply hurt himself on the same place Gut’s sword “hit” him. It’s the pain of losing the battle.
yeah i could also see that as an explanation, and it’s actually what i used to think. like ngl i really like the idea of griffith scratching himself because guts’ sword didn’t even touch him. nicely fits the sexualized scar discussion later on between guts and casca too lol. “I too want a wound that I can say you gave me” js.
these days i’m very solidly on my tombstone of flame related explanation, but yeah yours is also gr8.
Okay, this is totally overkill, I know, but your ask has motivated me to just lay it all out, so ty!
Yeah, I can see why people look at this image and see it as one huge raised scar. It’s fairly ambiguous looking, and it’s the visual interpretation the anime went with, which reinforces this common perception:
But look at this:
You can see when he traces it that the “outline” of that “wound” fits his two fingers exactly. It’s not one scar, it’s two self-inflicted parallel scratch marks.
They’re not in the same place as the river scratches, there are only two instead of four, and they’re also older and therefore either mostly healed scabs or scars which he’s tracing instead of tearing open in that moment, which is why they’re not the same as the bleeding open wounds we see in chapter 17, but they are definitely two separate marks, not the edges of one giant scar.
Tbh I think Miura put them on his shoulder instead of his arms this time mainly for dramatic effect so Griffith is more curled in on himself when he traces them.
imo the movie is closer to the spirit of the manga in making them scratch marks and showing Griffith seemingly tempted to add to them. It’s still a little weird considering their placement further back, and idk what they expected new audiences to think since they cut out every relevant aspect of those marks being there, ie his backstory and the night Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and co. But whatever, it’s close enough for me.
And to just briefly explain those scratch marks a bit further, basically, as much as it looks a bit like a big scar in the manga, like you said, it really makes no sense for it to be.
If Guts’ sword had hit him in the second duel he’d either have a gaping wound or a discoloured bruise later that day, not a scar, and if he got it somewhere else that we never get to see then he has absolutely no narrative reason to trace it and cry while thinking about Guts. It would be nonsensical and meaningless for him to trace some random mysterious scar that has no relevance in this highly emotionally charged moment.
On the other hand we know he has a history of self-harming by scratching himself, and we’ve seen him viciously scratch himself under circumstances very similar to Tombstone of Flame Part 2 – the moment Griffith flashed back to just as we see his bare shoulder with those marks on it for the first time in that first image up there: “You believe that, don’t you?”
Griffith has done something he considers “dirty” for the sake of his dream, asks someone else what they think of him (”Am I dirty?” // “Do you think that I’m cruel?”), both Casca and Guts inadvertantly reinforce his belief that he’s dirty/cruel with their responses (”N- why… why were you alone with him before?” and “Ain’t that part of the path to your dream?”), and in the river in front of Casca he self harms while talking himself through the necessity of dirtying himself for his dream, so it feels safe to assume that sometime shortly following his conversation with Guts in Tombstone of Flame he also self harmed while telling himself it’s necessary to be cruel for his dream.
Now that Guts has left in what Griffith believes is a rejection of the “cruelty” and “dirtiness” that he let Guts in to see, he traces those old scratch marks and tries to convince himself again that it’s worth it for his dream. And the point of this moment is that he can’t convince himself this time. Instead he just curls up and sobs, because in the face of Guts’ apparent rejection, it’s not worth it.
Like I said lol, this is overkill as a response to your ask, but like I saw an excuse to explain my take on this moment in its own post, instead of buried in a much longer post, so I took it.
i like my femto as a manifestation of griffith’s self loathing hot take more the more i think about it, bc like, it’s a gr8 way of exemplifying berserk’s “people’s actions/choices/etc shape them” “he who fights monsters” etc theme.
which yk is everywhere from the concept of the sacrifice (choosing to sacrifice your loved ones makes you evil), to guts’ sword gaining more essence-of-darkness power the more ghosts and monsters he kills with it, to regular old non-metaphorical character progression like the black swordsman arc.
but the self loathing specifically is a great touch because what it means, which holds true in berserk, is that it’s not doing generic bad things that slowly fucks you up, but specifically doing things that you yourself find abhorrent. it’s pushing past your own limits.
eg tombstone of flame was a dark moment for griffith, because he felt guilty about the assassinations.
for guts? didn’t make an iota of difference because he didn’t care.
for griffith every battle feeds his dark side because every life lost on the road to his dream makes him feel guilty, and pushing away that guilt and doing it anyway is what shapes him and makes him capable of doing more and more, until sacrificing the hawks (guts excluded) can be framed as just another round of casualties, another scoop of bodies on the mountain.
for guts, the things that feed his dark side tend to be more along the lines of going above and beyond and torturing apostles and killing children or using them as hostages lol. or mistreating his friends eg abandoning and attacking casca. he has a very strong dividing line between people he cares about and canon fodder.
griffith didn’t have that dividing line, he cared about every death he caused, ally and enemy alike, which ironically made him more susceptible to corruption, in that it basically gave him practice burying his heart lol, until by the eclipse he was like, fuck it i’m a monster anyway, might as well make it official.
i don’t think this is the be all end all, i think there’s also a strong ‘one’s environment shapes you’ theme that intersects w/ this, particularly wrt trauma feeding ppl’s dark sides as well. plus this is only part of griffith’s reasoning for making the sacrifice lol.
but yk, it’s a good + interesting element of the story.
also somewhat relatedly i love the thought of all those little moments in their relationship that we know existed but never get to really see, at least not in detail, in like the 3-4 years they had before everything got all fucked
the little quiet moments pre and post battle, eating together, drinking together, chatting about nothing important, or griffith opening up to guts the way we’ve seen a few times but must’ve happened more than that, laughing together, sparring together, whatever. there’s just so much potential there.
but i’m glad that we got to see just enough of them to hint at the little chill unimportant-to-the-plot moments, just enough to get the sense of the casual intimacy of their relationship
like guts trying to see griffith after the zodd fight because why the hell shouldn’t he go visit him? or like corkus calling guts griffith’s favourite. or like guts casually reclining in griffith’s study paging thru the kama sutra while griffith talks about the assassination attempt.
or like owen’s memory
and some of the official art is gr8 for this too
and mb my favourite two examples:
like, i love that after the eclipse guts’ mournful memory of griffith is one we never actually saw, nothing particularly important, nothing relevant to the plot – just one instance of griffith glancing back at him before a battle.
and griffith’s last memory before making the sacrifice is also nothing relevant to the plot, nothing particularly important, just the two of them limping away after one battle out of a hundred together.
because it’s those moments that really, really define their relationship, moreso even than griffith saving guts from zodd or guts dedicating his sword to griffith or griffith’s breakdown when guts left or guts realizing he fucked up when he left, etc etc.
+ it’s those little details that rly sell their relationship even when we don’t get to see all that much of the casual pointless in-between moments imo. like the big important moments are incredibly good and why i ship them, but it’s just nice to know that those moments aren’t the only ones that matter.
technically the term “apologist” means someone who argues in defense
of something unpopular or controversial, not someone who apologizes for
the actions of someone else. so like, i myself am a huge griffith
apologist lol. i’ll argue in defense of griffith as a wonderfully three
dimensional, super interesting, super sympathetic character who shouldn’t be judged on the basis of one terrible offensive writing choice all day.
hell
i’ll even argue in defense of femto as a potentially/originally great
villain that got fucked over by the author’s love of gratuitous
misogynist grimdarkness and homophobia.
self-describing as a griffith apologist isn’t the same as saying that you’re fine with rape lol, because griffith is fictional and defending him as a fictional character doesn’t mean saying everything he did would be justified irl, sometimes it means that the writing around him was bad, and/or that he’s a good character rather than a good person, and/or that they think judgement should be aimed at miura for writing gratuitous rape rather than at griffith/femto bc he’s not real, yk?
(I mean yeah some people hate fictional characters for doing bad things, or think that if you like a fictional character that means you’d support everything they do if they were real, but plenty of people don’t respond to fiction that way and it would be nice if more people understood that lol)
and tbh i feel like “haters gonna hate” applies here lol. people are going to be assholes to fans of controversial fictional characters no matter how consciencious you are about always writing a disclaimer when you talk about liking them, so fuck it, why bother? (i say this while i have like a disclaimer in my about page lol, but yk. i don’t blame anyone for not bothering. if someone leaps to the conclusion that you’re fine with rape irl bc of which fictional characters you like, that’s absolutely their own problem.)
Like, you shouldn’t blame other fans for being enthusiastic about their love and attracting hate lol, you should blame the people who go out of their way to look for excuses to be dicks.
As long as ppl aren’t sliding into rape apologism or other offensive rhetoric when they talk about griffith, who cares? and tbqh in my time on tumblr as a huge fan of griffith i’ve never actually seen anyone defend femto raping casca or claim it’s justified or should be forgiven etc. like, maybe it happens, i’m sure there are edgy teenagers somewhere out there saying the eclipse rape scene was badass or w/e, but it sure isn’t common.
I mostly see people saying it was bad/offensive writing, or that femto is far enough removed from griffith due to, yk, the whole fantasy magical monster transformation thing that it doesn’t affect their feelings towards griffith lol.
anyway my point is that someone calling themselves a griffith apologist doesn’t mean they think his actions are justified, or would be justified in real life, because ime griffith fans tend to be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and judge the character as a fictional construct within a deeply flawed fictional work, rather than as a real person.
ok i’m sorry but in addition to the excellent way this hugely significant moment of triumph for Griffith’s dream concludes with Griffith seeking Guts out across a crowded ballroom and through a window so he can smile at him:
Contrast that to the way Charlotte keeps trying and failing get Griffith’s attention in these two chapters lmao.
Like this is just a perfect little microcosm of where Griffith’s emotional priorities now lie lol, his dream is Right There but he only has eyes for Guts.
I think Griffith is gay, even though I feel like he doesn’t know it(maybe after a while he came to realize it, especially after Guts left him) as for Guts his sexuality is a mystery to me. I know he definitely likes men(even though he probably definitely doesnt understand that or acknowledge it) attraction to women is debatable.
The way I see it we
cant really pinpoint what Guts’ sexuality is or his thoughts on women.
Griffith was the first to give Guts something that he never had and I
feel like his affection for Griffith is dominantly based on this. No one
else in the manga, both men and women, have yet to give Guts what
Griffith gave him thus why no one has yet to win over his affections.
ia tbh
for me I think Griffith is variable, like i could see him being either super repressed about being gay thanks to a) his dream revolving around marrying a woman and b) gennon being the only textually gay dude in berserk (thx miura) and griffith being taken advantage of at probably the age where he’d be just starting to realize he had feelings of attraction to men, like, that seems extremely likely to fuck him up.
But I could also see him accepting that he’s attracted to men – I mean he reads a lot, he seems fairly worldly, maybe gennon isn’t his only exposure to same-sex attraction, etc – but also not thinking it’s important because it’s incompatible with his dream.
Either way though I definitely can’t see him as anything but gay.
Wrt Guts I see him as gay too. He could be bi easily enough, but it’s just so easy for me to see his short-lived relationship with Casca as repression at work lol. Like saying she was the only person who could touch him back in the day, which was textually because she’s a woman (and also wrong bc Griffith also could) feels really suggestive of this to me. And of course the way their relationship screams rebound from their feelings for Griffith for both of them. And post eclipse, the only times he thinks of Casca sexually are when Griffith is also somehow involved, a la
And of course the entire Beast of Darkness debacle.
But yeah sexualities aside, since I mean it still could go either way from gay to bi, so w/e, that’s a really good point about Griffith being the only person in the manga who’s given Guts what he’s so desperately wanted – ie affection and attention and respect from someone Guts respects. It’s Griffith who he wants to look at him. Not Casca, not any of his rpg group or any of the other Hawks, just Griffith. It’s Griffith whose respect he feels like he needs to earn, no one else’s. It’s Griffith who he needs to feel equal to, no one else. It’s Griffith who he’s been obsessed with, no one else.
It’s why their relationship is still so extra lol, it’s shown as singular in the story, whether Miura meant that to be sexual or not.
So yeah idk, good comment basically, I just wanted to ramble on the subject lol.
i know i’ve talked about this before lol but i s2g every time i remember this moment i’m even more taken aback by how fucking… jaw-droppingly suggestive it is
judeau, the dude whose sole goal in the latter half of the golden age is getting guts and casca together, telling rickert to shut up about how much griffith loves guts right before he overtly shoves guts at casca, starting on the very next page when judeau changes the subject to her leadership
like there is absolutely no reason for that panel to be there; rickert could’ve stopped talking of his own volition, guts could’ve had his moment, and the subject could’ve naturally changed to casca. you could remove it and change nothing else and everyone still makes sense in this scene, the dialogue still works, etc etc.
what it tells us is that judeau is being manipulative here, that he has an agenda in hooking guts and casca up (not that that’s subtle), and, the actual hugely interesting part, it means judeau has to avoid conversation about griffith’s feelings so guts and casca will get together – ie
guts and casca can only connect in the absence of griffith.
this is followed through of course when they both brood over him afterwards, and in how their sex scene is framed as a rebound for both of them through parallels to significant moments they each had with griffith, and in how their relationship such as it it starts to fall apart when they rescue griffith and eventually come to accept that he needs to be taken care of, and in how post-eclipse guts abandons her to pursue femto/griffith for 2-3 years, and in how he’s able to stick with casca after ngriff “deserts” him, and how he’s “come this far by letting go of his obsession with him,” etc etc
and mb even more interestingly, it also means that they can only connect when guts falsely believes griffith doesn’t feel strong irrational life-destroying feelings for him. hence judeau telling rickert to shut up while rickert is telling guts a game-changing truth. guts knowing how griffith feels about him is incompatible with his relationship with casca.
hence guts denying any feelings of guilt and regret when casca stabs him and putting it out of his mind when they fuck, until those feelings start creeping back during the rescue mission
AND hence guts moping and walking away with casca in tow when neogriffith flies off on zodd after telling guts he’s “free” from his feelings for him – only finally choosing to stay with her instead of pursuing revenge after ngriff deserts him.
so once again it comes back to this question:
what happens if guts finds out neogriffith’s heart isn’t frozen after all?
you're the only one 