like ok this visual reference doesn’t really bring anything new to the table since we already know that Casca’s heart is full of dark negativity but yk
i still like it
also i’m still on my casca using the behelit bullshit ftr
cut for controversial theorizing and also lost chapter spoilers
I want this to be purposeful for two reasons:
1. what if there’s a tiny griffith living somewhere in neogriffith
2. i fucking hate the visual metaphor of casca being a ~broken doll~ and the only thing that could even come close to salvaging it for me is if it’s a deliberate griffith parallel because at least then it seems less grossly gendered
In the fourth and final part of this exploration of the tug of war between Griffith’s dream and his love for Guts, I’m going to look at how Griffith ultimately ends up choosing the dream over Guts despite the fact that Guts is more important to him – or, more accurately, because Guts is more important.
I’m starting by diving right into what is, hands down, my favourite part of Berserk.
The small battles we fought on the cobblestone when we were still young. The small victories we achieved. The many sparkling junk spoils we plundered.
In the evening… staring up from the back alley of brothels and taverns, where the sun never shines, I saw something. Shimmering against the setting sun, it was the brightest thing I had ever seen.
I made up my mind. The junk I would get for myself… would be that thing.
Darkness.
Deep darkness without even a trace of light.
How much time has passed since I was cast into this darkness…?
An eternity… but it also seems like an instant… All my senses are numbed and I can’t feel a thing. What of my body? It’s like it’s floating in mid-air. Have I retained my sanity? Did I go insane long ago?
Only him.
Like lightning on a dark night, he rises up within me, blazing. And again and again like a tidal wave, an infinite number of feelings surge upon me. Malice, friendship, jealousy, futility, regret, tenderness, sorrow, pain, hunger… So many recurring, yearning feelings. That giant swirl of violent emotions in which none are definite but all are implied. That alone is the bond which keeps my consciousness from vanishing amidst the numbness.
I know that I’m different from other people. Those I’ve met can by no means disregard me. They always view me with either a look of good will or animosity. I know that the good will forms into trust or fellowship and the animosity into awe or possibly dread. Thereby have I grasped… the hearts of so many in these hands.
…But why is it when it comes to him I always lose my composure?
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive. Out of so many thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies, why just him…?
How long ago did someone I was supposed to have in hand… instead gain such a strong hold on me?
Because you’re in love with him, oh my god.
At the end of the day, that’s what it boils down to. That’s the difference between Griffith shutting Casca out and letting Guts in. That’s why Casca has been jealous of Guts. Casca wanted to be Griffith’s emotional support, something indispensible to his dream – she wanted to be the one to “change him that way” – and learning that her feelings for Griffith were romantic all along points pretty conclusively imo to envying Guts for being the person Griffith loves, rather than her.
I’m going to be honest here: as much as I’ve been taking it as read that Griffith is in love with Guts (and, tbqh, vice versa) I wasn’t actually planning to make it a central point of this meta. I genuinely thought, going in, that I could focus on Guts as an emotional crutch and shield against his self loathing, as I’ve been doing so far. Yk, Griffith allows himself to become dependant on him because he loves him, but the point is the emotional dependency, not the love, right?
Fuckin wrong.
The climax of Griffith’s narrative can’t be understood without not just acknowledging that Griffith is in love with Guts, but recognizing it as the whole point and his central motivation.
This is going to be important later, but for now I’m stating that up front and I figure this is a good place to do so because, between Casca’s confession to Guts and Griffith’s monologue, it’s basically Miura spelling out the fact that this love is Griffith’s strongest motivating factor.
(And, just as an aside, despite the fact that it’s never explicitly defined, I’m calling it romantic love because a) it is, b) like, it just fucking is lol. I feel like you have to jump through hoops and twist yourself in knots to call it platonic. Without assuming that straightness is the default, saying Griffith is in love with Guts is genuinely the most straightforward, clear and concise way of reading this relationship to me. All my points hold true if you call it platonic love so ultimately you do you, but if I called it that I’d be being disingenuous.)
This monologue is our re-introduction to Griffith after a year of nothing but torture, darkness, and self-reflection. It’s the definitive statement on his relationship to Guts and how it compares to the dream now, after he’s lost both.
And the dream barely rates a mention. The matching visual of the shining/vivid thing, and the way Griffith opens the monologue by describing the dream as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, prime the reader to expect that the one vivid thing is the dream. That after losing Guts, Griffith has returned to obsessing over the dream in deluded desperation, or is maybe lamenting its demise.
But it’s a pure bait and switch because Guts is all-important to him now. Despite Guts’ rejection, despite the loss, despite the fact that he’s partially blaming Guts for having been tortured for a year, next to him the dream grows dull.
A core point of this meta was basically to show how this has been true from the very start. It’s not that Guts only outshines the dream when the dream has been lost to him, it’s that, after losing both the dream and Guts and being forced to confront himself, stripped of all those defenses that help keep him in denial, Griffith is finally able to understand, too late, what has been most important to him all along.
And this remains true. From Guts rescuing him to Griffith choosing to sacrifice him for the dream, Guts is still more important.
But if Griffith’s story up until Guts leaves has been about how his relationship with Guts had begun to replace his dream as the thing he turns to in order to shield himself from his weaknesses – guilt, self-loathing, the weight of lives on his shoulders, etc – then his story when Guts returns follows the opposite trajectory:
it’s about how he returns to his dream as his armour against his feelings for Guts.
And the place we’re starting from is Griffith letting go of his dream.
Back near the beginning Zodd gave Guts a prophecy:
If you can be said to be a true friend of this man… then take heed… When his ambition collapses… death will pay you a visit! A death you can never escape!
Because Zodd is a dramatic asshole. But the thing is, Griffith’s ambition has collapsed. His dream’s dead. The closest he can get to it before literal magic intercedes in his life is in moments of self-delusion, like when he told Charlotte he’d return to her, and when he snapped and chased a hallucination. But in the cold light of day, aware and relatively sane, he knows his dream is gone. Charlotte could still be over the moon for him and it’s not going to help him gain her kingdom without a tongue or working limbs, and he does know it.
And when Griffith watches the castle disappear over the horizon and lets the flowers in his hands go as his symbolic child self runs away from the brightest thing he’d ever seen rather than towards, when Griffith lets go of his dream, he’s… okay.
The Godhand don’t make an appearance. The behelit doesn’t come back and start screaming. Griffith is continuing on. This is acceptance. We’ve already seen the monologue about how the dream barely matters to him in comparison to Guts after all, so this isn’t too surprising either.
And then fucking Wyald shows up.
This fight’s significance to Griffith’s narrative is in his distance from the others, his alienation in being the only one who can’t pick up a sword to fight, and his helplessness as he desperately tries to do something to help Casca and Guts and can’t even manage to tear himself away from his minders, particularly in contrast to the fight against Zodd.
Eg:
Guts compares this fight to the Zodd fight a lot. When he’s briefly knocked out we see a flashback to a discussion with Erica where he talks about Zodd and Erica suspects he wants to fight him again. We see Guts thinking about Zodd as his only other frame of reference for a real live monster. And we see him think about Zodd when it comes to his and Griffith’s partnership specifically.
This emphasizes the difference between that fight and this current fight. Namely:
Whereas when Griffith tried to rescue Guts from Zodd they then squared off and faced him together, when Guts saves Casca he tells her to get lost and insists on taking Wyald one on one, because he’s got a score to settle.
Compared to the fight with Zodd, which led to the most positive and hopeful moment of their relationship – Griffith admitting he had no rational reason to leap into danger and save Guts, and Guts realizing he may have found what he’s been looking for ever since he killed Gambino – this fight with Wyald is a showcase of Griffith’s enforced distance and isolation from everyone, especially Guts.
If Griffith saving Guts from Zodd was the pinnacle of their relationship, the truest and most revealing moment of how Griffith feels, leading to Guts’ subsequent acceptance of those feelings and dedication to him in turn, then Guts pointedly fighting Wyald alone highlights the low point they’ve entered where they’re forcibly separated by Griffith’s broken body and voicelessness. They’ll never be a team again.
The chapter right after the fight is a heartbreaking mix of hope and despair. It begins, very appropriately, with Charlotte telling Anna that Griffith said he’d come back to her. Logically, like I’ve said, Griffith was deluding himself at that point. He accepts that his dream is gone a few hours later when they make it out of the sewer tunnels.
But by bringing it up and explaining that moment here, at the beginning of this chapter, it serves handily as ominous foreshadowing, and, even better, it’s a reminder that Griffith has always clung to his dream as emotional self-defense, and it still “smoulders from the bottom of [his] heart.”
The thing is, the comparison between Wyald and Zodd isn’t solely for the sake of contrast. It’s also a reminder of that pinnacle of their relationship, of
Griffith risking his life and dream for Guts, of Guts feeling like he’d found that indefinable thing he’d been searching for ever since he killed Gambino. It’s a sign of hope that the potential for their relationship isn’t lost. They’ve lost their ability to fight side by side, but their relationship isn’t predicated on just being able to fight together, or Griffith’s leadership, or the structure of the Hawks. It’s based on genuine love and mutual respect, and that isn’t gone.
Despite everything, they can still smile at each other. This scene demonstrates the potential they have just as two people who love each other, and gives readers vain hope for their future as it simultaneously sows the seeds for the destruction of their relationship.
The mask/helmet is a symbol of his former role as the leader of the Hawks, and hence, a symbol of everything that entails: the dream, repression, isolation, the image of perfection, everything I’ve been talking about for way too high a wordcount now. All those defense mechanisms.
Guts saying it’s okay for Griffith to take off the mask since it’s just the two of them is, therefore, an extremely loaded statement. Guts is offering Griffith the opportunity to be vulnerable, to be himself, no image, no mask, no leadership position, just the two of them, as equals, in each other’s company. He’s offering acceptance of Griffith, weakness and vulnerability and physical damage and all.
Instead of accepting, Griffith asks for his armour. It’s a way of reinforcing the barrier between them, and hiding his vulnerability.
The great thing about this chapter is that I don’t have to work to justify any of this because it’s literally called, “Armor to the Heart,” lol. Telling Charlotte he’d return was denial for the sake of guarding his heart against the reality of having lost everything he’d once strived for, and asking for his armour is a more literal version of that. Once Guts puts it on him he starts awkwardly denying reality too – such as telling Griffith he’ll be able to swing a sword soon.
Rather than Griffith being able to accept the truth of what’s happened – that he’s vulnerable, he’s helpless, he can no longer win for the sake of the dead, everything he’s worked for is lost – and maybe find consolation in Guts’ acceptance of him and love for him despite that, he tries to keep hiding behind the old image of perfection, the way he used to. This is basically a futile version of Griffith smiling and telling Casca, “it’s nothing.”
When Wyald returns like a bad penny, he really gets to the heart of what it means for Griffith to manufacture this image of himself to hide his vulnerability behind, and boy is it devastating:
Griffith is a symbol. He has deliberately cultivated that ideal image of himself as the perfect leader, a knight in shining armour. It keeps him distanced and detached from everyone except Guts, who has been allowed to see through it. His allies see him as a symbol of hope and change for the better, his enemies see him as a symbol of corruption in the system and change for the worse, Gennon sees him as a symbol of perfect beauty, Charlotte sees him as a symbol of a perfect relationship, and his Hawks see him as a symbol of their rise to glory.
And, of course, it all leads back to Griffith’s dream. It’s the reason it’s necessary to become this idealized image, rather than a real person. It’s an intrinsic part of his ascent to the throne.
And it’s part of how he convinces himself that he’s all right, “it’s nothing.” It helps him deny his emotions and bury them. If he can convince everyone else he’s perfect, he can convince himself. That mask of perfection is an intrinsic part of his defense against his self-loathing.
This is what he tried to hide behind when he asked Guts to dress him in his armour, and this is what Wyald strips away from him now.
He’s lost nearly every defense he has against his own self-hatred. His dream is dead in the water and he failed to prove that everything he’s done and all the lives lost in his wake were worthwhile sacrifices. He’s not one of the mover shakers of the world, he’s just an ordinary person who wanted to be special and couldn’t stand the weight of guilt on his shoulders.
Now he’s helpless and dependent; not only did he wholly fail the people who follow him, he is now reliant on them, without anything even to offer in exchange. Wyald pretty much takes away his last lingering ability to deny this.
To Griffith, this is as close to hell as you get without dying first. He didn’t keep winning for the sake of the dead, he lost, for good. He failed everyone, dead and alive, and his very existence is worse than worthless, it’s a burden on others (from his point of view).
I’d say that this couldn’t be a more perfectly tailored hell for Griffith if someone designed it that way, but, well, someone did design it that way.
Then the next scene just doubles down.
Honestly there are a shitload of possible readings of this scene, many of them not even mutually exclusive, and I think there are a number of complex factors that feed into it, but I’m landing on one for the purposes of this meta.
Based on what I perceive of Griffith’s own feelings of self-worth and his current headspace, and particularly the way the scene with Wyald right before serves as a literal and metaphorical stripping away of everything that gives Griffith a sense of worth, I think one solid reading is that he’s offering himself to Casca here because it’s the only thing left of himself that potentially has worth to someone.
Like I’ve seen other Berserk fans call this an attempted rape as a matter of course, which couldn’t be further from the truth, and not only because he literally stops when Casca says stop, and is physically incapable of even taking his clothes off. It’s not a sneak preview of the Eclipse rape, it’s a huge, pointed contrast.
This is Griffith at his lowest. He’s broken, desperate, and he feels worthless. He’s not trying to fuck Casca because he wants to, it’s because at one point that’s what she wanted.
He moves on her right after overhearing her tell Guts that she just wants to be held, after she contemplates her shaking hands and remembers how Griffith had once been able to comfort her with just a hand on her shoulder. Contextually the set-up of this scene points to Griffith desperately wanting to be that person who could comfort Casca once again, instead of being the person who needs comfort.
I also think there’s a precedent that sets this scene up with Casca comforting Guts sexually and thinking, “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.” The difference between giving and being given to is a recurrent theme, and I think this scene draws on it.
But he is the one who needs to be comforted. He no longer has the power or the position to be the one offering comfort. Casca refuses his sexual offer, and as he trembles above her, she lays her hand on him, in a role-reversal that just highlights everything of his past self that he’s lost.
If Griffith’s ability to once put on the mask of perfection and comfort Casca even in the midst of his own despair was a demonstration of strength, this is a humiliating demonstration of complete and utter weakness and uselessness. It seems that now he’s nothing to Casca, once his most devoted follower and admirer, except a victim who needs to be taken care of.
Guts’ hand on his shoulder in Tombstone was a sign of his emotional vulnerability to Guts specifically, because of the unique nature of their relationship. It was a symbol of Guts’ hold on him and Griffith’s weakness in loving him. Casca’s hand on Griffith’s back now is a sign of Griffith’s vulnerability in general. His armour’s been stripped off, his dream is gone, everything he once relied on to help him repress his self loathing has been ripped away, and now he can’t offer Casca anything; he can only accept her comforting hand.
Griffith has one thing left: Guts, and the possibility of absolution to be found in his love, if Guts does still love him. If Griffith needed to hear that he wasn’t cruel back in Tombstone of Flame, now he desperately, desperately needs to hear that he’s worth something to someone. That he isn’t just a cruel monster who piled up a mountain of corpses and then couldn’t even climb it all the way, who is now just a useless inconvenience to everyone with the weight of thousands of bodies on his shoulders.
And I believe, despite everything, that Guts would’ve been enough. Narratively, we’re told that he could’ve been enough. Griffith’s torture chamber monologue, Griffith letting his dream go, the way “I’ll st-” is placed on a panel of Griffith sleeping through it, conveying a sense of missed opportunity perfectly:
And the way Guts realized he fucked up by leaving only seconds after Griffith has overheard them.
Note that this line is a conclusive call-back to Guts musing on this statement a few pages earlier, making it clear that it refers to his regret over leaving, and how by leaving he threw away the thing he wished for in the first place:
If there wasn’t at least the possibility for Griffith to find some kind of happiness in a life with Guts at his side despite losing everything else, none of this would matter. Guts finally making the right choice by deciding to stay just as Griffith thinks he’s going to leave again would be dramatically pointless.
And this is a tragedy, so despite all these hope spots, this happens:
And Griffith just fucking breaks.
What do you fear in this place? asks the version of Griffith who still has a dream, and then he points to another place, a place where Griffith could leave his fears behind.
Like this is literally right after he overhears Casca telling Guts to leave. This was the part I struggled with until I just went with my gut, backed up, and realized that this isn’t actually about Griffith’s self-loathing, or his fears of being worthless or a burden. It’s not about being stripped of his coping mechanisms.
This is about being in love with Guts. This is about the visceral fear of Guts leaving him again, not because of how it might reflect on Griffith as a person with or without worth, but because he loves Guts so much he can’t bear the thought of a life without him.
Griffith’s dream is a coping mechanism. This page conveys that concept as clearly as anything. “What do you fear in this place?” Run away from it, towards your dream, your kingdom, the safe place you’ve fantasized about all your life, the place where you have the power to make things better.
He desperately chases his hallucinatory vision of his dream, and then he has a vision of a potential future:
And, true to form, the defining aspect of this short, three-page sequence isn’t the loss of Griffith’s dream or his helplessness and dependency. It’s not about his self-loathing or being unable to hide his weakness behind armour and a mask of perfection. It’s Guts’ absence. The point is that Griffith is here, with Casca, and Guts is elsewhere.
“With you and the boy… just the three of us.” Like their kid is even named after Guts, just to highlight the actual Guts’ absence as emphatically, and depressingly, as possible. The first image is Griffith surrounded by Miura’s patented black panel of symbolic isolation, Casca brings up Guts and wonders where he is, then reiterates that it’s “just” the three of them. In a total of three pages containing almost no other information what we’re given is Griffith with Casca and a nightmare kid named after the man he loves, Guts gone, and Griffith’s total mental and emotional detachment from the world.
And then he wakes up and immediately tries to kill himself.
What does Griffith fear in this place?
The first time Guts left him he ran to Charlotte, the means of achieving his dream, for comfort, denial, escape from reality, and self-destruction.
This time he tries to turn to his dream again, but it’s nothing more than a hallucination that segues into a nightmare in which Guts has left him behind, and with no dream to escape to, no armour or mask bury his heart under, no coping mechanisms left, he loses himself. “This peace and quiet isn’t so bad,” he thinks, barely even aware, his life stretching out ahead of him, without Guts.
That is, after all, the one difference between now and the torture chamber. He’d lost his dream, his tongue, the use of his limbs, his self-worth, ability to hide behind an image, and Guts then, too, and the Godhand never showed. But Griffith thought he would eventually die in the torture chamber – even if the King specified that he live through a year, that’s a lot less than a lifetime. Now he’s faced with a full life in this state, apart from Guts.
And I want to make this distinction clear. The prospect of losing Guts is what sends him into suicidal despair. It’s not the loss of his dream or the stripping away of the persona he hid under – in other words, it’s not the loss of the coping mechanisms he used to rely on that drives him to despair. Losing those is likely what makes suicide, and then sacrifice, seem like the only possible escape from his despair, hence the set-up with Wyald and Casca hammering home the fact that he’s lost all his ways of guarding his heart, but it’s not the source of that despair. The source is Guts.
Guts was replacing the dream as Griffith’s defense against self loathing. But that does not make Guts just one more coping mechanism to lose. He’s not the final straw that broke the camel’s back, he’s the whole bundle of hay.
The premise of the first three parts of this meta was that his relationship with Guts helps Griffith deal with the immense weight of everything he’s done on the path to his dream, and had the potential to fully replace achieving the dream as Griffith’s way of not hating himself.
Well the premise of this part is that the reason Guts could’ve replaced the dream is because Griffith is in love with Guts, incredibly, all-consumingly in love with him, and now that is what he needs help coping with. There’s no getting around this lol, and no way of downplaying it either.
We know this because of how his nightmarish vision of a life with Casca highlights Guts’ absence instead of, eg, his self loathing, or his lack of an image to hide behind, or his guilt, or being a burden to Casca (hell, in his imagination she’s explicitly content.) We know it because it’s the words, “even if it’s alone, you have to go,” that make Griffith snap. We know it because the entire narrative of the Golden Age has largely been devoted to establishing that Griffith feels unprecedented, incredibly powerful feelings for Guts, and this is the payoff.
We know it because Berserk thoroughly foreshadowed the Eclipse during the Black Swordsman arc, and it was absolutely not subtle about about love as a motivation:
I’ve written a post fully explaining this already so I’m not going to be that thorough here, but suffice to say, through images like Femto there on “so that you could bury your fragile human heart,” through Puck’s direct questions and statements, through the entire point of this scene being to hint at Guts’ backstory, etc, it’s made very clear that the Count and Griffith/Femto are parallels.
And we know it because of what drives Griffith past that final point of despair that opens the behelit.
Sorry for posting practically the whole scene, but damn, don’t you just want to bask in it?
After everything – the loss of his dream, the torture, the loss of his voice and working limbs, the loss of his image, of his escape, of his denial, of his pride, and the loss of Guts – what finally plunges him into the kind of despair that creates a demonic demigod is the touch of Guts’ hand. Specifically his hand on Griffith’s shoulder.
What does Griffith fear in this place? What drives Griffith into despair?
Love.
It’s the understanding how utterly fucking gone he is for Guts. That hand on his shoulder signifies Griffith’s vulnerability to Guts because of his feelings, and it’s that touch that finally opens the behelit.
To split hairs, what drives him to despair is not believing that Guts will leave him, it’s knowing that if Guts leaves him, the loss will destroy him.
After all, it already happened once.
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive.
And Griffith’s vision of the future shows us a version of what he believes will happen: if the first time Guts left his body was destroyed, the second time the rest of him will follow. We saw him existing in a seemingly permanent state of semi-dissociation, maybe living entirely in daydreams (”daydreaming again…”), barely aware of the present.
Love is the source of Griffith’s despair – the overwhelming, horrifying, life-destroying vulnerability of love.
So Griffith turns back to his first defense mechanism to escape it.
Now, I don’t want to downplay the role Griffith’s guilt plays in the sacrifice. I didn’t write three posts about Griffith’s issues only to completely ignore them at the climax of his arc just because love happens to take centre stage.
So let’s briefly recap.
Griffith is filled with guilt and self-loathing; his dream was a way of repressing those feelings with the belief that one day his very existence, and everything he’s done during that existence, would be justified. One day Guts came along and instead of continuing to live in repression and emotional denial he fell in love and started opening up. This made him vulnerable and “weak,” so when Guts seemingly rejected him because of everything Griffith hates about himself, his dream was no longer enough for him to retreat to. So he crashed and burned. Now he’s stripped of all his defenses and the horror of that vulnerability to love has sent him into pure despair.
And now some cenobite looking assholes have joined the party and they’re telling Griffith ex-fucking-zactly what he’s spent most of his life desperately hoping to one day hear, in some form or another:
And despite being plunged into crimson-behelit-opening despair by his love for Guts, despite already being told everything he wants and needs to know – that he’s been chosen by God, all is not lost, he has another chance, and to take it what he has to do is sacrifice the Band – he still irrationally, desperately prioritizes Guts when his life is in danger yet again:
This is such a tragic moment, because this is the last time Griffith chooses Guts over the dream. And, once again because he loves Griffith, Guts is the one who lets go of his hand, falling away from Griffith into darkness like a lost beacon.
So, separated from Guts, the Godhand bring Griffith up to the palm of the hand and then they proceed to play him like a fiddle, knowing exactly which buttons to push, in their exploration of his self-loathing and guilt.
Like, they’re not lying to Griffith, technically. What Ubik and Conrad are doing is playing to Griffith’s shame and guilt. They are showing Griffith his own image of himself:
Griffith sees himself as a stupid kid scaling a mountain of corpses to get to a castle. He’s consumed by guilt, which is why he can’t stop – because if he does, if he apologizes, if he repents, everything will come to an end, and that mountain of people will have died for nothing.
We already know this, of course.
The Godhand show Griffith his own perception of himself, and tell him that it’s completely accurate.
So of course, of course we have to revist the moment Griffith asked someone if they see him the same way he does, in the hopes of getting a different answer:
With Guts, Griffith could’ve taken a different route. He could’ve learned not to see himself as a monster. In showing Guts the worst of himself and being accepted, he could’ve accepted his own self-worth, independent of achieving a dream.
I mean, let’s be real here: Griffith has no real reason to feel as guilty as he does, or as driven for the sake of the dead as he does. He’s right when he says that the Hawks chose to follow him. The only people whose deaths he forced were enemies trying to kill him, give or take a pedophile who wanted to capture him as a sex slave rather than kill him, and a kid whose death was an accident and not on his orders, even if it did work out great for him. He’s a military leader, but so is Guts, so is Casca, hell so is Rickert technically, and none of them feel any guilt about the people they kill in battle, or the men they send to their deaths.
It’s heavily suggested that Griffith wants a kingdom in order to create a place of equality, where people’s lives and bodies aren’t bought and sold. (”What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth even a single piece of silver.”) When he eventually does get a kingdom that’s exactly what it is, and it exists to grant the deep desire of humanity as a collective – in other words, the people who fought and died for it considered it worth fighting and risking their lives for. It’s not just Griffith who wants this kingdom, according to the narrative, it’s humanity – certainly the non-elite majority of humanity.
Griffith thinking of himself as a monster, and the Godhand calling him one, is Griffith’s own personal self-loathing bullshit talking, not an objective moral judgement, or Miura’s moral judgement.
Like, Miura deliberately shows us that the Godhand are fucking with him, telling us that chapter 77′s magical mystery tour through “the reality within his conscious realm” is highly manipulative and far from objective:
If Guts – any close, intimate, revealing, and genuine relationship really, but Griffith’s with Guts is the one this is about – was Griffith’s potential to see himself differently, to judge himself less harshly through the eyes of another, then the Godhand is a reinforcement of Griffith’s self-loathing.
Guts could’ve told Griffith he wasn’t cruel, wasn’t a monster, that he genuinely loved and admired him even while knowing all those things Griffith is ashamed of, and left so he could be more like him and become a friend to him. But he didn’t, and now the Godhand are using his words to tell Griffith that he is cruel, he is a monster – and that it’s necessary to be.
(And, just to be clear, this isn’t a judgement of Guts. He has his own giant pile of issues contributing to this world-destroying misunderstanding, and I feel like I fully understand his reasons for every mistake he made, and I love him for them lol, just like I love Griffith for his contribution of issues to this enormous fuck up. But this is about Griffith’s side of things, not Guts’.)
So, if Guts could’ve been a healthier way for Griffith to be absolved of guilt by altering his perspective of himself, the Godhand absolves Griffith of guilt through the method I described way back in part one of this thing:
by giving him a divine seal of approval.
If it be reason that destiny transcend human intellect and make playthings of children… it is cause and effect that a child bear his evil and confront destiny.
This is your destiny, kid. You’re not responsible for anything, you have no reason to feel guilty. You’re a horrible monstrous person piling up corpses to reach a castle, but hey, it’s okay – that’s your predetermined role in life. So you’re absolved, just as long as you roll with fate, add some more bodies to the pile, and double-down on that whole monster thing.
This is everything Griffith has always wanted.
Turns out he’s special after all. Everything he’s done that he hates himself for is justified because in the end he was meant for greatness. All those dead people can still achieve the thing they died for, all the dirty things he’s done were worthwhile, even his torture and despair was part of the wheel of fate and has meaning. All he has to do to sign off is agree to sacrifice a group of people who already pledged their lives to him, who he led and fought beside in full knowledge that they might one day die on his orders, for the sake of his dream, anyway.
And also Guts.
I don’t think I need more evidence that Guts is special and stands alone among the rest of the sacrifices, but I do want to point out that right before the Eclipse Miura emphasizes that Guts is no longer a part of the Hawks.
Guts fights his own battles. Unlike the rest of the Hawks, he has very deliberately removed himself from Griffith’s dream so he can be Griffith’s friend and equal instead of his underling. Back with Casca he said he wants to, “draw the line… keep things separate.” And, “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll never entrust my sword to another again. I’ll never hang from someone else’s dream.”
This distinction between Guts and the rest of the Hawks is significant because he is not being sacrificed for the same reason as the rest of the Hawks. He’s not being sacrificed as an underling, as one more necessary evil on the path to his dream. Once again, Guts stands apart to Griffith.
I tend to think of the sequence from Griffith reaching the palm of the hand to “I sacrifice,” our very last scene with original, fully human Griffith, as a mirror to our very first scene with Griffith in structure.
That first scene was much shorter, but similarly 90% of it revolved around Griffith’s dream and the philosophy of fate and vindication behind it, building up to the moment that he said, “it’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.”
90% of this sequence revolves around Griffith’s dream, his guilt issues, his self-loathing, and Void validating it all and vinidcating him, telling him he’s one of those keys that shape the world after all. And it all builds up to this:
Among thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies… you’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.
Griffith has a lot of very good reasons to say yes to the sacrifice. I sure hope somewhere in this fuckload of words about those reasons I’ve managed to show that it makes perfect logical sense for him to take the Godhand up on their offer.
And yet, the final, climactic reason given – the moment all this logic builds to, is emotional. You made me forget my dream.
Ultimately Griffith has two reasons for making the sacrifice:
1. achieve his dream, pile up some more bodies, reach the castle, let fate absolve him of guilt.
2. fuck you, Guts.
Griffith overhearing Casca telling Guts to leave, Guts’ hand on Griffith’s shoulder sending him into despair, the Count parallel, the sheer amount of Griffith’s narrative that revolves around his life-destroying, irrational feelings for Guts, the final conclusive statement from human Griffith… I feel like, given everything, it’s impossible to deny this aspect of Griffith’s motivation.
Again, the dream is an escape. In making the sacrifice, Griffith is falling back on all of his defense mechanisms to escape the pain in his heart, the pain of love.
“You’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream,” is a tender, tragic statement of love, and it’s also an accusation. How dare you be necessary to me, how dare you be able to destroy me just by leaving, how dare you make me love you.
It’s because of that love that Griffith lost everything, because he needed Guts, Guts made him weak, and Guts abandoned him. It’s because of that love, because he thought Guts was leaving again, that Griffith felt the worst despair of his life and tried to kill himself.
GOD he’s so in love. And that’s what he’s he’s trying to carve out of himself and escape from, by making the sacrifice. His fragile human heart.
It’s another form of self-destruction. The way he “destroyed himself,” by throwing himself at his dream when Guts left the first time mirrors the way he’s destroying himself now, with the exact same motivation behind it.
He becomes the monster he’s always believed himself to be. His armour and the mask – the one he wore in the torture chamber, the one mockingly modeled after his White Hawk persona – become an exoskeleton. Femto embodies Griffith’s self-loathing. Every part of himself Griffith hated, every reason he thought he was cruel, every assassination he was ashamed of, every body paving the way to his dream, is what Femto is made of, and his shame, his self-hatred, his love, his guilt, his despair, have all been shattered and torn away.
And if Femto is Griffith’s self-loathing, then NeoGriffith is the image of perfection.
In making the sacrifice and burying his heart, Griffith became the embodiment of everything he hated in himself, and everything those who never truly knew him admired about him. The cruelty, the monstrosity, the ruthlessness, the filth; the beauty, the immaculate perfection, the charisma, the sense of singularity.
He destroyed himself and became the false conception of Griffith.
Give or take.
Welp, that does it. I’m not going to really get into anything Femto or NeoGriffith has done or said, because this is about human Griffith’s character and narrative. Griffith’s final act as a whole person was choosing to sacrifice Guts for his dream, and lbr you couldn’t ask for a more narratively satisfying send off, so that’s where I’m ending this. And tbh if I went any further it’d lean way more towards critique than analysis anyway.
Ultimately the Golden Age is Griffith’s story. Guts may be the protagonist, but it’s Griffith’s feelings, actions, and choices that drive the plot. Griffith kickstarts the narrative and he ends it. And Griffith’s story is about falling in love. It’s about how love can strengthen you and help you overcome the worst of yourself, and it’s about how love can make you weak, vulnerable, and desperate for an escape. And, because it’s a tragedy, it’s about how and why Griffith chooses escape and succumbs to the worst of himself rather than overcoming his flaws through a mutually supportive relationship with Guts.
tyfyt
ty everyone who’s commented or said things in tags, liked these posts, etc, i really appreciate it and it’s v heartwarming to know people enjoyed reading this ❤
i don’t think there’s room for this in my griffith meta bc it doesn’t particularly pertain to the point, but i need to point something out:
Griffith notices this, and may even hear what Casca says since she’s shouting, and we get one of his patented jealous looks in reaction.
And the next thing we see him do right after this?
Futilely try to do anything to save Casca when Wyald immediately picks her up. Because his jealousy is a minor component of his entire being, and his love for his friends is by far a more powerful motivating factor.
Like shit like this is why I can’t deal with people who think Femto is just Griffith with power lol. He’s Griffith with the jealousy (among other negative emotions) magnified to an extreme degree and the compassion and love and empathy etc etc removed. Like that is explicitly stated but yk, these details help too.
To Griffith, the dream is emotional security. It’s assurance that if he’s dirty, then it’s because it’s necessary to be so, so he can keep winning for the sake of the dead. It’s a way for him to repress his guilt and self loathing, because when he gets that kingdom-shaped seal of approval, it will have been worth it.
So when I say that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is beginning to replace the dream, that’s what I mean – rather than relying on the dream to reassure himself that everything he’s done, even his very existence, is worthwhile, he could rely on Guts for that. He starts opening up to Guts, rather than repressing through his dream.
Despite Griffith’s Promrose Hall speech, nothing actually changes on his end. He prioritizes Guts above the dream again when he sends a search party after him and Casca despite the nobles he’s trying to suck up to telling him he shouldn’t. He drops everything during the Battle of Doldrey to have a quiet panic attack when Guts’ sword breaks. His first reaction upon achieving a huge milestone on the path to his dream when the Band is officially integrated into the royal army is to find Guts and share the moment with him.
And boy I love how the chapter that depicts Griffith’s moment of triumph for his dream ends with Griffith just smiling at Guts across a vast ballroom.
The story between Promrose and the end of the war is filled with little moments that are suggestive of Griffith’s reliance on Guts. Another of my favourites:
I just hope he stays calm and composed.
Casca worried that volunteering to defeat an army of thirty thousand with five thousand men might be an act of recklessness because a predatory pedophile who took advantage of Griffith’s extreme self loathing when he was like fourteen is the leader of that army? Naaaaaah impossible, Griffith would never let that faze him. Oh and speaking of Griffith being calm and composed, this is my last battle, it’s almost time to leave.
But those moments are just for spice. Tombstone of Flame is where the real meat of this analysis is.
This is the second night of assassinations, and it’s a neat mirror to the first. Where Guts came away from Julius’ assassination consumed with inadequacy, self-loathing, and generally feeling like a monster, now it’s Griffith who comes away totally fucked up and filled to the brim with self hatred.
Between Promrose and Tombstone we learn Griffith’s backstory. This adds to the mirror image effect between these assassinations by revealing Griffith’s insecurities to us so we can understand his perspective, and it serves as its own parallel to this scene.
And this is the scene where we see that not only does Guts surpass the dream in importance to Griffith, but he could have potentially become a much more emotionally healthy alternative to it. This is where we see how Griffith could have not just prioritized Guts, but replaced the function of the dream with his relationship with Guts.
And I want to emphasize the emotionally healthier part. One of Berserk’s most consistent themes imo is that relationships with others are a superior way of dealing with your issues compared to dreams and swords.
eg, Godo, our favourite dispenser of wisdom, has some pretty telling lines to that effect.
You
were right beside those irreplacable things… yet you couldn’t bear to
immerse yourself together in sorrow with them. So instead… you ran
away so that your own malice could burn inside you.
Guts’ personal growth post-Eclipse is associated with making friends; his backsliding and mistakes are associated with going off on his own to fight monsters; he begins to overcome his revulsion to touch when he becomes part of the Hawks;
on the rooftop after the Zodd conversation Guts recalled the night he killed Gambino and wondered if this was the answer he’d been searching for since then (family) before dedicating his sword to Griffith; part of his healing process for his childhood trauma is talking about it to Casca; etc. And Guts and Griffith’s relationship is very much included, even though it’s far more of a tragic missed opportunity.
The second half of Tombstone of Flame Part 2, aka my favourite chapter of Berserk, abruptly shifts tone from triumph and pure badassery to quiet, contemplative vulnerability halfway through. As a chapter I feel like it really encompasses the highs and lows of Griffith’s character, from defeating his enemies and cooly predicting Foss’ actions to wrap everything up in a neat little bow, to highlighting his guilt, self-loathing, and emotional dependency on Guts.
Here, Griffith opens up to Guts in an intensely vulnerable moment.
I involved you in this filthy scheme… and I didn’t even get my hands dirty. I left all the dangerous, taxing work to you…
Idiot! What kinda question’s that for the guy who killed a hundred men?
This is another scene the significance of which cannot be overstated. There’s so much to unpack here I hardly know where to start. Like… this is the moment. This is what Griffith flashes back to when he’s fucking Charlotte and burning his life down around him. This is a moment Guts remembers when slowly realizing that Griffith loves him. This is exactly what the Godhand shows Griffith to get him to agree to make the sacrifice. Guts remembers this after Griffith makes the sacrifice. This moment is the linchpin of Berserk.
This is both a mirror to Guts overhearing the Promrose Hall speech, and a call-back to Griffith in the river after Gennon.
So first, the set-up of this chapter recalls Promrose Hall strongly. It’s the second night of assassinations, Promrose Hall took place on the first night. When Guts assassinated Julius he came away from that encounter wracked with guilt over accidentally killing Adonis as well, strongly and traumatically reminded of his childhood, and basically thinking of himself as a monster in a way inseparable from his own childhood trauma:
Guts is consumed with self-loathing, comparing himself to monsters like Zodd overtly, and like Donovan symbolically. He’s also reminded of killing Gambino, like, basically this event just brings a pile of old issues crashing down on Guts’ head.
In a concussed daze he wants nothing but to find Griffith, presumably for reassurance. I don’t want to get too heavily into Guts’ side of things here, but remember that this is shortly after he dedicated himself to Griffith when Griffith told him he risked his life for him for no reason. I think it’s safe to say that he wants that reassurance again, he wants to feel the same sense of being valued and respected that he got during that staircase conversation.
And instead he overhears Griffith telling Charlotte that he has no friends. More to the point, what he gets is Griffith’s dream blocking the emotional bridge that Guts is trying to cross like a damn troll.
In Tombstone, Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and this time it’s Griffith who turns to Guts for emotional reassurance in a moment of vulnerability.
The way killing Adonis reminds Guts of his many, many issues is echoed in the strong parallel between Tombstone and Griffith in the river. We don’t get to see what’s going through Griffith’s head the way we see into Guts’, but we can infer an awful lot based on this comparison.
In the river, Griffith asked someone for reassurance after doing something he considers shameful for the sake of his dream.
Casca’s response isn’t all that reassuring.
She cuts herself off in the process of automatically reassuring him and instead she asks why he was with Gennon. This is totally understandable and not at all something I blame Casca for lol. She’s a kid, she’s understandably disgusted at the thought of Griffith having sex with Gennon willingly knowing that he’s a pedophile, and she’s out of her depth in a highly charged, difficult discussion. But that doesn’t change the fact that Griffith probably took her answer as a “yes.”
Griffith then goes into his self-harming dream spiel, as he reiterates to himself exactly why it was worth it to dirty himself for his dream while tearing open his arms. What may have been his first attempt to open up to someone else in a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability was shut down, inadvertently, so he violently returns to his original justification and defense measure, his dream.
The saddest thing about Tombstone, to me, is that this time Guts brings up the dream for him.
Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?
Guts’ answer is a depressing double-whammy of both implicitly agreeing that Griffith is cruel, and reminding him that the cruelty is necessary to achieve his goals. This second time we see Griffith try to open up to someone is also shut down, inadvertently, and the fact that Guts is the one to bring up his dream this time rather than Griffith tells us that the dream wasn’t even on his mind. Guts’ answer comes as a very painful reminder.
Like, imo this is huge. In the first part of this meta I tried to show how wholly reliant Griffith is on his dream. It’s what he clings to as his shield against his intense self-loathing and guilt. It’s a way for him to tell himself that everything awful and dirty that he’s done was worth it, and that one day he’ll be able to prove that.
Well this moment shows Griffith forgetting all that in the face of Guts’ potential acceptance, until Guts reminds him and his self loathing comes crashing down on him all at once.
If his dream was what he turned to for validation from fate or some higher power, then now Guts is who he turns to for validation. He needs Guts’ reassurance that he isn’t cruel. He needs Guts to see his “dirty side” and continue to remain by his side – that is all the validation he needs now. Not fate, not a kingdom, just love.
The same way the only thing Guts needed in order to feel like he was where he belonged wasn’t his own dream, but the knowledge that Griffith loved him, the knowledge that he had after their staircase conversation about Zodd, and which dissolved after Promrose.
But instead Guts, with Griffith’s dream on his mind getting in between them again, says the wrong thing and Griffith looks the exact same way he looked when he felt like he was responsible for a kid’s death.
So, to sum up, Griffith feels self-loathing, tries to open up to other people to assuage his sense of self-loathing in the hope that, having seen him at his worst, they don’t see him as filthy/cruel the way he sees himself, and each time his self loathing is only reinforced. The first time he clings to his dream in lieu of Casca’s reassurance, while the second time Guts is the one who brings up his dream, in so many words pushing Griffith away and telling him to cling to the dream instead of him.
Each time the dream serves as a replacement for real human connection and love.
The first time Griffith was able to close himself off, place a hand on her shoulder, and tell Casca, “it’s nothing,” when he realized how emotionally vulnerable he was in that moment. But when it comes to Guts, he’s much too far gone to separate himself and play the perfect leader.
Now, as opposed to putting the mask of perfection on and saying, “it’s nothing,” with Guts he says:
Unlike Promrose Hall, Guts putting the dream in between him and Griffith and thwarting Griffith’s efforts to open up to him and take comfort in his potential reassurance doesn’t immediately ruin their relationship. I’d say that Griffith is very accustomed to seeing himself as a monster by now, so while Guts’ implicit confirmation of that fact is incredibly fucking depressing considering what could have been, it’s nothing Griffith didn’t expect to hear.
Guts remains the man allowed to see behind the mask and into the real him.
And then there’s this contrast:
This is depicted as a cute moment, but it’s also indicative of how utterly weak and emotionally vulnerable Griffith is now that he’s let Guts in. With Casca he was still able to step back and remove himself, put the mask back on, and be the one to comfort her despite clearly needing it more.
Now Guts is the one to put his hand on Griffith’s shoulder. It’s not depicted as a hugely significant and character revealing action the way this moment in the river is, but it’s a perfect illustration of what Griffith finally realizes after it’s too late:
And it’s exactly the moment Miura uses to show us how emotionally vulnerable Griffith has become to Guts. Griffith couldn’t separate himself when he tried, and now he doesn’t try, he just accepts Guts’ assessment that his cruelty is necessary with a sad smile, and intends to continue on with Guts at his side.
Finally, there’s seemingly one thing missing from this comparison between Griffith in the river and Griffith in Tombstone of Flame: the self harm.
But, well, it’s not actually missing, we just don’t get to see it until a month later:
And the reason we’re not shown Griffith’s self-harm scratches*** until this scene is because it’s actually another big contrast between Griffith’s reaction to Casca and his reaction to Guts.
Presumably, based on the other parallels I drew between Tombstone and Casca’s flashback, and based on the placement of these panels – Griffith’s memory of Guts reminding him about his dream and questioning Griffith’s resolve followed immediately by our first glimpse of those scratch marks on Griffith’s shoulder – Griffith self-harmed at some point closely following the assassinations.
One can imagine it following exactly the same pattern we saw with Casca: Griffith asks someone if they think he’s X thing he hates about himself, doesn’t hear a no, and then some time following he reinforces his resolve, tells himself that it’s ok, it’s necessary for him to do these dirty, cruel things for the sake of achieving his all-important dream, for the sake of the people who have given their lives for it, for the sake of making their sacrifices meaningful, etc, while self-harming. Just like he did in the river.
The contrast comes now, after Guts has left.
Griffith could probably convince himself after Tombstone that the things he does for the sake of his dream are necessary and important and it’s worth becoming a monster to achieve his goal. “You believe that, don’t you?” Guts had to remind him, but Griffith agrees. “You’re right.”
But after Guts leaves him?
When Guts leaves, Griffith takes it as a rejection. Those little moments that by themselves never ruined their relationship or amounted to more than mild rebuffs have probably turned into wholesale condemnations in Griffith’s mind. Guts saying, “just order me to do it,” goes from a mild reminder that they don’t have an equal relationship to, “I won’t dirty myself voluntarily, but I’ll do it if you order me to because that’s my job.” Guts saying, “ain’t this part of the path to your dream?” turns into, “your dream is paved with cruelty and I’m sick of being dragged through the dirt with you.”
Griffith winning Guts’ loyalty in a fight turns into Guts being forced to associate with him, and leaving as soon as he’s accomplished what he thinks Griffith wanted him for, thereby fulfilling his end of the bargain.
The moment Griffith is remembering here is our first glimpse of them together. “It’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” It’s a memory of Griffith choosing to open up to someone and share his innermost thoughts for the very first time. And he’s convincing himself that Guts was disgusted by him from the very first glimpse he got of the Griffith underneath the perfect image, and wanted to escape him since the beginning.
Ironically, we know exactly how Guts felt in this moment: “At that time he shone before me as something beautiful, noble, and larger than life.” It makes the choice of this particular memory all the more painful.
The other thing this particular memory signifies is Griffith’s driving motivation behind his dream. This is the scene where he tells Guts all about his belief in fate and his desire to know what he’s destined for – it’s our first indication of what Griffith’s dream means to him. It’s a contrast: Griffith then, just beginning to open up to Guts and explaining the pragmatic philosophy behind his dream, and Griffith now, falling to pieces because he believes Guts is rejecting him.
In other words, Griffith then, reliant on his dream, vs Griffith now, reliant on Guts.
The very fact that Griffith is the one challenging him, refusing to let Guts go without a fight demonstrates how far the dream is from Griffith’s mind. Remember how important it is for the Hawks to choose to follow him? How even when Guts first joined, the duel and the stakes were chosen entirely by Guts and Griffith just went along with it? Now that’s not even a factor. The feelings of guilt lying just below Griffith’s surface don’t matter at all in the face of Guts leaving. Griffith is now so far beyond distancing himself from Guts with reminders that he may die for his dream that he’s willing to risk killing him directly, in an irrational attempt to negate Guts’ rejection.
“I guess it’s because they themselves chose to fight,” is a careful rationalization, and Griffith is no longer anywhere close to capable of rationalization in this moment. This is what happens when the emotions he buries and spends his life denying burst to the surface. Despite being more emotionally open with him than he’s ever been with anyone before, he’s never put a label on his feelings for Guts and never even identified them to himself. He asks Guts, “do I need a reason each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake?” he tells Guts, “it’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this,” he tells Guts, “you’re rough enough to share this with. To the end,” he tells Guts, “you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this,” but he never tells Guts that he cares for him, prioritizes him, trusts him, loves him, and I don’t think he’s ever told himself either.
Having ignored and rationalized away his emotions for most of his life, now he’s finally run out of logic and rationalizations. He has no experience dealing with feelings like this because he lives in denial of them; I genuinely don’t think he himself understands what he’s feeling or why as Guts announces that he’s leaving, so he ends up lashing out through an established framework that he does understand, that Guts himself once suggested as a way to win his loyalty, that, might I point out, Judeau, Corkus, and Pippin all think is reasonable, and Guts is reassured by lol.
Griffith won Guts in a fight, so Griffith will keep Guts through another fight, because he can’t bear the thought of Guts rejecting him.
Which brings me back to the scratch marks on his shoulder.
He remembers the moment Guts implicitly agreed that Griffith is cruel and called his resolve into question. “You believe that, don’t you?”
A month earlier his answer was yes. He scratched himself and told himself that everything was necessary for the sake of his dream.
Here’s his answer now:
No.
He doesn’t scratch himself – he traces the marks, trying to remind himself that yes, it’s worth becoming a monster for the sake of his dream, even if it drove Guts away… but it isn’t. Now instead of self-harming he curls up and cries. No blood this time, just tears.
Griffith scratching himself is tied to affirming his dream and repressing his feelings of self-loathing, and the pointed absence of scratching here tells us that he can no longer affirm his dream or repress his self-loathing. It’s not worth dirtying himself for, it’s not worth the deaths on his head, it’s not worth becoming a monster, because that, he believes, is why Guts left, and nothing was worth losing Guts, not even his dream.
This whole sequence with Charlotte*** is Griffith’s attempt to fall back on his dream after losing Guts. Charlotte represents his dream perfectly – Judeau even reminds the audience of that fact in the chapter preceding the second duel (chapter 34). The key to his dream is Charlotte, and Griffith showing up at her window is an irrational attempt to attain his dream now, no matter how premature it is, because he is in dire need of the emotional reassurance his dream provides him.
Guts is gone, seemingly having rejected him, and Griffith retreats to his dream the way it’s always been a defense against his self-loathing and a way of repressing his emotions.
Take all the frightening and sad things… and cast them into the fire.
But again, it doesn’t work this time – it’s not enough to cope with the loss of Guts.
I think there is also a strong component of self-destruction here. Griffith knows how risky sleeping with Charlotte is, she even points it out while he’s standing in a tree outside her window. The King alludes to Griffith “destroying himself,” as well, and everyone and their horse except Corkus, stubbornly, connects Griffith’s meltdown after Guts left to the way he and the Hawks are declared traitors the next morning. It may not be a planned suicide, but it’s an act of self-immolation just the same, and something Griffith did knowing the risks full-well.
It’s no surprise when he lands himself in a dungeon.
Oh this chapter. This chapter this chapter this chapter. I’ll admit, it’s been giving me some trouble, not because it doesn’t fit with my point, but because it fits too well lol. I debated for a long time whether I’d try really delving into it or whether I’d omit some stuff and just like, ignore the fact that I genuinely believe this is the meaning behind it.
But lbr I’m taking the first option, as hard as it’s been to find a way to talk about this shit that doesn’t like… give entirely the wrong impression, because it’s basically the capstone to this part of Griffith’s character arc, and therefore this part of this meta, and it encapsulates everything about Griffith’s self-loathing perfectly.
Everything he calls the King out on is something he hates about himself.
You’ve lived on by resigning yourself to the monster [war] you envision. But you’ve by no means tried to harness that monster.
The second part is fairly obvious. The King was born to the throne and didn’t even bother to use his power for anything worthwhile. Griffith wasn’t born into that power but he spent his life trying to attain it, and just as he was about to succeed he threw it away, ultimately accomplishing nothing. “This is… worthless.”
The first part, the mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, was the part that tripped me up for a while, because frankly, it’s such a parallel to Griffith’s feelings for Guts, to the point where when I tried to write this section while ignoring it it felt like a really glaring omission, but oh man, let’s be real here, it’s unpleasant as fuck.
I’m choosing to give Miura the benefit of the doubt because while I don’t think he’s above comparing gay pining to incestuous rape, I do think, as I’ve said, that this scene is about Griffith’s self loathing, and Griffith considering his own feelings to be just as pathetic and grotesque as the King’s lust for his daughter makes a depressing kind of sense to me.
First I want to explain why this parallel is so clear to me because I’d hate to look like I’m making this up. First of all, once we’re agreed that the King bemoaning the weight of lives on his shoulders and assuming Griffith has no idea what that’s like, and getting a very knowing look from Griffith in response, is as clear a parallel as you get, I feel like it’s impossible to ignore how neatly obsessive love for someone fits in as well.
Griffith’s feelings for Guts have been defined by giving himself in exchange for him, risking his life and his dream/kingdom for him, as Casca points out at every possible opportunity. And now he finally has given up a kingdom for him – or at least, because of him.***
We know why Griffith is in that dungeon. Griffith knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness”) Casca knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“Because you left us! Because you abandoned Griffith!”) Rickert, a little kid, knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“What I think is… it must’ve been over you, Guts.”) Eventually even Guts gets a clue. (“Was I the one who brought all thisupon you?”)
Like, just to reiterate the main point of this meta, Griffith’s narrative so far is about becoming emotionally reliant on Guts as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders, instead of the dream which had been his defense until Guts. This scene is about the King’s emotional reliance on Charlotte as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders instead of using the “sword called the throne” to defend himself against that weight by doing something worthwhile with it – something to justify what the King’s subjects have been dying for.
And it’s no coincidence that the throne is described as a sword.
In Berserk, swords are coping mechanisms. Griffith is mocking the King for his emotional dependence on someone else to shield his heart rather than using his “sword” for that purpose, which is, of course, exactly what led to Griffith ending up in a dungeon.
The King goes on this diatribe:
I would give myself… even this kingdom in exchange for her! She’s my whole life!
What value is there in this world? Wars rage on and the people’s lives are lost like they were insects! After how many decades of war and how many tens of thousands of corpses, we’ve finally built a time of remembered peace, but it’s only for an instant! On the underside, the monster named war is always seeking new blood, starting to brew itself anew! In the face of that monster, the will of one land’s king is powerless! The wisdom of one man is folly! And yet I cannot cease being king! There’s no way I can stop! In this… blood stained, meaningless world… if there is one single ray of hope to be found… it is… warmth. Only warmth covers and protects me from this world.
You’ve taken that one flower that gives me that warmth… and plucked it! Unforgiveable!
Alas, my poor Charlotte. I’ve brought her up for seventeen years. She knowing no impurity… now that she’s given herself up to the sport of a commoner… I’d rather that… rather that…
Directly from the King lamenting that monster called war and the lives lost to it, to declaring Charlotte his one defense against the world. His one means of protection from the weight of “the lives of all the people, all on [his] shoulders.”
Again, Guts was becoming Griffith’s defense against his feelings of guilt. A large portion of Griffith’s story revolves around how his relationship with Guts is in part a coping mechanism, a defense against self-loathing.
And not in a negative way – remember, compared to dreams and swords as coping mechanisms, finding emotional support in a connection with someone else is by far the superior option, according to Berserk as a whole.
Griffith’s expression of his feelings for Guts wasn’t altogether healthy, because Griffith is not altogether emotionally healthy lol. He’s an extremely repressed guilt-ridden obsessive dude who self harms and thinks achieving an arbitrary goal will justify his existence, and who fell in love, had no way to understand those feelings, and became very emotionally dependent without even noticing.
Hence freaking the fuck out, challenging Guts to a duel and thinking as he strikes that he’d rather kill him than let Guts reject him. But despite that, overall, we’re shown that Griffith’s feelings for and relationship with Guts could’ve helped him grow as a person, had their relationship been given a chance to flourish without misunderstandings getting in the way.
I’m pointing all this out because I’m trying very hard to avoid coming across like I’m saying that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is at all equivalent to the King’s relationship to his daughter.
Griffith and Guts’ relationship falls apart because of a failure to communicate and because neither realize that their feelings are mutual. Griffith believes that Guts is rejecting him when he leaves, but we the readers know that in reality Guts is leaving entirely because he loves Griffith and wants to be worthy of his friendship.
I believe that the parallel here between Griffith and Guts and the King and Charlotte is so utterly loathsome because it reflects how Griffith feels about himself, not because it’s anything close to an objective parallel or a commentary on relying on relationships with other people as a means of emotional support.
The King is nothing more than a lonely, miserable man who can’t find any reason to live beyond the one person he loves, while Griffith threw his life away over Guts’ perceived rejection, and he knows it. As much as he represses, he can’t deny this – when he curls up and weeps beside Charlotte, that’s Griffith failing to deny his feelings for Guts, and he later describes him as the reason he’s been thrown into the darkness of the torture chamber, and the sole sustenance keeping him alive. Griffith is realizing that somewhere down the line his life had switched from revolving around the dream to revolving around Guts, and he thinks it’s pathetic.
The distinction Griffith makes between the King wanting Charlotte to have him rather than having Charlotte is relevant too. I used to take this line as little more than Miura feeling like he needed to justify why the King eventually flees instead of continuing his sexual assault attempt – ie because Charlotte’s rejection was too much to bear – but it works within the framework of Griffith’s feelings for Guts very well, particularly in light of the second duel.
I mean
And again like, ngl I hate to do this lol, like I said I’m not thrilled by this parallel, but fuck, it works perfectly and I do think it’s deliberate:
The King attacking Charlotte is a parallel to Griffith challenging Guts to the second duel. In a way. Again, not an objective way, not in a way that’s truly comparable – hell, we get Guts’ inner monologue and he’s literally comforted by Griffith’s challenge while Judeau and co think it’s perfectly reasonable as former mercenaries – but within Griffith’s self-loathing mindset where he sees himself as a rejected monster, he sees himself in the King and his fucked up attraction to Charlotte. The King’s subsequent attack and “rejection” by Charlotte mirrors Griffith’s perception of attacking Guts and then being left, rejected, in the snow.
Griffith makes the distinction between having and wanting to be had because everything about his own breakdown revolves around Guts’ perceived rejection of him. Griffith thinks Guts sees him as a monster, and, through their duel, from Griffith’s perspective, Griffith was trying to keep Guts with him despite that rejection, against Guts’ will. In hindsight, removed from the heightened emotions of the moment, he believes his actions to be as pathetic as the King’s lust for Charlotte. He tried to “have” Guts against his will, when what he wanted was to be “had” by him – wanted by him, loved by him, accepted by him. He wanted Guts to want to stay with him, not to be forced to stay.
And of course, the supreme irony is that Guts did love Griffith, and that’s exactly why Guts was leaving. He wanted Griffith to want him, he just didn’t recognize Griffith’s irrational actions as a show of desperate need until it was too late. This is directly stated in the text several times, so I’m not going to try to justify this statement through a big tangent about Guts’ decision to leave. Here’s one of the most self-explanatory moments where Miura tells us what happened from Guts’ perspective:
So, again, the King attacking Charlotte is not an actual objective parallel; it’s a parallel when filtered through Griffith’s false framing of what happened between him and Guts as a vicious rejection, which makes sense because Griffith is the one bringing it all up and condemning both the King and himself.
At the end of the day I don’t particularly care whether “If I can’t have him, I don’t care,” is taken as a super dark moment or barely a drop in the pond when it comes to dark things people do in Berserk. Judge Griffith harshly for it or go ‘meh people try to kill each other in Berserk all the time, he wasn’t even trying so much as accepting the possibility,’ I just want to draw a clear distinction between that and a father trying to rape his daughter, which I think is fair.
And now the King’s final condescending judgement.
“Such a worthless matter.” We know what that worthless matter is. The King thinks it was lust for Charlotte that landed him there, but we (and half the cast of Berserk, vocally) know that it was his feelings for Guts.
And on the very next page we transition to the King’s assault of Charlotte. The King is doing some projecting himself here – he mocks Griffith for destroying himself over lust for Charlotte (Guts) which is what the King immediately proceeds to do. This attempted rape decimates him as a person; the next time we see him he looks like he’s aged thirty years, and he’s growing senile – just as Griffith is tortured to irreversible physical damage after Guts’ rejection.
After Charlotte wakes up and screams a horrified no, we return to Griffith for the last page of the chapter:
Charlotte’s assault is perfectly bookended by Griffith in the dungeon, and the repetition of “worthless,” a word used three times in this chapter.
The first time it refers overtly to the King not utilizing his power to justify his existence and assuage the guilt on his shoulders, instead comforting himself with Charlotte, with the implication that this is how Griffith feels having thrown away his dream over Guts.
The second time the King uses it to refer to the matter that Griffith destroyed himself over, ie stupid, impulsive actions based on feelings for another person. The King thinks it’s Charlotte, but we know it’s Guts.
The third time is how Griffith feels about himself, a final conclusive statement after his mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, the King’s accidental mockery of his feelings for Guts, and Charlotte’s assault. The way this chapter is structured essentially tells us that the attempted rape scene applies in some way to Griffith’s final declaration of his own worthlessness, and hopefully I’ve made a convincing case for how it’s an illustration of his self-loathing regarding his feelings for Guts.
Griffith, thrown into the darkness of the dungeon, may as well have been plunged into his own self-loathing. “Worthless.”
SO! What’s left? The torturer rips off Griffith’s behelit a short while later, nicely symbolic of the lost dream. A year passes. Guts returns. And Casca neatly condenses this enormous meta into the four sentences I stole for titles and writes the conclusion to this section for me:
Griffith had to make himself strong – remember, that refers to the way he represses his emotions and projects his image of perfection, the way he smiled at Casca and put his hand on her shoulder after violently self harming.
Guts made Griffith weak because Griffith was starting to open up to him rather than repressing those emotions and relying solely on his dream to defend against everything that haunts him. Do I need a reason? It’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this. Do you think that I’m cruel?
After being rejected by Guts and believing that Guts sees him as a monster, the promise of his dream was no longer enough for him to rely on, and he crashed and burned in an implosion of self-loathing and feelings of worthlessness.
Griffith’s no good without Guts anymore because his feelings for Guts made him weak. He came to rely on Guts to sustain his heart, because people need other people, and Guts was the person Griffith needed.
Wish Casca could’ve written this whole thing for me, it would’ve been a lot shorter and neater lbr.
That’s the end of Part Three. The next and final part is going to explore how Guts growing more vital to Griffith than the dream leads, contrary to expectations, to Griffith sacrificing Guts for his dream.
*** There is a common misconception that this is one big, thick scar rather than scratch marks, probably thanks to the anime depicting it as such, but frankly, the anime got it wrong. There is zero reason for Griffith to have a scar there, and it would have no significance – Guts’ sword didn’t touch him, and if it had he’d have either a bruise or a gaping wound lol, not a scar. They are two parallel lines that you can see Griffith trace with two fingers right as he starts crying, and since we already know Griffith has a tendency to scratch himself, this leaves no doubt to me that they are two scratch marks, not one big mark of unknown origin.
*** I think the scene with Charlotte is deeply flawed, and I’m treating it as consensual sex in this analysis because I believe that’s what Miura intended it to be read as, despite shitty, misogynist, tropey writing. More on that here, if you’d like a further explanation.
*** I remember an old conversation I had with I think @yesgabsstuff and @mastermistressofdesire where one of you suggested that Griffith burning his life down by fucking Charlotte could be interpreted as a childish act of bargaining, at least subconsciously. Griffith trying to trade his dream for Guts. And I’m js, that rang true to me and this comparison made me remember it.
I think that, from the very start, Griffith’s feelings for Guts are at least as strong as his feelings for his dream. I say this because Griffith doesn’t have a pattern of desiring things or people and doing what he can to have them. Til now he’s had one thing he wants and that’s a kingdom, and now after meeting Guts he has one more thing he wants, and as soon as he’s given an opening he pursues him with equal fervour.
And from the very start, his feelings for Guts have a tendency to make Griffith forget about his dream.
“I don’t feel at all responsible for my comrades who have lost their lives under my command. I guess… it’s because they themselves chose to fight.”
This is what Griffith says when he begins self-harming in the river. This is the number one way he rationalizes away and buries his guilt. He repeats it to the Godhand later too – “I never forced anyone to come along.”
Remember how he recruited Casca? “Whether you come along or not is your decision.” The fact that his Hawks freely choose to follow him is extremely important to him.
Now, he didn’t press-gang or kidnap Guts lol. He didn’t even suggest dueling for his loyalty – Guts himself suggested it, and I can only assume that if he hadn’t, Griffith would’ve let him walk away. But when Guts did suggest a way to win his loyalty, Griffith seized on it hard, instead of allowing Guts the same perfectly free choice to follow him the rest of the Hawks had.
Guts is explicitly the first and only person who Griffith has expressed desire for, Guts is therefore presumably the first and only person Griffith tried to sweet-talk into joining him, and it seems safe to assume that Guts is probably the only person he’d so eagerly agree to fight a duel for. His rationale of giving his followers a free choice, which is necessary to allieviate his guilt, is forgotten here – therefore his guilt is forgotten.
This is the beginning of a war between Guts and the dream in Griffith’s subconscious, that we see again and again throughout his narrative.
A week after Guts joins the Hawks, Griffith risks his life for him for the first time. The reaction to his actions here handily tells us how unprecedented this is.
Griffith ditching this dude in the hat – quite likely the guy who hired them – mid-sentence to immediately check on losses, ie whether Guts made it, to vocal surprise from both hat man and Casca.
Then he leads a back-up team to rush to Guts’ defense. And it’s geuinely risky – they escape death here by like an inch while Guts frets about the two of them weighing down the horse.
And of course Guts questions him directly while Griffith avoids answering:
And we get more helpful commentary on how surprising Griffith’s actions here are from the peanut gallery:
The next morning Guts broaches the topic again, after accepting Griffith’s initial brush-off.
This scene starts with Guts and Griffith’s first real bonding experience, and it ends with Griffith’s grandiose and iconic “I will get my own kingdom. You will fight for my cause, because you belong to me.”
The first time we read this it comes across as a kind of really off-putting and over the top statement of ownership. Guts is dazzled by it, because he’s dazzled by everything Griffith does, but it’s not surprising that so many Berserk fans see this moment as sinister and threatening to an extent. Frankly, it’s a fucking weird thing to say lmao. As Eclipse foreshadowing it’s great, but as a character moment it raises a lot of questions.
But here’s the thing: Casca’s flashback tells us exactly why he says it.
Two things happen right before this moment. First Griffith and Guts have a naked water fight and bond. Then, after an exchange about the behelit, Guts asks Griffith that question once again.
This time Griffith has an answer.
Now remember, Guts thinks this is bullshit. He directly says so three years later when he has to ask the same question yet again. This line Griffith gives him is a lie – a lie that Griffith himself may very well believe, and tbh I personally think he does, but it’s not the reason Griffith saved him.
And this fun naked bonding experience?
It’s a subtle parallel to the scene with Casca. The tone and circumstances are obviously very different, but the point of this comparison is the emotional intimacy. Both Casca and Guts are shown glimpses of the real Griffith underneath the armour, underneath the veneer of perfection he puts on. It’s not a coincidence that he’s naked in both either.
Casca’s glimpse is dark and depressing while Guts’ is just light and human – a glimpse of the child Griffith still is, entirely Guts’ equal in every relevant way. Same age, same vulnerability to buckets of water, and in the end, Guts dumps a bucket on his head and says they’re equal even. Then he asks why Griffith saved him.
After each scene, Griffith shuts them both out – he clams up and puts the mask back on when Casca tries to comfort him, and with Guts, he does this:
This happens on the very same page that Griffith makes his “excellent soldier” excuse. He segues immediately from that into his elegant statement about his dream and how Guts is totally going to die for it – when he chooses.***
What I’m saying is that it’s a distancing tactic. Somewhere deep down Griffith knows his answer to Guts’ question is bullshit. He knows he’s already prioritizing Guts over his dream, and he knows how utterly dangerous that is to his entire life plan. He represses that fact and reminds himself here that his dream is all-important and he’s probably going to send Guts to his death for it someday, and he saved Guts’ life simply because it’s his perogative to decide when, and he decided that last night wasn’t the time.
Because let’s be real here, for a mercenary leader, “I will choose the place where you die,” is a factual statement. It’s more than likely that he’ll send Guts to his death someday simply by ordering him into the battle that eventually kills him. And as we learn in the later flashback, it’s a fact of his life that takes a serious emotional toll on him. He viciously self harms while monologuing about people dying for his dream.
Like, again, it’s an incredibly weird thing to say outloud to someone, but no less true for that, and knowing what we learn about Griffith, him saying it in these specific circumstances – after bonding with Guts, after being treated like an ordinary kid rather than the symbol of success he makes himself out to be, after being questioned about something irrational and dangerous he’d just done to save Guts’ life – strongly suggests to me that he’s using the dream as a way of repressing and denying his feelings for Guts, feelings that have already taken precedence over his dream once, after only knowing him for a week.
But while he was able to keep Casca at an emotional distance, he fails entirely where Guts is involved.
Three years later the first notable plot event we see after one chapter of establishing off-screen character development and where-are-they-now-ing is Griffith risking his life for Guts again, to an even greater, more irrational extent this time.
Like, this is what defines their relationship. It begins with Griffith putting his life and dream on the line for Guts despite consciously telling Guts and himself that Guts is expendable, and three years later we pick the story back up when Griffith does it again.
And this time it’s not Griffith and Guts escaping an opposing force by the skin of their teeth together – this time Griffith and Guts lose. Guts is up against a monster, Griffith sees this, he tells the rest of the Band to run when he realizes that a volley of arrows does nothing, and he stays behind himself to try to rescue Guts. He doesn’t even order someone else to run in and grab him, he just automatically, instinctively runs to him while telling the rest of the Band to escape to safety.
There’s a reason this is the moment he recalls when thinking about how he loses his composure around Guts.
Like okay, we all know that Griffith is in love with Guts, I figure I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s important to understand how huge this is. Fate ensures that they survive the encounter – Zodd sees the behelit, lols, and leaves – but Griffith didn’t know that would happen. For all intents and purposes, he’s dead here. And he’s not just laying down his life for Guts, he’s laying down his dream. Casca even makes the distinction when she yells at Guts for it in the cave later – he can go die himself on some battlefield, but she won’t let him take Griffith’s dream down with him.
When they talk about it on the staircase afterwards their relationship takes a huge turn. Guts asks again why Griffith risked his life for him, and like the previous instance three years ago, this is also the second time he questioned Griffith after failing to get an answer.
Here’s the final time Guts asks the question:
And here’s Griffith’s new answer, now that Guts has called him out on making shit up:
This time Griffith’s got absolutely nothing. He doesn’t fall back on a convenient rationalization because it simply wasn’t a rational decision, and this is the closest he can get to admitting that.
He doesn’t admit the truth either – that he risked his life and dream for Guts because he loves him and prioritizes him above the dream – probably because he himself still doesn’t realize, because he’s so disconnected from his feelings after spending most of his life burying them that he can’t recognize and identify them. But imo this is still the closest to self-aware Griffith gets before the torture chamber, so like, give him a pat on the back.
Now, I see a strong through line from this moment to another scene: the night he asks Guts to kill a man for him.
The way he asks is unusual enough for Guts to comment on it. He explains the risks, explains why he suspects Julius, and asks Guts to help him.
I’m gonna throw something out there that people joke about but is actually totally relevant:
It’s dirty work. Failure isn’t permissible at all, nor is your face being seen. It’s for those reasons… that I’m asking you to do this.
The assassin can’t be recognized and can’t fuck it up, so Griffith specifically asks a huge dude with a huge sword who’s never stealthily killed anyone in his life and who immediately fucks it up to do it. Like, I’m thinking Judeau might’ve been a more solid choice for this particular mission, yk?
But those aren’t the reasons he picked Guts. The reason he picked Guts is the very first sentence: “It’s dirty work.”
This is the first time we see Griffith toss around the word “dirty” but it sure as hell isn’t the last. This is Griffith revealing a side of himself that he hasn’t revealed to anyone before, except Casca, accidentally – a side of himself that he’s ashamed of. And Guts is who he wants to reveal it to.
And this is Guts’ response.
Griffith is treating Guts like an equal in this scene, not like a soldier. In a way it’s a reversal of the waterfight scene: Guts treated Griffith like an equal and friend, and Griffith reminded himself that he’s Guts’ commander. Here Griffith is treating Guts like an equal and friend, and it’s Guts who reminds them that Griffith is the boss and he’s the subordinate.
I don’t think Guts intended to distance himself – it reads like a tension-breaking joke to me, but it’s a joke based on truth. They are a commander and subordinate, and this is a gentle rebuff and reminder of that fact to Griffith because, after risking his life for Guts and finally admitting it made no sense to do so, their actual unequal relationship has slipped from the forefront of his mind.
It’s a minor misunderstanding, and imo it wouldn’t be very important in the grand scheme of things, if it wasn’t for the next time Guts sees Griffith:
“They are… excellent troops. Together we have faced death so many times. They are my valuable comrades, devoting themselves to the dream I envision… But… to me, a friend is… something else. Someone who would never depend upon another’s dream… someone who wouldn’t be compelled by anyone, but would determine and pursue his own reason to live… And should anyone trample that dream he would oppose him body and soul… even if that threat were me myself… What I think a friend is… is one… who is my equal.”
Guts has just reminded him that while Griffith may want Guts to be his friend and equal, whether consciously or not, and may even be already subconsciously thinking of him that way, it’s not the nature of their relationship. Griffith is still his commander. He’s still the one who orders him into battle, and Guts could still die in service to his dream.
And like the waterfight to speech sequence three years ago, this is another instance of Griffith pulling back and trying to re-prioritize his dream over Guts, pushing down and repressing his actual feelings for Guts to focus on dreams.
Personally I don’t think Griffith is at all consciously aware of what he’s doing lol. I don’t think he planned to treat Guts like a friend and equal while asking him to assassinate someone, and I don’t think he actually thought to himself, “oh right, I’m his commander, not his friend.” I think it just came naturally for him to ask Guts instead of ordering him, and I think it came naturally to pontificate about how he doesn’t have friends while talking to Charlotte, and Guts reminding him that he’s his boss is at least partly why, even if Griffith himself doesn’t make that connection.
There’s a war raging between Guts and the dream in Griffith’s subconscious, and in light of being reminded that Guts views him as a superior and takes orders from him, the dream is rallying, basically.
During this whole speech Griffith is building the dream up, making it seem significant just for existing. What it does is show us how he sees himself – or, maybe more accurately, how he wants to see himself. He wants to believe that his dream is inherently noble, he needs to believe that it’s a worthy pursuit. Griffith isn’t lying to Charlotte here, so much as he’s lying to himself.
For no other’s sake vs for their sakes.
It’s easy to take the speech at face value at first, but it’s impossible when you learn more about Griffith.
The speech is about an abstract ideal, the same way his monologue about destiny was in his first scene, and it’s transformed when we learn more about him in five chapters, and are shown that the reality beneath it is much more complex. Dreams devouring dreams like storms, a life spent as a martyr to the god named Dream, Griffith finding the idea of being born and living just to live abhorrent – these are all framed as pretentious philosophical ideals. But looking back after Casca’s flashback once again gives this speech depth.
It’s his way of insisting to himself that he is what everyone believes him to be – an idealistic philosopher king waiting for his throne, justified in everything he does because it’s his perogative as a person to pursue a dream and achieving it is its own validation and proof that it was a worthy venture, rather than a monster walking a path of corpses.
I’d go so far as to argue that this is the point of Griffith’s wonderfully sinister smile when he finds out Guts killed Adonis too.
Again, it’s only five chapters before we learn that he has serious dead-child-related guilt issues, so what’s the deal? Well, the deal is that Griffith is even better at denial than he is at waging war. It’s the polar opposite of his reaction to First Kid’s death entirely for the sake of highlighting that difference.
The only two conclusions you can draw are that either Griffith has completely changed since the events Casca relates and no longer feels any guilt, or that he’s so thoroughly buried his guilt in this moment – this moment where he’s pontificating about his dream to Charlotte and building it up to her and himself – that his reaction is pleased. It’s similar to “I will decide the place where you die,” in the sense that it’s Griffith repressing his feelings by owning the inevitable cruelties of his dream.
And we know it’s not the first option, because first of all it would make that entire flashback comedically pointless, and because we see his guilt and self loathing surface again in significant moments, such as when he asks Guts, “do you think I’m cruel?”
Put another way: The dream signifies burying his heart and accepting that he’s cruel, while Guts signifies opening his heart and desperately not wanting to be a monster.
And again, we know that there’s more to this speech than what Griffith is actually saying, because we learn Griffith’s actual motivation soon after, and the entire point of Casca’s Griffith history lesson is to add those layers of guilt and self loathing and repression and let them colour everything we thought we knew about Griffith.
So now, to get back to his feelings about Guts, I want to examine Griffith’s definition of a friend in light of those guilt issues we learn about in the flashback.
To Griffith a friend is, ”someone who would never depend upon another’s dream… someone who wouldn’t be compelled by anyone, but would determine and pursue his own reason to live…”
To Griffith a friend is someone who would never depend on his dream, would never cling to his dream, would never die for his dream.
A friend is someone he cannot order into battle to die for him.
Furthermore, I want to suggest that Griffith’s, “he would oppose him body and soul, even if that threat were me myself,” clause adds another aspect to his criteria for friendship: a friend is someone who would never force Griffith to choose between him and his dream. A friend is someone who prioritizes his own dream, who understands that dreams come first and friendships come second, who can expect to be opposed if he stands in the way of Griffith’s dream, and vice versa.
Look at it this way: Guts has already forced Griffith to choose between him and his dream by nearly getting killed twice, and Guts won resoundingly both times. Because of this Guts represents an enormous threat to Griffith’s dream, because Griffith is willing to risk it for him. Three years ago Griffith said, “I will choose the place where you die,” to try to distance himself from Guts, but after Zodd he doesn’t even try to distance himself. He just tells Guts that he has no reason to put his own life on the line for Guts’ but that’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s gonna be.
Because Guts isn’t his “friend” by these standards, he’s at risk of dying for his dream. Because Griffith loves him, his dream is at risk of getting trampled for Guts.
The characters, of course, aren’t framing their decisions this way, but essentially, Guts’ answer to this conundrum is to leave to figure out a dream and become Griffith’s equal. He chooses to follow Griffith’s weird friendship criteria to the letter. But Griffith’s answer is to start replacing the dream with Guts.
This started as an attempt to explain my take on why Griffith is so utterly dedicated to his dream, and then it evolved into a monster when I decided to apply that reading to the rest of Griffith’s narrative. This is basically an examination of the dream, and how Griffith’s relationship with Guts comes to not only take precedence over it, but functionally replace it.
Now, while this is essentially a Griffith character study, I’m coming at him from a very specific angle so this is by no means definitive or all-encompassing. There’s so much to say about Griffith, his role in the story, his characterization and motivation etc that I just can’t fit into the purview of this meta – like, hell, I don’t even talk about class issues lol – but hopefully this serves as a thorough exploration of the aspects I did choose to focus on.
And, of course, it goes without saying that this is just my own interpretation. I’ll make the best case I can, but at the end of the day so much of Griffith’s story is left in subtext that there’s plenty of room for other interpretations.
Also, I want to lead off with a warning/advertisement:
I fucking love Griffith. I think he’s a fantastic character with a ton of depth and humanity who gets reduced to a two dimensional caricature in fandom way too often, I’m sympathetic towards him, and I take it as read that he’s blatantly in love with Guts, and indeed, that his narrative is almost entirely about being in love with Guts. I’m also writing this for a presumed audience of people who don’t need to be convinced first that Griffith is more complex than “conniving sociopath,” but if that’s your starting point you’re more than welcome to read anyway and see if anything I have to say resonates despite that.
Basically, if you’re into really really long, really gay character analyses, enjoy!
This is divided into four parts:
Part One is an analysis of what I feel are the relevant aspects of Griffith’s dream and why he’s so dedicated to it.
Part Two explores the way Guts immediately takes precedence over the dream.
Part Three explores how Griffith comes to rely on Guts more than the dream.
And Part Four explores why Griffith ultimately chooses to sacrifice Guts for the dream.
And lastly, I’m using the word “explores” deliberately because this isn’t really an argument. I don’t have to argue that Guts takes precedence over the dream, or that Griffith becomes emotionally reliant on Guts, etc, because this is all pretty clearly stated in the text. Rather, I want to use the tension between Guts and the dream as a jumping off point to dig into Griffith’s character arc. I’m not just saying that Griffith’s dream pales in importance compared to Guts, I’m trying to explainwhy,how Miura shows us, and what it tells us about Griffith’s character and narrative.
Ok that’s it for the preamble, let’s dive the fuck in.
I’m going to start us off by examining two sequences which, together, tell us pretty much everything we need to know to understand Griffith and his relationship to his dream, at least as far as this meta is concerned.
The first is his very first scene in the manga, all the way back in chapter eight, during the Black Swordsman arc. This is our introduction to pre-demon Griffith.
Martyrdom for a merciless god. What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t even worth a single piece of silver. In today’s world, most people’s lives are subject to the whims of a handful of nobility and royalty. Of course, even a king himself can’t live exactly as he pleases. We are all at the mercy of a great tide… fate, or whatever you wish to call it… And we all disappear in the end… our lives spent… never even knowing who we were.
In life, unrelated to one’s social standing or class as determined by man, there are some people who, by nature, are keys that set the world in motion. They are the true elite, as dictated by the golden rule of the universe. That’s what I want to know! What is my place in the world? Who am I? What am I capable of? What am I destined for?
This tells us Griffith’s driving philosophy. It tells us that he believes in fate, that he wants to push himself as far as he can and attain the most he can in the hopes that he is fated to be one of the few significant people who can change the world.
And it tells us that Guts is special to him. Griffith’s monologue here builds up to “You’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” We learn significant information about Griffith’s philosophy – along with some fun dramatic irony because, as we already learned by seeing Femto, Griffith is one of those keys – but the true point of this brief flashback is this moment of connection with Guts, with Griffith freely opening up to someone for the first time.
The second sequence is, of course, Casca’s flashback. From the kid’s death to Casca expressing her jealousy of Guts, these chapters are the real key to understanding Griffith’s character. That first scene is like the surface look with hints of depth, but Casca’s flashback recontextualizes everything that came before and informs everything that comes after. Like, I can’t stress enough how important this flashback is to understanding Griffith lol, it’s the axis around which his character revolves.
Miura even points out through Casca that learning what we learn about him should make us take another look at Griffith and further our understanding of what we’ve already seen, and what we’re going to see.
So I’m going to go through it and explain exactly what this flashback tells us about him.
We learn that the deaths of those who follow him weigh extremely heavily on him and fill him with guilt. Given the way the boy returns during the Eclipse this was likely a wake-up call, maybe the first instance of a death in the line of duty hitting him this hard. However, whether it’s the first time he’s been fucked up by one of his Hawks dying or whether he makes a habit of brooding over them doesn’t matter – this is the example we’re given to tell the reader how Griffith feels about the deaths of those fighting for him.
We learn that Griffith deals with this guilt through a pretty fucked up combination of self harm, rationalization, and denial. “I don’t feel at all responsible for my comrades who have lost their lives under my command,” he says, and then tears the shit out of his arms until Casca’s crying and begging him to stop. And I mean, if this scene isn’t clear enough, Miura uses self harm as an illustration of immense guilt despite denial a lot.
And not to belabor the point, but the dead kid’s relevance is demonstrated by the simple fact that Miura decided it was narratively important to include him, Griffith’s reaction to his death, and Casca making the connection and looking blatantly skeptical when he denies that the boy had anything to do with his decision to have sex with Gennon. We are absolutely supposed to understand that Griffith is lying when he says he doesn’t feel responsible, both to Casca and himself.
We learn that his dream is intrinsically tied to emotional repression. Griffith making himself strong means Griffith denying his emotional weaknesses, burying his heart, and putting on a mask of perfection at all times so he can embody the correct image for the Hawks and be what they need from him. It’s not that he can easily bear the burden of his dream and what he does for it, it’s that he forces himself to do so by repressing the emotional toll it takes on him.
By putting on this mask he is able to repress his feelings – or by repressing his feelings he is able to put on the mask. Either way, the knight in shining armour image he projects and his refusal to acknowledge his feelings of guilt and self loathing are intrinsically tied together and referred to by Casca as a sign of strength.
We also learn why Griffith is devoted to his dream.
We began with the assumption that his reasons are philosophical, theoretical, and self-serving. He wants to be special. Hell, if you really boil down the keys that set the world in motion speech, it means he wants proof that he’s special, and if he achieves his dream then it’s a sign from God or the universe or fate or whatever force beyond human knowledge that it was meant to be – that he was truly destined for great things all along.
But when we learn how driven by guilt he is, that motivation is transformed and complicated. He wants to be special, he wants fate to prove that he’s special, because that means he’s been doing the right thing all along. It means the deaths on his head were necessary. And if he achieves his dream he proves that it was worth it, that the dead didn’t die for nothing – that they were right to follow him even though it lead to their deaths, because he made the thing they gave their lives for a reality.
It makes it worth it to “dirty” himself too. If he achieves his dream then sex with Gennon was worth it, the assassinations were worth it, that hidden underbelly of his rise to power that he feels ashamed of was worthwhile after all.
If he achieves his dream, then he has no reason to feel guilty. If he achieves his dream, then he has no reason to hate himself. It was all just part of the wheel of fate.
I truly believe that this is what motivates Griffith more than anything else, and why his dream is paramount to him. And I think that when he gave the keys speech to Guts (among other instances of Griffith talking about the dream) it was also a form of rationalization and denial – a half-truth that obscures his real motivation, even to himself.
Finally, as Casca’s story concludes with Guts’ arrival in their lives, we finish with Casca coming as close as possible to saying that Griffith is in love with Guts without actually saying it. Griffith relies on Guts. Guts changed Griffith. Guts makes Griffith irrational. Griffith has never said anything like, “I want you,” to anyone else, ever. Presumably Griffith has never actually wanted anything or anyone but his dream before. In risking his life for him, Griffith also risks his all-important dream, and Casca won’t let Guts take Griffith’s dream down with him. It’s as if… as if…
So, let’s summarize what we know about Griffith now.
He needs to achieve his dream for the sake of the dead. In doing so, he can prove to himself that he has no reason to feel guilty, or dirty, or ashamed, because it was all meant to be. And he himself has no real understanding of this – he denies and rationalizes it. He would never think of himself as someone consumed by guilt or self-loathing, he’d just let a child predator fuck him so he can feel like he’s sacrificing something of himself too, then justify it with cool logic while calling himself unclean and tearing his arms up the next morning, and then bury all of that under that mask of perfection so no one else ever knows and he can even deny it to himself.
And we know Guts has changed him, to the point where Casca sees Guts as a direct threat to Griffith’s dream.
This is who Griffith is. He exists and functions in this state of guilt and self-loathing, and he is constantly repressing it for the sake of the image of a perfect leader he shows the Hawks, except in the few self-destructive moments when it seeps out. His dream is a self-perpetuating coping mechanism. He manages to live with himself through the belief that if he achieves it, it means fate is putting a seal of approval on everything he’s done on the road to achieving it, but in the meantime the bodies and the dirty deeds pile up and the emotional toll on Griffith continues to rise.
But Guts makes him forget that dream.
So let’s see what happens when Guts is introduced into his life.
like is this one of those things that Miura had changed between magazine publication and volume publication because it was too on the nose? and if so did he forget by this chapter? shit should i assume griffith said it or not?
if i assume he said it there are three possibilities:
1. griffith is speaking metaphorically, ie people who have the power to change the world may as well be gods.
2. griffith is speaking literally and somehow only he knows that sometimes people become gods. (the “fortune teller” that sold him the behelit maybe? does that make griffith the kind of weirdo who genuinely believes wild shit salesmen tell him?)
3. it’s generally accepted knowledge/myth/belief in berserk’s universe that sometimes people become gods and griffith is referencing that belief system.
like i’m obviously going for option #1 here since it’s the most reasonable, but still lol. and tbf griffith believes strongly in fate and clearly wants to believe in higher powers, so it’s not beyond the realm of plausibility that he’s speaking literally.
that and the fact that he sold his body so less of his men (or children ..) would have to die, and then comforted casca when she was trying to comfort him
those are the two things that stand out in my mind and cement his personality as very giving, though it may not seem like it to some because he tries to cover it up with varying levels of success
“a dream is something a man must achieve for no one else’s sake but his own” or w/e
five chapters later: “if there’s something i can do for their sake, for the sake of the dead, that thing is to win.”
he so does try to cover it up lol, i was just writing about this earlier too (because I actually didn’t even think to address Griffith’s dream speech in my meta about Griffith’s dream… and had to go back and add it in. yeah)
but yeah I mean like NGriff becoming “the desired,” the achiever of humanity’s dream is such a good encapsulation of his human life. (also the fact that he became a monster first is a gr8 encapsulation of griffith’s distorted by self-loathing perception of his life.)
i love these kinds of questions! but please prepare yourself because this is going to be long and incoherent
so, to be perfectly honest, i know this is a cop out but all griffith scenes are my favourite scenes?
if i had to pick a few that stand out the most, however, i love griffith & guts’ first and last duels so much
these panels especially, but also:
i also LOVE:
this whole entire thing. all of it, every panel, every word, i love it.
then there’s the entire sequence starting with him overhearing casca telling guts to leave again and ending with him sacrificing everyone. love all of that, especially: his suicide attempt which breaks my heart whenever i re-read it, the moment when guts is approaching him and he’s thinking “stay away!!!” and his thoughts leading up to the sacrifice, about how guts outshone his dream.
this obvious parallel
also, needless to say, i have a complicated relationship with his nightmare wherein he is in a lifesucking heterosexual marriage with casca .. lol.
another big scene for me is, obviously, the bthump scene. i love it so much. i love how he came to guts to check if he still had feelings. very subtle. and then he was like “ok sweet i don’t have feelings bye” and then he had a feeling. I LOVE IT.
OH and allllllll of those femto + black swordsman interactions from the nonnumerical chapters. kisses fingers like a chef.
those are the first few scenes that come to mind, honestly. but there’s a lot of other gems too, like his and guts’ very first meeting when he tells guts that he wants him, that moment when he shows guts the behelit smiling like a little kid, that time he was talking to guts about their duel and how fun it was and just looked really fond, every time he risked his life for guts and every time he lied about his reasons, that time he gave julius a dangerous smile (and every time he talked shit about the nobles), when he asked guts to do him the favour of killing julius, these two scenes god
the scene with casca in the lake, that moment when guts’ sword broke in the middle of their important fight and he looked like … idk what that emotion even was, probably fear? that moment he told gennon he meant nothing to him, god that scene when he sets the room with the queen inside on fire and takes off the ribbon tying his hair …… all of his little smiles and glances @ guts. all of his little 😮 moments.
i’m not fond of the fuck scene with charlotte for obvious reasons, but i do like how he was thinking about guts and also afterwards when he just … curls in on himself and starts crying. that destroyed me.
this isn’t a scene people talk about a lot but i love when he tells charlotte’s gross father off? he just knows … exactly which buttons to push. and we didn’t even know he had all this dirt on the king until that scene, i just love it so much
i love that moment when they find him in the torture chamber and he wakes up and sees guts. puts his hand on his neck, but then guts starts crying, and his hand slides down to guts’ instead. fuck me.
AND ok you already know about this ‘cause we’ve talked about it but:
this moment of clear, undeniable jealousy. love.
obviously i love his little private moment with guts in the carriage. i love neo-griffith’s mind-numbingly boring tea parties, and his talk with rickert. … like i said, i love pretty much any scene where griffith showed up in the manga lol.
if you ask me why … i apologise ’cause this isn’t going to be anything profound, really, but i just love him as a character, literally everything about him. looking at this array, i seem to prefer scenes where he loses control and shows some kind of intense emotion, generally directed towards guts. but i also love the scenes of clear emotional repression, be it him telling guts he doesn’t really have a reason for risking his life to save him, or him telling himself and everyone else that he doesn’t feel guilty for all the lives that were lost for his cause. i love his messy emotions, whether he tries to hide them or they take over him completely and cause him to make his disastrous decisions. i love his impulsivity, i love his jealousy, i love his guilt. i just love him so much.
i feel like i already know a few of your favourite scenes but still wbu? feel free to ramble @ me like i just did @ you
Yesss, ngl I asked because I’ve been craving some pure certified organic griffith positivity and I read this post with just a big grin on my face lol. so ty for the long and awesome answer ❤
Like, other than going ^^^^all of the above^^^^ I guess right now I really want to ramble about like… the genuinely good stuff. I never shut up about Griffith’s flaws, his self loathing, his guilt, his emotional repression, the way he lashes out in interesting yet horrifying ways when he can’t just repress his feelings, the sacrifice, etc…
But yk what despite how fucked up he is as a person he has a lot of good aspects that always get downplayed for the sake of villainizing him, and I want to talk about those.
Like dude wanted to create a socialist, non-discriminatory paradise in the middle ages? His goal was literally to become king so he would have the power to carve out a place where people’s bodies and lives wouldn’t be bought and sold. I’d side-eye the shit out of Miura for making that the antagonist’s motivation if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s consistently portrayed as a good thing. Still keeping my side-eye on hold tho for when we find out exactly where Miura’s going with Falconia.
And he walked the walk in addition to talking the talk. His second in command was the only woman we ever see fighting in an army in Berserk, and she joined him because he saved her from a noble who bought her. Then he got her, and a bunch of other former peasants, knighted. If Griffith had become king the normal way rather than taking the magical god route, the… idk military command. Head General? Whatever, the commander of his armies would’ve been Casca.
Like yeah there’s some ye olde sexism in the mix but that comes from every dude we see, including beloved ones like Guts and Judeau (especially Guts, yeesh).
He was a beloved commander for a reason. His strategies aren’t just brilliant, they’re a way of minimizing casualties as much as possible. Despite always having to project an image of perfection, he was able to be personable too, making the Hawks feel valued. He partied with them after victories, all he said to Casca when she was full of guilt for going into battle with debilitating cramps was “welcome back,” he got Casca to rescue Corkus from Guts and then came over and rescued Casca when that wasn’t enough, he had a personal recollection of the kid who died in the flashback who Casca didn’t know anything about, remembering the way the kid looked at him.
He hides the dark underside of his rise to power not just because he doesn’t want anyone (except Guts) to see it and judge him for it, but also because he doesn’t want the Hawks to have to worry about it.
Guts thinks it’s cruel to not let them in on the plan, but Griffith thinks it’d be cruel to burden them with the knowledge of some of the fucked up things getting them those knighthoods.
The way he says, “But for hundreds, thousands of lives to hang in the balance and myself alone not to be unclean…” which completely fails to acknowledge that his life is on the line exactly the same as everyone else’s since he leads his army at the front, but he thinks that doesn’t count, he has to do something extra basically as penance.
And like, sorry but that extra thing is literally selling himself to a child rapist, as a child, to prevent as many soldiers from dying in battle as possible. I’m like, so done with watching fandom downplay that at every turn. Also while I’m listing good deeds, personally murdering that dude.
How being in love with Guts makes him automatically do things from little stuff like asking Guts to assassinate Julius instead of ordering him to, to huge things like basically straight up dying for him w/ Zodd. I mean, Zodd won, if it wasn’t for fate Griffith would’ve died right there while running to Guts to grab his hand.
And this is after ordering the rest of the Hawks to retreat and running in alone to try to rescue Guts.
Also not just doing good things, how about being awesome? Like taking five thousand people and winning a battle against thirty thousand. Like the way it’s set up with Casca thinking that Griffith might be being reckless by volunteering because his rapist is head of that army, but it turns out that he knew he could win entirely because of his history with Gennon, basically using his predatory lust against him. Like burning a bunch of murder-plotting conservative nobles alive while doing this:
Like going through at least two days of torture without making a sound. And coming out the other side after a full year still sane because his feelings for Guts kept him going. And then saving everyone during the escape attempt despite being helpless and voiceless. Wanting desperately to be able to grab a sword and help Guts fight a giant terrifying monster.
I just love him so much and I talk about his stupidity and self loathing and emotional fucked up ness and how he succumbs to his flaws all the time and have been especially focusing on it recently due to this thing i’m procrastinating on still writing, but he has a lot of genuine virtues too and sometimes u just wanna sit back and be a Griffith apologist.
Overall I actually really like Casca’s relationship with Griffith, and I think if a) Berserk was a very different story and b) Miura didn’t make Casca’s life revolve around romantic pining, I’d really love them as a v interesting platonic brotp style relationship with lots of layers and depth.
Casca has a v unique perspective and insight on Griffith, with her combination of hero worship and the way she’s seen him at his worst (pre-torture).
She’s aware that he hides himself behind a veneer of perfection, that he feels immense guilt, that he buries his emotions. She watched him self harm in front of her after prostituting himself to a pedophile. She’s more aware of his vulnerable humanity than even Guts is.
And knowing that he’s human, seeing some of his darker and sadder flaws first hand, only makes her admiration grow. I love that. I think it’s sad for Griffith because he doesn’t know this and knowing it would’ve probably really helped with his self loathing issues, and I think it’s a little… messed up, the way Casca sees Griffith’s ability to suppress his feelings and be perfect for everyone as a strength, but it’s really interesting as a dynamic.
When it comes to Griffith’s point of view, I think it’s kind of a shame that he remained so closed off to her. Casca and Guts have very similar feelings towards Griffith, but where Casca is largely shut out after he turns and puts his hand on her shoulder in the river, Guts is let in. So Casca and Griffith feel kind of like a missed connection. Not in a romantic way, but in a “if things had been slightly different between them, they could’ve been great mutual support for each other” kind of way.
If the river scene had gone a little differently, like say if Casca had assured Griffith she didn’t think he was dirty instead of asking why he was with Gennon, or if Griffith had allowed himself to accept her comforting hug, I think Casca could’ve been solid, affirming emotional support for Griffith. If she knew about the assassinations, say, she’d’ve been fine with them. She probably would’ve been a better assassin than Guts, too, lol.
lbr, Griffith desperately needed someone to see all of him and tell him he wasn’t a monster, and Casca would’ve been great at that. For Casca’s part, she wanted someone to prioritize her and trust her enough to accept her emotional support (as we see pretty clearly in the scene where she and Guts fuck.) And I think getting this platonically would’ve been just as good or better for her than getting it with a side of sex.
But at the end of the day it was Guts who Griffith turned to (and tbqh the fact that Casca’s jealousy is explicitly because she’s in love with Griffith absolutely means that Griffith trusting Guts, prioritizing Guts, and wanting Guts to see all of him, ie exactly what Casca wanted to be to Griffith, all boils down to attraction and Griffith choosing Guts over Casca as essentially his emotional support because he’s in love with Guts and not Casca. But I digress) and Casca’s relationship with Griffith never met its full potential.
But despite that, they still have a really cute, generally fairly positive relationship before everything goes down. Griffith sends a search party not just for Guts but also specifies her when they fall off the cliff. When they get back Casca’s falling over herself apologizing and Griffith just smiles and welcomes her back. At Guts’ prompting he mentions her dress to her just to say something nice and slightly make up for letting her think he was dead. When he first saves her she becomes devoted not just because he threw her a sword, but because he helped calm her down after she killed the dude, seemed to empathize with her (”he just nodded, deeply and slowly,”) and gave her a blanket. After the rescue there’s a moment where he sees her crying near Judeau from afar and clearly wishes he was still able to comfort her.
Idk honestly their relationship isn’t perfect, it has some sadness, some missed opportunities, some dark moments (I’m talking pre-Eclipse, I’m not touching Femto bc as far as I can tell the Eclipse rape had nothing to do with Casca or Griffith’s overall relationship with her and everything to do with Guts), but overall I think it’s a sweet, mostly positive friendship.
Ok lol sorry about that essay that doesn’t even address most of your ask.
As for Casca trying to protect Griffith from getting hurt, I think it makes perfect sense from a character perspective, though I’m a little cynical when it comes to my thoughts on what Miura may have intended. Like, eg, I think Casca’s violent diatribe against Guts near the waterfall was meant to be a mix of genuine anger over the way he broke Griffith, partially projecting her own feelings of abandonment, and partially her feelings of jealousy getting involved too – why couldn’t Guts have stayed for her, and why couldn’t she affect Griffith the way Guts could? We see both issues come up shortly after – jealousy right before she tries to kill herself, and raging at Guts for (she thinks) wanting to leave her behind again after they have sex.
So I guess now I’m thinking Casca’s feelings when she tells Guts to leave are probably a complicated mixture of like, everything.
I think what you described plays a large part. She knows how Griffith feels about Guts, and that seeing her and Guts together every day would be torturous for him. Also lbr, a few days with another dude aren’t enough to erase anyone’s like, near decade of feelings for the first dude, and we see them come up again during the rescue mission, when jealousy starts creeping between Guts and Casca, so she’s not exactly over her feelings for Griffith, which includes wanting to protect him.
I think there’s also an element of Casca being self-sacrificing, telling Guts to leave to pursue his dream because she thinks Guts’ dream is the most important thing to him, and she believes Guts staying would be a sacrifice on his part.
I think Casca is aware enough of the weird love triangle between the three of them that she knows if they both stayed with Griffith things would get weird and fucked up real quick for everyone, probably especially Griffith. She’s jealous of Guts and Griffith, Griffith loves Guts and would be jealous of the relationship between him and Casca, plus he’s the most vulnerable, and I think there’s a strong indication that Guts would be caught in the middle, but probably would end up prioritizing Griffith.
AND THEN there’s another aspect to Casca pushing Guts away that I think could, at least in theory, be the strongest motivating factor, at least when it comes to my interpretation of Casca and my love of flawed female characters who make terrible choices just like the men do, which is that she’s been given an opportunity to take Guts’ role.
Now Griffith needs her. Now she’s the one who can comfort him and Griffith finally accepts her comfort. And sex is also maybe on the table which, taking the narrative at face value, is something Casca also wants.
There is a “yet,” there, ofc. I think Casca’s feelings are mixed. She genuinely wanted to leave with Guts, she was probably glad of the chance to get over her one-sided feelings for Griffith, but at the same time, she still has those feelings.
So like, ultimately, once she’s faced with the reality that Griffith desperately needs someone who loves him and she can’t just take off with Guts, there are three options available: her and Guts both stay, only Guts stays, only Casca stays.
Both her and Guts staying would be an unmitigated disaster of jealousy issues, only Guts staying would fucking suck for Casca (right now from her pov, in the long run lbr it would by far be the best option bc Casca needs to find herself away from dudes), but only Casca staying would give her something she used to desperately want, and still does want on some level.
So she tells herself Guts would be unhappy without his dream and he shouldn’t stay for his own sake, and tries to send him off, but the actual driving emotional reason is that only one of them can stay with Griffith and she wants it to be her.
(For the record I think this would’ve been a huge mistake for Casca even if the Eclipse didn’t happen. Despite Griffith’s nightmare vision I can’t imagine her being happy living a quiet domestic life with him. But what’s the point of a Berserk character if they’re not making huge mistakes?)
lol man this is a lot longer than I thought it would be, and I think a lot of this is a stretch and probably not what Miura intended, but it’s the explanation I want to land on.
Oh and finally, just to briefly hit the last two things, I’d say Casca can’t tell the difference between love and a feeling of obligation she gets when someone saves her. Both her feelings for Griffith and Guts started after being saved by them, and both manifest in wanting to comfort them and be their emotional support and give them something in return for what they’ve given her.
“Not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.”
So while maybe Miura wanted us to believe Casca loved Guts, or could’ve fallen in love with Guts (tho idk maybe this is purposeful, I talk a lot about how I think he deliberately went a relatively non-romantic route with Guts and Casca’s hook up), I don’t think she genuinely loved him, or Griffith for that matter, in a romantic sense.
@poppy-moon because you asked a while back re: meta about casca and griffith and now I’ve written something lol. and the first half is more the positive kind of thing you were suggesting.
i feel like the double standard stems partially from the fact that guts “feels bad” about what he did to casca
but griffith would fucking feel bad too if he had the ability to feel anything lol. he is literally the king of feeling bad about fucked up shit he’s done, please
griffith:
berserk fans: i am shocked, shocked and absolutely appalled that neogriffith said he has no regrets
griffith:
those same berserk fans: griffith has clearly been an evil unfeeling sociopathic monster from the beginning
actually speaking of griffith/rosine parallels one thing i’m real worried about is that falconia is going to end up being another land of the elves style thing compared to guts’ jill.
not in the sense that children are murdering each other or even that there’s a dark underbelly at all, just in that falconia will be portrayed as a childish immature fantastical escape from the horrors of the world compared to the more ‘mature’ concept of just dealing with your life being terrible instead of actively trying to escape or change things, a la rosine’s escape from abuse to her fake fantasy vs jill being portrayed as more admirable for going back home and just… taking the abuse?
i hated the end of the lost children arc, is what i’m saying, but it seems like very apt set up for falconia, which worries me. i don’t want guts and griffith to be jill and rosine 2.0
well that’s a lie i absolutely do, but yk, just with the gay vibes, not with those particular themes.
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.
Also speaking of the monologue I want to take a sec to just gush about how it’s structured. The way it begins with two pages of Griffith reminiscing about his dream. “It was the brightest thing I had ever seen.” Shining. The next page is Griffith with that light shining before him.
Then into darkness, deep darkness without even a trace of light. The darkness of the torture chamber, the darkness, one assumes, of having his dream ripped away from him. Only one thing is vivid.
And it’s Guts.
I just love how it’s set up as a bait and switch to really drive in the point that Guts has overtaken his dream. You turn the page, expecting to see Griffith consumed with longing for his lost dream, for the castle, the thing he just described as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, but nope, it’s Guts, like lightning blazing within him.
And then the monologue ends with Griffith returning to the subject of the dream only to say it’s dull compared to Guts.
Like this is straightforward but I still love how it’s set up to play with expectation, and to compare Griffith before and Griffith after Guts. The dream shining within him, replaced by Guts shining within him.
Oh yeah I see what you mean. And you could probably argue that Guts is doing the same thing with Casca right now too, idealizing the concept of her as healed and exactly the way she was before as a Hawk commander.
Also yeah while I’d say Utena was mostly about examining misogyny and patriarchy, I think you could apply a lot of the same conceptual stuff to homophobia and heteronormativity. Like ngl I only watched Utena for the first time fairly recently and I know this would be p much blasphemy to a lot of fans lol, but afterwards I immediately wanted to compare Griffith’s castle dream to the floating upside-down castle. I mean Griffith’s dream is kind of intwined with an ideal heteronormative relationship with Charlotte, noble storybook knight and princess, which is at odds with his genuine love for Guts, except he ends up choosing the dream.
I tend to err on the side of thinking that it’s not purposeful on Miura’s part, and being able to read Griffith’s narrative as about internalized homophobia and heternormativity is just a side effect of him being emotionally repressed, in love with Guts, and needing to marry a princess, but it’s still fun to think about, and imo it’s really not much of a stretch.
fa and i were talking the other day about certain people who (imo) misinterpret griffith’s character to be all about power & control … i think that’s a very stupid but also very interesting character analysis and i think i understand where it comes from lol
what baffles me is how people miss all the not so subtle hints that griffith actually cares. but i guess when you’ve already adopted a point of view, your brain shifts reality to fit it. no one’s exempt from that, really
so griffith is the commander (? idk these titles, sorry if i got it wrong, i’m gay) of the band of the hawk, clearly likes being in control, i won’t deny that. ‘claimed’ guts at least partially due to his strength and fighting ability, schemed behind the scenes a lot, eventually when guts tried to leave he wouldn’t let him, all true. but did he break because he wasn’t in control anymore? well, in a way, i guess, i say with my voice going really high. the real conflict of his character was the contest between his dream, motivated by childish desires and guilt, and guts, the only man who made him forget all about it. guts made him lose his reason, lose control, and he fell apart completely. his raw feelings for guts made him feel so weak and vulnerable it was unbearable.
but even so, what griffith really wanted was guts. the problem was it was already too late. too many people had died. too much time had been wasted. on top of that, guts was no longer a certain and stable presence in his life. he could leave at any moment, again, and griffith wouldn’t be able to stop him, and would have to go through another emotional breakdown.
i don’t know, like. if what you get from that is “griffith is a control freak who throws a fit when he can’t puppet master everyone around him” then i applaud you because that’s an
inconceivable
perspective for me. to me, griffith’s character is about guilt, repression, and an unspeakable love, so strong it made him lose sight of everything else, so intense it shattered him into a million pieces. griffith claims he does things for Logical Reasons, but do you really buy that? when he sold his body to a paedophile, do you really think it was because he just wanted more money? when he decided to throw away his humanity, to bury his fragile heart, do you really think he was doing it strategically? i don’t know, must be nice to not care about anything that truly makes griffith compelling as a character, i bet reading berserk is way less painful then
also a couple of points:
as someone has pointed out already, griffith didn’t force guts to join the band of the hawk. he invited him, guts refused, griffith was surprised but didn’t really say anything. and then guts was like, we’ll duel for it, and griffith saw his opportunity and accepted
this one’s important: griffith ….. didn’t want to become a king so he could have power and money lol. he wanted to create his own society, where things like class, race, and gender wouldn’t matter, just like they didn’t to the hawks. and that’s clearly the type of kingdom falconia is now.
SAME I feel like the aspect of control and whether Griffith has it or not is completely incidental to his character. I don’t think having control is a priority for him, I don’t think it’s a source of anything or a motivation, I think at most it’s a side effect of the enormity of his dream and the fact that to achieve it he has to be a leader.
Like, he is a leader, he sends people to his death and he owns that fact (partially in a denial of his guilt over that fact imho), he wants to be king, and he has a breakdown when Guts leaves that involves claiming ownership of him, but none of those stem from a place of control-freakiness.
When it comes to Guts Casca gets angry because Griffith doesn’t control him as much as he should as a leader and lets him basically do whatever the hell he wants and plans around it. Griffith is the one who tries to ask Guts to help him as a friend by killing a guy rather than ordering him as a soldier, and Guts is the one who wants it to be an order. Griffith makes a point of letting his Hawks choose to follow him because it’s another way he can deny his guilt for their deaths. (”I guess it’s because… they themselves chose to fight.”) Casca follows him after Griffith tells her “do what you wish” (do whatever tf you want is practically a griffith motto, he says it to corkus in the beginning, p much says it to guts wrt battle tactics, etc.)
Idk I don’t get any sense of needing to be in control from Griffith’s personality, I almost see the opposite in the way he denies responsibility for the Hawks’ deaths, his calm interest when discussing the fact that monsters exist even though Zodd almost killed them, his belief in – and more than that, his strong desire to believe in – fate, etc. “We are all at the mercy of a great tide, fate or whatever you want to call it.”
Refusing to let Guts leave came from emotional desperation and falling back on a previously established dynamic that Guts himself suggested and reinforced because he couldn’t communicate his feelings any other way. Imo.
Oh and also like +1 I think Guts fucked him up partially bc to achieve his dream he has to remain in control of himself and when Guts is involved he totally loses it, but I don’t think he really allowed himself to accept the fact that Guts makes him irrational until the torture chamber. I could see an argument that his emotional repression/denial is a way to remain in control of his feelings, but again I don’t think he lives in denial and repression because he’s a control freak, I think it’s because his dream necessitates it.
“Griffith had to make himself strong.” He doesn’t intrinsically desire to be in control of himself or others, he forces himself to be to achieve his dream, which itself is motivated by guilt.
Yeah, I’d say whether Femto is a different person from Griffith comes down to semantics and what someone considers personhood, but to me undergoing a magical transformation that augments the “evil” in your heart (which, in Berserk, exists in the hearts of all people) and removes the “goodness” or w/e, as visually depicted by literally losing fragments of himself:
makes you different enough that I have no problem mentally separating human Griffith and Femto, and definitely don’t hate Griffith for Femto’s actions, same way I don’t hate Guts for trying to murder his friends when the armour takes over.
If you (general you) wanna hate Griffith for agreeing to sacrifice his friends, or challenging Guts when he left, or w/e, I’ll disagree but I think that’s fair game. But hating him for Femto’s actions after we’re taken step by step through his magical transformation into an entity made out of evil really doesn’t make sense to me.
Also, do you mean Griffith would’ve taken Guts back if he’d returned, say, a year after the duel, like in canon, but Griffith hadn’t gotten caught fucking Charlotte and therefore hadn’t spent that year in a dungeon?
I think Griffith probably would take him back, because he’s desperate and needy and irrational and in love, but I could see an argument where the duel is a big wake-up call to how emotionally compromised he is by his love for Guts, which could make him view Guts as a huge threat lol, and he might refuse to let him return to try to protect himself from his own destructive, dream-endangering feelings.
Though I think it’s also likely that Griffith isn’t that self aware even after the duel, and would still manage to deny his feelings. Like Guts would come back and Griffith would somehow logic himself into returning to their close relationship without admitting to himself that he just really needs Guts in his life. Like, “it’s not because I desperately want him back at my side, it’s because he knows I assassinated the queen and co and therefore I need him as my ally and not my enemy.” Or something along those lines. Though of course his feelings would be that much harder to deny now, and eventually something would have to give.
Or he could be aware of his feelings now, but too far gone to refuse Guts, a la “if I can’t have him, I don’t care!” Like, “ok Guts’ existence could clearly ruin me, but fuck it, he came back and I’ll be damned if I’m letting him leave me again ever.” Which would open its own associated emotional can of worms lol.
lol sorry I love thinking about Griffith’s stupid feelings and how he deals or doesn’t deal with them.
(And now I’m wondering what if Guts turned around and walked back two minutes after leaving Griffith in the snow. I feel like if that was the case Griffith would be incapable of anything but genuine emotional expression, either in the form of being overwhelmed with relief that Guts came back and immediately taking him back, or rage followed by a sobbing breakdown or smthn.
This is a great topic to muse on lol)
I wonder if, if Guts turned around and walked back, if Griffith would be too vulnerable for relief/rage? Like, Guts just almost left, and Griffith made a fool out of himself by completely letting his emotions get the best of him. I feel like anger, pride, and just plain exhaustion might stop him from acting up again, although … they also might not, damn, I don’t think we can know for sure.
Idk the way he falls to the snow and stares into space, unable to even pretend he’s okay for the Hawks who are just standing there awkwardly, personally has me thinking it’s a v rare moment where he’s not capable of self-control. I’d give it maybe a few minutes before he smiles, stands up, and pretends “it’s nothing,” but if Guts caught him before that point I think his reaction would be raw af.
though there’s def some wishful thinking here because it’s a reaction I’d love to see even if I don’t think I can completely picture it.
If Guts caught him after he put the mask on again I think his reaction could be very different. Maybe angry and prideful, maybe something like, “you won your freedom, so gtfo,” something indicating an “i don’t want your pity” kinda feeling, idk. but i’m just throwing headcanons at the wall lol, like I could see a lot of different reactions as ic depending on how it’s depicted.
Yeah, I’d say whether Femto is a different person from Griffith comes down to semantics and what someone considers personhood, but to me undergoing a magical transformation that augments the “evil” in your heart (which, in Berserk, exists in the hearts of all people) and removes the “goodness” or w/e, as visually depicted by literally losing fragments of himself:
makes you different enough that I have no problem mentally separating human Griffith and Femto, and definitely don’t hate Griffith for Femto’s actions, same way I don’t hate Guts for trying to murder his friends when the armour takes over.
If you (general you) wanna hate Griffith for agreeing to sacrifice his friends, or challenging Guts when he left, or w/e, I’ll disagree but I think that’s fair game. But hating him for Femto’s actions after we’re taken step by step through his magical transformation into an entity made out of evil really doesn’t make sense to me.
Also, do you mean Griffith would’ve taken Guts back if he’d returned, say, a year after the duel, like in canon, but Griffith hadn’t gotten caught fucking Charlotte and therefore hadn’t spent that year in a dungeon?
I think Griffith probably would take him back, because he’s desperate and needy and irrational and in love, but I could see an argument where the duel is a big wake-up call to how emotionally compromised he is by his love for Guts, which could make him view Guts as a huge threat lol, and he might refuse to let him return to try to protect himself from his own destructive, dream-endangering feelings.
Though I think it’s also likely that Griffith isn’t that self aware even after the duel, and would still manage to deny his feelings. Like Guts would come back and Griffith would somehow logic himself into returning to their close relationship without admitting to himself that he just really needs Guts in his life. Like, “it’s not because I desperately want him back at my side, it’s because he knows I assassinated the queen and co and therefore I need him as my ally and not my enemy.” Or something along those lines. Though of course his feelings would be that much harder to deny now, and eventually something would have to give.
Or he could be aware of his feelings now, but too far gone to refuse Guts, a la “if I can’t have him, I don’t care!” Like, “ok Guts’ existence could clearly ruin me, but fuck it, he came back and I’ll be damned if I’m letting him leave me again ever.” Which would open its own associated emotional can of worms lol.
lol sorry I love thinking about Griffith’s stupid feelings and how he deals or doesn’t deal with them.
(And now I’m wondering what if Guts turned around and walked back two minutes after leaving Griffith in the snow. I feel like if that was the case Griffith would be incapable of anything but genuine emotional expression, either in the form of being overwhelmed with relief that Guts came back and immediately taking him back, or rage followed by a sobbing breakdown or smthn.
This is a great topic to muse on lol)
You should have known. This is the man I am. You of all people.
the fact that he’s remembering the very first moment we saw them together when we know guts thought of him as “beautiful, noble, and larger than life,” where griffith said, “i’ve never spoken to anyone like this,” is killer tbh. thinking about that early moment of vulnerability, wondering if guts has been hating/resenting him all this time.
yk, i always think of guts as being the only member of the hawks who was recruited without a choice in the matter. the only one who didn’t choose to follow griffith but instead got won in a duel. i was even about to write some meta on it and what it says about griffith and how he forgets his dream when guts is involved (because it’s important to him that every one of the hawks chooses to follow him of their own volition, it’s how he maintains his denial of guilt). but i sat down to start writing it and i was like, wait a sec.
bc the thing is, the duel was all guts.
griffith said he wanted guts to join him, seemed taken aback when guts refused out of hand, and that’s it.
guts is the one who went hey i know let’s fight again and if i lose i’ll fight for you or we’ll fuck or whatever
like, i think griffith just leapt at the chance to keep guts around another way, i don’t think he would’ve made that suggestion himself, or kidnapped him if guts didn’t suggest it or w/e. guts probably could’ve just went ‘uh thanks for not letting me die i guess, see ya’ and griffith probably would’ve sighed and let him leave if more sweet talking didn’t work.
instead guts went ‘we’re enemies, i want to fight you again, here are the stakes,’ and griffith was like, ‘fuck yeah i’m in’
idek i’ve read this scene a million times idg why i always think of griffith as the instigator when he’s textually not. maybe bc once guts brings up the idea griffith is so hugely into it lol with his ‘i must obtain the things i desire’ and reiterating that guts belongs to him etc.
but guts did have a choice. he chose to fight griffith and he chose the stakes of the duel.
2/2 So I’m a bit puzzled and I am wondering about your
interpretation, if you’ve already written a meta about that scene. What I
think is that Guts definitely sees Griffith romantically so he was
doubly heartbroken after hearing that he doesn’t see him as a friend or
equal, so he wanted to leave in order to make him care about him
seriously. But Griffith already loves Guts and respects him, so his
speech is a bit contradictory. Sorry for the long ask btw I love your
blog 🙂
Hi there 🙂 Yk, I don’t think I actually have really talked about this scene in much depth.
My general default reading of Guts and Griffith’s relationship is that they are both romantically in love with each other but neither of them actually realize that they are. (Well, I don’t think Guts has ever quite realized it, at least not consciously, but I do think that Griffith figured it out during his year of torture.)
So in my opinion, Griffith meant his friendship speech.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the conversation that comes right before the assassination attempt and then Griffith’s speech in the narrative included this exchange:
Griffith asking Guts to assassinate Julius was, in a way, a gesture of friendship. It was a request for Guts to do this for him, as a favour for a friend rather than an order from a superior, and Guts picked up on Griffith’s careful phrasing and accidentally rebuffed him. I think Guts meant this as a lighthearted joke, but while we don’t get to see Griffith’s reaction to it, I’m willing to bet he took it as a rejection.
Maybe not even a purposeful rejection – but certainly a sign that Guts doesn’t see him as a friend, but sees him as a superior first. I think this leads directly to Griffith’s speech to Charlotte where he proclaims that he has no equals. Like, it’s completely accurate, whether or not it’s arrogant as well – people either look up at him as a saviour or symbol of their ability to rise in the world, or look down on him as a symbol of corruption in the system.
I also think there’s another important aspect to his speech.
What he describes to Charlotte as a friend is someone who has his own dream, separate from Griffith’s, and would pursue it even if it meant clashing with him.
To Griffith, whose life revolves around his dream and who frames things like that because it’s how he sees the world, what this translates to is that a friend is someone who won’t die in service to his dream.
I think he tries to keep an emotional distance between himself and his Hawks because, frankly, they tend to die in battle, and it fucks him up (as we see in Casca’s flashback to the dead kid and the morning after Gennon.)
So he says the Hawks aren’t his friends because he can’t think of them that way. They see him as a perfect leader, he sees them as people who he will one day send to their deaths, simply by ordering them into whichever battle eventually kills them.
So when Guts re-establishes that he sees Griffith as a leader and tells him to order him to do things instead of requesting favours, it’s a reminder to Griffith to distance himself.
Of course, it doesn’t actually work. He can’t turn off his feelings for Guts even if he tries to ignore and downplay them (also see: I had no reason at all for risking my life for you. He can acknowledge that yeah, he did do that, but he can’t acknowledge why – because he loves him – not even to himself.) Guts is still the only person who Griffith allows to see and participate in the shady shit he does to rise to the top, the stuff that makes him feel dirty. He still risks his life for Guts. He still sends a search party after Guts and Casca despite going against the wishes of the nobles he’s supposed to be sucking up to, and then ditches an important meeting to see them in person. He still expresses concern for Guts’ safety before the Battle of Doldrey. And he crashes and burns harder than anyone has ever crashed and burned after Guts leaves lol.
(Now there is an obvious contradiction in that Griffith wants to be Guts friend and equal rather than the superior who will send him to his death eventually, but also won’t let him leave the Hawks, but that’s plain old fear of rejection imo, and not understanding Guts’ reasons for leaving, and an irrational emotional implosion lol.)
AND I think there’s a third aspect that ought to be explored: Griffith can only call an equal who would fight for his own dream a friend because this definition allows him to continue prioritizing his dream. To save Guts’ life at the risk to his own, rather than let Guts be killed for his dream, is, at its core, a betrayal of his dream, and the thousands of people who’ve died for it. But if his “friend” was an “equal” with his own obsessive dream, then in theory he’d never have to choose between his friend and his dream – it would be understood that their respective dreams would be prioritized. Another reason for the “and should anyone trample that dream he would oppose him body and soul… even if that threat were me myself” clause.
At the end of the day Griffith already loves and respects Guts, of course – he has from day one – but he can’t admit that yet, not even to himself, imo, because it’s a serious, serious threat to everything he’s built his life around.
Tbh I feel like there’s a lot more to say on this topic, especially how and why Griffith represses and denies his feelings for Guts, and what his dream means to him, etc, but I think I’m definitely going to end up writing a long ass analytical post about him soon because I’m really feeling all this nitty gritty Griffith stuff at the moment lol. But yeah when it comes to Promrose Hall I think this is pretty much my thoughts on what Griffith’s speech is about.
Anyway, thanks for the message, I love talking about this kinda stuff 🙂 And ty I’m glad you enjoy my blog.
I love love looooooove Griffith’s immediate reaction to finding out Guts intends to leave. At that point I don’t think he had forgotten about Guts boss-zoning him, and him wanting to just … leave without a goddamn word only rubbed salt into that wound. In my opinion, along with impulsive irrationality fueled by pure fear, this is one of the reasons he so quickly resorted to basically saying “You can’t leave because I own you.” It’s spiteful out of hurt–if you’re going to treat me like a stranger, then I’m going to treat you like one too.
Yessss ia! And I also think that along those lines, while Griffith might not have been like hugely devastated Guts’ apparent rejection of his attempt to lower that barrier of commander/soldier between them at the time (yk he might’ve taken it as the light joke it was meant to be as well as just an incidental reminder that that’s not their relationship), after he learned that Guts wanted to leave I’ll bet he replayed that moment in his head and it turned into Guts asking to be ordered because he wouldn’t do it as a friend.
Like a judgement – I won’t voluntarily do this abhorrent dirty work for you, but I’ll do it if you order me to because I’m a soldier.
Griffith asking him instead of ordering him imo had another level of wanting Guts’ acceptance of his “dirty side.” It was a show of trust.
So I could def see “wrest yourself away by your sword,” coming from a place of spite + desperation from that angle too. You’ll only stay by my side if I order you to? Then that’s what I’ll do.
2/2 So I’m a bit puzzled and I am wondering about your
interpretation, if you’ve already written a meta about that scene. What I
think is that Guts definitely sees Griffith romantically so he was
doubly heartbroken after hearing that he doesn’t see him as a friend or
equal, so he wanted to leave in order to make him care about him
seriously. But Griffith already loves Guts and respects him, so his
speech is a bit contradictory. Sorry for the long ask btw I love your
blog 🙂
Hi there 🙂 Yk, I don’t think I actually have really talked about this scene in much depth.
My general default reading of Guts and Griffith’s relationship is that they are both romantically in love with each other but neither of them actually realize that they are. (Well, I don’t think Guts has ever quite realized it, at least not consciously, but I do think that Griffith figured it out during his year of torture.)
So in my opinion, Griffith meant his friendship speech.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the conversation that comes right before the assassination attempt and then Griffith’s speech in the narrative included this exchange:
Griffith asking Guts to assassinate Julius was, in a way, a gesture of friendship. It was a request for Guts to do this for him, as a favour for a friend rather than an order from a superior, and Guts picked up on Griffith’s careful phrasing and accidentally rebuffed him. I think Guts meant this as a lighthearted joke, but while we don’t get to see Griffith’s reaction to it, I’m willing to bet he took it as a rejection.
Maybe not even a purposeful rejection – but certainly a sign that Guts doesn’t see him as a friend, but sees him as a superior first. I think this leads directly to Griffith’s speech to Charlotte where he proclaims that he has no equals. Like, it’s completely accurate, whether or not it’s arrogant as well – people either look up at him as a saviour or symbol of their ability to rise in the world, or look down on him as a symbol of corruption in the system.
I also think there’s another important aspect to his speech.
What he describes to Charlotte as a friend is someone who has his own dream, separate from Griffith’s, and would pursue it even if it meant clashing with him.
To Griffith, whose life revolves around his dream and who frames things like that because it’s how he sees the world, what this translates to is that a friend is someone who won’t die in service to his dream.
I think he tries to keep an emotional distance between himself and his Hawks because, frankly, they tend to die in battle, and it fucks him up (as we see in Casca’s flashback to the dead kid and the morning after Gennon.)
So he says the Hawks aren’t his friends because he can’t think of them that way. They see him as a perfect leader, he sees them as people who he will one day send to their deaths, simply by ordering them into whichever battle eventually kills them.
So when Guts re-establishes that he sees Griffith as a leader and tells him to order him to do things instead of requesting favours, it’s a reminder to Griffith to distance himself.
Of course, it doesn’t actually work. He can’t turn off his feelings for Guts even if he tries to ignore and downplay them (also see: I had no reason at all for risking my life for you. He can acknowledge that yeah, he did do that, but he can’t acknowledge why – because he loves him – not even to himself.) Guts is still the only person who Griffith allows to see and participate in the shady shit he does to rise to the top, the stuff that makes him feel dirty. He still risks his life for Guts. He still sends a search party after Guts and Casca despite going against the wishes of the nobles he’s supposed to be sucking up to, and then ditches an important meeting to see them in person. He still expresses concern for Guts’ safety before the Battle of Doldrey. And he crashes and burns harder than anyone has ever crashed and burned after Guts leaves lol.
(Now there is an obvious contradiction in that Griffith wants to be Guts friend and equal rather than the superior who will send him to his death eventually, but also won’t let him leave the Hawks, but that’s plain old fear of rejection imo, and not understanding Guts’ reasons for leaving, and an irrational emotional implosion lol.)
AND I think there’s a third aspect that ought to be explored: Griffith can only call an equal who would fight for his own dream a friend because this definition allows him to continue prioritizing his dream. To save Guts’ life at the risk to his own, rather than let Guts be killed for his dream, is, at its core, a betrayal of his dream, and the thousands of people who’ve died for it. But if his “friend” was an “equal” with his own obsessive dream, then in theory he’d never have to choose between his friend and his dream – it would be understood that their respective dreams would be prioritized. Another reason for the “and should anyone trample that dream he would oppose him body and soul… even if that threat were me myself” clause.
At the end of the day Griffith already loves and respects Guts, of course – he has from day one – but he can’t admit that yet, not even to himself, imo, because it’s a serious, serious threat to everything he’s built his life around.
Tbh I feel like there’s a lot more to say on this topic, especially how and why Griffith represses and denies his feelings for Guts, and what his dream means to him, etc, but I think I’m definitely going to end up writing a long ass analytical post about him soon because I’m really feeling all this nitty gritty Griffith stuff at the moment lol. But yeah when it comes to Promrose Hall I think this is pretty much my thoughts on what Griffith’s speech is about.
Anyway, thanks for the message, I love talking about this kinda stuff 🙂 And ty I’m glad you enjoy my blog.
Password: Enough
Happy New Year everyone, I’m ringing it in by finally posting the fruits of me getting way too into a vid that was only supposed to be a fun evening of playing around on Premiere.
It’s set to an Avril Lavigne song and it’s earnest about it. Enjoy!
Pardon my bad writing English isn’t my language I’m not fluent, cheers from Ukraine.
Yes! At least that’s absolutely how I understand his character, and it’s like my favourite thing about him.
I get what you mean about Griffith being suprising, like if you assume something about him a later action will contradict it. I feel like to me he makes perfect sense, but only after reading the manga twice in a row and spending way too much time thinking about his narrative lol.
At face value he seems very contradictory because he tends to lie to himself, and the way he gets more complicated as the story goes on also tends to throw people off. Yk like we start out with this impression of him as a powerful charismatic leader driven towards a goal and willing to kill to get there, distant and above everyone else, but the more we learn about him – about his past and his insecurities and guilt and self loathing and feelings for Guts etc etc – the more layers we uncover, and the more we see that first impression is… not wrong exactly, but there’s a LOT more going on beneath the surface, and most of it is pretty depressing.
And like, he’s an unreliable narrator about himself, which can also make him hard to figure out. Imo Miura did a great job writing a character who doesn’t even understand his own motivations and emotions and making him understandable to the audience, but it’s still really easy to miss a lot of the complexities.
Also same! I really feel like we’re heading towards a big emotional reveal for NeoGriffith and I can’t wait.
tbh I’m thinking I might write a much more thorough meta post about his narrative/character soon. I want to talk about this more lol it’s like my favourite Berserk related topic. And it’s been a while since I got in-depth about something here, so keep an eye open if you’re interested!
And not to mention those moments that were cut were supposed to humanize Griffith and make him more relatable and fun. Anime and films made him look just cruel and cunning.
yeahhhh
tbh i feel like there are a lot of rly minor, seemingly insignificant tweaks that end up making the story feel much flatter overall. In the anime I mean, the movies just full on cut most of Griffith’s character out lol.
But like, little things like how he looks angry rather than regretful when Guts is about to kill the hired goons in tombstone of flame, or how we don’t see his face on “do you think I’m cruel?” or losing the moment where Guts remembers him asking him not to tell the Hawks about the assassinations, etc, all add up to less depth and less understanding and sympathy.
Also Guts tends to look way more dour imo, like his default expression is much pissier in the anime than the manga, which makes him seem low-key resentful constantly and kills a lot of the chemistry between Griffith and Guts in significant scenes. Also a bunch of his super fond wistful thinking-about-Griffith smiles are gone lol. I’m sure that helps contribute to the idea that anything between them is one-sided.
And then there are the filler scenes added just so Guts can do something useful and Casca can act like a tsundere, playing up Guts and Casca in a rly cliched way.
Also no flashback to Guts during sex with Charlotte, and his scratch marks are interpreted as a giant scar which doesn’t make any sense – there’s no reason for him to be clutching a mysterious scar and crying, but we’ve seen him self harm before so like, whoever made that call fucked up.
Ooh the torture – the scene that happens after Griffith has spent about one day in the dungeon in the manga instead happens right before Guts returns which really makes his suffering in the anime seem diminished in comparison.
Also Guts’ sparks speech to Casca is turned into half an episode of him chilling with Godo, which means that his dream of fighting people and swinging his sword forever is treated as completely noble and manly by the narrative, because we don’t get Casca’s immediate “you sound like a fucking asshole” counterpoint. Casca’s angry reaction is instead solely a reaction to Guts saying he’s leaving again, not to his whole “dream,” which also makes her look worse.
Idk this turned into a list bc I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently lol. The anime does a lot of things rly well too, but idk I definitely feel like I interpret the story pretty differently to whoever made it.
the thing with berserk is I’d love more fan content and there is stuff out there in the non-tumblr portion of the internet that’s mostly discussion, which would be great but I don’t think I could be more scared of cis-male opinions on berserk tbh
I’ve barely read any and but I feel like I can… picture it based on what little I’ve seen and I do not want. strongly.
this is the only thing that springs to mind as something from straight dude-centric berserk fandom that i mostly agreed with. it’s been a while since i watched it and i’m sure i’ve refined my own opinions since then so idk if i’d still be going ‘yeah you’re not wrong’ at most of his points, but it’s probably still worth a watch
but yeah in general i avoid everything outside my little tumblr circle, greater berserk fandom is the absolute worst
a) oh hell yeah, thank you! the title of that video is even interesting and it’s actually come up recommended on youtube for me a few times and is one of the ones I was scared to click on and
that’s the kind of thing I want to avoid but at the same time if it’s a downplaying or an alternate explanation I can live with it– I think the only thing I’d come close to accepting is that there’s something more “profound” that motivates him, or well. no accepting, but I can fully understand why people would take that view while also completely disagreeing? there’s at least justification for that in some ways. (although I think that view in itself is as you said, no homo-ish, but also accepts something the narrative pretty explicitly explains is a Bad Idea: making griffith into something “more than”, or someone on a pedestal, who is incomprehensible in nature, is one of the deepest reasons for griffith doing what he does imo).
and c) I’ve now had like my first ever unexpected negative anon (a transphobic one to boot! wow amazing) from this fandom. oh. dear.
(also just watching now and “the less you look at griffith, the worse he seems” is a pretty observation though. yes good).
but also accepts something the narrative pretty explicitly explains is a
Bad Idea: making griffith into something “more than”, or someone on a
pedestal, who is incomprehensible in nature, is one of the deepest
reasons for griffith doing what he does imo
yk this is a great point actually. part of the point of griffith’s narrative is that he’s only human. like, i do think his feelings are incomprehensible to him, at least until he spends a year doing nothing but being tortured and examining those feelings, but they’re not particularly grandiose or more-than.
I actually really dig that as a thematic thing now that you’ve brought it up – Griffith’s feelings for Guts should be plain old ordinary human love and sexuality, because Griffith is an ordinary human who just like… sucks at recognizing/accepting that he is, and sucks at being recognized as an ordinary human.
and the same goes for femto/neogriff since despite being a demigod demon in berserk all these monsters and gods originate in recognizable ordinary human feelings.
like damn that just neatly tied one of my favourite berserk themes to griffith and guts’ love, that’s perfect.
(also tbf I may be misrepresenting what he says about griffguts since I don’t remember the one i linked very well and I haven’t actually watched his video about it, I’m just going off a few comments on it that I read while trying to figure out if it was worth watching lol)
ps lol i went for a good like 8 months without getting any anon hate
despite regularly posting controversial opinions, but now there’s one
anon blowing up my inbox, and it’s def the same person who sent you
those messages lol. sorry about that, she probably found you thru me.
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.
you're the only one 