mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
Tag: character: guts
so this is p much guts being terrified that he’s going to die because his ambition of getting revenge is too great, but i kind of also want to choose to read it as a behelit/griffith reference, calling the sacrifice a form of self destruction too. he did pick up the behelit before this and knowing his other major frame of reference for great ambition I feel like it works as at least an accidental reference to the Eclipse.
Something to think about:
While Griffith is human, Guts is an ordinary dude doing his best.
While Griffith is Femto, Guts is the Black Swordsman, traumatized, lashing out, driven by the rage inside of him.
While Griffith is NeoGriffith, Guts shifts away from rage and revenge towards personal growth.
Plus, each of Guts’ character shifts is a direct result of Griffith. Becoming Griffith’s soldier helps Guts come out of his shell, helps him grow as a person and accept the friendships of those around him, helps him be a responsible leader and dedicated comrade, and inspires him.
Guts becomes the Black Swordsman because of Femto’s actions, because of his desire for revenge and need to exorcise the rage and hurt inside him.
And Guts decides to take Casca to Elfhelm, gaining friends and chilling out along the way because NeoGriffith “abandoned” him.
I don’t have a real conclusion to draw but I’m throwing this out there anyway. Parallels, reflections, etc.
“guts had a harder life than griffith” uuuuuuuuuu why cant people read lmfao
ikr
idk i think it boils down to the fact that we’re with Guts more, we see his traumas and hard times in detail, while we’re generally told about Griffith’s rather than shown, and with him we only see the after effects.
but like any way you slice it i feel like a year of constant torture and permanent loss of the use of your limbs and ability to speak is worse than Guts’ eclipse trauma, which largely revolves around stuff that happens to other people (dead friends, traumatized girlfriend). Yeah Guts lost a limb but he got a canon to replace it, and it’s his choice to go out and shoot monsters with that canon instead of taking Godo’s sage advice and chilling out with the friends he has left.
tbh I agree that this is part of why people respond more positively to Guts and negatively to Griffith. Griffith’s narrative ended in succumbing to despair and becoming a monster, while Guts’ nickname is “struggler” lol. People absolutely respond more positively to a narrative about fighting and persisting against all odds than a narrative about losing everything and essentially selling your soul because you feel like you’re out of options.
However, that said, I think this misses a few important points.
Like for one, to describe Griffith as embracing Femto while Guts resists the Beast of Darkness is kind of, well, loaded and not entirely correct. Griffith didn’t embrace Femto, he embraced his dream and the guilt it caused and seized the one chance he had to make tens of thousands of deaths that weigh on him meaningful.
Like, one thing I love about Griffith’s narrative is that his motivation – to ensure that thousands of people didn’t die for nothing – is heroic. In most stories that would be considered noble. Berserk twists that, because Miura likes to play with morality this way. Griffith’s noble, quite respectable goal, and his relatable and sympathetic emotional motivation (guilt) are what lead him to darkness.
Miura isn’t showing us a character who cheerfully embraces his own inner darkness, he’s showing us a character who becomes a demon ironically because of his desire to be a good person. What ultimately convinces him to make the sacrifice isn’t the promise of power, or rejuvination – it’s to ensure that so many people didn’t die for no reason.
Griffith and Guts’ narratives are different. They exist to pose different questions about what it means to be evil/human/good. But they aren’t comparable on a characterization level.
Guts hasn’t had a moment of pure despair where he’s given a choice to live out his life wholly dependant on others, mute and helpless, wracked with irreconcilable guilt and about to lose the last thing that matters to him, or sacrifice people for the sake of a goal they, among thousands of others, chose to die for, to make those deaths meaningful.
Instead, Guts has a sinister jiminy cricket telling him to murder and rape people. And Griffith doesn’t have a particularly vocal and belligerent hawk taunting him, he has a moment of despair, ordained by causality, orchestrated by the Idea of Evil for the sole purpose of having him choose to make the sacrifice.
Guts and Griffith are different people, but Guts is not inherently better or more moral than Griffith. Griffith frets about killing people for his dream, Guts tells him murder is nbd. Griffith prioritizes Guts over his dream several times before that final moment of pure despair during the Eclipse, and Guts prioritizes revenge over Casca several times before finally giving up on revenge after NeoGriffith blows him off. Griffith prostitutes himself to a pedophile at a young age to prevent as many deaths in the line of duty as he can, while Guts doesn’t really give a fuck about people dying unless he personally knows and cares about them (or if they’re children). Guts describes his dream to Casca as “I just did my own thing,” while Griffith describes his dream to Casca as, “for the sake of the dead… if there’s something I can do… that thing is to win.”
Ultimately, Griffith’s narrative illustrates a man succumbing to evil in the pursuit of good, while Guts’ narrative illustrates a man struggling to balance the good and evil within himself. The only relevant personality difference between them is that Griffith is driven towards a goal by guilt, essentially living for the dead, and Guts is living for himself and the people he personally cares about.
And to address another of your points, Guts has not had a harder life than Griffith. Maybe he’s had a harder childhood – we don’t see much of Griffith’s but it’s a fairly safe assumption – but after killing Gambino?
The narrative takes the position that during the Golden Age, Guts actually had it fairly easy compared to Griffith. Guts’ years with the Hawks are his happy place. Griffith on the other hand had a huge emotional burden on his shoulders, his guilt caused him to self harm, he had the aforementioned encounter with a pedophile bc he was driven by guilt, he had to hone himself to his limits to achieve his goal. Constantly dealing with nobles, constantly fighting at the head of his army, figuring out battle plans, carrying out assassinations that added to his guilt, maintaining an immaculate image of himself, and emotionally closed to everyone except, rarely, Guts. I mean like, the stakes of the climactic battle of the Golden Age is the risk of Griffith being captured as a sex slave lol, and he not only knows it, he incorporates it into his battle plan, like, dude is under a lot of pressure.
And of course, that’s nothing compared to a year of constant torture. Even after the Eclipse, Guts has never experienced anything on that level. Griffith was only barely sane at the end of it, totally physically helpless, mute, he’d lost everything he valued including, he thought at the end, Guts. He tried to kill himself right before the behelit opened.
Like, sorry, Guts has had a hard life, but it doesn’t compare to Griffith’s year of hell. Especially considering that, post-Eclipse, Guts had the option to bow out any time and live in relative peace and comfort with Rickert and Erika (which everyone and their dog points out to him), and now has the option to hang out in peace and comfort in Elfhelm that he probably also won’t take.
Idk basically this is a long way of saying that yeah, thanks to the thematic purposes of their narratives Griffith’s is about succumbing to evil in pursuit of good and Guts’ is about trying to find a balance between good and evil, and at a shallow glance that makes Guts look more respectable than Griffith, but that doesn’t actually reflect on their personalities, their morals, or their personal struggles.
I wrote what basically amounts to a response to this a little while ago (focused on why ppl hate Griffith more than Guts), so rather than just re-writing that I’ll link it. (tw for discussion of rape)
But like, in addition to that, ikr?
I mean one of the central premises of Berserk is that everyone is capable of great evil and humanity is kind of a hot mess, and that’s exemplified in both Guts and Griffith. Like just like Griffith always had the potential for Femto in him, Guts has the Beast of Darkness, and both manifest in violence and rape. Guts is absolutely no better than Griffith, and I’d personally say he’s worse considering that he assaults his traumatized, infantalized, sort-of-girlfriend twice without transforming into an embodiment of evil first.
like look at this
In Berserk the behelit helps certain chosen ones gain power, but you don’t exactly need it to be evil, and part of the point of Guts’ narrative is that at times he’s getting pretty close to indistinguishable from a monster, behelit or no, magic armour or no.
But he’s the protag, fans identify with him, and while Griffith’s fucked up acts lead up to a magical transformation into a monster, Guts’ fucked up acts seem likely to be leading to redemption and growth. There’s nothing intrinsic in Guts and Griffith’s characters that leads one to monsterism and one to self improvement, it’s not like one has more good qualities and the other has more evil qualities – it’s literally just circumstance and the fact that Berserk’s God chose Griffith as his jesus figure, not Guts. But it affects how readers see them and respond to them.
I mean ffs we see Guts do worse things than several apostles. Right now, based on what we see them do in the manga, fuckin Zodd is a “purer” character than Guts lmao. The idea of mixing fandom purity politics and Berserk of all things, which at the end of the day amounts to getting judgy based on which sexually abusive character someone likes more, is incredible to me.
i really want to know what guts told rickert. like i want to know how guts phrases the explanation, what he mentions or doesn’t mention, how he describes it and what he emphasizes, etc. i feel like we were kind of robbed by skipping it, even though it does make sense to skip bc an explanation of something we already saw is redundant.
but idk it could’ve been a good character moment bc we’ve never actually seen guts rly talk about the eclipse and griffith etc. especially not to someone who also knew griffith.
consider the following:
Until that day. The day you showed up.
vs
Until Guts overheard Griffith’s dream speech.
Casca had her place at Griffith side, nursing her crush on Griffith, then Guts showed up and took that place with much greater success than Casca had. Then Guts overheard the dream speech, decided to vacate his place and hand it back to Casca, which he does by encouraging Casca and Griffith to get together romantically.
And idk this is just a good parallel to illustrate some of that.
[Insert Ganeshka’s backstory of isolation and fear here.]
eh? eh?
ok honestly I’m just throwing shit at the wall but Ganeshka’s lonely freakout really really intrigues me, that plus the talk of light and dark reminds me both of Griffith in the torture chamber and Griffith as he’s transforming into Femto, and while yeah NeoGriff’s “within darkness that true light is discovered” bit is much more metaphysical (yk more to do with the fact that Griffith had to become Femto to become the saviour of humanity, probably), the fact that it’s in response to Ganeshka’s total loss of himself and everyone around him, the fact that the light Ganeshka longs for has shifted from something he considers his enemy to the only connection he has in an unknowable lonely world just… resonates man. I love it.
“You can see. Because he who bears the light exists in the deepest shadow.” Ganeshka can see NeoGriffith’s true form because he’s the only one on the same plane of existence of him, and that plane is defined by despair – despair opens the behelit that makes him an apostle, despair in the face of an inevitable loss sends him into that reincarnation thing to become a god, and his brief existence as a god is defined by existential terror and isolation. In a way he and NeoGriff are both made out of the same stuff the Idea of Evil is made out of. that’s the “darkness” imo.
And despair is the darkness of the torture chamber (give or take the lightning blazing within him that is Guts) and it’s what Griffith succumbs to when he sinks into darkness and becomes Femto.
Also
while the “light” referred to might more literally be Griffith-as-godly-saviour, bringer of peace to humanity or whatever, I’m thinking it works as a symbol of that longing for connection.
like idk the way I take Berserk’s use of light and darkness as symbols is, essentially, darkness is the despair that opens the behelit and light is what you sacrifice. darkness – the swirling negative emotions that make up the idea of evil. light – connection, love, joy, family, peace, brotherhood yadda yadda yadda. or at least the potential for those things.
Griffith/Femto appears right after Ganeshka’s backstory of being unable to connect with anyone around him because of his paranoia – loneliness and fear. He gives Ganeshka that brief sense of connection before his death as the light envelops him.
I’m basically just thinking outloud in a disorganized way here bc tbqh I have such a hard time sussing out what “It’s within darkness that true light is discovered” means in the overall context of Berserk. Like, other than Griffith going ‘lol I’m evil but also saving the world.’ that’s too reductive. But I think longing (darkness) for connection (light) maybe works for me? thanks to Ganeshka’s whole thing being isolation.
Yeah it’s really unfortunate bc he’s such an interesting complex character and I wish more people appreciated that. Tho I have a few ideas on why so many Berserk fans ignore most of the text and write Griffith off as evil from the start.
I mean obviously the biggest one is that Femto’s defining act of evil is rape. And tbh I put the blame pretty squrely on Miura for that one lol, like, I can’t actually blame anyone for being unable to feel sympathy for or enjoy the complexities of a character who later turns into a monster and rapes another major character.
Like the problem with using sexual assault as your major illustrative example of the ~darkness in the hearts of men~ or whatever is that it’s pretty damn common for people to have experienced it themselves, or know someone who has, and therefore reactions to a depiction of rape are inevitably a lot more visceral than reactions to say, murder or torture. Even if Griffith is depicted as a sympathetic, three dimensional, very interesting character throughout the Golden Age, I can’t blame anyone for not giving a fuck and just hating him anyway because his evil alter ego’s first act was rape. People ignoring your good writing is a price you pay as a creator for using rape as shock value and cheap drama.
(Plus when you add his badly written night with Charlotte to the mix, like, again, I can’t blame anyone for going “fuck this guy” and not caring about his depth of character. Like I don’t think the night with Charlotte is meant to be read as rape because there are zero indications that we’re supposed to think it’s skeevy or even potentially morally dubious once Charlotte gets into it – to me it reads like a badly written bodice-ripper type scene where the woman just has to get turned on and then she forgets propriety and enjoys herself – but again, that’s on Miura and his sometimes shitty writing.)
However, that said, from what I’ve seen the vast majority of Griffith haters still love Guts, who also sexually assaults the very same character (except Guts hadn’t even just been magically transformed first, and the first time he sexually assaulted her was long before the hound ever made an appearance), so like, when so many people condemn one character and excuse another for the same thing, there’s obviously something else at work.
So putting aside the rape, I think there are a lot of other factors as to why Griffith is so hated while very few of his haters extend that ire to Guts as well.
Like, for starters, Griffith is gay, or at the very least, gay coded and feminine in appearance and clearly in love with the protagonist, which definitely makes a lot of straight cis dude fans uncomfortable and a lot less likely to be able to empathize with him, judging by the offensive nicknames they tend to use for him.
But then there’s also just the way Griffith lies to himself, which, if you tend to take things at face value in a story, is going to give you a serious misunderstanding of his character. Eg, a lot of fans think that when he tells Casca he doesn’t feel guilty for the deaths of the people who follow him he’s being genuinely truthful and sociopathic lol, ignoring the fact that he’s self-harming grotesquely during that conversation, among other hints that he’s deluding himself. Lots of people take character dialogue as ultimate truth, missing other context clues that are often more revealing.
And then there’s the fact that he ends up betraying the protagonist and becoming an antagonist, and a lot of people just aren’t interested in moral grey stories so they project black and white values onto it. So since Griffith/Femto/NeoGriff is the antagonist, everything he’s done must have been evil and he must’ve been solely motivated by selfish desire for power, and they’ll twist the story to find support for that. Like I’ve seen people who take Griffith’s “I will choose the place that you die” as evidence that he’s been planning to sacrifice everyone for power from the very start lol, even though that makes zero sense, just because they need Griffith to have been villainous all along or the story doesn’t fit their moral framework.
Like, while Berserk takes a general moral stance that a person’s actions shape them, a lot of people believe that a person’s actions reveal their true, innate nature deep down. So, to them, Griffith sacrificing the Band isn’t an act that turns him into a monster, it’s an act that reveals he’s always been a monster and now the veneer of humanity has been removed. Yk, the kind of fans who say that if Griffith was a good person he wouldn’t’ve sacrificed his friends, because no good person would ever do that, as though Good and Evil are qualities a person is born with. Which I consider to be an extremely boring way of looking at fiction, and a troubling way of viewing morality, and totally at odds with what Miura’s attempting to say, but people will always bring their own philosophy to the table.
Similarly I think that, at least for some people, this is why Guts’ frankly evil actions get totally downplayed or written off – because he’s the protagonist so he has to be A Good Person. Therefore he had to have been possessed by an evil spirit when he assaulted Casca (despite the fact that the first time was in Godo’s spirit-repelling cave and most people forget that even happened, and the second time was in broad daylight without a ghost in sight or any visual indication that Guts was anything other than himself.) Or they say it’s okay because Guts stopped before actually penetrating her, and he’s had a hard life, and cut him a little slack and let him get back together with Casca bc he’s a good person and he deserves to be happy blah blah horrifying blah.
idk I’m definitely not accusing everyone who hates Griffith and flattens his character of being a hypocrite lol, like I said, there are plenty of possible reasons to view him as evil, and some are totally reasonable. But yk there is kind of a double standard at work when people love Guts and hate Griffith and I think it’s worth looking at why that might be.
speaking of great moments
the view of griffith from behind and cut off at the eyes – his feelings hidden from guts, the audience, himself
contrasted to guts’ feelings at the forefront on display – guts’ ‘gh’ like the words, the apparent acknowledgement are a physical blow. ntm the way he holds himself back until griffith confirms – twice – that he feels nothing. hope is painful, and even worse when it’s given and then ripped away in like 30 seconds
if griffith remained serene i’d suggest that his face is largely hidden for the impact of ‘i am free’ and i think that’s part of it, but since his heart starts beating as he watches guts fight (in an echo of the very first time he saw guts in that courtyard js) i def think that this is a nice visual set up for neogriffith’s emotional ambiguity. we’re on the outside looking at a mysterious blank page, even when we’re in neogriffith’s thoughts – because griffith himself doesn’t understand his own heart.
today i was at work and thinkin bout how good the potential inherent in guts and neogriffith’s hero/villain relationship is tbh. like the tiny glimpses we’ve seen so far (ngriff’s heart beating, guts’ complicated feelings, eg) + the foundation of the golden age backstory = solid fucking gold in theory
complicated angsty hero/villain anger and rage + regret and desire and loneliness, and w/ neogriffith his godliness + potential latent humanity
like these are all things i adore to pieces. singular godlike figures brought down by human feelings (love lbr). vengeful rage complicated by love. destructive, life-destroying love and obsession. ppl incapable of understanding their extremely powerful feelings. regret for lost potential and the mistakes that led to ruin. prominent shifting power dynamics – the whole basis of their relationship being a desire to be equals, each feeling at points inferior to the other, then one of them becomes a literal demigod but the need for equality (and thus, friendship) is still there, like, fuck that’s good stuff.
one obsessed and one who cut out his obsession, sloooowly switching places as guts semi-successfully attempts to move on and griffith starts succumbing to his beating heart. ofc guts can’t truly move on or there’s no story, but the opposing character trajectories are perf.
ooh and then you got the whole thing where one has fully succumbed to his inner darkness and is essentially a monster, but with glimmers of humanity, and the other is a human being pulled under by his inner darkness and struggling with it. complete with fun shining beautiful saviour/near-monstrous warrior imagery.
and the fact that at first it was his feelings for guts that lead to griffith succumbing to the darkness, and guts’ feelings for griffith that uplifted him, in turn giving him a home and then spurring him on to better himself. and now it’s potentially his feelings for guts that lead to neogriffith evidencing signs of humanity, beating heart etc (”he was the reason i’ve been thrown into darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive” anyone?), and guts’ feelings for griffith that pull him towards monstrosity.
like just imagine the two of them finally brought together again with all this build-up behind them, fueling their confrontation. imagine all these teasing glimpses of mutually complex, contradictory, intensely powerful feelings really coming to fruition.
the set-up is dead on for an absolutely ideal hero/villain dynamic, and you know miura theoretically has the character and storytelling skills to make it amazing bc we all read the golden age.
Forgot to mention this when it comes to Griffith + Casca parallels (Guts leaves for a year/two years to pursue a dumb dream, abandoning someone who needs him, then he comes back, realizes he may have fucked up, and rescues them):
Im glad im not alone on this. Its so weird that casca was guts’s last chance to make the right choice but he still messed up in some way.
Ooh yk when you put it like that, what I find striking is that he did make the right choice, pre-Eclipse. He realized he shouldn’t’ve left and decided to stay with Griffith despite getting told multiple times to leave by Casca and Judeau.
It was Casca telling him to leave that fucked Griffith up lol, not Guts wanting to leave or being reluctant to stay.
Whereas with Casca he makes the same mistake again, and directly compares leaving Casca alone in a cave to leaving Griffith, but when he gets Casca back he’s his own worst enemy when it comes to sticking to his resolution to stay with her.
First he plans to leave her in the cave again anyway
and when it caves in he knows he’s not just gonna abandon her in a field somewhere but he’s reluctant af to postpone his revenge quest for her
and then when he decides taking her to Elfhelm is the thing to do he does it still fully intending to return to his revenge quest eventually. (Plus, yk, the fucked up Beast of Darkness shit that happens before he gathers some extra babysitters.)
I don’t really have a point other than Guts taking one step forward with Griffith and ending up like five steps back when the situation is repeated with Casca.
And I mean yeah a lot of shit went down in the interim and he has a pretty good reason to be obsessed with revenge, but the comparison between leaving Griffith and leaving Casca is made over and over by both Guts and the narrative so when you sit down and actually compare them it’s striking that Guts is still like, struggling to rise to the level of caring about someone over his “dream” (fighting stronger and stronger enemies/vengeful rampage) that he’d already reached once with Griffith right before the Eclipse.
I just noticed the parallel with Guts putting his cloak around both of them.
It’s so … quaint.
Also you’re absolutely right. While he sort of makes the decision to stay in both cases. In Griffith’s case it was a final decision he came to after going over his ‘this is where I belong after all’ and consciously admitting to himself that his dream side quest was stupid and unnecessary anyway. And he sticks by that realisation even after Judeau and Casca’s speeches. Casca telling him to leave wasn’t significant because it made Guts’ reconsider his decision, if I remember correctly we aren’t even shown Guts’ face in that panel- it’s significant for Griffith to hear and believe .
If anything Guts had already made the subconscious decision to stay waay before the raiders ran to him.
In the tent/wagon with Griffith he talks about the future once Griffith heals. “ We’ll be able to see that soon enough” he says we.WE.
Whereas with Casca his decision to stay always seems to be in lieu of there either being no other choice or in response to someone else’s prodding. Staying with Casca seems to be a means to an end where he can leave her in a safe and wholesome place and state and move on with a clear mind.
The only time there seems to be a real resolve behind his decision to stay is when he’s directly substituting the situation with already having failed at it with Griffith.
Even his “even if you put something back together piece by piece it may never be the same.” Dialogue ties in with this. He says this after his Griffith fueled Casca endeavor has sort of failed.
And yeah.
After Casca tells him “if you’re Griffith’s friend and equal… you have to. Even if it’s alone… you have to go” we get the “why do I always see these things… after they’re done and gone?” line. It seems p clear to me that that Guts is referring to his realization that he had his “dream” in the palm of his hand and threw it away by leaving to pursue it, ie he broke Griffith’s heart by leaving, though granted it’s not the plainest of statements.
But anyway yeah to me that sounds like Guts is absolutely unwavering in his resolve that he’s going to stay and he thinks leaving in the first place was a great big fuck up.
tbh I do wonder what Guts is thinking will happen when Casca gets her mind back, considering his brooding about the warnings he got. “She went to pieces because she can’t fully cope with it. What will she do if she does get her sanity back?” Like is he hoping she’ll join the trail of revenge with him? Is he planning to just play it by ear – take her with him if she wants to go, leave her in elfhelm if she wants to chill somewhere safe, etc? Cross his fingers and hope she doesn’t do something drastic?
I was kind of wondering if he’s hoping that getting her back the way she was will be enough motivation for him to take Godo’s advice and stay with the “irreplaceable things” instead of going back for revenge, but like I said, even on the ship he was still doing his “when this journey’s over, I’ll [not actually be able to finish this sentence]” thing, so I don’t think there’s much indication of that.
idk i’m just thinking outloud. it all comes back to griffith’s pull being like, the strongest force exerted on him lol, for both good and bad. devote himself to griffith, or leave to become griffith’s equal, or stay with griffith, or ditch casca to chase griffith, or stay with casca while comparing the situation to one with griffith, gritting his teeth, and anticipating being able to chase griffith again.
i wonder if it’s not so much that he’ll overcome the pull of griffith on him as the nature of it will shift again, from revenge to maybe realizing that his desire isn’t actually for revenge, but still to be griffith’s equal. maybe he’ll actually untangle some of his feelings at some point, considering things like “the instant I saw him… I forgot my urge to kill.”
Forgot to mention this when it comes to Griffith + Casca parallels (Guts leaves for a year/two years to pursue a dumb dream, abandoning someone who needs him, then he comes back, realizes he may have fucked up, and rescues them):
Im glad im not alone on this. Its so weird that casca was guts’s last chance to make the right choice but he still messed up in some way.
Ooh yk when you put it like that, what I find striking is that he did make the right choice, pre-Eclipse. He realized he shouldn’t’ve left and decided to stay with Griffith despite getting told multiple times to leave by Casca and Judeau.
It was Casca telling him to leave that fucked Griffith up lol, not Guts wanting to leave or being reluctant to stay.
Whereas with Casca he makes the same mistake again, and directly compares leaving Casca alone in a cave to leaving Griffith, but when he gets Casca back he’s his own worst enemy when it comes to sticking to his resolution to stay with her.
First he plans to leave her in the cave again anyway
and when it caves in he knows he’s not just gonna abandon her in a field somewhere but he’s reluctant af to postpone his revenge quest for her
and then when he decides taking her to Elfhelm is the thing to do he does it still fully intending to return to his revenge quest eventually. (Plus, yk, the fucked up Beast of Darkness shit that happens before he gathers some extra babysitters.)
I don’t really have a point other than Guts taking one step forward with Griffith and ending up like five steps back when the situation is repeated with Casca.
And I mean yeah a lot of shit went down in the interim and he has a pretty good reason to be obsessed with revenge, but the comparison between leaving Griffith and leaving Casca is made over and over by both Guts and the narrative so when you sit down and actually compare them it’s striking that Guts is still like, struggling to rise to the level of caring about someone over his “dream” (fighting stronger and stronger enemies/vengeful rampage) that he’d already reached once with Griffith right before the Eclipse.
Okay we’re finally on the last part of this giant self indulgent monster. Here I’m going to get into why I prefer to interpret Guts and Griffith’s relationship as mutual gay pining as opposed to one-sided, how I think the sexual attraction between them fits into the existing themes, and in general what makes it really work for me.
I wrote this thing because while I feel like a lot of fans can agree that there’s at least a strong indication that Griffith’s feelings for Guts aren’t strictly hetero, even lots of fans who acknowledge the gay subtext see it as one-sided. So I wanted to put a spotlight on Guts’ side of things.
And tbh, even ignoring all the stuff I’ve talked about so far, it boils down to one point: one-sided pining just doesn’t fit into the rest of Guts and Griffith’s relationship.
For me, the Golden Age tragedy works so well because it rests not on incompatibility or irreconcilable differences, but on a misunderstanding: both Guts and Griffith fail to realize that the other loves him.
This is just facts – you can call the love platonic if you must, since Miura never went beyond subtext with the romance, but that’s the plot of the Golden Age in a nutshell.
And if, like me, you think it’s pretty clear that Griffith the gay coded villain who irrationally risks his life for Guts multiple times, who is so gay Guts had to ask during their very first conversation and Griffith didn’t answer, so gay he thinks about Guts while having sex, so gay his feelings for Guts kept him sane during a year of torture, so gay that Guts is cheer captain and Casca’s on the bleachers, is romantically in love with Guts, then it follows that Guts’ feelings must also be romantic in nature.
Because again, this isn’t a story about unrequited love. The Golden Age is about two dudes who had a great relationship but fucked it up because they both misunderstood what that relationship was and failed to communicate. It’s not about a gay dude tragically in love with his straight bff. If attraction is part of Griffith’s feelings for Guts, then attraction is part of Guts’ feelings for Griffith.
The final arc of the Golden Age, after Guts returns from his stupid vacation, largely revolves around Guts’ slow realization that he was wrong when he thought Griffith looked down on him and didn’t care about him:
He’s realizing that Griffith’s breakdown after he left, Griffith losing his dream because he left, ultimately means that he didn’t need to leave at all, because Griffith didn’t look down on him. Griffith needed him. Griffith loved him.
Griffith’s corresponding misundertanding is that he didn’t know Guts left to become his equal, and almost certainly believed he left because he couldn’t stand to be around him after seeing Griffith’s “dirty side.”
This is a bit less straightforward because Guts gets most of the focus in the story, but I’ll do my best to briefly explain my reasoning.
Guts and Griffith’s final interaction together before the duel, that we get to see, is this night:
Griffith needs emotional reassurance in a revealing and intimate moment of vulnerability, and Guts fails to provide it. Instead of telling Griffith that no, he doesn’t think he’s cruel, he tells him something more akin to “yes but it’s necessary for your dream, remember?”
Griffith’s expression in the “You’re right,” panel is straight up the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, it might actually be my favourite image Miura’s ever drawn ngl. I love it so much.
Compare to how he looks at a dead kid before deciding the kid’s death means he has to have sex with a predatory pedophile, and then self-harms in the river the next morning while claiming he doesn’t feel guilty:
Down to framing and hair over his eyes these panels are so similar that I fully believe “You’re right,” is a purposeful call-back to this, giving us the necessary context to understand what Griffith is feeling.
This night of assassinations is Griffith’s corresponding Promrose Hall moment, imo. If only for a moment, he forgets his dream because what Guts thinks of him is more important, and when, instead of reassuring him, Guts reminds him that the path to his dream is paved with cruelty, he looks like all his self loathing hits him at once.
Also dude has a serious and depressing propensity for calling himself dirty.
So when we next see him and he’s falling apart because Guts is leaving, this is the context we have for his extreme reaction: his self loathing, the way he asks for reassurance, and the way he looks when Guts brings up his dream instead of giving him that reassurance.
Look at the moment Griffith is remembering here: “It’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.”
It’s ironic because we know exactly what Guts thought of him then, but Griffith is convincing himself that Guts hated him from the first glimpse he saw of the real Griffith, the Griffith no one else gets to see. The vulnerable, “dirty,” needy Griffith, the Griffith who questions his place in the world, the Griffith falling in love with Guts.
And like Guts, Griffith has no idea how Guts truly feels about him.
So yeah, this is why I think their feelings, all their feelings, from platonic to sexual and everything in between, are mutual. Because the point is that they’re two idiots who love each other but, thanks to their low self esteem, can’t see that they’re loved in return.
Which brings me to themes and shit, and why Guts and Griffith being sexually attracted to each other fits into Berserk like a puzzle piece.
Berserk is, at its core, about reactions to trauma. It’s right there in the title. Like every major adult character has childhood trauma that fucks them up. Serpico, Farnese, Casca, Guts, and Griffith.
When it comes to the Golden Age trio:
Casca was assaulted by a nobleman and saved by Griffith.
Griffith prostituted himself to a pedophile in a fit of extreme guilt while he was at most on the young end of teenaged, called himself dirty and self harmed afterwards.
Guts was raped by a soldier his abusive adoptive father sold him to.
Casca’s reaction to her trauma is to idolize Griffith as her saviour to the point where she has no sense of identity outside of him and helping him achieve his dream.
Griffith’s reaction is self-loathing, emotional repression (”I don’t feel guilty,” he says, while Casca begs him to stop hurting himself), and the beginnings of a vicious cycle in which he is driven to achieve his dream to make all the “underhanded” “dirty” things he does for it, and all the deaths on his head, worthwhile.
Guts’ reaction is his desperate desire to be loved and respected coupled with a mistrust of people.
All these traumas result in the bad decision pile-up that eventually leads to the Eclipse.
Guts’ desire to be loved and respected coupled with past experience making it all too easy for him to believe he’s not is why he ignores a mountain of evidence that Griffith loves him in favour of one overheard speech about how he has no friends, and then decides that it’s a good idea to abandon all his friends, including Griffith, in order to try to become his equal and earn his affection.
Griffith’s self loathing leads him to believe that Guts is abandoning him bc he’s desperate to get away from him after seeing some of his darker sides that he’s ashamed of. His emotional repression means he has no ability to understand or express his extreme emotional reaction to this. So he lashes out through a framework he does understand (”rules of the battlefield,” as Judeau says), then falls into despair, crashes and burns, and ends up in a torture chamber.
And Casca’s lack of identity leads to her transfering her obsession from Griffith to Guts – complete with sword metaphor – after they sleep together, which leads to her mistakenly prioritizing Guts’ previously expressed “dream” to go off and fight people, the same way she once prioritized Griffith’s dream, which leads to Griffith overhearing her telling him to leave, which leads to the Eclipse.
My point is that the Golden Age arc is basically the story of three traumatized people whose adverse reactions to their traumas fuck their relationships up. Because it’s a dark fantasy story ft gods and monsters and fate etc, fucking up their relationships results in the Eclipse.
This is a perfectly good story by itself. It doesn’t need sexual repression added to it, but at the same time, boy does sexual repression fit right in.
I think that, whether it’s intended by the author or not, Guts and Griffith are both extremely easy to read as repressed gay*** men.
Griffith’s got a whole narrative about his dream, a dream which he can only achieve through hetero marriage, being pitted against his love for a man. He does stupid irrational shit for Guts and Casca berates Guts for it because he could “take Griffith’s dream down with [him].” Overhearing him talking about his dream to Charlotte is what makes Guts decide to leave. Guts is the only one who makes him forget his dream. He has to sacrifice Guts, “burying his heart,” to attain his dream. Even when he becomes the saviour of the world as NeoGriffith, he still has to marry a woman to seal the deal on his dream.
The dream is associated with emotional repression and Guts is associated with emotional expression.
As for Guts, I just wrote over 10k words about his attraction to a man and 5k of those were about how his het romance revolves around his attraction to a man so I’m not going to reiterate all that. There are a few particularly noteworthy things about Guts and his narrative that scream repression to me though that I’ll mention.
The way it’s his deep, subconscious, instinctive id side, the Beast of Darkness, urging him to pursue Griffith, complete with a dark sexual undertone. (Relevant reminder: I’m only arguing that the gay is there, by accident or by design, I’m not arguing that it’s a positive portrayal lol.)
The way Guts’ statement to Casca after sex that only her touch was okay in the beginning is a) incorrect as I’ve shown earlier, and b) irrelevant bc the reason she was able to touch him was solely because she’s a woman, as we know from the way his burgeoning panic subsides when he realizes she’s not a man – and ever since then she’s been the only woman he knows. So it doesn’t feel like much of a jump to suggest that he had sex with Casca because she’s literally the only person he knows with whom sex wouldn’t automatically trigger him.
The way his matchmaking of Griffith and Casca seemed to be an attempt to get Casca to take his place, with the added layer of romance that he couldn’t envision for himself.
The way, in their first interactions, Guts seems transfixed by Griffith’s appearance, comments on his pretty face, suggests sex if he loses in a way that seems informed by his rape trauma, but then is once again entranced by Griffith, rather than angry or afraid or any other potential negative emotion you’d think he’d feel, when he does lose. This whole sequence gives me the impression that he wants to bone Griffith but can’t acknowledge it and can only relate the concept of same-sex desire to his trauma.
And, for both Guts and Griffith, the way their respective traumas are depicted is particularly relevant. I’ve explained how each formative traumatic experience gave these two a pile of issues that fuck up their relationship. But the thing is, none of those issues (for Guts a need to be loved and respected and a default belief that he isn’t; for Griffith emotional repression, guilt, and self loathing) are intrinsically tied to rape. For Guts, it’s Gambino’s betrayal of him that fucks him up, not the specific sexual nature of that betrayal. For Griffith, it’s the realization of the weight of his dream and the way he “dirties” himself for it – later examples of acts that make him feel “dirty” are assassinations, so there’s no narrative reason his first act has to be traumatic, non-consensual (as he’s a child) sex.
And this isn’t a critique of that, I actually think it’s great to see characters who have backstories involving rape without it being the sole thing that defines them. For every character it’s part of a tapestry of childhood trauma, not the only important part, or even the most important part.
But it’s really, really easy to fill in the blanks for how formative sexual trauma specifically also has a hand in informing the nature of and contributing to the destruction of Guts and Griffith’s relationship. We’re not explicitly shown or told this, but imo it is suggested when they first meet.
Guts makes the duel, and his first real meeting with Griffith in general, about sex by uncomfortably asking if Griffith’s gay and offering himself to him if he loses. Here either the narrative is choosing to deliberately point out that Griffith and Guts have some gay undertones going on in our introduction to their dynamic because this informs our understanding of the rest of their relationship going forward, or the narrative is choosing to remind us of Guts’ sexual trauma here because that trauma informs the rest of their relationship going forward. Or both.
It’s also suggested in the way we learn Griffith’s backstory with Gennon right before Casca finally expresses her jealousy of Guts and comes this close to telling Guts that Griffith is in love with him:
By revealing this backstory in the lead-up to this revelation of why Casca resents Guts, Griffith’s trauma and his feelings for Guts are tied together the same way Guts bringing up sex when he first duels Griffith ties his trauma to their relationship.
And the way these traumas may inform their relationship is that neither of them are capable of acknowledging or even recognizing their love and attraction.
Let’s be real here: if Guts and Griffith’s relationship was romantic there’d be no Eclipse.
This is what really makes the subtext and the idea that both of them are repressed dudes in love work for me. This is the number one reason I ship it: because they work so well together.
We’re shown exactly how compatible they are. The tragedy of the Golden Age is predicated on both of them failing to recognize the other’s feelings, but what makes it a real tragedy is the inherent lost potential when their relationship falls apart.
All Guts truly wanted was someone he loved, who loved him back and treated him with compassion and respect.
And he got that! That’s exactly who Griffith was to him, exactly how Griffith fulfilled his emotional needs.
Guts remembers the night he killed Gambino before dedicating his sword to Griffith. This is when Guts decides that maybe the Band – maybe Griffith – is what he’s been looking for. A home. Love. Someone to look his way – more than that, someone who cares about him enough to lay down his life for him.
This is the truest moment of Guts and Griffith’s relationship, imo. There’s no misunderstanding getting in the way and muddying the waters – there’s only Griffith admitting he had no reason to risk his life for him and casually saying he’d do it again (”each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake”), and Guts recognizing how significant that is, and dedicating himself to him in return.
Right here and now Guts has everything he’s always wanted. Later he overhears the Promrose Hall speech and re-evaluates his relationship through a false lens, but as I said back at the beginning of this post, Guts eventually realizes that he was right the first time.
Now again this is less straightforwardly stated and relies more on my own interpretation, but I think Griffith’s corresponding issue that matches Guts’ desire to be loved is his desire to be truly seen and accepted.
He wants Guts to be privy to his dirty side and to want to remain at his side anyway. In order to fulfill his dream Griffith has to constantly project an image of perfection.
His reaction to Casca seeing him in a moment of extreme vulnerability is:
There are countless references to Griffith looking like something out of a fairytale, there’s his carefully constructed perfect-fiancee image he shows Charlotte, his perfect infallible leader image he projects to the Hawks. He’s a symbol to everyone – to the Hawks and the peasants etc who love him he’s a symbol of change for the better, of soaring up; to his opponents he’s a symbol of corruption and change for the worse, a “parasite.” To his rapist(s)*** he’s a symbol of perfect beauty. People either look up at him or down on him. When he says he has no equals, in fairness, it’s because no one treats him as an equal. In their last scene together before the speech even Guts had reframed a request from a friend into an order from a superior (”It ain’t like you. Just cut to the chase and order me to do it.”)
But Guts is still unique because he wants to be Griffith’s equal. He wants to “stand beside him,” he wants to consider Griffith a friend and treat him like a real person and not a symbol. And, more than anyone else, he does.
Guts dumps a bucket of water over his head in his first week with the Hawks while they laugh together. Guts disobeys orders constantly to the point where Griffith just plans around Guts’ impulses and Casca gets pissy about how much he gets away with. Casca sees Griffith as distant and unreachable after a battle, but Guts scoffs and takes her to go hang out with him. During their homoerotic duel, Guts punches him and says, “I bet that’s the first time that pretty face’s ever been hit,“ showing only irreverence for the image everyone else is obsessed with.
And this is the one man out of tens of thousands who makes Griffith forget his dream.
This is the foundation their relationship is built on. Love and respect, and irreverence and equality. They both come closer than anyone else to providing what the other needs. And they both help the other grow:
Griffith gives Guts a supportive environment, his trust and belief, his love and affection, and Guts grows into a responsible person who leads a group of men who freaking adore him, who cares for the people around him and lets them in instead of being standoffish, who is able, until an overheard speech, to accept that he is loved and that he has value.
Guts gives Griffith attitude, playfulness, irreverence, etc, and Griffith is able to trust him, is able to allow himself to be vulnerable around him and show his insecurities. He’s able to be himself with Guts.
Plus Guts makes him forget his dream. And Griffith’s dream is bullshit, it’s absolutely terrible for him, it’s a huge weight on his psyche, it’s built on guilt and a need for validation from the universe. But after three years, it’s Guts he turns to for validation instead. Griffith asking Guts “do you think I’m cruel?” is so pivotal because in that moment Griffith’s desire for Guts’ regard outweighs his dream. Guts has to remind him about his dream, and that reminder hurts.
Griffith raises Guts up and Guts brings Griffith down to earth a little, and they come so close to meeting in the middle – but, to bring this post back to my point, they never quite do.
Guts brushes off Griffith’s attempts to treat him as an equal (asking him to help him out by killing a man and Guts telling him to order him to do it; asking if Guts thinks he’s cruel and being reminded of his dream; Guts becoming blind to Griffith’s showings of love after overhearing the speech) and Griffith doesn’t seem able to recognize or admit his own feelings for Guts until spending a year in a torture chamber.
But yk what if they could’ve just fucking boned at some point all those problems would’ve been solved. Literally. That’s my argument in a nutshell: if Guts and Griffith could’ve recognized their romantic and sexual feelings for what they are, and acted on them, they would’ve lived happily ever after. And if they didn’t both have significant trauma related to same-sex desire, not to mention all the other traumatic factors contributing to their awful emotional intelligences and self esteems, they probably could have.
Realistically of course that’s not how relationships work, there’s never any happily ever after guarantee, but this is a story, and we’re given enough information about their relationship to draw the corresponding conclusion that if they were open about their feelings with each other, if they had grown closer instead of being pulled apart by misunderstandings, they would’ve been very happy together.
And I don’t mean to say that sex would automatically fix everything either – just that the story implies that if they had both been able to recognize that their feelings of love and adoration were returned by the other, Guts wouldn’t’ve felt the need to leave to earn Griffith’s friendship through finding his own dream, the second duel wouldn’t’ve happened, and Griffith wouldn’t’ve ended up in a torture chamber for a year. And being able to take the step to turn their relationship romantic and sexual is a natural part of figuring this out.
And while there’s no real reason Griffith would have to choose between his dream and Guts, it’s worth pointing out that the driving conflict of his narrative is Guts vs the dream, and Guts effectively wins.
Guts was replacing the function of the dream in Griffith’s mind. Griffith was beginning to seek out Guts for validation instead of trying to prove himself worthy by achieving an arbitrary goal. He says Guts made him forget his dream. In the torture chamber he reflects that the dream grows dull next to Guts.
Would he have been able to give it up and find contentment in a relationship with Guts? It’s a hard sell, but we’re shown the building blocks that support this conclusion. We’re explicitly told that Guts is more important to him than his dream, so yeah, absolutely in theory Griffith could’ve quit the stupid dream given a choice between it and Guts. Hell we saw him make that choice when he risked his life for Guts during the Zodd thing. And if you believe that part of his motivation for sleeping with Charlotte, at least subconsciously, was self-sabotage, he threw the dream away then too.
The Godhand only came down to offer him the sacrifice option when Griffith believed Guts was going to leave him again, and even then he had to be physically separated from Guts, had to be totally physically helpless and mute after a year of torture, and had to be taken on a fun guilt trip by the Godhand before he sacrificed him. And the final emotional reason Griffith chose to sacrifice Guts wasn’t because the dream was more important to him, it was because Guts was. “You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.”
So yeah I think it’s absolutely possible, even plausible, that if Griffith was more self aware and capable of recognizing his feelings and acting on them he would choose Guts over the dream.
And obviously if Guts got together with Griffith – if Griffith gave up his dream for Guts, or prioritized Guts over his dream by, say, choosing him over Charlotte, or maybe even something as low-key as Griffith jeopordizing his ambition by beginning a relationship with Guts behind Charlotte’s back – Guts would know exactly how much he meant to Griffith, a la the rooftop scene. The speech would be meaningless in comparison to Griffith risking or losing the dream for him. Guts would be 100% secure in the knowledge that he is valued and loved.
But, thanks to Guts and Griffith’s traumas, they failed to recognize the possibilities in their relationship, they fell victim to self-doubt and insecurities, and they ruined everything. And that lost potential is what makes the tragedy so effective to me.
Like I said, this is already what their story is about, subtext or no subtext, platonic or romantic. Griffith could’ve chosen Guts over his dream platonically too (again), in theory. But the subtext adds another, very fitting layer to the story. It slots in neatly with the concept of missed opportunities and lost chances, and it fits with the characters’ histories and particular sex-related issues. And, having just written a 10k series of posts pointing out about half the subtext (Guts’ side), I think there’s a solid argument for considering sexual attraction part of the package.
One final thing I want to mention, from an out of universe perspective, is that one of my problems with Berserk is that every single textual instance of same-sex desire is evil and predatory and harmful. So I like the idea that the absence of gay sex between our two main characters
is what caused the Eclipse. Their mutual desire (or Griffith’s ~evil jealous~ desire) didn’t cause everything to go wrong, it was the fact that they failed to act on it that ruined everything. It doesn’t balance it out obviously, but reading the story this way just makes it more enjoyable for me.
tl;dr in conclusion Berserk is gay, Guts wanted to bone Griffith, and if he had Berserk would’ve been a much happier story.
*** I’m saying “gay” because this is my project and I hc both of them as gay. But if you see one or both as bi, more power to you.
*** The torturer’s “we were like husband and wife” sounds pretty suggestive to me but it’s left in creepy implication so who knows.
Thank you everyone who has read, liked, reblogged, and/or commented directly or in tags, etc ❤
In this post I’m going to discuss how Casca’s narrative role as a love interest overlaps with her narrative role as a substitute for Griffith, how those roles ultimately serve the main story that is the love/hate relationship between Guts and Griffith, and how Miura utilizes her as an emotional/sexual conduit between the two while also conveniently no-homoing them. Plus some additional straightforward stuff on Guts and his crush on Griffith here and there.
Advance warning: this is long. Looooooong. Also be warned that I do touch on the hound and the Eclipse, but only in one section of this post.
I also want to make clear upfront that I love Casca but I dislike the Guts/Casca romance subplot, for many reasons including my general dislike of most het, Guts’ awful treatment of her, and the sense I get that she’s been inserted as a buffer between Guts and Griffith, but mostly because I think the romance was added almost entirely to set up the destruction of Casca as a character for the sake of Guts’ manpain.
So yeah going in you should be aware that this is Guts/Casca negative. I don’t consider their romantic feelings for each other a valuable part of Berserk, and I spend a lot of time calling the legitimacy of those feelings into question. If that sounds like it’ll piss you off but you still want more Guts/Griffith content, you can totally just skip to part 4 without missing any necessary information for that part.
Ok that said, let’s get into it.
We’ll go back to the Golden Age eventually but I’m going to jump ahead first and start at chapter 130, during Guts’ night of self-reflection after he returns to Godo’s cave and finds Casca missing.
Guts is basically having an internal debate about whether or not his revenge rampage was worth abandoning Casca. He eventually emphatically concludes that it was in fact not worth it and he fucked right up when he draws this connection:
Again again again again. I’m starting here because it’s one of the most clear and straightforward examples of Guts viewing Casca as a replacement for Griffith. The connection is drawn explicitly – he considers abandoning Casca to be the equivalent of abandoning Griffith and drawing that parallel is what motivates him to save her.
But despite wanting to start atoning for past mistakes, he still intends to abandon her in a cave again after he gets her back.
“Actually, I only half mean it.”
Cue this #iconic page:
Now I talk about this page all the damn time because of how off the charts gay it is, but more importantly right now is that it draws a strong contrast between Casca and Griffith. It begins with “Just as I got her back… no, in the middle of swinging my sword to get her back…”
In the middle of getting her back… he… saw him. By framing Griffith’s appearance as an interruption that rips his attention away from rescuing Casca, Guts expresses the feeling that he’s torn between them. And of course he is, we see this throughout the rest of the manga, in his internal struggle not to toss Casca aside (or worse) and run after Griffith to, “give him… a heap of raw iron.”
We also see this inner conflict during NeoGriffith’s appearance when this happens:
But as of right now, Griffith has won the fight for Guts’ attention.
Guts’ half truth, as far as I can tell, is that he’s going to help make the damn cave a little homier and then take off again after Griffith.
As we saw in chapter 130 he decided to dedicate himself to getting Casca back, and we can assume that he fully intended to give up his revenge quest at that point. Godo tore him a new one over abandoning her to fight monsters, Guts realized he’s been being a dick, and he’s figured that maybe staying and helping take care of Casca is a better way of dealing with his issues than going back on a rampage, especially since last time he saw Femto he couldn’t even come close to touching him.
But then Skull Knight tells him the Godhand are going to be around, there’s going to be another version of the Eclipse, and we see Guts conflicted again:
Anyway Isidro ultimately saves Casca, she and Guts are reunited, and Griffith appears. Maybe Guts’ original plan was to stay with Casca and forget revenge, but now Griffith is reachable, he’s on the same plane of existence, and to top it all off, he’s hot again!
And no I’m not joking, I absolutely think that Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith is, for the first time since Promrose Hall, being clearly visually conveyed again. I already posted that iconic page in which Guts pictures Griffith’s ass and gets distracted from revenge, but there’s more where that came from.
Griffith’s sexiness is genuinely an important plot and thematic point lol, but it’s Guts eyes we’re shown that through, and holy shit does his gaze get a lot of attention in this scene. And why? Because Griffith’s reachable again. When he’s monstrous and demonic he’s out of reach on a whole nother plane of existence and shown as distant and untouchable:
When he’s incarnated as a physical being again he’s said to be “the desired,” he’s so beautiful no one can shut up about it, and imo Guts’ temptation to pursue him now that he’s “where [his] sword can reach,” is tied to the sexual temptation on display here.
Basically, while he’s certainly not intending to pursue Griffith so he can literally fuck him, there are blatant sexual undertones to his desire for revenge that ramp up hard and fast real soon, and they start with Griffith’s sexy as fuck rebirth.
And to elaborate on how the depiction of Griffith is a huge contrast here to the depiction of Casca:
Casca is shown at her least sexualized. She’s wrapped in a shapeless cloak and mirroring Erika, depicted as utterly childlike.
And this is Griffith:
Griffith is the temptation, he’s the one Guts wants to pursue, and Casca is the responsibility, and this is shown loud and clear through Griffith’s intense desirability and Guts’ enthrallment at the sight of him vs Casca’s desexualized childishness.
As for the Hill of Swords reunion
“More like someone out of a fairytale.”
Not overly relevant but it’s a fun detail that “He was so pretty” is on Guts’ face while “someone out of a fairytale” is on Griffith’s image.
That sound – like Griffith’s apparent acknowledgement, at long last, is a physical blow. Love it.
But of course then Griffith’s like, I came to see you to test my capacity for emotion, and it looks like this whole emotionless demon thing was a success. And this is Guts’ reaction – not rage, or at least, not solely rage, but so much hurt too:
Look at those sad eyebrows man. This scene thoroughly shows us how emotionally conflicted and confused Guts is. He’s angry, he’s hurt, he’s full of longing both for revenge and for “the way he he used to be,” and after everything he still wants acknowledgement, he still wants Griffith to look at him.
“I’ll not betray my dream. That is all.”
And it’s now that Guts finally attacks. So far he’s let Rickert hold him back, then shoved him away only to scream “you don’t feel anything?!” instead of rushing him. But when NeoGriff tells Guts in no uncertain terms that his dream is not only more important, but his sole priority, Guts snaps.
I do think it’s really easy to read this scene as Guts looking for a hint that Griffith still cares about him, along with the hope that he feels regret for what he’s done. Guts had a lot of misconceptions about Griffith’s feelings, but by the time of the Eclipse he’d realized that Griffith loved him – he’d left to seek something (love and respect and affection, friendship and equality) he already had and, in leaving, lost it.
Scroll back up to that first picture I posted, he says it right there: “Did I lose something before I even noticed it again?! Without even realizing I’d thrown it from the palm of my hand!” There’s a small part of him that was still hoping, now that Griffith is un-demonized, that his heart and his love had returned with his human body, that it’s not lost forever. But in declaring that he’s free, NeoGriffith shoots that hope down.
Anyway big fight, cave collapses, Griffith’s heart starts doing shit unbeknownst to Guts, he mysteriously saves Casca and takes off, and Guts
says he won’t abandon Casca again and decides to escort her to Elfhelm, with his dickish reluctance handily pointed out by Decent Person Puck lol.
Now look at this shit:
“Weren’t those Godo’s parting words?” Says Guts to Rickert to convince him to stay with Erika.
“You should have known. This is the man I am.”
Don’t abandon what you can’t replace. He finally learned that lesson when he compared abandoning Casca to abandoning Griffith. He frames his choice to stay with Casca as making up for it. Guts once deserted Griffith, now Griffith has deserted him, so he’s promising not to desert Casca. Given that Guts’ mind is solely on deserting and being deserted by Griffith, as opposed to that time when he left Casca in a cave for two years and she wandered off, “I won’t desert you anymore. This time… I won’t lose you,” is given a double meaning of applying to Casca while also referencing losing Griffith.
But what’s with that interlude up there of Guts remembering Griffith saving Casca? The man Guts “knows” NeoGriffith is, the man who dgaf about anything except his dream, isn’t the man who would randomly decide to save Casca from falling rocks. Guts is shown thinking about that apparent contradiction immediately before “I won’t leave you behind. I won’t… desert you anymore.”
Taken all together, to me this scene comes across as so utterly Griffith centric that it makes Casca feel like an afterthought, conveniently there so Guts can take some form of action in response to his extremely Griffith-centred emotions.
Guts charlie brown walks away because Griffith “deserted” him. Guts draws a comparison between abandoning Griffith and abandoning Casca, and being abandoned by NeoGriffith and refusing to abandon Casca. Guts remembers NeoGriffith saying he knows what kind of man he is right before recalling him saving Casca.
Then he declares he won’t desert her again – and I have to wonder if part of what gives him the willpower to take a break from his revenge quest despite NeoGriffith residing so temptingly in his plane of existence now is the ambiguity of NeoGriffith’s actions here, casting “the kind of man” he is now into doubt and deflating Guts’ rage boner the same way he says seeing NeoGriffith looking “so human… the way he used to be” makes him forget his “urge to kill.” It hardly seems like a stretch given how much of Guts’ decision here is explicitly shown to be about Griffith.
So far, post-Eclipse, Casca’s been treated as a prop for Guts’ internal conflict between revenge and not being a dick – a symbol of his lingering humanity. She exists to be put into peril so Guts can decide to save her and then waver between her and Griffith. She’s the poster girl for failing to pass the sexy lamp test. It’s real depressing, and it’s about to get worse.
Enter Beast of Darkness.
Now we’re at the really bad shit, but also the actual most explicit verbal suggestion of Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith, so it’s impossible to skip in a post on the topic. Plus there’s no point pretending that Casca isn’t done incredibly dirty by both the narrative and Guts.
It’s important to understand that the Hound is Guts. It’s not an evil malicious spirit trying to manipulate and possess Guts (which I have seen suggested before), it’s simply Guts’ dark emotions given substance. Just on the off chance this statement requires support for you, here’s a post on the subject. This scene is pretty much Guts arguing with his id.
And the way it’s framed with “dreams of him?” “let’s go to him” coming first on the image of an eager, excited puppy, followed by the teeth and “heap of raw iron” feels so deliberate to me. Guts wants violent revenge but it’s a feeling complicated by the fact that he loved Griffith, that he once strove to be his equal, to be considered his friend, and now he strives to kill him.
Like Guts facing Femto in the Black Swordsman arc, like Guts pleading for a shred of regret from NeoGriffith, there’s still an element of Guts wanting Griffith’s acknowledgement here.
More direct comparisons between Casca and Griffith and how Guts feels about them. Who’s more precious, your love interest or your arch nemesis?
And I’m not here to say that Guts doesn’t care for Casca and only cares about Griffith. As this scene shows, he’s torn between them, but he’s chosen Casca now, and he’s trying to get his doubts and his rage and his suppressed attraction to Griffith that’s now coming to the surface, coloured by hate, to shut the fuck up. But these are his own doubts.
“The wound Griffith left, because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you?” Okay, certainly an eyebrow raising description here but all right, this is about Guts’ motivation to kill Griffith. The Hound is suggesting he values Casca only as fuel for his rage. Which certainly seems like a relevant suggestion after Guts’ “I’d forgotten my urge to kill. And that… can’t be.” His rage needs fuel. So while that’s surely not all there is to his feelings for Casca, the Hound isn’t making shit up. Again, this is essentially Guts internally debating what his true motivations are.
Longing. Hell of a word choice. Granted I can’t double check the translation with others because I’m incapable of tracking down old raws (tho I did a cursory search on skullknight.net to see if anyone had criticized the translation of this scene and didn’t find anything) but this is such a boldly romanticized choice of phrasing that I feel it’s safe to assume the undertones are there in the original Japanese. You don’t accidentally describe someone’s urge to kill a dude as “longing” for him. That’s a blatantly deliberate double entendre.
And on top of that it fits right in with the Hound’s first eager, excited words to Guts in this scene. Again, it’s an illustration that Guts’ vengeful feelings are complex, and intertwined with his original feelings for Griffith.
And then the Hound tells Guts to rape Casca so he can get closer to Griffith and I throw up my hands.
There’s so much innuendo and homoeroticism in the lead up to this (including earlier, w/ Griffith’s sexy rebirth scene and the reunion on the Hill of Swords, ft Guts thinking about Griffith’s ass), and then this scene just doubles down as hard as possible. “Let’s give him… a heap of raw iron,” “because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you,” “she’s a sacrifice so you can continue longing for Griffith,” “you’ll get closer and closer to Griffith.”
The innuendo in this scene makes it one of the most homoerotic scenes in the manga.
Like, tl;dr Guts’ vengeful pursuit of Griffith is tied so thoroughly to sex in this
nightmare that tbh I have a hard time calling this subtext.
And while it is absolutely homophobic for one of the gayest scenes in the manga to basically tie Guts’ desire for Griffith to his desire for revenge and a suggestion to rape and kill Casca, it’s also worth noting that this isn’t exactly Guts’ desire for revenge being given a dark sexual element.
This is the Beast of Darkness using Guts’ pre-existing desire for Griffith to try to tempt him into sticking a sword in him. Still fucked up, obviously, but it’s at least deeper and more interesting than the alternative.
The earlier parallels I described, Guts comparing leaving Griffith and leaving Casca, etc, draw an emotional connection between Guts and Griffith through Casca as, essentially, a bridge. Guts is assuaging his desire to go back and fix his mistakes by replacing Griffith with Casca and refusing to leave her. Casca has become an outlet for Guts’ feelings about missed opportunities with Griffith.
This chapter draws a very direct sexual connection between Guts and Griffith through Casca as a bridge. By raping the woman Femto raped, Guts can get closer to him.
And it is, of course, not the first time the manga has done this. Femto’s unwavering stare into Guts’ eye(s) during the Eclipse rape scene isn’t subtle, though I don’t intend to go into it in detail as this is about Guts’ sexual desire, not Griffith/Femto’s. I feel like the stare (the fucking stare omg) speaks for itself.
I mention this only to make the point that there’s an established precedent for Casca bearing the brunt of these dudes’ repressed feelings for each other, whether it’s genuinely intended to be interpreted as repressed sexual desire or whether it’s meant to be platonic spite/longing to get closer and closer to Griffith no homo. It’s not fair, it’s bad writing on several levels, it’s both misogynist and homophobic, but there you go.
Ultimately my main takeaway here is that Berserk would be about 500x less fucked up and offensive if Guts and Griffith just cut out the middlewoman and fucked each other.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Let’s go back to the Golden Age.
So far I’ve done my best to show that, post-Eclipse, Guts’ relationship with Casca largely revolves around his feelings for Griffith, both regretful and vengeful, and the fucked-up sexual component of his relationship with her also relates to the sexual component of his relationship with Griffith. So what about pre-Eclipse? Does the same principle hold true then, back when Casca was an actual character and not just a plot device and projection screen for Guts?
And I would argue that it does. It’s less in-your-face about it, but tbh not by a whole lot.
Casca and Guts start off as romantic rivals for Griffith’s affection. Only Casca is aware of this, since Guts’ attraction to Griffith is subconscious and repressed imo, but that’s their early dynamic. Their first emotionally intimate scene together, when they finally stop hating each other and start to bond as friends, is when Casca tells Guts her backstory, which happens to be almost entirely about Griffith.
The Casca chapters end with Casca crying about Griffith having fallen in love with Guts and not her (”Why… why did it have to be you?”), but all Guts manages to get out of Casca’s story is that she’s into Griffith, so after he decides to leave he starts trying to be a good bro and set them up. Finally, right before Guts leaves, Judeau introduces him to the concept of hooking up with Casca.
During the course of this conversation Guts does a kind of 180:
to
“The one who has her eye… is Griffith. That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this.”
This is presented like part of Guts’ motivation for becoming Griffith’s equal is to be worthy of Casca, but we’ve seen his thought process for wanting to be Griffith’s equal, and Casca has never figured into it. He’d completely written her off before this chat with Judeau, as we see at the start, and he certainly never seemed to be consciously aware of the possibility of getting with her.
He’s been trying to set her up with Griffith for several chapters – pushing her into his arms, mentioning her dress to him, suggesting she ask him to dance, carrying her down to see him after Doldrey, saying “good luck with Griffith,” to her as he heads out, and now telling Judeau he expects them to get together.
There are three possible explanations for this behaviour:
1. Guts just wants to be a good bro and help his friends be happy together. 2. Guts is sublimating his unconscious desire for Casca into trying to hook her up with Griffith. 3. Guts is sublimating his unconscious desire for Griffith into trying to hook him up with Casca.
I think maybe Miura wants us to think it’s #2. Hence Guts’ awkward sweatdrop when Judeau brings her up, hence Guts complimenting her dress before mentioning it to Griffith, hence Guts carrying her down to him bridal style after Doldrey, hence Guts swiveling from “Less a woman I see her as… a comrade,” to “That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this,” within seconds.
Yk, he’s subconsciously attracted to her now and acts on that attraction by trying to hook her up with Griffith to make her happy, but once Judeau tells him that’s not an option, he can admit that he’s attracted to her.
(And, just to throw something out there, once we establish that Berserk has subtextual, repressed sexual desire in this love triangle it only adds more validation to the other combinations. Even if we are genuinely meant to read Guts as unknowingly attracted to Casca, it puts unknowing attraction on the table. Who else might he be unknowingly attracted to? Casca also apparently took some time to recognize her feelings for Griffith as potentially romantic. Lots of subconscious desire wrapped up in this love triangle, I’m js. But lol I digress.)
That said, I’m here to argue that, whatever Miura’s intentions may be (and hell they may be exactly this), it comes across as option #3.
I’ve already gone through the first part of the Golden Age to highlight how Guts looks at him and how visuals suggest attraction. After Promrose, that fades away because Guts no longer views Griffith as reachable, rather, he puts him on a pedestal. Enter Casca, right at the point where Guts is deciding what to do with the “fact” that Griffith doesn’t give a fuck about him.
Suddenly he gets invested in setting Griffith up with Casca, who he views as more worthy of Griffith because she has a dream (be Griffith’s sword) and he doesn’t.
This is when Guts starts pushing them together. He’s encouraging Casca to take his place at Griffith’s side, whether he realizes the implications of that or not – at the very least he knows that Casca believes Griffith feels things for him she wishes he felt for her, even if Guts doesn’t believe that Griffith truly values him.
“Until that day. The day you showed up…”
What’s interesting to me is that Guts recognizes that Casca wants to fuck Griffith lmao. He’s hooking them up romantically, even though Casca never directly says she’s in love with Griffith, and only alludes to her feelings in terms of being pissed off at Guts for stealing Griffith away from her side.
Guts doesn’t believe he himself is close to Griffith after overhearing the Promrose speech, but he seems to realize that Casca is jealous of him, manages to interpret that (correctly) as Casca wanting to bone Griffith, and yet still doesn’t realize that Griffith’s feelings for him may be a lot more significant than he thinks. Feels like repression at work to me.
Guts wants Casca to take his perceived place at Griffith’s side, except Casca’s theoretically able to do so romantically bc she’s a woman, so there’s plenty of heteronormativity at work too, though whether that’s coming from Miura or Guts I can’t say.
So yeah after Judeau explains the plot of Berserk to him and keeps nudging him towards Casca, Guts agrees that maybe he could hook up with her… but only if he becomes Griffith’s equal first.
So the other way of looking at this is that, rather than suddenly changing Guts’ entire motivation out of nowhere from “become Griffith’s equal to be his friend” to “become Griffith’s equal to get with Casca,” and generally being bizarrely terrible writing, this instead neatly situates a future relationship with Casca, in which she sees him as just as good for her as Griffith, as proof that he’s on the road to achieving his goal of becoming Griffith’s equal.
Which holds true later on – Guts and Casca’s relationship is not an endgame for Guts, it’s not his goal, it’s another step. He still intends to go back out and keep pursuing his own dream. He’s still motivated by wanting to be Griffith’s equal.
So yeah, Judeau’s like, whatever, I tried, Guts ducks out, and shit proceeds to go down.
Fast forward a year.
Guts comes back. Casca, interestingly, has taken over Griffith’s most notable narrative role as leader of the Hawks. Everyone sits down around the campfire.
Rickert tries to explain things to Guts:
Look what Judeau does! He’s telling Rickert to shut up.
Judeau is… weirdly invested in Guts and Casca getting together. Setting them up is largely his motivation in the latter half of the Golden Age, as far as I can tell.
After this moment he changes the subject to:
Subtle, Judeau.
I think it’s telling that Guts never comes up with the idea of hooking up with Casca on his own. He’s led to it by resident shipper on board Judeau, every time. The same dude trying to avoid any mention of Griffith’s feelings for Guts now. Why? Because he wants Guts and Casca to leave together after they rescue Griffith, and he has a feeling Guts won’t want to if he figures out how Griffith actually feels about him.
Hey here’s something interesting about this scene:
This is when Guts first starts trying to fix his mistakes by substituting Casca for Griffith, imo.
Casca attacks him while screaming that he ruined Griffith by leaving. As the point finally hits home, so does the point of Casca’s sword as Guts, shocked, lets her stab him.
Before Guts can really draw a useful conclusion from Casca’s diatribe, she offers a distraction from the subject at hand by trying to kill herself while bequeathing Griffith to him.
“I couldn’t be a woman. Or something invaluable. To keep on protecting the almost broken dream of someone who might not even be alive…“
Guts didn’t save the last Hawk leader who had a self destructive breakdown after dueling him.
Presented with another person who seems to need him, who is desperate and lost and needs comfort, this time he does something.
And what really makes me believe this is actually, for real the correct reading of this scene – that, to Guts, Casca is a substitution for Griffith here – is that Casca is doing the exact. Same. Thing.
Griffith is (seemingly) unreachable, (seemingly) emotionally and romantically unavailable, but Guts and Casca aren’t.
And they kiss for the first time right after Casca tells Guts how Griffith felt about him, right after Guts lets Casca stab him because of it, right after the memory of Griffith kneeling in the snow, and the beginnings of
the realization that by leaving he lost what he set out to earn, hit him, right after Casca tells him that Griffith is his responsibility now. It’s hard not to take that as Guts using Casca as a substitution for Griffith, giving her what he’s now very slowly beginning to realize he should’ve given Griffith.
Guts and Casca getting together here is two people obsessed with the same person trying to offer the other what they couldn’t offer him: comfort. And sex.
Once again a scene that looks like it’s going to be about Casca and
Guts, that should be if this was a typical romance, turns out to revolve
around Griffith.
And on the subject of Guts leaving Griffith in the snow instead of
kneeling down and kissing him the way he responds to Casca much later, how about Griffith going out and getting
self-destructively laid while thinking about Guts after the duel?
Thematically there’s a very well-defined empty space where Griffith and
Guts connecting romantically would’ve fit, is what I’m saying, but they
didn’t. They both sought out other sexual connections to compensate for the
loss of each other.
Finally, here’s the straightforward account of how Guts and Casca are feeling three days later with Griffith’s imminent return to their lives. Casca confesses to Guts that she’s still jealous of Charlotte, Guts gets pissy, but then thinks:
I hate that you’re still hung up on Griffith but I’d be a huge hypocrite if I got mad because I’m even more hung up on Griffith.
Which pretty much sums it up.
And I think I can stop there. There’s a lot more to say in the lead-in to the Eclipse about Guts’ intense feelings for Griffith, but when it comes to sexual attraction specifically, and how Casca figures into it, I think I’ll call it a day.
I hope I’ve made a decent case for Guts’ feelings for Casca, both positive and hugely fucked up, being largely built out of redirected feelings for Griffith. Whatever the reasons for this – actual authorial intent, intended redirection of Guts’s platonic bro feelings but adding sex bc Casca’s a woman so it’s obligatory without realizing how gay that looks, me totally reading into a half-assed het subplot created for the sake of more Eclipse drama, whatever – this is earnestly how Guts’ relationship with Casca reads to me.
In the final part I’m going to conclude this epic adventure in homoeroticism with what is essentially a “why I ship them,” going into why I think it makes perfect sense, from both a character and a thematic perspective, for Guts to be sexually attracted to Griffith. Stay tuned.
shout out to @mastermistressofdesire bc we’ve had a few conversations about this subject and some of your ideas really helped me coalesce these thoughts. Ty!
Okay, onto the Golden Age. This part is going to go up to Promrose Hall, because that’s when Guts’ image of Griffith shifts dramatically. But from their first meeting til then, Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith is like, painfully clear to me.
This is largely focused on visual chemistry and eroticized shots of Griffith specifically from Guts’ point of view, because there’s a lot in these first few chapters – it’s the main lens through which we’re introduced to their relationship and chemistry up close, rather than through the vague implication of their dynamic and how it ended which we saw last arc. I’ve limited myself to contextually relevant moments and really blatant shots that go above and beyond just showing that Griffith is objectively attractive, to showing that Guts feels the attraction. If I took every image of Griffith looking pretty while Guts looks at him I’d be posting half the Golden Age here.
There’s also going to be some step by step analysis of Guts’ giant boner for Griffith and how their relationship screams romance, but (hopefully) less overly detailed than chapter 7 was.
So, Guts kills Basuzo while Griffith watches intently. We know immediately that he’s the god we saw a few chapters ago because of his helmet, so we’re primed to be excited to find out how they’re going to meet and become close. We can already see that Griffith is interested in Guts, so how will Guts feel back?
It’s a bit anticlimactic actually – Guts kills Corkus’ crew, then Guts fights Casca, and finally Griffith, bored, shows up and perfunctorily stabs him.
But then Griffith takes off his helmet and Guts is treated to two and a half pages worth of sexy hair reveal, complete with two panels of tantalizing teasing first:
Note that this isn’t to tease a reveal, say, that he’s the same demon Guts was
really pissed off at in the Black Swordsman arc, and it’s not to tease his human appearance for the sake of the audience – we already know exactly who he is thanks to the helmet that keeps getting centre stage in panels, and people calling him “Griffith,” and we’ve already seen his face and hair in Guts’ flashback and while he’s lounging in the grass. This slow, sensual reveal is for Guts and only Guts. It illustrates and sets the tone for his first glimpse of Griffith, not ours.
And lbr everything about this screams love interest. The tantalizingly slow reveal, complete with long hair blowing in the wind, and two full pages worth of Guts looking at him. Guts’ first sight of Griffith illustrates exactly what he told us: he’s beautiful, noble, and larger than life. And there’s no skimping on the beauty part of that.
Then when Guts wakes up three days later and remembers he’s been stabbed the image of Griffith he first flashes to isn’t a helmeted soldier stabbing him, it’s Griffith letting his hair down.
This is what made the biggest impression on him. The sexy hair blowing in the wind.
The look on Guts’ face is a lot more complicated than “grr I’m mad bc I got stabbed.” He looks like Griffith blew his mind a little. Look how bright Griffith is too compared to the shadows over Guts’ hair and face, look at the light reflected in Guts’ eyes – it’s a nice visual set up for Guts’ later admiration of him, but right now Guts has nothing to go on but the fact that Griffith stabbed him and is also hot, so the fact that he’s shining in his mind already is more than a little suggestive.
Now comes the first duel, and man. Let’s just take a moment to look at the way the characters draw attention to the fact that things are getting pretty gay. “Because I want you, Guts.” “Are you a homo?” [gay silence.]
I can think of three reasons to have your characters come out and say, “hey that sounds gay. Are you gay?” when your story isn’t textually a gay romance. One is to follow it up with reassurance that nah it’s ok, they’re totally straight and we’re just acknowledging that yk we can see why you may think it’s gay, dear reader, and shutting that down. Two is ‘ha ha gay jokes are funny.’ And three is to plant the idea in the reader’s head and help contextualize what we’re seeing without actually confirming one way or the other.
This isn’t a one. It’s not shut down, it’s left hanging. And while it’s a lightly humourous moment due to the awkwardness, it’s not really a joke, especially because this is likely meant to reference Guts’ rape trauma, and all the gay content in the manga is played for drama, not comedy, both text and subtext. This feels like a very solid three to me.
And look at how Griffith is looking at him right before Guts asks if he’s gay. Like, no wonder the question is brought up. This is top tier visual chemistry right here. So it’s certainly worth noting that the homoeroticism inherent in intense, sultry gazes like this is acknowledged and commented on right from the start, because we’re going to be seeing a lot of intense, sultry gazes.
And speaking of Guts’ trauma, at the start of this chapter Guts wakes up from a nightmare about it, implied to be caused by the fact that there’s a naked person lying on top of him (in that his monstrous attacker melds into the form of the person on top of him as he wakes up). His panic subsides when he realizes that person is a woman, and therefore doesn’t feel like a threat to him.
Later on when he has sex with Casca he references this moment, saying to her, “When you first saved my life. For some reason… at that time… [your touch] was fine. But only with you.” I assume this is meant to be taken as romantic, an early sign that they’re ~right for each other. But it’s a re-write of what actually happened, which is that Guts was on the verge of panicking until he realized she wasn’t a man. “A woman…?”
“Only with you” is also factually incorrect.
Guts and Griffith’s exchange here before they start fighting is loaded with both sexual innuendo and direct statements. “I want you, Guts.” “Are you a homo?” “You can have what you want, my sword or my ass.”*** “I don’t dislike doing things by force.”
The duel is full of visual innuendo, and tbh I was going to avoid getting into sword imagery because while phallic symbols are an extremely well-worn literary device they’re still the lowest common denominator of gay subtext, but the stage is set so perfectly, through sexually charged dialogue and intense gazes from Griffith, for us to read the duel as a substitute for sex that the innuendo is lent a lot of extra weight for this scene.
Behold:
To summarize: Griffith gives Guts bedroom eyes, says he wants him, Guts awkwardly asks if he’s gay, Griffith doesn’t answer, Guts says Griffith can fuck him if he wins, there’s rapey undertones to the whole thing given Guts’ offer of like sex slavery and Griffith’s “doing things by force” line, the duel involves Guts neutralizing Griffith’s threatening sword by biting it, Griffith wins by dislocating Guts’ arm ie destroying his site of phallic physical power ie symbolic unmanning (and like I said, normally I wouldn’t pull out the freudian analysis but this scene fucking begs for it) which fits right in with the sexual stakes of the duel, and then Griffith does this:
And Guts is fucking dazzled. Guts looks like Griffith just swept him off his feet. That’s not disgust, or fear, or rage, or hate, or bitterness, or resentment, or humiliation, that is the Guts who describes Griffith as “beautiful, noble, and larger-than-life.”
Like what I’m saying is that, if Casca being able to touch Guts this early without him freaking out is considered romantic, what’s Griffith being able to grab Guts like this and declare that he belongs to him after literally winning his ass in a homoerotic fight considered?
Ok that’s that on the fucking gay duel. Moving on.
Imo the first really blatant instance of Guts feeling sexual attraction to Griffith as conveyed through visuals is here:
It’s not just Guts’ pov shot of Griffith’s ass – that’s pretty neutral by itself – it’s the over-the-shoulder wet and sensual look beside it, background fading to black as Griffith takes his full attention. It’s totally unnecessary and conveys zero information other than that Griffith is wet and sexy and Guts needs to take a second to focus on that fact.
For reference, there’s another very similar depiction of Griffith later on (combining the nakedness and the over the shoulder profile into one image) from another character’s point of view:
I’m not comparing Guts to Gennon at all, but I am saying that Miura is consistent in using this type of image of Griffith to portray someone’s sexual attraction to him.
Here have one more particularly iconic instance of naked back, ass, and sensual over the shoulder profile:
There is nothing not blatantly eroticized about this. And remember: this isn’t even Guts looking at NeoGriffith and NeoGriffith looking seductive, this is Guts remembering seeing a glimpse of him after he hatched on a distant hill lmao, this is Guts’ goddamn imagination, and it’s almost identical to Gennon’s memory (naked Griff with flowy hair, light, left, dude imagining him, dark, right) except that Griffith’s blushing sex face is given much more erotic detail in a second panel. Like, I can’t. This page is a QED by itself.
Plus Guts’ awkward sweat drop in the panel immediately after the naked ass shot lol.
Notice these are p much the same expressions we saw when he asked if Griffith was gay.
Which
a) tells us the homoerotic vibe here is almost certainly intentional, as if that
wasn’t obvious and b) makes it really, really easy to read this as
repression at work. Guts looks at Griffith’s naked body, zeroes in on
how hot he is, then gets uncomfortable.
And, as another aside, I just want to note that there’s no reason for their first playful and friendly bonding experience to happen while Griffith is naked. It tells us nothing about him except that he’s not self conscious (unless you think he’s trying to seduce Guts), it adds nothing thematically or symbolically or tonally beyond the homoeroticism. His nakedness doesn’t do any of the things nakedness usually does in a story like make him seem vulnerable, it doesn’t make him seem particularly human or down-to-earth (hell his most dazzling moment yet has him naked with the sun at his back telling Guts he’s gonna get his own kingdom while Guts looks up at him in awe).
The most Griffith’s nakedness here accomplishes is the above image of Guts springing an awkward boner while walking in on him, and making a bunch of Guts’ flashbacks to Griffith = Guts picturing him naked.
Thanks for that, Miura.
So now we flash forward to our first sight of them three years later:
Griffith during the battle:
Griffith as the other army retreats:
Our first look at older Griffith, unhelmeted is at the bottom of a page. The pose he’s in, drawing his helmet up, gives off cutie pulling hair behind their ears vibes, at least imho. He’s even got that under-eye blush for extra appeal here. It’s very pointedly at-odds with the helmeted conqueror of a battlefield we just saw; his beauty is deliberately emphasized in juxtaposition to his role as the leader of the “grim reapers of the battlefield.”
The next page reveals:
It’s Guts’ view of him. Our first glimpse of Griffith after three years have passed is intended to emphasize his surprisingly un-grim-reaper-like prettiness with a reveal that it’s from Guts’ perspective as he quietly watches him. After this we abruptly shift to a victory procession a few minutes later, making this brief moment stand out a little bit more. (And correspondingly our first glimpse of Guts’ face after three years is while he’s focused on Griffith.)
Then later this chapter we have Griffith looking ridiculously hot when he interrupts Guts and Casca’s argument.
Knowing what we learn later about Casca feeling jealous of Guts and the whole love triangle scenario, showing him here with that extra sensual lighting as they both turn to look at him – Guts and Casca in shadow, Griffith in the light – handily serves as a visual set-up for the concept of Guts and Casca as romantic rivals for Griffith. He’s shown here as an object of desire to them to an almost ridiculous extent, like, look at that picture.
Now I’m skipping ahead to the post-Zodd staircase scene, aka the most romantic goddamn moment in the manga.
“Tell me… do I need a reason each time… I put myself in harm’s way… for your sake?”
In that one panel where we see Griffith from Guts’ shocked point of view, Griffith is drawn more beautifully than any of the surrounding pages in the chapter. Sultry eyes, gentle breeze blowing a few leaves around and his hair back with a few sexy strands in his face, background faded away again. Hell, I’d say it’s the prettiest image of a person Miura’s drawn so far lol, including all the women. It’s not just indicative of Griffith’s attraction to Guts (yk the bedroom eyes), it’s indicative of Guts’ perspective, how he sees him, especially considering Guts’ taken-aback, dazzled expression in the panel following.
This is what Guts sees when, pressed for an explanation for his “hot-headed”ness from Guts, Griffith declares that he risked his life for him for no reason at all.
This moment is pretty objectively romantic.
To compare, here’s Charlotte looking at him in the next chapter when Griffith approaches to charm her and add to her burgeoning crush during the hunt:
Clearly showing us Charlotte’s attraction, still with the romantic floating leaves in the breeze, plain background, and extra pretty, sensual eyes. It’s romanticized using the same visual tools, but this is less sexually charged, by far. It’s bland in comparison.
And I mean later on Guts places that image in the damn moon in a moment of contemplation right before he dedicates himself to him in return:
(btw if you need a citation for “himself” rather than “his sword,” Guts’ sword is an extension of himself and his life, this is explicitly stated in chapter 48 but it’s also an obvious metaphor throughout the story. Not that it rly matters, the meaning is clear imo, but yk I’m trying to be as thorough as I can and cover all my bases.)
Ok that’s about it for part 2. We’ve gone through the particularly relevant moments that signify sexual attraction with a clear contextual reason to do so, up to around Promrose Hall. You’re gonna have to buckle in for the next part because it’s looooooong and it’s largely about how Casca and the hetero subplot figure into this.
But I’m going to play you out with a few shots of Griffith from Guts’ perspective that I couldn’t find room for and are much less contextually relevant, and yet still ott attractive, because it’s fun, and like I said, this kind of point of view image does actually stop appearing after Promrose Hall, so I think it’s worth depicting how Guts sees Griffith before and after he becomes a distant figure to him. Enjoy the sultry gazes:
But after accidentally killing a kid during an overenthusiastic assassination and then overhearing the Promrose Hall speech, Guts sees himself like this:
And views Griffith like this:
And subsequent images of him from Guts point of view just look less deliberately eroticized now that Guts has placed Griffith on a pedestal high above him, rather than seeing him as someone within reach:
He’s still beautiful, but these images convey other information first and foremost – Griffith’s pride, his delight, his vulnerability, his rage. There’s a distinct lack of the sultry vibe we used to see all the time.
This is of course just the largely subjective impression I got while re-reading from (the first) chapter 12 to the second duel, but hopefully others see it too.
*** This is the one translation I’m using that isn’t the Dark Horse version bc I’ve heard on the grapevine that it’s more literally accurate and also it’s just so good lbr.
Thesis statement of this goddamn thesis: Guts is sexually attracted to Griffith.
Now, this is long. This is the shortest part of a four-part series, and this isn’t a short post. And basically my intention is to show why I find it so incredibly easy to read Guts as attracted to Griffith, and explain how this reading adds layers of meaning that fit neatly within Berserk’s themes and enrich the story. I’m not going to speculate on Miura’s motives for adding a ton of gay subtext, like, it could be anything from trying to be as gay as possible without pissing off his publishers to it all being totally coincidental and meaningless with an alternate explanation for every point I have, or anywhere in between.
My point is only that Berserk readily lends itself to gay readings, with a focus on Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith (as I feel like it tends to be neglected in favour of interpretations that Griffith has a one-sided crush.)
Part one covers the Black Swordsman stuff and the way Guts and Griffith’s relationship is revealed to the audience, part two covers the first several chapters of the Golden Age with a focus on visuals and how Guts sees Griffith, part three tackles Casca’s role in the story, and part four is more of an overview on why I think reading Berserk through a gay lens works so well.
So here we go.
Part One – Our Introduction to the Concept of Guts and Griffith
We’re introduced to Guts and Griffith’s relationship near the end of the Black Swordsman arc. Before the appearance of the Godhand we know that Guts is really fucking angry, we know he’s monster slaying because he’s out for revenge, we know he’s looking for a group called “the Godhand,” and thanks to Puck spelling some stuff out we know that he’s also sad and deeply afraid that he’s fighting a losing battle.
The comparison to Vargas hints that maybe he lost some loved ones, plus an eye and a limb to an apostle which is close enough to the truth to be decent foreshadowing.
But it’s not until the Godhand show up as the Count’s about to die that we learn what’s really going on with Guts. The information is given to us surprisingly straightforwardly, and the way the information is revealed to us is pretty telling.
The first six chapters have been teasing the mystery of what happened to Guts to piss him off so much, from the way we kick off in media res, to hints about his issues and trauma (eg the aforementioned Vargas comparison, the way he lets the possessed corpse of the kid stab him, etc), to Puck directly asking what the hell happened to him outloud for the benefit of the audience. We start to get our answer in chapter 7.
The Godhand that Guts has been searching for shows up, Femto front and centre, and Guts’ rage is directed right at him. When Guts screams “Griffith!” at him we see Puck asking “Griffith? Who’s Griffith?”
My point with this is just to emphasize that the driving hook of the Black Swordsman arc is the build-up of the mystery and what makes Guts tick, the tension pretty much entirely coming from the audience wondering why Guts is so obsessed with revenge, and the reveal of the sacrifice is the climax of this arc.
And our example of a sacrifice, which we are explicitly told is also what happened between Guts and Griffith? A husband and wife.
In fact, the sacrifice that serves the main purpose of setting us up for Guts’ story is the only sacrifice of a romantic partner we ever see – the rest are all parent/child, weirdly abstract a la Eggman sacrificing “the world,” and ofc Guts and Griffith’s undefined, suggestive thing.
The details of this sequence make the parallels stand out even more.
First of all, before we learn much of anything, we see Guts’ reaction to Griffith/Femto. The rage we expect:
Guts taken aback and offended, which is less expected:
And then begging for attention when Femto turns away from him to address the matter at hand, which should definitely come as a surprise for a first time reader:
The audience is expecting rage and violence, and what we get is neediness. Guts, more than anything, wants Femto’s attention.
Guts is finally spurred into action when Femto directly says he doesn’t give a fuck:
(Something, btw, that Guts is still brooding about a chapter later lmao:
like, this arc couldn’t be more blatant about Guts wanting Griffith/Femto’s attention.)
But even now the focus is on the potential for more revealed backstory, not on Guts’ attempt at turning talk into action.
Throughout this arc the audience is lead to expect a dramatic, action-packed, and revealing confrontation between Guts and the object of his ire. By the time we get to the climax, Guts can barely stand, we discover the guy he’s mad at is a god he can’t even touch, and his feelings are a lot more complex and vulnerable than just rage and fear of failure. The focus is taken away from possible action and given to hints of backstory. When Guts is standing with sword in hand, advancing on Femto, these are the moments that pique our interest:
Guts makes a very impressive stand considering how fucked up his body is but he can’t even touch Femto before getting telekinesised against a wall. A fight is out of the question – Guts’ willpower, and what spurs him on and makes him fight through the pain, are what the audience is meant to be interested in.
After Guts is magically thrown against a wall we get more hints. The Count tries to offer Guts as an offering. Slan tells him, The boy is merely your enemy. As a sacrificial offering for the Invocation of Doom, not just any lump of flesh and blood will do. It must be someone important to you, part of your soul… someone so close to you that it’s almost like giving up a part of you.
Femto points at Theresia.
That should be more than enough, right? We’ve learned like, everything we need to know. Griffith/Femto is responsible for the brand of sacrifice on Guts’ neck, therefore he sacrificed Guts at some point, therefore they were close friends or maybe related, but Griffith betrayed Guts for demonic power, now Guts is real mad and Griffith has become a monster, as you do.
But we don’t stop there.
Now, in fairness, this does pad out the chapter and give us more build-up to the Count’s decision wrt Theresia. Miura obviously needed something to make the pacing work. And hey Ubik likes to fuck with potential sacrificers and make them feel like shit, so it makes sense for him to start telling everyone the Count’s backstory for funsies. But it’s here that the implications really ramp up, which tells us what the real point of this sad backstory is.
It’s during this story that Guts wakes up:
We get some pissed off reaction shots from him as they all watch the drama:
On the image of monster Count eating his wife:
And in the panels immediately following:
Here’s when Femto is most explicitly compared to the Count. That thoughtful over-the-shoulder look in reaction to Ubik’s words – The life of the person you loved the most and hated the most! – tells us everything we need to know. Especially since Femto’s been absent for the last few pages of Godhand reactions and this is our first image of him (aside from one long shot of the back of his head) since Ubik started telling the story, despite getting several reaction shots from the rest of the Godhand. This panel feels significant, and it exists to tell us that Ubik’s words fully apply to him as well.
And, while this is pretty obvious I’ll note it just in case, it’s only after Ubik’s story is over that Guts is like, “oh yeah,” and asks Puck to heal him so he can hold a sword, so those reaction shots are all about Guts reliving painful memories and not about his injuries or getting Puck’s attention.
Basically, the Count being told to sacrifice Theresia tells us what a sacrifice is and who it applies to, but the Count and his wife are our window into Guts and Griffith’s turbulent past, as we can clearly see by how they react to it, and how the narrative and visuals frame the story in relation to them.
And, if you already know the plot of Berserk, you should also be able to see some parallels here – “a family, the very picture of happiness.”
When it comes to infidelity, I actually don’t think that jealousy was Griffith’s main source of despair, but boy do these many panels of Griffith watching Guts and Casca and looking upset between the rescue and the Eclipse demonstrate that it was a factor. Eg:
Part of the point of the Count’s backstory is to show that it’s not lust for power that leads to someone making a sacrifice, or at least, not necessarily – the Count wanted to bury his human heart. He felt betrayed; his wife was the direct cause of his suicidal despair, and he was desperate to escape that despair.
As Guts was the direct cause of Griffith’s despair. The behelit only opens when Guts touches Griffith again – not after losing his dream, not after losing the use of his limbs or his tongue, not even after believing he was losing Guts again too – but the touch of Guts’ hand.
Guts eventually recognizes how Griffith’s feelings for him caused his despair as well.
All things considered, the Count’s sacrifice is certainly closer to Guts’ story than any other sacrifice we’ve seen, making it pretty fitting as our first introduction to Guts and Griffith’s epic love/hate relationship.
Plus as a bonus:
Griffith has been described as half of Guts as well in the same sacrificial context:
Just fyi.
This whole first arc has been building up to a climactic reveal about Guts’ past and the reason for his revenge quest, from pacing and emphasis to Puck, the audience expy, straightforwardly asking, “what happened between those two?” And the answer we’re given is that something similar to the Count’s backstory happened.
So now the apparent answer to Puck’s question is, “oh, well, I guess they were like in love, but then some shit went down, maybe Guts betrayed Griffith? Idk, Guts must’ve done something that made Griffith fall into pure despair and decide to sacrifice him to become a demon. So Guts is pissed off because Griffith branded him and now he has to fight ghosts all the time. Cool.“
And really, does anything in the following 344 chapters disabuse you of that notion? Sure it’s a lot more complex, there’s a lot of additional factors, but that’s the bare bones of it in a nutshell.
So then the next chapter opens on our very first glimpse of Guts and original flavour Griffith together. Early days, Guts is his 15 year old self pre 3 year flash forward. Still sullen lol. Griffith gives his keys that set the world in motion speech which, while illuminating thematically, is paced to set up this particular, emotionally revealing moment:
With the additional context of the parallel we’ve just seen between the Count and his wife, how does this come across? I mean come on, from Griffith’s side we have the statement that Guts stands alone as closer to him than anyone else has ever been, already – he’s the first and only person Griffith has ever felt comfortable voicing his internal thoughts to, his deep desire to know who he is at his core and what he’s capable of.
From Guts side we have “At that time he shone before me as something beautiful, noble, and larger than life.”
This reads as the beginning of a romance as far as I’m concerned, and not a one-sided one. Griffith’s quote tells us they have a uniquely close and emotionally intimate relationship, Guts’ quote tells us it’s a relationship that encompasses admiration/awe and thinking about how “beautiful” the other is.
The best illustration Miura came up with to introduce us to the nature of their epic love/hate relationship is a happy marriage broken by betrayal. And it’s not just because Griffith is in love with Guts (which hopefully we can all agree is fairly obvious), because, even beyond Guts’ neediness when confronted by Femto and the many suggestions of his complex not-just-rage emotions, I mean the first thing we see after 20 pages worth of that married couple parallel is Guts calling Griffith beautiful.
And boy do the first seventeen chapters of their relationship demonstrate that Guts is calling him beautiful for a reason.
Guts’ reaction to Casca being threatened is usually: Don’t do it, She’ll fucking kill ya.
And Guts’ reaction to Griffith being threatened is: DON’T YOU DARE FUCKING TOUCH HIM .I WILL CLEAVE YOU IN HALF.
not that Guts’ wouldn’t step in on Casca’s behalf but whenever he does there’s always this “why am I doing this?” “Do I like her” “Don’t pop a boner on my head” “Griffith what are you doing?” it’s almost a part of a whole different train of thought?
It doesn’t seem to be the tunnel visioned desperation which comes when Griffith is concerned.
i feel like guts’s feelings for casca are really poorly written, as you kinda mention. when judeau asks him about his feelings for casca, he says he sees her as a comrade more than anything, which is appropriate – but then with further prompting, he’s like “no… i’m just no good for her… as i am now…” because she’s caught up on griffith still and all that. because miura hadnt originally planned it, having FEELINGs for casca is an afterthought on everyone’s part. it really (to me at least) comes across as a “wait, im a dude, im supposed to be into girls and this is the one girl around”. he assists her multiple times, not real sure why, so hey, guts thinks, romance?? perhaps?? basically guts doesnt know fuck shit about girls but maybe he has a concept of compulsory het. thinking on this reminds me of how griffith also had to chase het – as is characteristic for griffith, it was thought out ahead of time and part of his plan (even if it his plan kinda went to shit). guts, on the other hand, relies not on thought but rather just on acting, often really impulsively, and thats where gutsca came from. unfortunately for the girls, what it al really comes back to is each other. everybody knows griffith has like 0 sincere feelings for charlotte and is eternally hung up on guts, but gutss is a bit more vague. hes the same way tho- the girl in his life is means to an end. i posted a few panels just recently that make this evident – even post-eclipse, when guts finds out casca js missing, he swears to rescue her By Himself (that falls thru) but if he runs into griffith, “then [he’ll]…” implying he’ll redirect his attentions there. chance of another type of eclipse, AND casca’s gonna be there in need of rescuing? how convenient. there are a lot more caps that point towards this that i think bthump has either mentioned or posted, but im on mobile and cant dig em up atm.
I was just thinking about that bit when Guts is about to leave where Judeau’s like, hey Casca’s single wink wink nudge nudge and Guts is like, I see her more as a comrade than anything, and Judeau’s like, are u sure??? and Guts is like, well anyway she’s into Griffith so if I was gonna d8 her I’d have to fulfill my dream of being Griffith’s equal first either way so bye.
And it’s framed as like burgeoning romance, Guts seriously wanting to become the kind of man Casca likes, but god it comes across as such an afterthought lol. Like he already wants to be Griffith’s equal for Griffith, this Casca thing is just added on and changes absolutely nothing about his goals or motivation. It’s like, off Guts goes because he desperately wants to be Griffith’s bff, btw here’s some heterosexuality just in case you’re uncomfortable with that, heterosexual male reader.
And more re: mmod’s original post, it’s just inarguable facts that every time Guts’ feelings for Casca and Griffith are compared, Casca comes up short. He decides to leave and take her with him until it turns out Griffith needs him. He goes on an animalistic rampage while rescuing Griffith whereas Casca gets told to fuck off bc she’s too naked and distracting after her attempted rape (which I’m sure is meant as a funny manly het moment and GOD IT’S BAD). He leaves her in a cave for two years to pursue Griffith. Hell when he thinks about the last thing he saw with his missing eye it goes Casca’s assault -> naked Casca -> Femto staring at him as the very last thing given the most significance. He decides he has to rescue her in the conviction arc but still plans to ditch her again afterwards now that Griffith is human-looking and in reach of his sword. He finally decides to stay with her and take her to Elfhelm when a) Griffith tells him he gives zero fucks and ditches him and b) the cave caves in and he can’t leave her there anymore. And he still treats it as a temporary sidequest.
Aww Casca distracting him from his revenge boner, how sweet.
So then what’s this? “The instant I saw him… I’d forgotten my urge to kill. And I’m kinda concerned about that because I should want to kill him, and this is gonna fuck up my revenge groove.” Sounds like you just don’t feel like killing him quite as much now that he looks like your crush again.
So is it sexy naked Griffith or Casca killing it for you? What is the truth?
Well he lets Rickert hold him back from Griffith too, and I’m js Rickert isn’t exactly a match for Guts.
Looks like he’s taking any excuse he can not to swing a sword at him yk?
Finally he does shove Rickert aside only to yell at him again:
Gets Griffith’s “I’ll not betray my dream, that is all” in response, and finally attacks, only for
Zodd to suddenly appear out of nowhere in what is frankly such bullshit egregious plot convenience and timing (where the fuck was he hiding in the middle of this field? behind a sword?) that I can only assume Guts saw him and knew he’d be interrupted.
Like, I’m js Guts was a whole lot better at this when he had 20 broken bones for some reason.
Guts: tbh… his tenacity – his
attitude that you have to see things through to the end, and how in most
stories this would be shown to be a virtue, but in Berserk while it is
often shown as admirable, it’s also one of his biggest flaws at times.
It’s there in touching moments, like when teenage Guts risks his life to
take a flower to a hill, and it’s also there when he vows revenge and
abandons Casca and Rickert to go off on a two-year monster hunting
spree. It’s there when he insists on getting Casca magically healed
despite Skull Knight’s warnings and his own musing that things could
turn out very bad if her sanity is forced back. It’s there when he
becomes obsessed with becoming Griffith’s equal, explicitly ignoring all
evidence that Griffith already cares for him. It’s there every time he
refuses to die.
The closest Guts came to abandoning a course
of action once he’d decided on it is when he switched from his “dream”
to realizing he wants to stay with Griffith, right before the Eclipse,
and that would’ve been the best thing Guts could’ve done, if he’d had
the chance. Switching from revenge to helping Casca is close too (and
pretty explicitly paralleled to leaving Griff vs returning and staying),
but he’s doing it with the thought in his head that it’s temporary
(”when this journey ends, I’ll…” [pictures Griffith]), and his
tenacity is still there in how he’s not letting doubts and warnings
deter him from fixing Casca, so it’s a bit of a double-edged sword.
Idk man I love Guts’ doggedness, both as a virtue and a flaw.
My
favourite Guts moment though, now that’s difficult. I’ll go with one of
the best early moments, during the Black Swordsman arc, for the sake of
making things easy. It’s my first favourite moment, at least:
Like
half his bones are broken, he couldn’t do more than crawl on his
stomach and beg for attention before this when faced with the object of
his revenge obsession, but he stands up and marches up the stairs with
his sword when Femto says he’s beneath his notice. I love him.
Griffith:
Griffith is one of my all-time favourite characters period so narrowing
it down to one thing is hard, but I think if I had to settle on one it
would be his emotional repression? The way he doesn’t realize he’s in
love with Guts until it’s too late, the way he refuses to acknowledge
his feelings of guilt and self-loathing, the way he comes so close to
getting more emotionally healthy and open with Guts at his side but then
Guts leaves without a word and everything falls to pieces, the way he
falls back on the fact that he “won” Guts in a duel and fights for him
again because he can’t articulate why he can’t stand the thought
of Guts leaving, the way he self-sabotages himself into a dungeon
because he’s so unfamiliar with his own emotions that he can’t deal with
his feelings after Guts leaves, etc.
Funnily enough, in contrast
to that, I think my favourite Griffith moment (lbr my favourite Berserk
moment) is probably his moment of greatest self-awareness:
But like the reason this monologue is so effective is because
he’s so emotionally repressed, and it took him a year of nothing but
torture and self reflection for him to recognize his feelings. It makes
this moment really, really shine.
Casca: I love that
she genuinely commands respect among the Hawks. It’s one of the few
really satisfying aspects of her character role and her treatment by
other characters to me – from Corkus getting scared and apologizing when
she threatens him, to Griffith giving her the most important job in his
capture Doldrey ploy, to the Hawks stepping back so she can take out
Adon herself and cheering her on, to being able to rally the Hawks as
their leader in the most panic-inducing circumstances, etc etc.
I think my all-time favourite Casca moment is this:
God she deserves this moment of glory.
Farnese: I love
her “you just have to become a storm yourself” thing. The way her
reaction to fear is to join the thing that frightens her and become the
frightening thing. I loved it when it lead to her doing terrible things
like burning people alive and I loved it when it lead to her doing great
things like joining Guts and learning to defend herself and Casca and
becoming a witch.
My favourite Farnese moment is a pretty obvious one but what can I say it’s so good:
Fighting
off a demon tiger taking out whole crowds with a swipe of its paw, with
a candlestick, at a fancy ball, man, how can you not love her?
Serpico:
I like the contrast between his chill and diplomatic
go-with-the-flow-ness vs how solid and immovable he is when it comes to
protecting the people he loves, and how what ties those contrasts
together is a willingness to be hurt for their sakes, from dueling
people to a draw to avoid feelings of resentment towards Farnese, to
standing between her and Berserker Guts.
My favourite Serpico moment is:
Putting
himself in danger while defusing a tense situation with that chill
diplomacy. And not even for Farnese, but for Guts this time.
“If you’re Griffith’s friend and equal” with the larger than life beautiful and noble image of Griffith dwarfing them, to “Why do I always see these things… after they’re done and gone…?” with what Griffith has become, tiny and weak, because Guts broke him by leaving to become his equal, itself proof that leaving was unnecessary.
Griffith as the image Guts wanted to rise up to join, whose love and affection and respect he craved vs Griffith as the human Guts was already equal to, who craved Guts’ love and affection and respect in kind.
I want to take a minute to explain my take on the Hound.
Basically he’s Guts’ equivalent to Griffith’s Femto, ie, the ~dark side~ of Guts, made out of swirling negative emotions like rage and fear and hatred etc. It’s likely due to the reality-warping brand on his neck that the Hound is given more form and will than most people’s dark sides, becoming more of a presence to Guts.
We know the Hound isn’t an external evil spirit trying to manipulate Guts or possess him because we see it in Godo’s spirit-repelling cave where Guts is guaranteed to be safe from mean external forces like ghosts.
Like, the nature of the Hound is basically spelled out in its first physical appearance:
This establishes that the Hound is a manifestation of Guts’ “malice” (among other negative emotions, like the fear Guts mentions). Godo says to Guts – “you ran away so that your own malice could burn within you.” That’s the dark flame Guts is referencing up there, which is essentially the Hound.
This also establishes that the Hound is real – it’s not just a metaphor for the audience’s sake, it’s a physical presence that Guts senses. It’s a part of Guts given ghostly form. When he argues with it he’s arguing with himself.
It’s explicitly compared to Femto a few chapters earlier, when the concept is shown to us, before it explicitly appears as an entity.
What Skull Knight means by “or else…” becomes clear on the following page where he finds Rosine’s behelit.
Reminding the audience that there are ways for men to become beasts.
We cut to Guts walking through a forest being taunted by all those asshole spirits, digging into his deep insecurities, locating sites of his self-loathing and using it to fuck with his mind.
They’re essentially voicing his thoughts for him.
Pointing out his inner darkness, similarly to how the spirit that possessed Farnese pointed out that she gets off on torture. They’re not making shit up here, what they say digs deep and fucks with people’s heads because it’s based on truth.
Here they explicitly compare the Hound to Femto.
And finally Guts’ response after they take off:
He’s completely right, and as we can figure out from the ominous shot of the behelit and the fact that this is Guts reaffirming his stupid self destructive revenge crusade, this isn’t the greatest attitude.
He is what he is, and the more he pursues revenge and soaks himself in blood etc the stronger the Hound part of him gets.
And just in case more evidence that the Hound is a part of Guts and not an external force is needed, there’s this:
“This… is my…”
After the armour transforms into the shape of the Hound, rather than Skull Knight’s Skull Knight:
Guts’ armour is Guts getting the power of his dark side that apostles get, without having to sacrifice a loved one first. If he became an apostle his monstrous form would look a lot like the Hound. If Griffith was in Guts’ place, his armour would look a lot like Femto.
Anyway yeah in short the Hound = Guts.
I like that Griffith’s two examples describe both him and Guts in the future. Like Griffith isn’t into world domination now, he just wants to be a king, but it sounds like that’s where the Falconia thing/Gaiseric’s giant empire parallel is headed.
And Black Swordsman Guts is both literally tempering his giant sword by infusing it with evil ghost spirits and shit, and also metaphorically honing himself a la Godo’s metaphor for him thru his dream of revenge and fighting tougher and tougher enemies.
and when he got his lofty noble dream figured out it was inspired by Godo being a blacksmith
but at the end of the day both go hand in hand with self destruction so like Griffith was right on the money here
I love this sfm. Guts’ biggest mistakes (narratively) are abandoning people and baby Guts refusing to leave his dying mother is just so good as a moment to define him for us because of that. There’s a sense that when he leaves Griffith, eg, he’s betraying himself on some level as well.
Also consider:
i feel like the fact that guts sees the band down there, including his pseudo girlfriend, dying horribly and turns away to continue trying to save griffith long after it’s too late should be a bigger thing, both in fandom and in canon
re-reading a few eclipse chapters and it feels so striking to me that casca is down there with judeau and the hawks facing an army of demons while guts is up there with griffith, neither sparing a thought for the other. it feels like a short, rougher and more intense version of casca leading the hawks as outlaws while griffith is being tortured and guts is off trying to become his equal.
except it comes after guts and casca have slept together and seem to be having a thing, which makes it very… stark in the way it completely doesn’t fit into a romantic narrative.
plus you’d think that while guts is bemoaning his own shittiness in abandoning casca for two years and comparing it to leaving griffith in the snow he could spare a thought for that time he left her to fight a hoarde of rapey monsters because he was wrapped up in futilely trying to help griffith.
Also ngl I completely forgot that Guts actually looks down and sees the Band being eaten alive with his own eyes before deciding his best course of action is to stay up there and try to save Griffith.
i was gonna post something that’s like, “anyone who thinks guts killing griffith and riding off into the sunset would be a happy ending needs to re-read chapter 4, because Berserk’s got something to say about the nature of revenge and it’s not subtle”
but in fairness one thing i actually really like and appreciate about berserk is that it’s not 100% anti revenge. i tend to hate narratives that are just like, revenge is bad, the end. i’m a fan of revenge lol.
guts killing donovan is not condemned. neither is griffith perfunctorily killing gennon after he’s already been defeated, neither is julius getting assassinated after trying to kill griffith (adonis is a different can of worms). even setting the queen on fire is depicted as badass and awesome, not overly fucked up. things start to get a little dicey when we get to guts slicing out a dude’s tongue before killing him, eg, and we get to see the horrified expressions of onlookers, but it’s not really condemned either – it’s dark, a little fucked up, but understandable, and the audience is probably meant to be torn between going ‘shit, dude’ and cheering him on.
what IS condemned is “living for revenge” or obsessing over the past to the detriment of your future. Guts’ revenge quest is condemned not because killing bad people who deliberately hurt you is Wrong, but because it’s actively fucking him up psychologically, harming his current salvageable relationships, preventing him from healing his own emotional wounds, forcing him to bury his vulnerabilities under a shell of darkness (the hound), and is basically a glorified years-long act of self harm.
and idk i appreciate the nuance. it’s like the best of both worlds – guts stalking around seeking revenge against griffith/femto is bad bc of the circumstances of what he’s doing and what he has to become to do it, so the final epic confrontation between them will probably be a lot more complex than guts killing him and riding off into the sunset. which is great. but it’s also great that in this story guts can kill his rapist by shooting him in the back and stabbing him through the mouth and the main reaction the audience is meant to have is “good for him.”
(incidentally this makes me wonder what the moral of the story would be if casca wakes up and ends up with the revenge torch passed to her. because i would really dislike it if she wanted revenge and got the same ‘living for revenge is bad’ message guts got, but at the same time all my good revenge examples are from the golden age and the moral of the revenge story has been pretty consistent since, so idk.)
tbh this probably didn’t help guts’ feelings of inadequacy when he overheard griffith’s speech an hour later
irony: two dudes think of themselves as monstrous and unworthy of the other; become monsters because of it
yk i think about this scene when i think about why griffith would’ve fallen for guts, bc i tend to think that at least part of the reason is that guts treats him like a person, rather than as a beacon of hope or portent of doom lol. which is exemplified when he dumps a bucket of water on his head.
but man how about why guts fell for griffith? guts, who never got to be a kid, who was trained as a mercenary since like age 4, never had any friends growing up, no one around his own age. he’s never played with friends before. like this is probably the first time he’s ever had fun with someone his own age.
If Griffith wanted someone to treat him as a person(/equal), well, that’s also what Guts wants, just from the opposite side. Griffith gets too much regard, positive and negative, and Guts doesn’t get enough, positive or negative.
Like sure this scene ends with Griffith talking about becoming a king and Guts looking up at him, blinded by the sun, but the potential is right here.
you're the only one 