Ok like, to start, Griffith’s heart starts beating when he watches Guts square off against Zodd.
Which imo is very reminiscent of the very first time he saw Guts, after he took Basuzo out.
Guts fighting Zodd on the Hill of Swords is a demonstration of the very first thing that enchanted Griffith lol.
Guts fighting Zodd specifically also has this particular relevance to Griffith’s feelings:
Their first encounter with him was all about Griffith’s irrational feelings for Guts. It kind of feels right for those feelings to hit Griffith again during another encounter with Zodd, even if he’s now on the opposite side.
So yeah I absolutely think NeoGriffith is lying his ass off to himself when he blames his feelings on the fetus lol. If I was Miura I might even go the same route – like you can’t have inarguable proof that Griffith’s feelings for Guts still exist if you’re going to be coy and ambiguous about NeoGriffith’s emotional state for the next 150 chapters. You need a narrative scapegoat to keep things ambiguous.
And lbr it’s extremely in character for Griffith to deny his feelings lmao. Like, it would be out of character if he didn’t find an excuse.
And at the same time if it turns out Griffith’s right and those are the fetus’ feelings then… it will just be mind-bogglingly, soul destroyingly bad writing lmfao. I can’t handle the concept of a writer spending 70 chapters dedicated to showing how Griffith is torn between his dream and his feelings for Guts, having those feelings completely drive the plot and making them the central point of the whole Golden Age, having the climactic sacrifice be Griffith’s attempt to escape those feelings, reintroducing Griffith as an emotionless shell of who he used to be, then dramatically suggesting that those feelings may still be there… only to have Griffith’s beating heart be a total coincidence and his residual feelings for Guts be the totally unrelated feelings of a fetus instead lmao.
Even NGriff blaming the fetus for saving Casca seems unnecessary to me, like I’d believe that if some of original Griffith’s emotions survived the transition to NGriff then he would also automatically move to save Casca, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that specifically is a legit fetus-related thing. I mean Miura’s going somewhere with the fetus lol so w/e maybe it’s somewhat relevant, but I just can’t believe it’s relevant to NGriff’s feelings for Guts.
Yeah he rly is drawn in a v extra overly beautiful way. Though I think this is more Miura’s art style changing, rather than an in-universe change, mostly because of this:
I think NGriff is probably more perfect looking than human Griff, like if you took human Griffith on the best looking day of his life and gave him that perfection all the time, but I don’t think any of his features or anything have changed, even if Miura draws them slightly different – like curlier hair eg.
ok lemme just hijack this post real quick cause the way i always read griff getting ‘more beautiful post eclipse’ was to show us that distance, to make him just that much more unavailable, i.e. he’s looking the way he did through the eyes of his followers when placed on that pedestal of absolute leader/the man who’s gonna bring them all glory, and later how he looks to guts himself (beautiful as always but very much more distant) once he started to feel like they were not equals after the fountain speech etc. etc.
because to me golden age griff as seen through guts’ eyes was always muuuch more human looking, less composed in his expressions, more open because he felt he could show that side to guts because ‘i’ve never talked to anyone like this before’ and ‘…only you’ and so on. He looks this ethereal now because it makes him unavailable visually, (e.g. wow that dude’s so perfect a lowly peasant such as i could NEVER–) and since we see him through guts’ eyes during a couple of the most powerful post eclipse scenes (honestly hill of swords is like the only one im talking about here but let’s pretend i care as much about other scenes too lmao) that unreal, unattainable beautiful look is the look that sticks, because griffith looks just as gorg. through others eyes, (like charlotte, or rickerts when they meet again) but it’s only when guts looks at him that the difference is so jarring, because TLDR; when guts looked at him before we saw a man, and now we see a god.
(or… like.. none of this and miura just evolved and his new skillz finally enable him to draw griff the way he always wanted to. (BUT I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THERE COULD BE A STYLISTIC CHANGE THIS OBVIOUS THAT DOES NOT HAVE SOME DEEP GRIFFGUTS ROOTS SOMEWHERE IN THERE.)
✌
ia with all of this!
and like, even if ngriff isn’t meant to be overtly physically different looking from regular griffith in any concrete way, he’s still always described as like a painting, like someone out of a fairytale, “more griffith,” etc.
I’ve framed it before as NeoGriffith becoming like the embodiment of the impression human Griffith used to leave people with, and the way you put that through Guts’ eyes specifically really makes a lot of sense to me.
NeoGriffith is totally like, an encapsulation of what Guts saw when he was looking up at him on the stairs to Promrose Hall, when he stopped seeing Griffith as just a man and he became this distant figure. And that just makes it extra depressing.
God, I was in physical pain reading this chapter. My heart just breaks for Rickert. The Griffith he followed, whose dream he shared and who he adored- who he wanted to save- that’s not the man who stands in front of him now, in this gorgeous prosperous city that was build on the corpses and dreams of hundreds upon hundreds of men. I always wondered if Rickert would feel like he shouldn’t have survived, if he ever found out the truth of what happened during the eclipse and met Griffith again. And this chapter kind of confirmed it for me. But unlike Guts he cannot drown in hatred and stake his life on revenge. All he could do, and all he had to console him was build that hill of swords. I can’t even imagine how lonely and helpless he must have felt, being the only survivor left with no answers and a thousand questions. But even so, the Griffith he faced this chapter cannot answer him, not really. I know I happily lost my shit and joked along with all of the ‘Rickert’s balls of steel and impending doom’ crap over the bitchsmack panel when it came out as a spoiler, but seeing it in the context of the chapter as a whole- wow. It took my breath away for a plethora of other reasons. People say he’s brave as hell for daring the slap the almighty Griffith but honestly I don’t think he even had time to work up courage, and it just happened on this spur of instinct- of way overdue hurt and that hurts me because jesus, Rickert deserves better dammit. Griffith’s reaction was on point though- I didn’t expect him to immediately chop Rickert’s head off or anything, but it’s impossible to read him nowadays. Is it just apathy? Like always? Does he even feel anything at all when Rickert rejects his new self- his pretty new kingdom? I can’t tell- I want to believe, but, alas. It’s Berserk. It kills. And I’m done.
Totally agreed about Rickert, I don’t often think about his survivor’s guilt but it’s a huge part of his character and it was rly satisfying to see him get to express some of his feelings about everything, directly to Griffith.
As for Griffith, his reaction is the most intriguing part of the scene to me ngl.
Like overall I think NeoGriffith is automatically interesting because of what Miura doesn’t show us? The last time we saw into his head was
like the first and only thing we find out about his internal life is that he’s not as unemotional as he appears, and every scene w/ NeoGriffith afterwards where his emotions are conspicuously hidden from us just adds to my sense that inevitably we’re heading towards a big revelation about his feelings specifically.
The scene with Rickert is especially interesting because it’s the first time we see NeoGriffith at a loss.
Like this is his only response to Rickert’s tirade, and it’s an acknowledgement of the difference between, well, who he is now and who he used to be, essentially.
Ngriff’s got nothing. And that is so damn interesting to me lol.
“Don’t throw away what you can’t replace,” is something Guts reminds Rickert right after the Reunion on the Hill of Swords and right before Guts does this:
NGriff starts putting a new Band of the Hawk together like he’s trying to replace the old one, and he’s invited Rickert to join. I got this idea from @mastermistressofdesire a while ago lol and it’s so perfect, like, basically NGriff invited Rickert along because deep down he wants validation from one of the original Hawks. It would be proof that “nothing has changed.” That he has successfully replaced the original Band.
But Rickert rejected him, and it seems like it throws him off. He’s supposed to be literally untouchable, but Rickert was able to slap him. He has nothing to say to Rickert in response other than to quietly agree that the Hawk symbol is different now. And his face is hidden from us while watching Rickert leave both times:
Like this ties in with this theory/hope of mine that NeoGriffith’s thing is going to end up being identity/isolation. As the absolute with no equal, as someone who has undergone huge changes and denies it (”this is the man I am.”), as a parallel to ascended Ganeshka, because he failed his own test and his heart started beating when he saw Guts and the first thing he did was deny to himself that it had anything to do with his feelings for Guts, and a few other little details, like eg this page at the end of a chapter all about sonia feeling lonely and isolated as the only person who sees the world the way she does:
Like c’mon Miura, all this suggestive emotional ambiguity has to be there for something.
@bthump i Guess that being founded by Griffith a man who betrayed his comrades, among other things shows that Falconia is based on a lie, and tragedy will come.
this response to you basically just became an excuse to disjointedly ramble about this subject more, sorry for how unnecessarily long it is lol
tbh the main point of that post was to demonstrate how personal the stakes are, and how falconia is essentially a response to the child abuse all three of our main characters have gone through, thematically. so if it does boil down to ‘welp the dude who enabled the existence of a utopia where lives aren’t bought and sold and more people aren’t traumatized the way our faves were is an asshole so throw out the whole thing’ i will find that very unsatisfying.
i think falconia poses a lot of interesting moral questions. is it worth griffith’s mountain of corpses? is granting humanity’s dream worth also granting their nightmares? was it worth the sacrifice? and those moral questions only work if falconia is portrayed as positive, which it has been so far (and as long as those negatives happened with the intention of creating the positive, hence why most of that post turned into complaining about the eclipse rape lol.)
i think miura could also go down a route where he portrays falconia more negatively in the sense that humanity shouldn’t wish for a saviour/escape, but should instead struggle through an uncaring universe. a la the lost children arc, essentially, which seems like a potentially very strong parallel.
though again, considering how personal the stakes are – always the child abuse, come on – i would find that message… sucky, to say the least. i mean honestly the message of the lost children arc basically boiled down to ‘child abuse happens, dwi kids bc running away is bad.’ i kind of hope that miura is either still going to complicate that at some point down the line (lol pipe dream) or at the very least that he does something different with falconia than he did with rosine’s land of the elves bc dear god i couldn’t stand a repeat of that shit lol.
I mean here’s one way of looking at it:
Guts, Griffith, and Casca all have experiences with csa. Guts’ way of coping is to lash out and kill everything that scares him. Casca’s way of coping is to latch onto a saviour. Griffith’s way of coping is to change the world.
Like, of the three, Griffith’s coping mechanism wins lol, and I’m not down with an overall message that says, you shouldn’t try to change things, you should just struggle your ass through life like Guts here, and fuck everyone else. I mean tbf I don’t think Guts’ method is shown in a great light, so it’s already a bit more complex than Griffith’s dream bad Guts’ dream good, but yk, I worry lol.
Again, like, the moral question shouldn’t be “is this place where people are free to live their lives without being exploited a good thing,” it should be “is this good thing worth all the bad things that led to its existence,” and I don’t want the story to answer that question for me, I want to be presented with the evidence and decide for myself. Do the ends justify the means narratives are only interesting as questions, not answers, imo.
so idk basically my response is yeah maybe some kind of tragedy will come to demonstrate that falconia was a doomed venture from the start, and/or that wanting to create a place without exploitation is an inherently flawed or immature desire, but if that happens i will be unimpressed lol. If falconia does end up being destroyed, ideally for me there would be negative consequences to that too, because there are no easy black and whites in Berserk (or there shouldn’t be.)
and like, the whole thematic connection to child abuse could be coincidental, but facts are that falconia is explicitly a place where the strong aren’t given free rein to exploit the weak, and our central and most emotionally resonant examples of strong given free rein to exploit the weak are the nobleman who bought casca, donovan, and gennon. Plus the apt Lost Children parallel. so if miura didn’t intend this he shouldn’t’ve filled berserk so full of thematically on the nose depressing backstories lol.
This is about Falconia, bodies and lives being bought and sold, the natural order of the world, etc.
tw for csa (no graphic panels but still disturbing enough for a cut imo)
The Conviction Arc shows us in broadstrokes the world humanity’s collective unconscious wants to overturn through starving crowds, dungeons filled with tortured ‘heretics,’ rampant plague and the desire for a saviour, and nobles terrorizing peasants using god as an excuse, but this is the up close and personal version. Lives and bodies as commodities, weak trampled by the strong, poor ruled by the rich, and everyone accepting it as the way things are.
Our three main protagonists during the Golden Age all have very personal formative trauma that revolves around being bought and sold as a matter of course.
And Griffith’s dream, as someone wracked with guilt for lives lost in his battles, someone who has sold himself to a rich and powerful predator to save some of those lives, is to overturn this natural order of things.
And he does. Falconia is a place where children aren’t sold as sex slaves, where the powerful do not oppress the weak, where the rich don’t exploit the poor, where everyone is treated equally and with dignity, where Guts, Griffith, and Casca could’ve all had happy childhoods.
One of the important aspects of this theme re: societal power dynamics and exploitation is that these evil actions
are excused away. This is true of like, just about every abuser of power and
rapist in Berserk. Some think it’s okay because someone more powerful than
them told them they’re allowed (torturer, Wyald/probably the rest of
the apostles, Mozgus’ torturers, Mozgus and the inquisition in general
passing the buck onto God, Donovan because Gambino allowed it, etc),
some think it’s okay because that’s just the way things are (Donovan
again, Adon, Rosine’s got some of this, etc), some think it’s okay because
they’re powerful enough to do anything they want (implied with Gennon,
Ganeshka,
the Godhand, a lot of apostles, Casca’s attempted rapist nobleman), and finally some think it’s okay because the world wronged them (Gambino, apostles like Rosine again and Eggman, Jill’s dad, the baby eating heretics lmao, one could argue the King, Mozgus’ torturers again, etc).
Again, it all comes back to the “reason of the world,” the natural order of things that NeoGriff overturns. In the ordinary world these people with power can do whatever they want and justify it to themselves. In NeoGriffith’s world, they don’t. Apostles, our prime example of powerful preying on weak because they’re allowed to, no longer prey on humans, simply because of NeoGriffith’s existence.
It seems safe to assume nobles no longer exploit people either, if nobility is even still a thing in Falconia. Like granted, I’m taking some of this as read based on what we’re told Falconia is, but I feel like the apostles (and the explicit focus on equality) are a good representative example of the point of Falconia, which is to essentially fix everything we see wrong with the world in the Conviction arc and, like I laid out above, in our protagonists’ lives.
The fact is that Falconia isn’t just a utopia on a distant macro level, where the readers can look at it and go, hm seems nice I guess but w/e. On a micro level it’s a place where these horrible things that happened to the characters we personally love and care about wouldn’t’ve happened. I, at least, am emotionally invested in that utopia because of this, yk?
But here’s where I get critical of the portrayal:
Femto and the Eclipse rape is the epitome of the harmful power structure. Like, Femto hits every branch on his way down this tree lol. During his transformation he met God, God absolved him of his guilt and responsibility by telling him he can do whatever the fuck he wants and it’ll be the right thing. He’s taking the place of the nobleman he saved Casca from and exemplifying existing power structures of strong preying on weak, and it’s petty revenge.
One can easily argue that the Eclipse rape is a distillation of every abusive power structure in Berserk.
So okay, you have Falconia, a utopia that exists to eschew these power structures and create a place of equality where no one is exploited, created by a dude whose defining act is the epitome of these abusive power structures.
And frankly it’s fucking pointless. This feels like the shallowest of shallow hot takes lol. Like, oooh what if this wonderful place where all the horrible things that traumatized our favourite characters are no longer an accepted given was created by an evil demon rapist???
Like… okay? And then what? The Eclipse rape has nothing to do with the social structure of Falconia, NGriff seems to have completely delivered on his/humanity’s dream regardless, he is now the higher power making the calls and he hasn’t told everyone to do whatever they want no matter who it hurts. From what we’ve seen he’s done the exact opposite, existing as a tempering influence on the apostles who no longer prey on those weaker than them, ending the Holy See’s reign of terror, ending wars in general, and uniting people in their differences.
So it’s just like, an arbitrary evil act which creates an artificial sense of moral greyness. It has no deep meaning. I mean I suppose Miura could address it in the future – I’ve mentioned that I think it could theoretically be really interesting for Casca to visit Falconia and see the dream she devoted her life to having come to fruition because of her rapist. But even so, that doesn’t have any like… deeper intrigue. That’s interesting for Casca’s character, not as an examination of moral relativity or w/e.
Similarly, if NeoGriffith turns out to be more human than he looks he could reflect on this contradiction in a potentially interesting way.
But I can’t think of a way to make it an interesting examination of morality. It’s boring at its core imo. I mean you could argue that it’s still worthwhile on that personal character level, but let’s be real here – no amount of potentially interesting character stuff in Casca’s future is worth removing her from the story for 20 years, and anything w/ NeoGriffith would be a retread of human Griffith’s guilt issues and frankly I don’t see it happening anyway lol.
So yeah ultimately this whole egalitarian utopia created by a rapist demon thing just does not work for me at all. There’s no reason the creator of this paradise /had/ to be a symbol of this abusive power structure it exists to destroy, again, that’s just an arbitrary happenstance, not a pre-requisite to utopia building, so it doesn’t say anything about the nature of Falconia. It doesn’t say anything about utopias in general, it doesn’t say anything about those power structures that we don’t already know (ie they bad, equality good).
It’s like, fake deep tbqh.
The actual interesting and morally grey aspect of Falconia is the way world peace was achieved by setting a bunch of fantasy monsters loose on humanity, and that has nothing to do with the Eclipse rape. Like, that’s literally all you need for the moral complexity. We have world peace and a growing utopia that everyone is welcome to join, but the price is monsters everywhere, and this could not have happened without those monsters to unite humanity in fear. Is the world better or worse than it used to be?
And NGriff being a rapist, or his demon alter ego being a rapist, or whatever the deal is there, adds nothing to that question, rather, it distracts from it and devalues the actual moral ambiguity.
In fact, it makes me wonder whether Miura regrets going with rape as his way of demonstrating Femto’s evil. Because it’s been such a non-issue to the whole theme of power structures, utopias, equality, etc, that it feels like Miura is sweeping it under the rug lol – it’s less of an attempt at dark irony and more the elephant in the room. I can’t even say with confidence that Femto was intended to be a symbol of exploitative power structures, despite how obvious it seems, because it just… hasn’t impacted the themes of the story at all.
these people just think that everything griffith is doing is all part of some evil master plan to end the world or ruin humanity or whatever even though hes never had any motivation of incentive to do such
that being said, it
definitely puts more of a stake in how they view guts fight lol? even if
they are ignoring literally everything else the story has told us and
rational common sense that a sudden reveal in the plot that griffith is
actually Evil (like. evil in the big bad villain way) would be
satisfying.
you mean wouldn’t be satisfying, right? bc yeah v true lol
it wouldn’t even be a reveal (we all saw the eclipse), it would just be a bizarre, tonally fucked up back and forth… weird thing. well, moreso than griffith’s narrative already is lol
like we get moments like this during the millenium falcon arc:
it’s just not framed as a tense bad vibey moment w/ an evil dude manipulating a bunch of poor innocent people so he can get a kingdom, it’s framed as ‘lol fuck you noble assholes, griffith’s back and this time he’s getting his utopia, high five’
like do other people basically read a scene like this with sinister horror movie music playing in the background?
i mean i completely get if (general) you can’t ignore the eclipse rape in your perception of the story, but i feel like if you can’t do that, then your berserk is fundamentally at odds with miura’s berserk, since he has diligently ignored it throughout the entirety of neogriffith’s narrative, without a single fuck given for the kind of awkward tonal pall it casts over everything.
i wonder what it’s like to read neogriffith’s narrative thru the lens of guts = good griffith = evil
bc one notable thing about how miura has been writing griffith’s side of the story since he was resurrected is that ngriff is treated as the protagonist – a distant, unemotional protagonist to be sure, we’re never in his head or anything, but still a protagonist
like that’s how the story is structured and beated. griffith’s allies are all interesting and sympathetic and three dimensional; griffith’s triumphs are treated as such, his enemy gets a chapter of sympathetic backstory but is undoubtedly the antagonist. griffith striding in and intimidating ganeshka into turning his army away is good, ganeshka leveling up and becoming an eldrich horror is bad, the human soldiers going “oh shit the war demons are all monsters what the fuck” is a tense moment and sonia telling them to stfu and just get along relieves that tension, etc.
like it’s no coincidence that we see flora’s assassination as part of guts’ side of the story, because it’s a darker moment and seeing it thru guts’ eyes allows miura to depict it as such. if we saw it thru griffith’s narrative it would’ve looked more akin to griffith and guts assassinating the queen back in the golden age.
and also it makes the second time their narratives intersect, on the docks when guts and zodd team up to fight ganeshka, very… interesting as a contrast to the fight outside flora’s house. enemies to reluctant allies.
anyway yeah basically i feel like ngriff’s millenium falcon narrative would read like, in a very bizarre way if you’re not going along with treating him as a protagonist during it. like, tonally it would be nonsensical and probably very frustrating.
Yeah I definitely see Femto/NeoGriff as basically an angel within the world of Berserk. The Godhand have been referred to as angels a few times too. I love the idea of him basically existing to fulfill humanity’s desires but his residual feelings for Guts are like a bug or flaw in the system that impedes God’s plans. Tho who knows?
Imo yeah becoming an apostle or a Godhand essentially strengthens your negative emotions and weakens/destroys your positive ones. “A fissure in your heart will open into which evil will surge,” Griffith explicitly losing his ability to feel empathy as he transforms, in the lost chapter Femto is described as being physically (well astral-ly?) made of evil, etc. So yeah, it literally changes you, but not necessarily into something completely new with no relation to your original self – it’s more like, an alternate version of you.
Are you asking me what Griffith wants, or just kind of musing outloud lol, I’m not sure based on your phrasing. But imo he just wants a kingdom/empire. I think NeoGriffith basically retained human Griffith’s ambition, but lost the very human reasons behind that ambition (guilt, despire for an escape from harsh reality, to feel like he has a reason for existing) in his transformation, making him kind of this eerie being who just exists to create a utopian empire.
But again, residual feelings for Guts in the mix can and should complicate that rly interestingly.
1. This is another one of my favourite expresions in Berserk tbh
2. I’m not saying this is deliberate, I’m not sure it would even be in character, but I can’t help but imagine this as Guts taunting Femto/Griffith about the fact that he was in love with him, his life was destroyed because of him, Guts drove him to make the sacrifice by leaving him, and Guts knows it.
Like yeah logically it’s just Guts being pissed off over the fact that Griffith sacrificed him to become a demon, especially with the follow up “thanks to me who’s fighting an army of the dead because of you,” but man, I’m js that knowing how the Golden Age goes gives this line potential Layers. You’re where you are now because this petty existence had all that power over you.
On the other hand this whole scene exists to set up Griffith making the sacrifice to bury his fragile heart bc of whatever went down w/ Guts, so like, it could be that deep?
Plus Femto’s response:
Just gonna reiterate that you mean absolutely nothing to me.
Whether that’s what Guts meant to say or not, I’m pretty sure he’s well aware of the irony of Femto emphasising his insignificance now, considering everything that went down between them. He might even stubbornly refuse to go back to post-Speech-to-Charlotte Guts, clinging to the fact that, no, I meant something to you and you meant something to me, and we both know that.
But then he would also have to know that it’s his fault that Griffith went this far. Which we know that he does, but idk, whenever I re-read the manga I feel like we should get to see more guilt from him.
Anyway, I don’t think Miura was fully taking all this into consideration while writing these first few chapters, but in retrospect you have to think about all the layers of meaning behind nearly every word Femto & Guts exchange. Like, this is off topic, but it’s in these chapters that Guts first finds out what sacrificing someone really means, and he doesn’t really react in any significant way, when realistically he should.
To be fair he’s unconscious when the Godhand actually explain the sacrifice and tell the Count that a sacrifice has to be someone you love so much it’s like they’re part of you. Which imo is kind of a hmmmm in and of itself, like there’s no reason Guts had to be unconscious at any point at all since he could barely move anyway, except to miss the explanation of who can be sacrificed. When he does wake up he just lies there and listens to the Count’s backstory before finally telling Puck to heal him. So I feel like it kind of suggests that Guts knowing that info might affect some things.
But otherwise yeah ia. I’m actually kind of rly into the idea of Guts stubbornly clinging to the knowledge that he was important to Griffith, hard earned as it was, now that you mention that. At least between the Eclipse and Griffith’s rebirth.
It’s like… idk I think there’s an argument that he left the Hawks because he knew he did mean something to Griffith, and that gave him the confidence to believe he could truly become his bff4ever if he changed his whole life lol. Whereas if he thought Griffith genuinely couldn’t give a shit about him he wouldn’t even try.
And then I think a similar way of thinking could be informing his behaviour during the Black Swordsman stuff. Like, I know I meant something to you, deny it all you want, I’m going to find you and force you to acknowledge me.
But after NGriff ditches him I think he kind of gives that up? Which is why he’s able to put his revenge thing on hold – it starts to feel futile when he genuinely believes NGriff feels nothing at all towards him. (Which is why that beating heart is a game changer in waiting js.)
idk lol I’m just thinking outloud.
And yeah like, it’s textual that he feels guilty for Griffith’s breakdown, from letting Casca stab him to:
But I do wish we saw more of that post-Eclipse other than the recurring moments when he thinks about Griffith kneeling in the snow and mopes lol. It kind of makes sense to me that we don’t see Guts feeling guilty after the Eclipse because I feel like the point of the Eclipse rape was to piss Guts off enough that he’d basically channel his guilt into rage, but I feel like we should still see more inner conflict. Not that we don’t see any, but yk, I always want more.
Ohhh, man, I remembered he got knocked out but I thought we didn’t get to see the exact moment when he came to … so I thought, you know, we don’t know exactly how much he’s heard?
But I went to check and this is him twitching awake after all the juicy details have been laid out:
Which is honestly even better than him hearing all that and not reacting.
He does get to hear these parts though:
I honestly like to interpret his expression here as loathing directed specifically @ the God Hand sans Griffith/Femto, for waltzing in and ruining everything lol.
And I agree with everything else you brought up! Like, Guts can actually be pretty confident and even cocky, so it’s not like he’s constantly putting himself down. He’s just a little naive, bless his heart.
I can’t WAIT for Neo-Griff to finally snap lol
It’s gotta happen. Even if Guts’ storyline is wall-to-wall disappointment I know in my soul NGriff’s is going somewhere good.
And yeah I’m sure the parallels aren’t lost on Guts lol, but i guess it’s not quite as direct as essentially saying ‘being able to sacrifice someone is proof that you love them.’ Also yeah I’m into that interpretation of his anger there, like imo he hates Femto on a personal level for being an evil version of the dude he loves, but he def hates the rest of the Godhand for facilitating it. His reaction when seeing Slan in the troll cave was even more overwhelmingly rage-y than when he saw NGriff on the Hill of Swords, eg.
huh, this isn’t rly something I’ve ever thought about, interesting question.
I’d say that in general he’d think about it in a utilitarian way – he knows what he’s capable of with it and he’d work to keep it that way. that includes fighting and being able to seduce a princess, or whoever else may be necessary. it’s a tool.
you could probably make a good argument for him having some issues with it/detachment from it though, that could feed into him thinking about his body as a tool rather than a part of him. like, looking at the way griffith said he seduced gennon eg, it seems like a way of removing himself from what actually took place – rather than thinking of it as gennon using him, griffith used a tool (his body) to get what he wanted, that kind of thing. a way of granting himself a sense of autonomy and detaching himself from the body which he’s washing in the river and thinking of as dirty now.
plus i feel like that attitude would make for some interesting character study-ish thought processes during his torture, with both the pain inarguably tying his body to him (also possibly related – his self harming habit?), and the torturer’s fetishization of his physical beauty, and afterwards when his body is no longer useful as a tool and he’s grown so used to the pain he feels numb and “like [his body is] floating in mid air.”
and ngl neogriffith’s feelings towards his body could also be interesting. femto was like, on the astral plane, his body was arguably not even real, but then neogriffith incarnates in flesh and blood again. he’s probably more concerned about his feelings lol, but he’d likely be like, super detached from his physical form, due to having lived on another plane of existence and being a pseudo god or w/e, and also literally untouchable. now it truly is nothing more than a tool, and one that can’t be broken or forcibly tied to him because no one can even inflict pain on him.
and therefore his thought processes could be extremely interesting if/when he is touched. though for me interesting is basically griffith lying badly to himself about not caring/not feeling/etc.
In the fourth and final part of this exploration of the tug of war between Griffith’s dream and his love for Guts, I’m going to look at how Griffith ultimately ends up choosing the dream over Guts despite the fact that Guts is more important to him – or, more accurately, because Guts is more important.
I’m starting by diving right into what is, hands down, my favourite part of Berserk.
The small battles we fought on the cobblestone when we were still young. The small victories we achieved. The many sparkling junk spoils we plundered.
In the evening… staring up from the back alley of brothels and taverns, where the sun never shines, I saw something. Shimmering against the setting sun, it was the brightest thing I had ever seen.
I made up my mind. The junk I would get for myself… would be that thing.
Darkness.
Deep darkness without even a trace of light.
How much time has passed since I was cast into this darkness…?
An eternity… but it also seems like an instant… All my senses are numbed and I can’t feel a thing. What of my body? It’s like it’s floating in mid-air. Have I retained my sanity? Did I go insane long ago?
Only him.
Like lightning on a dark night, he rises up within me, blazing. And again and again like a tidal wave, an infinite number of feelings surge upon me. Malice, friendship, jealousy, futility, regret, tenderness, sorrow, pain, hunger… So many recurring, yearning feelings. That giant swirl of violent emotions in which none are definite but all are implied. That alone is the bond which keeps my consciousness from vanishing amidst the numbness.
I know that I’m different from other people. Those I’ve met can by no means disregard me. They always view me with either a look of good will or animosity. I know that the good will forms into trust or fellowship and the animosity into awe or possibly dread. Thereby have I grasped… the hearts of so many in these hands.
…But why is it when it comes to him I always lose my composure?
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive. Out of so many thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies, why just him…?
How long ago did someone I was supposed to have in hand… instead gain such a strong hold on me?
Because you’re in love with him, oh my god.
At the end of the day, that’s what it boils down to. That’s the difference between Griffith shutting Casca out and letting Guts in. That’s why Casca has been jealous of Guts. Casca wanted to be Griffith’s emotional support, something indispensible to his dream – she wanted to be the one to “change him that way” – and learning that her feelings for Griffith were romantic all along points pretty conclusively imo to envying Guts for being the person Griffith loves, rather than her.
I’m going to be honest here: as much as I’ve been taking it as read that Griffith is in love with Guts (and, tbqh, vice versa) I wasn’t actually planning to make it a central point of this meta. I genuinely thought, going in, that I could focus on Guts as an emotional crutch and shield against his self loathing, as I’ve been doing so far. Yk, Griffith allows himself to become dependant on him because he loves him, but the point is the emotional dependency, not the love, right?
Fuckin wrong.
The climax of Griffith’s narrative can’t be understood without not just acknowledging that Griffith is in love with Guts, but recognizing it as the whole point and his central motivation.
This is going to be important later, but for now I’m stating that up front and I figure this is a good place to do so because, between Casca’s confession to Guts and Griffith’s monologue, it’s basically Miura spelling out the fact that this love is Griffith’s strongest motivating factor.
(And, just as an aside, despite the fact that it’s never explicitly defined, I’m calling it romantic love because a) it is, b) like, it just fucking is lol. I feel like you have to jump through hoops and twist yourself in knots to call it platonic. Without assuming that straightness is the default, saying Griffith is in love with Guts is genuinely the most straightforward, clear and concise way of reading this relationship to me. All my points hold true if you call it platonic love so ultimately you do you, but if I called it that I’d be being disingenuous.)
This monologue is our re-introduction to Griffith after a year of nothing but torture, darkness, and self-reflection. It’s the definitive statement on his relationship to Guts and how it compares to the dream now, after he’s lost both.
And the dream barely rates a mention. The matching visual of the shining/vivid thing, and the way Griffith opens the monologue by describing the dream as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, prime the reader to expect that the one vivid thing is the dream. That after losing Guts, Griffith has returned to obsessing over the dream in deluded desperation, or is maybe lamenting its demise.
But it’s a pure bait and switch because Guts is all-important to him now. Despite Guts’ rejection, despite the loss, despite the fact that he’s partially blaming Guts for having been tortured for a year, next to him the dream grows dull.
A core point of this meta was basically to show how this has been true from the very start. It’s not that Guts only outshines the dream when the dream has been lost to him, it’s that, after losing both the dream and Guts and being forced to confront himself, stripped of all those defenses that help keep him in denial, Griffith is finally able to understand, too late, what has been most important to him all along.
And this remains true. From Guts rescuing him to Griffith choosing to sacrifice him for the dream, Guts is still more important.
But if Griffith’s story up until Guts leaves has been about how his relationship with Guts had begun to replace his dream as the thing he turns to in order to shield himself from his weaknesses – guilt, self-loathing, the weight of lives on his shoulders, etc – then his story when Guts returns follows the opposite trajectory:
it’s about how he returns to his dream as his armour against his feelings for Guts.
And the place we’re starting from is Griffith letting go of his dream.
Back near the beginning Zodd gave Guts a prophecy:
If you can be said to be a true friend of this man… then take heed… When his ambition collapses… death will pay you a visit! A death you can never escape!
Because Zodd is a dramatic asshole. But the thing is, Griffith’s ambition has collapsed. His dream’s dead. The closest he can get to it before literal magic intercedes in his life is in moments of self-delusion, like when he told Charlotte he’d return to her, and when he snapped and chased a hallucination. But in the cold light of day, aware and relatively sane, he knows his dream is gone. Charlotte could still be over the moon for him and it’s not going to help him gain her kingdom without a tongue or working limbs, and he does know it.
And when Griffith watches the castle disappear over the horizon and lets the flowers in his hands go as his symbolic child self runs away from the brightest thing he’d ever seen rather than towards, when Griffith lets go of his dream, he’s… okay.
The Godhand don’t make an appearance. The behelit doesn’t come back and start screaming. Griffith is continuing on. This is acceptance. We’ve already seen the monologue about how the dream barely matters to him in comparison to Guts after all, so this isn’t too surprising either.
And then fucking Wyald shows up.
This fight’s significance to Griffith’s narrative is in his distance from the others, his alienation in being the only one who can’t pick up a sword to fight, and his helplessness as he desperately tries to do something to help Casca and Guts and can’t even manage to tear himself away from his minders, particularly in contrast to the fight against Zodd.
Eg:
Guts compares this fight to the Zodd fight a lot. When he’s briefly knocked out we see a flashback to a discussion with Erica where he talks about Zodd and Erica suspects he wants to fight him again. We see Guts thinking about Zodd as his only other frame of reference for a real live monster. And we see him think about Zodd when it comes to his and Griffith’s partnership specifically.
This emphasizes the difference between that fight and this current fight. Namely:
Whereas when Griffith tried to rescue Guts from Zodd they then squared off and faced him together, when Guts saves Casca he tells her to get lost and insists on taking Wyald one on one, because he’s got a score to settle.
Compared to the fight with Zodd, which led to the most positive and hopeful moment of their relationship – Griffith admitting he had no rational reason to leap into danger and save Guts, and Guts realizing he may have found what he’s been looking for ever since he killed Gambino – this fight with Wyald is a showcase of Griffith’s enforced distance and isolation from everyone, especially Guts.
If Griffith saving Guts from Zodd was the pinnacle of their relationship, the truest and most revealing moment of how Griffith feels, leading to Guts’ subsequent acceptance of those feelings and dedication to him in turn, then Guts pointedly fighting Wyald alone highlights the low point they’ve entered where they’re forcibly separated by Griffith’s broken body and voicelessness. They’ll never be a team again.
The chapter right after the fight is a heartbreaking mix of hope and despair. It begins, very appropriately, with Charlotte telling Anna that Griffith said he’d come back to her. Logically, like I’ve said, Griffith was deluding himself at that point. He accepts that his dream is gone a few hours later when they make it out of the sewer tunnels.
But by bringing it up and explaining that moment here, at the beginning of this chapter, it serves handily as ominous foreshadowing, and, even better, it’s a reminder that Griffith has always clung to his dream as emotional self-defense, and it still “smoulders from the bottom of [his] heart.”
The thing is, the comparison between Wyald and Zodd isn’t solely for the sake of contrast. It’s also a reminder of that pinnacle of their relationship, of
Griffith risking his life and dream for Guts, of Guts feeling like he’d found that indefinable thing he’d been searching for ever since he killed Gambino. It’s a sign of hope that the potential for their relationship isn’t lost. They’ve lost their ability to fight side by side, but their relationship isn’t predicated on just being able to fight together, or Griffith’s leadership, or the structure of the Hawks. It’s based on genuine love and mutual respect, and that isn’t gone.
Despite everything, they can still smile at each other. This scene demonstrates the potential they have just as two people who love each other, and gives readers vain hope for their future as it simultaneously sows the seeds for the destruction of their relationship.
The mask/helmet is a symbol of his former role as the leader of the Hawks, and hence, a symbol of everything that entails: the dream, repression, isolation, the image of perfection, everything I’ve been talking about for way too high a wordcount now. All those defense mechanisms.
Guts saying it’s okay for Griffith to take off the mask since it’s just the two of them is, therefore, an extremely loaded statement. Guts is offering Griffith the opportunity to be vulnerable, to be himself, no image, no mask, no leadership position, just the two of them, as equals, in each other’s company. He’s offering acceptance of Griffith, weakness and vulnerability and physical damage and all.
Instead of accepting, Griffith asks for his armour. It’s a way of reinforcing the barrier between them, and hiding his vulnerability.
The great thing about this chapter is that I don’t have to work to justify any of this because it’s literally called, “Armor to the Heart,” lol. Telling Charlotte he’d return was denial for the sake of guarding his heart against the reality of having lost everything he’d once strived for, and asking for his armour is a more literal version of that. Once Guts puts it on him he starts awkwardly denying reality too – such as telling Griffith he’ll be able to swing a sword soon.
Rather than Griffith being able to accept the truth of what’s happened – that he’s vulnerable, he’s helpless, he can no longer win for the sake of the dead, everything he’s worked for is lost – and maybe find consolation in Guts’ acceptance of him and love for him despite that, he tries to keep hiding behind the old image of perfection, the way he used to. This is basically a futile version of Griffith smiling and telling Casca, “it’s nothing.”
When Wyald returns like a bad penny, he really gets to the heart of what it means for Griffith to manufacture this image of himself to hide his vulnerability behind, and boy is it devastating:
Griffith is a symbol. He has deliberately cultivated that ideal image of himself as the perfect leader, a knight in shining armour. It keeps him distanced and detached from everyone except Guts, who has been allowed to see through it. His allies see him as a symbol of hope and change for the better, his enemies see him as a symbol of corruption in the system and change for the worse, Gennon sees him as a symbol of perfect beauty, Charlotte sees him as a symbol of a perfect relationship, and his Hawks see him as a symbol of their rise to glory.
And, of course, it all leads back to Griffith’s dream. It’s the reason it’s necessary to become this idealized image, rather than a real person. It’s an intrinsic part of his ascent to the throne.
And it’s part of how he convinces himself that he’s all right, “it’s nothing.” It helps him deny his emotions and bury them. If he can convince everyone else he’s perfect, he can convince himself. That mask of perfection is an intrinsic part of his defense against his self-loathing.
This is what he tried to hide behind when he asked Guts to dress him in his armour, and this is what Wyald strips away from him now.
He’s lost nearly every defense he has against his own self-hatred. His dream is dead in the water and he failed to prove that everything he’s done and all the lives lost in his wake were worthwhile sacrifices. He’s not one of the mover shakers of the world, he’s just an ordinary person who wanted to be special and couldn’t stand the weight of guilt on his shoulders.
Now he’s helpless and dependent; not only did he wholly fail the people who follow him, he is now reliant on them, without anything even to offer in exchange. Wyald pretty much takes away his last lingering ability to deny this.
To Griffith, this is as close to hell as you get without dying first. He didn’t keep winning for the sake of the dead, he lost, for good. He failed everyone, dead and alive, and his very existence is worse than worthless, it’s a burden on others (from his point of view).
I’d say that this couldn’t be a more perfectly tailored hell for Griffith if someone designed it that way, but, well, someone did design it that way.
Then the next scene just doubles down.
Honestly there are a shitload of possible readings of this scene, many of them not even mutually exclusive, and I think there are a number of complex factors that feed into it, but I’m landing on one for the purposes of this meta.
Based on what I perceive of Griffith’s own feelings of self-worth and his current headspace, and particularly the way the scene with Wyald right before serves as a literal and metaphorical stripping away of everything that gives Griffith a sense of worth, I think one solid reading is that he’s offering himself to Casca here because it’s the only thing left of himself that potentially has worth to someone.
Like I’ve seen other Berserk fans call this an attempted rape as a matter of course, which couldn’t be further from the truth, and not only because he literally stops when Casca says stop, and is physically incapable of even taking his clothes off. It’s not a sneak preview of the Eclipse rape, it’s a huge, pointed contrast.
This is Griffith at his lowest. He’s broken, desperate, and he feels worthless. He’s not trying to fuck Casca because he wants to, it’s because at one point that’s what she wanted.
He moves on her right after overhearing her tell Guts that she just wants to be held, after she contemplates her shaking hands and remembers how Griffith had once been able to comfort her with just a hand on her shoulder. Contextually the set-up of this scene points to Griffith desperately wanting to be that person who could comfort Casca once again, instead of being the person who needs comfort.
I also think there’s a precedent that sets this scene up with Casca comforting Guts sexually and thinking, “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.” The difference between giving and being given to is a recurrent theme, and I think this scene draws on it.
But he is the one who needs to be comforted. He no longer has the power or the position to be the one offering comfort. Casca refuses his sexual offer, and as he trembles above her, she lays her hand on him, in a role-reversal that just highlights everything of his past self that he’s lost.
If Griffith’s ability to once put on the mask of perfection and comfort Casca even in the midst of his own despair was a demonstration of strength, this is a humiliating demonstration of complete and utter weakness and uselessness. It seems that now he’s nothing to Casca, once his most devoted follower and admirer, except a victim who needs to be taken care of.
Guts’ hand on his shoulder in Tombstone was a sign of his emotional vulnerability to Guts specifically, because of the unique nature of their relationship. It was a symbol of Guts’ hold on him and Griffith’s weakness in loving him. Casca’s hand on Griffith’s back now is a sign of Griffith’s vulnerability in general. His armour’s been stripped off, his dream is gone, everything he once relied on to help him repress his self loathing has been ripped away, and now he can’t offer Casca anything; he can only accept her comforting hand.
Griffith has one thing left: Guts, and the possibility of absolution to be found in his love, if Guts does still love him. If Griffith needed to hear that he wasn’t cruel back in Tombstone of Flame, now he desperately, desperately needs to hear that he’s worth something to someone. That he isn’t just a cruel monster who piled up a mountain of corpses and then couldn’t even climb it all the way, who is now just a useless inconvenience to everyone with the weight of thousands of bodies on his shoulders.
And I believe, despite everything, that Guts would’ve been enough. Narratively, we’re told that he could’ve been enough. Griffith’s torture chamber monologue, Griffith letting his dream go, the way “I’ll st-” is placed on a panel of Griffith sleeping through it, conveying a sense of missed opportunity perfectly:
And the way Guts realized he fucked up by leaving only seconds after Griffith has overheard them.
Note that this line is a conclusive call-back to Guts musing on this statement a few pages earlier, making it clear that it refers to his regret over leaving, and how by leaving he threw away the thing he wished for in the first place:
If there wasn’t at least the possibility for Griffith to find some kind of happiness in a life with Guts at his side despite losing everything else, none of this would matter. Guts finally making the right choice by deciding to stay just as Griffith thinks he’s going to leave again would be dramatically pointless.
And this is a tragedy, so despite all these hope spots, this happens:
And Griffith just fucking breaks.
What do you fear in this place? asks the version of Griffith who still has a dream, and then he points to another place, a place where Griffith could leave his fears behind.
Like this is literally right after he overhears Casca telling Guts to leave. This was the part I struggled with until I just went with my gut, backed up, and realized that this isn’t actually about Griffith’s self-loathing, or his fears of being worthless or a burden. It’s not about being stripped of his coping mechanisms.
This is about being in love with Guts. This is about the visceral fear of Guts leaving him again, not because of how it might reflect on Griffith as a person with or without worth, but because he loves Guts so much he can’t bear the thought of a life without him.
Griffith’s dream is a coping mechanism. This page conveys that concept as clearly as anything. “What do you fear in this place?” Run away from it, towards your dream, your kingdom, the safe place you’ve fantasized about all your life, the place where you have the power to make things better.
He desperately chases his hallucinatory vision of his dream, and then he has a vision of a potential future:
And, true to form, the defining aspect of this short, three-page sequence isn’t the loss of Griffith’s dream or his helplessness and dependency. It’s not about his self-loathing or being unable to hide his weakness behind armour and a mask of perfection. It’s Guts’ absence. The point is that Griffith is here, with Casca, and Guts is elsewhere.
“With you and the boy… just the three of us.” Like their kid is even named after Guts, just to highlight the actual Guts’ absence as emphatically, and depressingly, as possible. The first image is Griffith surrounded by Miura’s patented black panel of symbolic isolation, Casca brings up Guts and wonders where he is, then reiterates that it’s “just” the three of them. In a total of three pages containing almost no other information what we’re given is Griffith with Casca and a nightmare kid named after the man he loves, Guts gone, and Griffith’s total mental and emotional detachment from the world.
And then he wakes up and immediately tries to kill himself.
What does Griffith fear in this place?
The first time Guts left him he ran to Charlotte, the means of achieving his dream, for comfort, denial, escape from reality, and self-destruction.
This time he tries to turn to his dream again, but it’s nothing more than a hallucination that segues into a nightmare in which Guts has left him behind, and with no dream to escape to, no armour or mask bury his heart under, no coping mechanisms left, he loses himself. “This peace and quiet isn’t so bad,” he thinks, barely even aware, his life stretching out ahead of him, without Guts.
That is, after all, the one difference between now and the torture chamber. He’d lost his dream, his tongue, the use of his limbs, his self-worth, ability to hide behind an image, and Guts then, too, and the Godhand never showed. But Griffith thought he would eventually die in the torture chamber – even if the King specified that he live through a year, that’s a lot less than a lifetime. Now he’s faced with a full life in this state, apart from Guts.
And I want to make this distinction clear. The prospect of losing Guts is what sends him into suicidal despair. It’s not the loss of his dream or the stripping away of the persona he hid under – in other words, it’s not the loss of the coping mechanisms he used to rely on that drives him to despair. Losing those is likely what makes suicide, and then sacrifice, seem like the only possible escape from his despair, hence the set-up with Wyald and Casca hammering home the fact that he’s lost all his ways of guarding his heart, but it’s not the source of that despair. The source is Guts.
Guts was replacing the dream as Griffith’s defense against self loathing. But that does not make Guts just one more coping mechanism to lose. He’s not the final straw that broke the camel’s back, he’s the whole bundle of hay.
The premise of the first three parts of this meta was that his relationship with Guts helps Griffith deal with the immense weight of everything he’s done on the path to his dream, and had the potential to fully replace achieving the dream as Griffith’s way of not hating himself.
Well the premise of this part is that the reason Guts could’ve replaced the dream is because Griffith is in love with Guts, incredibly, all-consumingly in love with him, and now that is what he needs help coping with. There’s no getting around this lol, and no way of downplaying it either.
We know this because of how his nightmarish vision of a life with Casca highlights Guts’ absence instead of, eg, his self loathing, or his lack of an image to hide behind, or his guilt, or being a burden to Casca (hell, in his imagination she’s explicitly content.) We know it because it’s the words, “even if it’s alone, you have to go,” that make Griffith snap. We know it because the entire narrative of the Golden Age has largely been devoted to establishing that Griffith feels unprecedented, incredibly powerful feelings for Guts, and this is the payoff.
We know it because Berserk thoroughly foreshadowed the Eclipse during the Black Swordsman arc, and it was absolutely not subtle about about love as a motivation:
I’ve written a post fully explaining this already so I’m not going to be that thorough here, but suffice to say, through images like Femto there on “so that you could bury your fragile human heart,” through Puck’s direct questions and statements, through the entire point of this scene being to hint at Guts’ backstory, etc, it’s made very clear that the Count and Griffith/Femto are parallels.
And we know it because of what drives Griffith past that final point of despair that opens the behelit.
Sorry for posting practically the whole scene, but damn, don’t you just want to bask in it?
After everything – the loss of his dream, the torture, the loss of his voice and working limbs, the loss of his image, of his escape, of his denial, of his pride, and the loss of Guts – what finally plunges him into the kind of despair that creates a demonic demigod is the touch of Guts’ hand. Specifically his hand on Griffith’s shoulder.
What does Griffith fear in this place? What drives Griffith into despair?
Love.
It’s the understanding how utterly fucking gone he is for Guts. That hand on his shoulder signifies Griffith’s vulnerability to Guts because of his feelings, and it’s that touch that finally opens the behelit.
To split hairs, what drives him to despair is not believing that Guts will leave him, it’s knowing that if Guts leaves him, the loss will destroy him.
After all, it already happened once.
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive.
And Griffith’s vision of the future shows us a version of what he believes will happen: if the first time Guts left his body was destroyed, the second time the rest of him will follow. We saw him existing in a seemingly permanent state of semi-dissociation, maybe living entirely in daydreams (”daydreaming again…”), barely aware of the present.
Love is the source of Griffith’s despair – the overwhelming, horrifying, life-destroying vulnerability of love.
So Griffith turns back to his first defense mechanism to escape it.
Now, I don’t want to downplay the role Griffith’s guilt plays in the sacrifice. I didn’t write three posts about Griffith’s issues only to completely ignore them at the climax of his arc just because love happens to take centre stage.
So let’s briefly recap.
Griffith is filled with guilt and self-loathing; his dream was a way of repressing those feelings with the belief that one day his very existence, and everything he’s done during that existence, would be justified. One day Guts came along and instead of continuing to live in repression and emotional denial he fell in love and started opening up. This made him vulnerable and “weak,” so when Guts seemingly rejected him because of everything Griffith hates about himself, his dream was no longer enough for him to retreat to. So he crashed and burned. Now he’s stripped of all his defenses and the horror of that vulnerability to love has sent him into pure despair.
And now some cenobite looking assholes have joined the party and they’re telling Griffith ex-fucking-zactly what he’s spent most of his life desperately hoping to one day hear, in some form or another:
And despite being plunged into crimson-behelit-opening despair by his love for Guts, despite already being told everything he wants and needs to know – that he’s been chosen by God, all is not lost, he has another chance, and to take it what he has to do is sacrifice the Band – he still irrationally, desperately prioritizes Guts when his life is in danger yet again:
This is such a tragic moment, because this is the last time Griffith chooses Guts over the dream. And, once again because he loves Griffith, Guts is the one who lets go of his hand, falling away from Griffith into darkness like a lost beacon.
So, separated from Guts, the Godhand bring Griffith up to the palm of the hand and then they proceed to play him like a fiddle, knowing exactly which buttons to push, in their exploration of his self-loathing and guilt.
Like, they’re not lying to Griffith, technically. What Ubik and Conrad are doing is playing to Griffith’s shame and guilt. They are showing Griffith his own image of himself:
Griffith sees himself as a stupid kid scaling a mountain of corpses to get to a castle. He’s consumed by guilt, which is why he can’t stop – because if he does, if he apologizes, if he repents, everything will come to an end, and that mountain of people will have died for nothing.
We already know this, of course.
The Godhand show Griffith his own perception of himself, and tell him that it’s completely accurate.
So of course, of course we have to revist the moment Griffith asked someone if they see him the same way he does, in the hopes of getting a different answer:
With Guts, Griffith could’ve taken a different route. He could’ve learned not to see himself as a monster. In showing Guts the worst of himself and being accepted, he could’ve accepted his own self-worth, independent of achieving a dream.
I mean, let’s be real here: Griffith has no real reason to feel as guilty as he does, or as driven for the sake of the dead as he does. He’s right when he says that the Hawks chose to follow him. The only people whose deaths he forced were enemies trying to kill him, give or take a pedophile who wanted to capture him as a sex slave rather than kill him, and a kid whose death was an accident and not on his orders, even if it did work out great for him. He’s a military leader, but so is Guts, so is Casca, hell so is Rickert technically, and none of them feel any guilt about the people they kill in battle, or the men they send to their deaths.
It’s heavily suggested that Griffith wants a kingdom in order to create a place of equality, where people’s lives and bodies aren’t bought and sold. (”What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth even a single piece of silver.”) When he eventually does get a kingdom that’s exactly what it is, and it exists to grant the deep desire of humanity as a collective – in other words, the people who fought and died for it considered it worth fighting and risking their lives for. It’s not just Griffith who wants this kingdom, according to the narrative, it’s humanity – certainly the non-elite majority of humanity.
Griffith thinking of himself as a monster, and the Godhand calling him one, is Griffith’s own personal self-loathing bullshit talking, not an objective moral judgement, or Miura’s moral judgement.
Like, Miura deliberately shows us that the Godhand are fucking with him, telling us that chapter 77′s magical mystery tour through “the reality within his conscious realm” is highly manipulative and far from objective:
If Guts – any close, intimate, revealing, and genuine relationship really, but Griffith’s with Guts is the one this is about – was Griffith’s potential to see himself differently, to judge himself less harshly through the eyes of another, then the Godhand is a reinforcement of Griffith’s self-loathing.
Guts could’ve told Griffith he wasn’t cruel, wasn’t a monster, that he genuinely loved and admired him even while knowing all those things Griffith is ashamed of, and left so he could be more like him and become a friend to him. But he didn’t, and now the Godhand are using his words to tell Griffith that he is cruel, he is a monster – and that it’s necessary to be.
(And, just to be clear, this isn’t a judgement of Guts. He has his own giant pile of issues contributing to this world-destroying misunderstanding, and I feel like I fully understand his reasons for every mistake he made, and I love him for them lol, just like I love Griffith for his contribution of issues to this enormous fuck up. But this is about Griffith’s side of things, not Guts’.)
So, if Guts could’ve been a healthier way for Griffith to be absolved of guilt by altering his perspective of himself, the Godhand absolves Griffith of guilt through the method I described way back in part one of this thing:
by giving him a divine seal of approval.
If it be reason that destiny transcend human intellect and make playthings of children… it is cause and effect that a child bear his evil and confront destiny.
This is your destiny, kid. You’re not responsible for anything, you have no reason to feel guilty. You’re a horrible monstrous person piling up corpses to reach a castle, but hey, it’s okay – that’s your predetermined role in life. So you’re absolved, just as long as you roll with fate, add some more bodies to the pile, and double-down on that whole monster thing.
This is everything Griffith has always wanted.
Turns out he’s special after all. Everything he’s done that he hates himself for is justified because in the end he was meant for greatness. All those dead people can still achieve the thing they died for, all the dirty things he’s done were worthwhile, even his torture and despair was part of the wheel of fate and has meaning. All he has to do to sign off is agree to sacrifice a group of people who already pledged their lives to him, who he led and fought beside in full knowledge that they might one day die on his orders, for the sake of his dream, anyway.
And also Guts.
I don’t think I need more evidence that Guts is special and stands alone among the rest of the sacrifices, but I do want to point out that right before the Eclipse Miura emphasizes that Guts is no longer a part of the Hawks.
Guts fights his own battles. Unlike the rest of the Hawks, he has very deliberately removed himself from Griffith’s dream so he can be Griffith’s friend and equal instead of his underling. Back with Casca he said he wants to, “draw the line… keep things separate.” And, “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll never entrust my sword to another again. I’ll never hang from someone else’s dream.”
This distinction between Guts and the rest of the Hawks is significant because he is not being sacrificed for the same reason as the rest of the Hawks. He’s not being sacrificed as an underling, as one more necessary evil on the path to his dream. Once again, Guts stands apart to Griffith.
I tend to think of the sequence from Griffith reaching the palm of the hand to “I sacrifice,” our very last scene with original, fully human Griffith, as a mirror to our very first scene with Griffith in structure.
That first scene was much shorter, but similarly 90% of it revolved around Griffith’s dream and the philosophy of fate and vindication behind it, building up to the moment that he said, “it’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.”
90% of this sequence revolves around Griffith’s dream, his guilt issues, his self-loathing, and Void validating it all and vinidcating him, telling him he’s one of those keys that shape the world after all. And it all builds up to this:
Among thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies… you’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.
Griffith has a lot of very good reasons to say yes to the sacrifice. I sure hope somewhere in this fuckload of words about those reasons I’ve managed to show that it makes perfect logical sense for him to take the Godhand up on their offer.
And yet, the final, climactic reason given – the moment all this logic builds to, is emotional. You made me forget my dream.
Ultimately Griffith has two reasons for making the sacrifice:
1. achieve his dream, pile up some more bodies, reach the castle, let fate absolve him of guilt.
2. fuck you, Guts.
Griffith overhearing Casca telling Guts to leave, Guts’ hand on Griffith’s shoulder sending him into despair, the Count parallel, the sheer amount of Griffith’s narrative that revolves around his life-destroying, irrational feelings for Guts, the final conclusive statement from human Griffith… I feel like, given everything, it’s impossible to deny this aspect of Griffith’s motivation.
Again, the dream is an escape. In making the sacrifice, Griffith is falling back on all of his defense mechanisms to escape the pain in his heart, the pain of love.
“You’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream,” is a tender, tragic statement of love, and it’s also an accusation. How dare you be necessary to me, how dare you be able to destroy me just by leaving, how dare you make me love you.
It’s because of that love that Griffith lost everything, because he needed Guts, Guts made him weak, and Guts abandoned him. It’s because of that love, because he thought Guts was leaving again, that Griffith felt the worst despair of his life and tried to kill himself.
GOD he’s so in love. And that’s what he’s he’s trying to carve out of himself and escape from, by making the sacrifice. His fragile human heart.
It’s another form of self-destruction. The way he “destroyed himself,” by throwing himself at his dream when Guts left the first time mirrors the way he’s destroying himself now, with the exact same motivation behind it.
He becomes the monster he’s always believed himself to be. His armour and the mask – the one he wore in the torture chamber, the one mockingly modeled after his White Hawk persona – become an exoskeleton. Femto embodies Griffith’s self-loathing. Every part of himself Griffith hated, every reason he thought he was cruel, every assassination he was ashamed of, every body paving the way to his dream, is what Femto is made of, and his shame, his self-hatred, his love, his guilt, his despair, have all been shattered and torn away.
And if Femto is Griffith’s self-loathing, then NeoGriffith is the image of perfection.
In making the sacrifice and burying his heart, Griffith became the embodiment of everything he hated in himself, and everything those who never truly knew him admired about him. The cruelty, the monstrosity, the ruthlessness, the filth; the beauty, the immaculate perfection, the charisma, the sense of singularity.
He destroyed himself and became the false conception of Griffith.
Give or take.
Welp, that does it. I’m not going to really get into anything Femto or NeoGriffith has done or said, because this is about human Griffith’s character and narrative. Griffith’s final act as a whole person was choosing to sacrifice Guts for his dream, and lbr you couldn’t ask for a more narratively satisfying send off, so that’s where I’m ending this. And tbh if I went any further it’d lean way more towards critique than analysis anyway.
Ultimately the Golden Age is Griffith’s story. Guts may be the protagonist, but it’s Griffith’s feelings, actions, and choices that drive the plot. Griffith kickstarts the narrative and he ends it. And Griffith’s story is about falling in love. It’s about how love can strengthen you and help you overcome the worst of yourself, and it’s about how love can make you weak, vulnerable, and desperate for an escape. And, because it’s a tragedy, it’s about how and why Griffith chooses escape and succumbs to the worst of himself rather than overcoming his flaws through a mutually supportive relationship with Guts.
tyfyt
ty everyone who’s commented or said things in tags, liked these posts, etc, i really appreciate it and it’s v heartwarming to know people enjoyed reading this ❤
omg right??? ty for pointing this out, like, what the hell is he doing having tea in full armour lol
but yk symbolically it does make perfect sense. the armour is such a strong metaphor for like, repression/denial/etc. like there’s even a chapter named after that metaphor (armor to the heart). it’s to the point where i feel seeing neogriffith wearing anything else would be a big indication that shit’s getting real for him.
interestingly the only time we see him without the armour as far as i remember is when he’s naked. or idk maybe it’s not interesting, maybe that was just a plot necessity since he’d just hatched out of an egg apostle lol, but it is kind of a strong contrast.
Yeah I think it’s possible, but it would depend on like… what NGriff’s emotions even are I guess. If like you suggest he has residual feelings for Guts because they were so life-alteringly strong when he was a human and Guts survived the sacrifice, then his capacity to care enough about anyone else to feel remorse is probably long gone. similarly if it’s just the fetus fucking with him then guilt and remorse is probably totally out of the picture.
I’m really into the idea of NGriff having a full range of unfrozen emotions and just completely repressing them tho. like, if human griffith justified his dirty/cruel actions to himself by telling himself that it would be worth it and he’ll be validated by fate when he achieves his goal (which i think he did but i’m not going to get into it rn bc that’s an upcoming post), then neogriffith can double down on that because he has achieved his goal now and has basically had his entire life and all his actions validated directly by god lol
so even if part of himself has woken up or w/e and is there with his beating heart feeling actual emotions and being horrified at what he’s become, it’d be really easy for him to deny/ignore those feelings because he has divine right, his life was/is dictated by fate and god itself told him everything he does is exactly what’s meant to happen, and therefore he has no reason to feel guilty for anything ever
which has the potential to be a really interesting internal struggle in theory. in practice the fact that the guilt-worthy subject is rape really like, sours it for me lbr, i can only cringe at the prospect of Miura addressing it in the future, but welcome to berserk i guess.
Also if I was going to make a guess about what’s most likely to happen in actual canon, I’d say that NGriff is probably never going to express actual remorse for anything though there may be subtle hints of inner conflict. give or take how much or how little of his feelings end up genuinely being attributed to the patron saint of lazy writing, the fetus.
Yeah totally, even all the way back in the Black Swordsman arc Puck gets his great moment where he calls the Count out on still having human feelings. And oh shit lol you’re right, that never occured to me but Slan wiping away tears like a couple chapters after Griffith is told “this is the crystalization of your last tear shed,” is more than a little suspect. I guess God telling Griffith he’ll never cry again could be less literal and more, you’ll never feel that despair that brought you to this point again, but still, like, the Godhand def have feelings, they’re just very dark/negative ones from what we see.
So idk, maybe we’re supposed to think that by incarnating himself as a flesh and blood person Femto/NeoGriff should’ve lost even those negative emotions for some magical reason, but something went wrong?
Or maybe Femto just believed he was emotionless despite that clearly not being the case, hoped he’d remain “emotionless” even after incarnating himself as a flesh and blood person, predictably turned out to be wrong, and decided to lay all the blame on the fetus so he could ignore his feelings.
tbh I could go for either explanation.
AND YEAH there seemed to be a lot of focus on how easy everything was for NeoGriffith – he barely had to lift a finger to defeat Ganeshka, transform the world, and become an emperor lol, it’s such a strong contrast to human Griffith having to work for his victories and face the possibility of defeat in tense moments, like the Battle of Doldrey was very suspenseful because of that, whereas the war with Ganeshka never had a single moment of suspense, NGriff was never not in control. I def wonder if that theme is going to go somewhere, especially with Guts, whose nickname is “struggler,” in contrast.
my take is yes, but neogriffith wouldn’t think so.
Like on one hand it’s very ambiguous and up in the air because we get absolutely nothing from his perspective after that one contemplative ‘why am i feeling things?’ moment, but on the other hand 99% of Femto’s screen time was dedicated to being resentfully petty and while NeoGriff might’ve hoped to genuinely have no feelings, that beating heart tells us otherwise, so I can only assume that some of those feelings are resentment.
Like I basically think his feelings now are probably a big unexamined tangle of
that he is absolutely not going to acknowledge to himself until he’s forced to.
And possibly his emotions are dulled depending on whether NGriff only has some capacity for
emotion but not as much as he did as a human, but tbh I like to think he
feels just as much now and is just a lot better at ignoring/dismissing
it due to being a godly thing on another plane of awareness. And like, the wonderful symbolism of becoming the mask fits too – like his perfect leader image was partly how he buried and denied his emotions as a human (eg see his “it’s nothing,” to Casca in the river), so now that he’s an embodiment of that perfection it just works for me to think that he’s better at denying/repressing his feelings, but they’re still there.
Also I like to think that he got a petty kick out of being the one to leave Guts behind this time, after the Hill of Swords reunion.
neogriffith = outside perception of griffith; the image he portrays
femto = griffith’s perception of himself, coloured by self-loathing
Could it be him maybe accepting that for NGriff, his old dream is taking priority over his previous love for guts, which guts was eventually aware of?
Not necessarily buying into NGriff’s hype himself, but not wanting to overcomplicate Griffith to his friends? His friends who didn’t even know he knew Griffith?
Yeah I definitely don’t think he’d start getting into all the complicated stuff wrt that relationship with his friends, but the line “he hasn’t changed” is just guts’ thoughts, not something he said outloud, suggesting Guts believes it:
and that’s a hell of a loaded statement for guts to be thinking to himself especially with the immediate visual reference to NeoGriffith’s look back at him as he says “nothing has changed.”
It could be that he’s just referring purely to what his dream entails, ie a kingdom, but then again, even then, human Griffith only said he wanted a kingdom, he didn’t say anything about taking over the world or building an empire, which is what they’re talking about now.
Guts echoes NeoGriffith’s “nothing has changed. This is the man I am.”
Has Guts come this far, letting go of his “obsession” with Griffith, by letting himself buy Griffith’s own hype?
Like I’m not sure about this but I don’t remember any moments where Guts reminisces about human Griffith after this:
Is there an underpinning of Guts letting himself forget and downplay how much Griffith loved him, in order to let go of his fruitless obsession?
Guts’ obsession with killing Griffith has ultimately been about wanting his attention, which Femto/NGriff has consistently refused to give him, at least overtly. (lbr the fact that he goes to see guts to test his capacity to feel, and the constant eye contact and needling taunting as femto belies the shit out of that)
Like to lay this out real quick, “you of all people,” is Griffith asserting that he was always a monster, and Guts knew it. Part of the reason Griffith was devastated when Guts left is because he saw it as a rejection of him, based on everything he hates about himself. He let Guts in to see those things he hates, and he thinks Guts left him because of it.
Of course we know that Guts left entirely because he loved and respected Griffith. He “shone before [him] as beautiful, noble, and larger than life.”
The last 30ish chapters before the Eclipse revolve around Guts slowly realizing that he already had Griffith’s love and respect, and therefore leaving was a mistake. Even he knew that Griffith ended up in that dungeon because of him.
Guts knew Griffith loved him.
But does he still know it, after being “deserted” by him? After NeoGriffith’s assertion that “it seems I am free,” “nothing has changed,” “this is the man I am,” “you of all people,”?
And if he’s let himself forget, what happens if Griffith finally does start paying attention to him again?
I can always console myself that if Guts’ narrative is going to continue being about letting go of his Griffith obsession right up until the very end, Griffith’s narrative is going to be about his Guts obsession coming back to haunt him.
It’s only half of the story I want, but I’m still down for that half.
(ftr these 2 statements are separated only by one full page panel of Guts walking away with Casca)
you know i wonder if at least one part of griffith’s heart bthumping here is the fact that zodd and guts are dueling, as opposed to just the fact that guts is there
for one, their duels should be very significant to him both because he won guts with their first one (and guts won him over: “that fight was enjoyable. that’s how fights should be.”) and because he lost guts with their last one (and that destroyed him)
but also, and i’m aware this is a bit of a stretch, but though griffith always believed in guts’ fighting ability he also never stopped worrying about him
i’m not saying he’s worried about guts here necessarily but he’s watching him fight, duel, something he used to do with him, something he used to watch him do a lot. if he remembers everything (except, i assume, how it felt?) … you know.
I totally agree! imo Guts vs Zodd here could echo a lot of significant moments in their relationship. Like Griffith’s first intrigued sight of him when he dives into danger to kill Bazuso, the first time they met Zodd and Griffith risked his life for Guts and couldn’t rationalize it afterwards, Griffith worrying and watching Guts from a distance while he fights Boscogne, watching the Wyald fight while removed from it and feeling isolated from Guts.
Like yeah I don’t think he’s feeling any of those things directly, but if we’re going to see his heart beating while Guts is around this is a v appropriate situation that reflects a lot of their past and makes it feel extra significant.
You should have known. This is the man I am. You, of all people.
“you, of all people” is a really powerful translation imo but the literal translation would be “just you” which i think ………….. is noteworthy
yesss like this line absolutely refers back to the fact that griffith let guts (and only guts) in to see the darker sides of his rise to the throne, and specifically tombstone of flame, and guts telling him his cruelty is a part of the path to his dream, and what griffith believed guts’ reason for leaving was etc, and it’s nice when learning more about the literal dialogue only solidifies my interpretation
this being in reference to whether griffith sent an assassin after rickert is extra interesting.
rickert: griffith wouldn’t have me assassinated… but griffith isn’t even human anymore… and even back when he was he did some shady shit… and he sacrificed the rest of the band… but still…
just the fact that that the narrative is reminding us thru rickert’s musing that griffith did indeed care about the band a whole lot when the subject is neogriffith and his feelings towards rickert now is good shit
like clearly rickert here is erring on the side of ‘yeah he probably did send raksas after me’ so there’s no reason for him to maintain that little bit of doubt at the end unless it’s relevant. and it’s not relevant to rickert’s decision making or actions soooo
idk this is just a long way of saying ambiguity is only worthwhile if the truth is (at least somewhat) unexpected.
why the portrait of neogriff at the end of chapter 250, after all the discussion of loneliness, is one of my faves:
miura’s visual depiction of isolation, loneliness, and alienation is consistent af and if this doesn’t lead somewhere i’ll eat my hat
i feel like the double standard stems partially from the fact that guts “feels bad” about what he did to casca
but griffith would fucking feel bad too if he had the ability to feel anything lol. he is literally the king of feeling bad about fucked up shit he’s done, please
griffith:
berserk fans: i am shocked, shocked and absolutely appalled that neogriffith said he has no regrets
griffith:
those same berserk fans: griffith has clearly been an evil unfeeling sociopathic monster from the beginning
these two pages are the most strongly visually conveyed theory -> rebuttal i’ve ever seen
like i’m sorry i can worry all i want over ominous fetus-y portents and casca’s narrative, and i am, but i just can’t believe the same guy who wrote this scene is going to skimp on the emotional resolution to guts and griffith’s relationship
he went to see guts to test if anything would shake his heart! and then failed that test! while watching a fight extremely reminiscent of his very first sight of guts! this is just so good
Ooh good question. Yeah I wonder. Because it’s really unsurprising to me that he has no Eclipse-related regrets, but it would be so interesting to see him confronted with a reminder of how vulnerable he was to his feelings for Guts.
I’ve seen people theorize that NeoGriffith might’ve had Guts leaving him in the snow on his mind and maybe took a little bit of spiteful pleasure in being the one to leave Guts behind this time, which I rly like as an idea, especially with Guts moping about how NeoGriffith “deserted” him, but it’s just a headcanon really.
Idk. I feel like something as small as an involuntary flinch from NeoGriffith would be extremely satisfying at this point, x10 if a reminder of the second duel and his devastating feelings for Guts is the reason for it. Maybe we’ll get to see something like that in the future.
i’ve seen ppl speculate that he Let rickert slap him which …. hmm i don’t know about that. he certainly was surprised by it, tho ig he could let his “guard” down unintentionally
I could maybe see Griffith letting Rickert slap him because it doesn’t really matter and he’s letting Rickert give him an honest answer or w/e.
But what really gets me is Griffith’s silence in response to Rickert’s speech about how he’s loyal to his Griffith, not this Griffith. There’s no way that’s calculated, he just had nothing to say. All he’s got is “so it is,” in response to Rickert saying the insignias are different. Idk I love it, I can’t help but read that ambiguous silence as inner conflict and self doubt.
Tho incidentally, as an addendum to that last ask, I think the fact that Griffith is supposed to be untouchable (presumably literally and figuratively) by the vast majority of people means that Rickert being able to slap him and leave him speechless and off-balance is a great big sign that something’s malfunctioning with Griffith and his unfreezing heart.
Which is one reason I think that while no one’s going to be able to murder him or turn Falconia against him directly, there’s a distinct possibility of a future storyline where Griffith fucks himself over because he’s a hot mess.
He’s not currently doing any campaigning, he defeated Ganeshka pretty easily and now all his work seems to be taking in refugees, expanding Falconia, performing miracles so ppl can say goodbye to their loved ones, and having tea with the pope or w/e.
I do wonder about people who would resent Griffith for not being noble – they might provide some conflict, though I doubt there’s much they could actually do. And tbh I think Foss is actually a genuine believer now, personally, and probably a somewhat terrified one, but he’d also be an interesting thread to pick up again. I really want to see more from the perspectives of people who knew original Griffith.
I feel like for most of them this is actually kind of a natural progression – we saw people talking back in the Golden Age about how he was like a painting, how he was like a fairytale hero, we saw admiring peasants, etc. He won the war despite all odds so to have him reappear and save Midland from Ganeshka’s army fits everyone’s preconceptions of him. But there could still be some interesting stuff to be explored.
Tbh I’d love for Charlotte to gradually start to realize how non-genuine Griffith’s affections are (though I don’t think that’s changed between being human and being a god lol) or maybe sense a certain coldness or emptiness from him. I doubt it would happen soon though, and it might not happen at all – Charlotte didn’t exactly know him very well as a human, she idealized him herself quite a bit and NeoGriffith’s image of perfection probably fits her expectations.
Idk what I’d love to see is like, suggestive conversations and little reminders that NeoGriffith isn’t quite the same as Original Griffith, and that he’s very singular and therefore very alone. We got Rickert, now I want more. Like let’s see Owen asking after Guts the way he asked Guts about Griffith. Or let’s see what Griffith does in his spare time, or what the nobles say about him and the rumours that he was a traitor a few years ago. I like outsider perspectives a lot and I think there’s a lot of good potential there.
I feel like I remember seeing confirmation that Miura was inspired by Hellraiser, tho it could’ve just been speculation I guess, but either way yeah big similarities there lol.
tbh I think we’re supposed to think the possibility exists for Guts to become an apostle, but not a Godhand, since a new member only joins up once every 200 something years. But I personally don’t think it’s going to happen.
But Femto/NeoGriff opposing the rest of the Godhand, now that’s something I think is a possibility. Void is sketchy as fuck, he seems to know more than the rest of the Godhand, and he’s got ultimate big bad written all over him. Plus Miura hinted that he’s going to be really relevant. Add in the fact that theoretically there must’ve been 5 other Godhand members 1000 years ago (since one of them can only incarnate every 1000 years, and this must’ve happened more than once to be a recognized cycle) so Godhands don’t last forever, and ngl I do wonder if there’s going to be a conflict between NeoGriff and the Godhand.
And that’s not a stupid question. Like, I don’t think Femto and NeoGriff are in conflict, but I absolutely wonder if NeoGriff has some inner conflict going on with his reawakened emotions, whatever they are. So if that’s the case I wouldn’t really describe that as NeoGriffith vs Femto so much as the last vestiges of human Griffith vs Femto/NeoGriff, but hey that’s just semantics, no one knows wtf is going on with NeoGriff internally or whether he’s distinct from Femto, etc. So I guess “maybe” is my actual answer to that, haha.
Thanks for the ask, idk there’s lots to think and wonder about. I can’t wait til Miura starts actually like, revealing stuff and getting the plot going again lol.
you're the only one 