character: rosine – you're the only one

the end of the lost children arc fucks me up because i find rosine’s regret over sacrificing her parents and wanting to return home as she dies to be extremely sad and emotionally affecting, and very understandable and relatable as a character choice

but contrasting that to jill’s “i’m going to go home and just deal with my alcoholic physically abusive dad and his pedo friends :D” ending completely ruins it

like, if that’s presented as the alternative, yeah i give rosine a high five for sacrificing her parents and becoming a monster. good for her. fuck her parents, she should’ve been allowed to die with no regrets.

like it’s one thing for, eg, old man troll fight to talk about how dreams can be opportune escapes from reality when his reality was taking care of a sick parent and working for a living, but when your reality is an abusive family, yeah escaping from that is good, actually. and i feel like that nuance is unaccounted for in berserk lol. like you can say it’s bad to kidnap children and transform them into monsters and kill people etc without also saying it’s bad/weak/immature/whatever to want to escape from your abusive home.

and by having rosine regret the sacrifice and long for home as she dies, contrasted to jill grinning and bearing her abuse, the narrative is essentially placing the blame on rosine for not being able to cope with abuse rather than where it should be, ie, on her father for abusing his kid and orchestrating his own death.

like, the lost children arc should’ve been about condemning abusive parents but… it wasn’t, and it’s fucking bizarre really. the abusive parents are just like, generic 2 dimensional stand-ins for any kind of life struggle, and the kids get the burden of reacting to life struggles correctly. we’re not shown that the parents should’ve or even could’ve made different choices, the parents just exist as trials to test these children, essentially.

and ok fine if you want to focus on reactions to abuse, rather than the perpetuation of it, that’s fair enough, but to then condemn one kid for seizing on the only escape she had and give another kid a pat on the back for deciding not to escape but rather to just suck it up… like damn. this fucking arc lol.

actually speaking of griffith/rosine parallels one thing i’m real worried about is that falconia is going to end up being another land of the elves style thing compared to guts’ jill.

not in the sense that children are murdering each other or even that there’s a dark underbelly at all, just in that falconia will be portrayed as a childish immature fantastical escape from the horrors of the world compared to the more ‘mature’ concept of just dealing with your life being terrible instead of actively trying to escape or change things, a la rosine’s escape from abuse to her fake fantasy vs jill being portrayed as more admirable for going back home and just… taking the abuse?

i hated the end of the lost children arc, is what i’m saying, but it seems like very apt set up for falconia, which worries me. i don’t want guts and griffith to be jill and rosine 2.0

well that’s a lie i absolutely do, but yk, just with the gay vibes, not with those particular themes.