Tag: replies

madchen
replied to your post “i just wrote a thing about guts + griff’s first duel including gay…”

where is…. the first duel penis sword fight post ��

it’s…. one section of the second part of what’s looking like a four part series on Why I Think Guts is Attracted to Griffith

yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “i feel like the fact that guts…”

@bthump One thing that really struck me about the sex scene between Guts and Casca was the way that he became triggered. She turns her back to him if I remember correctly and he at that moment sees himself as a child in her place and reacts violently. Her being a woman in that moment really only reminds him of both his pervious vulnerability and also dare I say the fear of the “feminine” he has in himself. I don’t know really what else to say about this and I want to to know what you think.

Hmm, from an in-universe perspective idk if it’s really because Casca’s a woman, if he happened to be fucking a man in that position I imagine his reaction would be the same.

When it comes to what Miura intended to convey, man, idk lol. Honestly I’m gonna bypass this bc I tried to write smthn about it but Miura + deliberate criticisms of misogyny + gender and gender roles + his own misogyny + homophobia, is such a hot mess, I can’t come up with anything useful to say. Like equating being raped with being forced into the role of a woman does seem in line with his deliberate portrayals of misogyny, but tbh I just don’t have the energy to add my own critique to that, it’s a v heavy topic that requires a lot of nuance. Suffice to say I have v mixed feelings.

But! On the subject of Guts’ flashback one thing I was thinking of after I wrote that last post about how gay Guts is that I should’ve added, is that after having sex with her she’s like, “that’s why you used to hate being touched by anyone, isn’t it?”
“It never mattered with you. When you first saved my life. For some reason… at that time… it was fine. But only with you.”

And Miura is probably trying to re-write that scene to seem kind of romantic, but let’s be real here Guts was about to have a flashback when he woke up next to a naked person before realizing she was a woman and calming down. We know the reason he was okay with Casca then, and it’s because she’s not a man. And then ever since she’s been the only woman he like… knows. At all. With this being brought up right after sex, the overall takeaway I get from this exchange between Guts and Casca is that Guts registers Casca as extra non-threatening because she’s the only woman he knows, and therefore she’s the only person he would’ve been okay having sex with at this point in time, regardless of his actual sexuality.

(I mean granted if Guts was deliberately written as canonically gay I’d be pretty unhappy about Miura having him have sex with women because of trauma, but since I’m reaching here and I don’t think it’s deliberate and the het sex scene is there whether I like it or not, I’m still gonna grasp at this straw to support my Guts is Gay thesis statement.)

yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “i feel like the fact that guts sees the band down there, including his…”

I’m having feelings about this and your essay about Griffith’s arc of being closeted. I kind of feel that you could write a parallel essay about moments like this with Guts honestly. Despite coming across generally as the one who is more willing to confront his feelings during the GA arc he feels like the less self aware of the two here. It’s interesting. The idea that he would throw himself into a sexual entanglement with someone who he does trust certainly but isn’t really in love with so
He could I don’t know
“enact” loving someone.(I’m pretty sure that was how Casca felt too. The
idea of her being kind of so soaked in compulsory heterosexuality that
she can’t really name or give herself room to think of her own desires
resonates with me a lot.) I don’t know how emotionally cavalier and
dangerous to himself and others that is while at the same time being
“easier” socially isn’t really all that different than Griffith’s
relationship with Charlotte to me.
Honestly Guts being more normatively
“masculine” seems to give their relationship this veneer of authenticity
to a lot of the fans and I can’t see any other reason for it. His
behavior certainly doesn’t support those conclusions.

I completely agree. Like het in general almost always feels paint-by-numbers boring to me but Berserk goes an extra step – it doesn’t just feel like inauthentic he was a boy she was a girl bs, it feels aggressively… idk, harmful? Negative? The comparison to Griffith and Charlotte makes a lot of sense to me, the only difference is that Griffith knows his relationship is a sham.

Like @mastermistressofdesire said, a chapter later they’re getting weird and jealous and love-quadrangle-y with Griffith and Charlotte thrown into the mix, and then a short while after that Casca’s telling him to leave and Guts is trying to reaffirm his loyalty and love for Griffith, and then during the Eclipse they’re entirely separated in body and thought until it’s time for Casca to become solely a pawn of Guts and Griffith/Femto’s intense enmity.

At their most positive they never feel like more than friends trying something out – even Guts is like, yeah you can come with me and maybe it’ll suck and you’ll throw off my groove but w/e we’ll see.

And at their most negative Guts assaults her to feel a connection to Griffith.

Also to address the actual like, compulsory heterosexuality vibe from an in-universe perspective, god like, they are so gay. Casca’s crush on Griffith feels extremely like a lesbian with a “crush” on a gay dude, ie someone safe to focus on who will never return her feelings (and no you don’t have to know the dude is gay for this to be a thing lol, citation: me and quite a bit of anecdata of gay women who’ve nursed crushes on dudes who also later came out). And excuse my messiness wrt personal identification but as someone who started out as ambivalent wrt having sex with men and is now firmly Not Into It, Casca having bad sex with Guts and going ‘yeah this is fine i guess i could do this more’ because she feels like a relationship with him validates her as a person is also #relatable.

And obviously Guts is gay but has related trauma. The first time he slept with Casca he was freaked out until he registered the fact that she was a woman, which seems like a pretty relevant prelude to their “relationship” such as it is.

you said it more eloquently tho here:

 I think the idea that they didn’t have
another way to imagine their intense feelings at that moment outside of a
romantic relationship tells you how deeply they don’t really understand
themselves at that moment and how much I think a part of them longs for
“normalcy.”

like tl;dr ia with yours and mmod’s convo in the comments lol, allow me to join in on the gay projection.

chaoticgaygriffith:

genuine question @bthump why do you think guts and griffith have elf ears

genuine answer if i had to guess i’d say guts had them from the start to make him that little bit more monstrous and demonic while fighting apostles. griffith bc they’re elegant and slightly otherworldly looking. coincidence of useful character design.

(or maybe their fathers are both apostles and it was all subtle foreshadowing that they’ve been superhuman/destined for evil respectively all along~~~)

seisans
replied to your post “seisans
replied to your post “i forgot ALL of berserk EVER started…”

yeah ia, it’s not actually that ooc when you think about it, just, like you said, seems out of place when you consider the rest of the story

yeah, tonally it’s way off lol. tbh i think of at least the first two arcs as a bit of a deconstruction of the 80s masculine antihero type (miura did say he was partially inspired by 80s action movies + i think he mentioned rutger hauer by name at some point) and it fits right in with establishing the archetype and then feels rly weird when you start tearing it down and getting to know guts. so i like the additional explanation to make it work a bit on both levels.

seisans
replied to your post “i forgot ALL of berserk EVER started with guts balls deep in some…”

it’s clear that miura also wanted to hook his straight male audience but it’s also kind of clever bc it’s ironic and i hate it

yeah true, i have a tendency to forget the majority straight dude audience lol.

tbh it’s kind of hilarious that guts has had sex a grand total of twice and one time was an edgy opening scene with a monster. it’s so comparatively out of place as a character-establishing moment i can’t help but like it.

(otoh i’ve seen a p convincing argument that it’s actually more ic for guts than you’d think. in the sense that the way he tends to kill apostles is to let them attack him until he’s in a position to blow them up. in this case the apostle sexes victims up so yk, i can actually see it from that point of view. not cause guts is cool and hardcore, but bc guts is self destructive. ~layers~)

craigslost
replied to your post

“so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

talking like total flip au here? def black swordsman because 1.) theresia probably wouldnt be traumatized for life 2.) reaction to femto and the associated bullshit

ngl i’m kind of into vengeful casca wandering around traumatizing kids and using them as bait and hostages but i could rly see her being way colder than guts and just straightforwardly killing count slug instead of taunting him in front of his daughter first so either way you might be right

and man i’d love to see her reaction to femto. I think it’d def be less complicated by lingering feelings than guts’ bc she was already trying to move on before the Eclipse happened, and she’s just more pragmatic than Guts in general, plus she’s used to thinking of Griffith as a lost cause, so I think she’d be better at writing him off as a jerkass demon. So like she’d still try to kill him, but with less of the pay attention to me vibe mb?

craigslost replied to your post  “so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

OK DOES CASCA STILL GO THRU A LIKE? TRAUMATIC
LOSS OF BABY?  demon fetus still around?  because the burning babies in
lost children would be Murderous on the emotions

oh shit i forgot she’s pregnant. so maybe she’d be less inclined to traumatize kids when you consider that, good point. But man the Lost Children arc would be so much more fucked up, ouch. Also I could see her identifying with Rosine a little tbh – escaping a fucked up situation in childhood by joining something that seems like a fairytale…?

tho if the eclipse still caused the miscarriage but without weird magic demon corruption (fighting apostles is not that easy on the body so sure) she probably wouldn’t’ve known she was pregnant at all, so there’s a way to ignore it too if u want. choose your own preferred level of trauma lol.

tfan2013
replied to your post “so like, if you could pick any post-golden age scene/chapter…”

@bthump​ i would actually like to see her fight a hundred men buut considering her period was on at the time it’s unlikely but it still would be cool

that would be so cool and epic

anyway we could swap more stuff around. say casca’s fine but guts is sick and running a fever and falls off a cliff, bam. casca the hundred man slayer, damn i’m so into that.

seisans
replied to your post “yk one thing i can say for the berserk ovas is that, even though they…”

god agreed the reason i love those films so much (apart from the fact that griffith looks gorgeous in them) is bc you can just TELL the people who made them get it

ooh and speaking of griffith looking gorgeous i adore all the character design, especially griffith (that lovingly animated curly hair, man) but everyone looks fantastic. it’s rly too bad they didn’t go past the golden age and we just got a few glimpses of their take on the later characters in the credits and a couple cameos. more ovas >>>>>> berserk 2016/7

godclaw
replied to your post “I’ve actually always wondered about how much sexual experience…”

I see the kama sutra thing a lot actually tbh…like…its an awful foreshadowing in itself lmao

lmao it rly is isn’t it. but i’m glad it’s there so i can hc that griffith hasn’t slept with a woman b4 charlotte ngl.

@yesgabsstuff said:
@bthump *Shameless plug for Anna* 

honestly if a gay guy who’s dissociating and thinking about a dude at the time gets charlotte going that easily i hope anna likes her women ear-shatteringly loud in bed.

craigslost
replied to your post “do we ever get any hint about how old griffith is other than guts (at…”

i’ve read the wiki timeline enuf times to remember that he’s apparently 3 years older than casca and guts? idr what in the manga points to that that tho, time to do some skimming

lol yeah i’ve seen that 3 years older number mentioned but ihni where it would’ve come from

3 years older than casca i could see, since he looked visibly older than her when she was like 8 or w/e, but then i wouldn’t necessarily think guts is the same age as casca

eta: oh just noticed your 2nd reply lol. that’s weird if it’s not on the wiki bc 3 years is def what i’ve heard so i’m sure it was thrown around somewhere.

seisans
replied to your photoset “You should have known. This is the man I am. You of all people.”…”

i have to laugh when people talk about the plot of berserk like it’s heading towards guts killing griffith w/o a second thought and getting his hetero happy ending with casca because they’re completely missing clues like these

ikr there’s just so much you have to skip over or ignore or willfully misunderstand to assume that

ngl sometimes i get cynical and start thinking like, but what if everything i love about berserk was just a fluke and miura intended to write a basic maybe slightly downer grimdark revenge story and just accidentally filled it with really interesting complexity? but then i re-read a chapter or two and i’m like ‘lol nvm’

seisans
replied to your post “seisans
replied to your post “i was browsing thru all the pages i…”

yeah that’s basically what i thought it was, unless by symbolic you mean not actually there? ig that’s a possibility too. but shit you’re right it can also be seen as two parallel lines …… i literally never noticed that. miura speak the fuck up what’s the truth

yeah I mean not actually there bc Guts’ sword didn’t actually hit him, but we see it bc Griffith basically wishes he had a scar from Guts. Which also works rly well to me bc it mirrors Casca later wishing she had a scar from Guts and is therefore even gayer.

tbh at this point it’s all guess work and headcanon lol, so like, I just go with whatever I’m feeling in the moment. lbr miura + clarity is like oil and water sometimes.

seisans
replied to your post “i was browsing thru all the pages i have saved looking for smthn to…”

the thing that i find confusing is it’s not 4 scratch marks from 4 fingers, it’s one scar that’s thicker than his individual fingers. when i was first reading the manga and noticed the scar i was like “wait, he got wounded? i thought the whole point was that guts stopped just before the blade sunk in” and then i went back and re-read the duel and confirmed that there was no wound so i was like??? maybe griffith purposely did it in that spot because guts did not wound him
your theory is way better it just does not look like scratch marks it’s one giant scar, right where guts almost hit him

I’ve heard this a lot and tbh I used to think that it was one inexplicable big scar myself but if u look at the 2nd to last image i posted in that thing, where he’s tracing it, you can see how both “sides” line up exactly with his two fingers. So I still think it’s def 2 parallel scratch marks from 2 fingers. Just like, drawn slightly confusingly.

The movie actually turns it into 4 red scratches. Not sure what the anime does if it depicts it, I should check that lol, I’m kind of curious now.

Though the theory I’ve heard that goes with the “it’s one big scar” that I like is that it’s a symbolic depiction of Griffith wishing Guts’ sword had hit him. It makes most sense to me that it’s scratch marks but that’s also quite a nice concept imo.

replied to your post “ replied to your post “am i the only one who thinks when griff became…”

i know!! the amount of times ive seen even polite debate back & forth (usually abt the eclipse lol) & both ppl agree on concept but there’s two different mental definitions of the buzzwords being used

lol same, i remember a discussion about whether femto’s a different person from griffith or not, and ofc everyone agreed he’s magically changed but not entirely separate from griff but no one agreed on how to define the concept of personhood.

 replied to your post “am i the only one who thinks when griff became femto that he didnt…”

also semantics lol but i think often in berserk meta ‘humanity’ = the sum and total (good emotions plus the negative parts also) so he’s ‘lost’ it in that most parts of the whole have been severed : o
this is half a joke but we need a term glossary for discussion abt sacrifices/the eclipse/femto/neogriffith/apostles

Oh hey yeah this makes sense, like he’s lost his humanity bc he’s no longer a complete human, even if what’s left was still a part of him. that totally works for me.

ngl it would be really handy if everyone in the fandom had the same working definitions of everything, it would probably cut down on a bunch of arguments at least lol.

yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “yesgabsstuff
replied to your…”

He did an amazing job of having the reasons they didn’t talk to each other make perfect sense in character. It makes watching them excruciating because it feels almost like fate. Key word I suppose for plot reasons is “almost.” It feels like they didn’t even have the language to talk about their feelings due to the world of the story as well, which in turn, created their psychological reasons for not expressing themselves. It’s kinda perfect?

yeah exactly, like it never felt at all contrived or like drama for the sake of drama, the reasons why they couldn’t talk to each other reflect on their own characters and backstories, and good point about the setting factoring in too.

also yeah one thing i dig about how fate works in the story is that it always seemed to just lead the characters to choices (eg it’s easy to blame fate for guts overhearing griffith’s speech or the king interrupting their post-zodd chat or the maid spying on griff and charlotte), but never affects the choices they make which all come completely from character. nothing ever feels forced to me despite fate being an active agent in the plot.

yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “ooh also now that i’m…”

Oh yeah. Their power dynamic is very delicate and that’s what really hooked me into the series honestly. Like you have this tension between playing their roles in their relationship and what they need as people. They don’t really understand that they can have everything they need if they talk about it

yeeeeep same, and like, your last sentence is a perfect summarization of this whole thing lol.

it’s funny, berserk is one of the few stories that rests on a premise of ‘two idiots could’ve fixed everything if they’d just talked to each other’ that i feel really, really works instead of feeling like hamfisted bad drama.

yesgabsstuff
replied to your post “ooh also now that i’m contemplating this topic i think the scene in…”

@bthump I agree. I’m not sure that Griffith achieving his goal the ~conventional~ way would have lessened the distance between them. That may very well have triggered a splitting episode in Guts of the “who are u even?!!!������” variety. It would have been very slow burn lol. And possibly more openly kinky than it already is. I mean I’m into it so….

lol yeah i don’t really think griff becoming king would do it, i think they’d have to talk and open up to each other emotionally and feelings of being equals rather than rungs on a hierarchal ladder would follow naturally

tbh it’s funny because i’m always into role reversals wrt relationship power dynamics – like whoever seems to have the most power overall has the least when it comes to ~their feelings~ so GriffGuts kind of really suits me there (that torture chamber monologue, maaaan) – but at the same time there’s such an emphasis placed on equal relationships in Berserk overall but especially wrt GriffGuts that I really want to see it happen, whether it’s a happy AU or equally killing each other at the end of the story lol.

Like first Griff had all the power, then Guts had all the power, then Femto/NeoGriff had all the power, while what both of them wanted was equality. idk it’s a big part of why i find them so endlessly interesting i think. like even in a happy AU it would be rly interesting to explore their dynamic shifting from Guts feeling subordinate to Griffith feeling emotionally powerless and eventually finding some kind of balance. probably with plenty of subtle and overt kinkiness along the way if canon is anything to go by.

the-black-swordsman
replied to your post “oh and i know i talked recently about how the hawks didn’t seem to…”

Guts and Casca – yes, but I always thought Judeau just wanted to take
care of him, so Casca can be happy with Guts and they can ride off into the
sunset together, I don’t believe he actually cared for Griffith, but only to have Casca move on from him asap. I actually think he is the hawk, who liked Griffith the least, but that might be my hc.

i p much agree actually. the impression i get from judeau is that he admired griffith but didn’t really know what to make of him or what his deal was and was maybe a little wary of him bc of that.

actually now that i think about it maybe the best way to put the way i think the hawks (including judeau to an extent) see griffith in general by the ballroom scene is that they’re like, varying degrees between respect for a commander and friendship, and griffith is the one keeping that distance from being closed by keeping them in the dark about stuff and keeping himself on a pedestal for them. like i see potential there for real friendship that’s never actually fully reached, i guess.