Any thoughts on the chapters about Cascas mind and her restoration?

Oh, lots.

Off the top of my head I find them fairly disappointing. I feel like Miura’s really half-assing this glimpse into Casca’s psyche – eg we got a few scattered Golden Age scenes from Casca’s perspective, but they didn’t bring anything new to the table, we didn’t learn anything about Casca that wasn’t already obvious. The chapter full of dick monsters was ridiculous lol, and the whole concept of piecing Casca together like gluing together a broken doll is like, kind of cliche and super shallow? Again, we’re not learning anything about Casca, we’re just montaging through a dumb dream quest.

On the other hand this sequence does have good points. I loved Farnese w/ tiny Casca. The fact that Farnese is now v intimately familiar with Casca’s whole life, seeing through her eyes and feeling her feelings, is interesting from a shippy standpoint even if canon does nothing with it. I liked that dog Guts just fucked right off and got destructive to everyone around him when pterodactyl Femto showed up, to the point where they were worried he’d smash Casca. Gives me hope lmao. The portrayal of the Eclipse was remarkably restrained so I applaud Miura for that lol. And of course I loved that Casca’s heart is covered in ominous despair thorns, and that shit got dark as soon as Casca saw Guts after waking up.

Like it’s not enough to make me super confident that g*tsca isn’t gonna happen, but it was enough to make me fistpump lol.

I have mixed feelings about the fetus showing up. On the one hand, I fucking hate that fetus and every glimpse of it fills me with dread. On the other hand, the fact that it symbolizes Casca’s heart backs up my wild reach-y theory that she might sacrifice it lol.

I have seized on the fact that Danann 180ed from ‘get lost Guts Casca’s scared of you’ to ‘wear this dress and go see Guts right now’ and I completely believe that Danann is plotting something and Casca going into despair as soon as she sees Guts (who has a behelit on him js js) was planned.

Actually here’s my post full of plot-focused theorizing if you’re interested.

Also my immediate reactions to recent chapters are here

bthump:

ALSO

like ok this visual reference doesn’t really bring anything new to the table since we already know that Casca’s heart is full of dark negativity but yk

i still like it

also i’m still on my casca using the behelit bullshit ftr

totally random question, but how is it possible for Casca to have the demon baby as her sanity’s tipping point? she was in that condition a while before the foetus was born… I don’t understand this lol and it seems unlikely to me that Miura forgot what he was writing since he has remembered smaller details throughout the years and this is a pretty big one to forget

I wish I could understand an iota of what Miura is going for with the fetus tbh.

Idk, idk if it’s so much that the fetus being the last piece means the whole demonization thing was what drove her insane, the vibe I got was more like, it’s the most important part of her and everything around it “guarding” it (the monsters, the femto-pterodactyl) was what drove her insane. Which at least fits with the fact that she’s immensely traumatized.

This is a bit of an optimistic take tho, because I could absolutely believe Miura writing that it was the corruption of the fetus that mostly drove her insane and she just innately sensed it or something.

I originally had this as a second part of my last response but tbh it’s not actually all that related and it seemed silly to reply with a giant wall of text explaining an opinion that the person never asked for lol. So I’m just throwing it out separately.

Like I complained that Casca’s reaction to the Eclipse trauma is unrealistic but that doesn’t actually have much of anything to do with why I hate it.

Bc the
thing is, even if I assume that it is totally possible for
someone to regress to a state of infanthood due to trauma, or if I just
assume that Casca’s mental state is a result of fantasy magic, the way
Miura portrays it is still uncomfortable and worth criticizing, imo,
and he certainly doesn’t seem to care about making it feel grounded in
reality or depicting her trauma with care and respect.

For
instance, the way we don’t get to experience Casca’s point of view ever
again (even now we see her mind through Schierke and Farnese’s points of
view), the babyish mentality combined with Miura’s art still
sexualizing her adult body a whole lot, the way her current mental state
(the result of horrific rape) is often used as comic relief (eg
grabbing Puck and sticking him in her mouth in the background), the way
it totally strips Casca of agency as a character and turns her into a
plot device, the way Miura has said that he had her survive the Eclipse only to keep her around as a reminder to Guts that he wants revenge, etc.

It
seems much, much less like a genuine and thoughtful exploration of
Casca as a traumatized individual and much more like a convenient way of
reducing her to an object for Guts to protect and project on.

Even
now that we’re in her mind doing some magical therapy it seems really
half assed to me. We see Schierke and Farnese fighting dick monsters in
her mind, they’re collecting shards of her and sticking them back
together… I mean, when you compare it to, say, the absolutely
heartwrenching portrayal of Guts’ ptsd flashback during sex and his
subsequent panicky breakdown, it just doesn’t seem like Miura really
cares about selling Casca’s trauma as realistic and making sure the
audience empathizes with her. It really seems like he just wanted to
make her a cute and helpless non-entity for the sake of furthering Guts’
narrative.

It’s such a shame to me because I really like
Casca as a character but she gets such a raw treatment
from the narrative pretty much consistently, and it sucks.