I’d say that argument is directly and unambiguously contradicted over and over again in the story, including by Griffith himself.
And like, literally the last thing Griffith thinks before sacrificing Guts is that Guts is more important than his dream. That’s why he’s sacrificing him. “You’re the only one who made me forget my dream.”
The main point of the Golden Age is to hammer home the concept that Guts is more important to Griffith than the dream, and it does it over and over and over lol. Everything revolves around that fact. And the sacrifice is a really clever (imo) culmination of that theme, not a weird last-minute contradiction of it.
Also I might try to add a quick explanation of my reading of the dream, ie it’s a defense mechanism/way for Griffith to escape his feelings, both guilt and the feelings for Guts that make him vulnerable and essentially destroyed his life, “the life of the person you loved the most and hated the most! you gave it to us so that you could bury your fragile human heart!” all that jazz. Which explains why Griffith chooses his dream over Guts even though he cares about Guts more (because he cares about him more). But idk if I could manage that without writing an essay, or more likely, linking one I’ve already written lol.
Wrt the second bit, idk what the fact that he had to sacrifice the other Hawks too has to do with it, it’s pretty clear to me that Godhand sacrifices are bigger and more epic than apostle sacrifices, but Guts still gets the spotlight even though there’s 30-40 others in the group. He’s the one Griffith’s last thoughts are directed to, he’s the one Slan singles out as a particularly excellent sacrifice, he’s the one Zodd directed his “prophecy” to and even makes sure to save so he can be sacrificed later (when he threw him a sword during the battle of Doldrey), while Rosine and the Count and Wyald killed a bunch of Hawks before the Eclipse without causing any issues. He’s the one Skull Knight singles out to give a warning to.
I like that the rest of the Hawks are included because it proves that Griffith does in fact care very much about all of them. I mean Casca’s flashback already proved that, but yk, it never hurts to underline Griffith’s capacity for caring about others, because Griffith himself downplays it as much as possible lol, to say nothing about the fandom. But I don’t think it detracts from Guts as the most important sacrifice either. He’s still above and beyond. He’s the one who caused Griffith’s behelit-opening despair, and he’s the one Griffith sacrifices to escape that despair.
Idk man, the sacrifice is like half the reason I ship griffguts, so I definitely don’t think it downplays or diminishes Griffith’s feelings for Guts in any way, imo it emphasizes how they’re front and centre as Griffith’s number one priority and central motivation in an immensely satisfying way.
i think it was probably meant as a shock value thing more than anything, like yes the idea was to feel the anger and betrayal guts was feeling, but imo it wasn’t meant to make us hate griffith the character as a whole from that point onward. because the way miura presents his story after the eclipse is very generous
like it was a shoking turning point that
was supposed to 1) give guts revenge motivation but also 2) really
drive home the ~morally ambiguous~ thing he’s trying to go with, which
might have been the worst fail ever because not only is rape generally
tied to pure evil villainy but also miura /kinda/ made that connection
too. i mean he was actually trying to make that “there’s evil in the
world bc everyone has a dark core” point
and also maybe
something about ultimate freedom (which is why it’s the apostles that
rape like almost every time) but he just failed so hard on that front bc
everyone saw the eclipse rape scene and was like, oh ok so we’re
supposed to hate griffith then. and instead of making their view of the
story more ambiguous and open, it made it completely black and white.
the literal opposite of what miura was imo going for
one thing that i think
the eclipse rape does do is drive home the hatred griffith felt for
guts when he was at his lowest, because those are the feelings that come
to surface when he’s stripped down to only his “evil core.” however the
counter-argument there is that it absolutely didn’t have to be rape,
like you mentioned in another post. it could have been torture or
whatever else. and i’m so pissed off that he went with rape in the end
bc it just cheapened everything
Hm yeah it’s meant to illustrate Femto as an entity made out of evil and Griffith’s inner darkness, make us hate him specifically and empathize with Guts’ desire for revenge. I def agree that it’s not meant to make us retroactively hate Griffith, it’s pretty clear that human Griffith is still meant to be very sympathetic and not Femto-lite or anything like that lmao, I mean look at how Guts remembers him.
NeoGriffith, idfk. It seems clear that we’re not meant to hate him, considering how he’s framed as the hero of his own story with his own loathsome antagonists and a cause we’re meant to generally consider good, and allies we’re meant to like, etc. But we’re probably still supposed to be wary of him, and uncertain about him? His whole thing is ambiguity. So idk, maybe Miura intended for it to be obvious that NGriff isn’t the exact same as Femto just like regular Griffith isn’t, so distancing the Eclipse rape from his narrative doesn’t feel awkward as fuck to him lol.
And yeah in addition to illustrating his evil it does illustrate his negative feelings towards Guts, also necessary, but yeah, choosing rape as that illustration was bad, and the particular way Miura went about it was even worse.
so ……… berserk is red pill vs blue pill
not sure if this is a matrix ref or a reddit ref lol. both kinda make sense…
i’m hoping miura
doesn’t rush this. bc it’s still not entirely clear what he’s really
going for, and i’d kind of like it to be, by the end
depends, if it’s gonna suck i just want the band aid ripped off, but if he’s going to surprise me and it’s gonna be good i want to savour it. and also yeah, understanding it would be nice too lmao, but I feel like that’ll be more clear after whatever happens w/ casca happens. that’s the make or break for me.
honestly the concept
of falconia is so sexy, starting with the ripped statues outside and
ending with its literally lusted after angelic beautiful leader like
come on. props to him, griffith haters need to give credit where credit
is due
when one of your literal superpowers is magic sex appeal you don’t have to go the extra mile, but he did. what an icon
Hi, I ended up here because you linked the post recently. So, about Charlotte. It’s not a thing I like or totally understand the cultural reasons for, but you see a lot of women/bottoms saying “no/don’t” in Japanese porn that’s framed as consensual. I gather it’s a “good girls always say no” thing? It’s still really uncomfortable and problematic, but the scene with Charlotte reads like it’s complying to an established (although ugly and misogynist) standard to me.
I agree about all the ways the trio’s
characters were gutted by the eclipse though. I don’t even really
disagree about Charlotte, I just think Miura was riding the wheel, not
inventing it.
Yeah I have like, a vague awareness of that as a cliche inJapanese porn/erotica, tho it crops up in more than its fair share of english media too, and I feel like that no means yes trope is an unfortunately p universal form of misogyny/rape culture. And yeah def agree that it’s what’s informing that scene.
Yeah, the backstories
were what made me hopeful that there was a more cohesive idea being
explored. Now I mostly hope he just leaves it alone and doesn’t go
there.
The book was was Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Stover. It’s:
-the second book in a series
-a masterful culmination of themes explored in the first book
-maybe my favorite book ever?
-choke-full of things that should not work but do
-seriously dark and violent, but worth reading if you can stomach it
I looked it up and ngl the premise of that series sounds pretty intriguing. idk if I’ll check it out but it’s going on a list of books to maybe look into next time I’m bored, so ty.
And yeah ikwym, I feel like in a different story the Golden Age narrative culminating in Griffith transforming into a version of himself that embodies his inner darkness and that being shown through rape could’ve worked like, thematically. It just like, would’ve had to be different in almost every way lol. like about Casca’s trauma rather than Guts’, and half the narrative could not centre NGriff as a protagonist afterwards, and Casca should be a full character and have at least as much narrative significance as Guts, and the depiction would actually have to be tasteful and centred in Casca’s pov since the theme in question is trauma and the rapists throughout the Golden Age are all one dimensional caricatures – like they’re not the focus, the victims are.
But idk this is the mess we got, and I’m with you, at this point I’m just hoping Miura doesn’t make it worse.
I guess I’ve always assumed the Eclipse rape was there to give us a reason to hate Griffith. Like, in another setting committing murder would be “crossing the line” into villainy. In a story where all the dewy-eyed still-innocent major characters are also hired killers, escalation is bound to get awkward. Given how sympathetic Griffith’s storyline otherwise is, it feels like a effort to say “no really, this is supposed to be morally complicated, stop rooting for him.”
Yeah I don’t think you’re wrong about that. Though more than anything I think it’s meant to give Guts specifically a reason to hate him lol, because the way Miura wrote the sacrifice and Guts’ reaction to it
sacrificing him wasn’t nearly enough.
I mean personally I think the sacrifice could’ve still worked fine on its own if Guts had actually like, demonstrated some extreme feelings of betrayal, which I feel like he should’ve, because the sacrifice is meant to be an echo of his childhood trauma of being sold imo, and I feel like Miura kind of dropped that in favour of the more immediate shock value.
Like it wouldn’t’ve been enough to get me to hate him, but I’m kind of an exception lol, I feel like Guts expressing heartbreak and betrayal that echoes like, the scene where Gambino told him he sold him to Donovan, probably would’ve worked okay for most fans to make them at least very angry at Griffith/Femto.
Buuuuut you’re right that like, he is really sympathetic otherwise and Guts wanting to chase him down and kill him while he’s orchestrating world peace and ruling a utopia might make Guts seem less sympathetic without that visceral show of evil during the Eclipse to “justify” it. But then the Eclipse rape goes so far in the other direction that it completely fucks up the balance too. So idk.
I guess if I was writing it and I felt like the Eclipse needed something extra to prove that Femto is evil, which is fair since he’s supposed to be Griffith’s inner darkness with an additional boost of humanity’s evil in general, and you probably do want to demonstrate some of that, I’d opt for like, torture + maybe some magical mind torture or something if Casca needs to be driven insane, because that’s the kind of ott fantasy evil that none of the Berserk readership will have personally experienced. Rape as a gratuitous demonstration of evil has a whoooole lot of baggage that makes writing that character as a morally ambiguous antagonist later on extremely terrible imo.
tl;dr basically ia, I think the purpose was to immediately show how evil Femto is and make the readers and Guts hate him, and I mean it worked I guess lol, but I still think it was a bad decision and Miura should’ve done something else.
Yeah I definitely think we just got to the beginning of the last third of the story… hopefully not the halfway point
lol imagine if we’re only halfway through now… tho ngl that would be nice for my impossible “Casca levels up and becomes a secondary antagonist making Griffith, Guts, and Casca three enemies with their own intwined but opposing goals” hope.
It’s actually pretty crazy for how many
people HATE Griffith like he’s the most evil villain ever when all he’s
done was for the “greater good” for the rest of humanity (and monsters
too I guess.)
Though the only absolutely evil thing he did was rape Casca, which was
actually completely pointless and horrible. The story would’ve been
better if it never happened tbh
this is one reason I have such a problem, from like, a story construction standpoint (never mind the pile of other problems I have with it), with the Eclipse rape. It’s sooooooo irrelevant to the rest of Griffith’s narrative. Obviously I understand why it makes people hate him, regardless of the magical fantasy logistics of transforming into an evil demon first, or how badly written it is, or its significance (or lackthereof) to his narrative as a whole, yk, whatever, it’s reasonable to have a strong negative emotional response to it regardless.
But it has nothing to do with his dream, with NeoGriffith’s entire narrative, it was not necessary to create Falconia, it amounts to nothing more than a v shallow show of evil that does nothing to complicate the moral quandaries of Griffith’s dream/Falconia because it was entirely unnecessary and gratuitous. It doesn’t even tell us anything about NeoGriffith as an individual running a utopia because he transformed again and we don’t know how similar or different he is to Femto lol. Miura completely downplays it to the point where I kinda suspect he knows he completely hamstrung his attempt to write an interesting morally grey villain as soon as it left the gate, and now it’s like he’s doing a weird juggling act where the Eclipse rape is Guts’ whole motivation but also it simultaneously has zero bearing on the framing of NeoGriffith’s story.
Like I’ve mentioned this before but how fucking weird and awkward is it that we as readers have no idea whether Rickert even knows about the Eclipse rape, when the whole narrative point of his digression to Falconia was his choice to judge and reject NeoGriffith. Rickert delivers his judgement – essentially as an audience stand-in – and the Eclipse rape doesn’t factor into it at all. That’s the definition of gratuitous lol. And that’s just one example of Miura turning it into this awkward elephant in the room.
I think they don’t understand Griffith at all and probably willfully ignore a huge amount of his story.
A god complex is an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility.
I mean I’ve talked about my take on Griffith enough that I could collect it all into a book at this point lmao, but in essence no he is full of self loathing and guilt and exists by living in denial and trying to bury it.
He portrays an image of utter confidence and security, maintains it well enough that he buys his own con to an extent, but even that confident self-assured image isn’t god-complexy. His assessment of his own abilities is realistic. He knows he’s good, he has confidence in his abilities, but he also knows when he’s outclassed.
He doesn’t think by default he’s one of the people he believes are fated to change the world, he just hopes he is. He wants to see how far he can go, and not for the sake of being important, but in service to a greater goal which is fueled by disgust at the state of the world and his own sense of guilt.
He doesn’t have a falsely inflated perception of himself, if anything his self-image is much more negative than it should be.
You see any other mercenaries in Berserk who feel guilty for the enemy soldiers their underlings kill?
And like, eg, Griffith feels ashamed about assassinating people while Guts thinks he should be telling the rest of the Hawks all about it and has absolutely zero problem with burning a room full of nobles and royalty alive.
And as Casca lays out here
his confidence isn’t an ingrained personality trait, it’s something he manufactured and wears like armour, which is why sometimes it shatters and reveals the exact opposite – the guilt, the self-loathing, the insecurity – underneath.
Idk it seems like the same type of Berserk fan who calls Griffith a sociopath or a narcissist or a control freak or whatever. Like… no. That’s a wild misreading of his character, and honestly the story isn’t exactly subtle about his giant heap of issues that drive him so idk why so many people refuse to see it.
Like, re-read chapter 17 and this time look at the pictures of him self-harming too, bc that adds a little necessary context to statements like:
Like, this is so far from subtle that people just choose not to understand it lol.
(This isn’t directed at you anon, just yk, the fans you’re talking about.)
honestly no, or at least, not in the way you probably mean. and this isn’t me being a griffith apologist and reaching to make excuses for him lol, this is me looking at each scene and getting a very different conclusion from them. like i really just don’t think they logically add up to griffith turning into a rapist demon when you examine each scene you mention, even though it’s admittedly a really really easy connection to draw at a surface level and I can see why people do draw that conclusion.
tho i guess the first duel is actually kind of a “sort of,” to be fair.
at this point the golden age stuff is really hardcore calling back to the black swordsman stuff in an excellent way, and making some v overt comparisons between Griffith and Femto, largely for the sake of… well, for the sake of establishing both similarities and eventual differences.
Griffith’s narrative is a gradual tearing down of our (and Guts’) expectations about him – we start with this larger than life mythical sort of figure who we already know eventually betrays Guts and becomes a demon, so we begin with showing his ambition, his drive, the deference his followers show him, his ability to take out Guts with one parry, etc.
He literally starts out as basically the same antagonist we saw a few chapters ago, at least in Guts’ eyes:
Like, this is meant to show the singleminded obsession that we’re led to believe is why he betrayed Guts to become a demon.
But it’s also a set up for a later revealing subversion of expectations:
In all fairness to Griffith, Guts is the one who gave him the chance to win his loyalty in a fight. Griffith didn’t demand he fight for his freedom or anything lol, he just asked Guts to join, was taken aback when Guts refused, and then leapt at the chance Guts provided to win him in a fight. He even offered to wait a while until Guts had healed more. That’s like, consent right there.
But by taking Guts up on his ridic offer he is definitely kind of pushing the limits of this whole need he has for people to freely choose to follow him, which is also an early sign that Guts is extra special.
Anyway the more overt rapey overtones to this fight, ie Guts basically offering sex slavery if he loses, say more about Guts from a characterization standpoint than they do about Griffith. Griffith is like, lol sure, clearly having no actual intention of taking him up on the sex offer.
But coming after a) the Black Swordsman arc, and b) Guts’ childhood, what this exchange does is draw a comparison between Griffith and the men who abused Guts as a child, both to the reader and in Guts’ mind. (I would argue that this is why Guts insists on fighting him – after Griffith one hitted him Guts is actually scared of him, and his rape trauma informs how he interprets and responds to fear. But I digress)
And again, this is both subverted and played straight. We should’ve already been able to draw comparisons between Femto and Gambino. We’re told about the sacrifice, told Griffith sacrificed Guts, then shown a flashback to Guts’ childhood in which his trusted father figure sold him to Donovan. That’s our explanation for Guts’ vendetta against Griffith/Femto. The sacrifice was a replay of his childhood trauma, and it fucked him up. And our introduction to Griffith here, with Guts projecting his trauma at him, plays off that.
The subversion is in the fact that Guts basically falls in love with Griffith, or insert some platonic phrase meaning essentially the same thing here, because I’m trying to be as objective as possible here lmao. It’s not another Gambino situation where Guts loved him because he was his father and the only family Guts knew, Griffith earns Guts’ love. Griffith is loveable, frankly. He risks his life to save Guts after a week, he‘s put together a merc group that behaves more like one big happy family than like a bunch of hired killers, and Guts spends the three happiest years of his life with him.
We also have Casca’s running commentary helpfully informing us that Griffith’s feelings for Guts are genuine because he’s acting very out of character around him already.
Like to bring this home, Griffith’s narrative is:
to
One reason it was so brilliant to start with the Black Swordsman arc is because it reverses the expected narrative – instead of being shocked when a character we love decides to sacrifice Guts to become a demon, we’re surprised over and over again when a character we were introduced to as a villain turns out to be motivated almost entirely by his intense, very human, very vulnerable, very sympathetic, love for Guts, rather than the expected sociopathic ambition. (And even that ambition has a very human, very vulnerable, very sympathetic source, ie, guilt.)
And, basically, the first duel starts this narrative off by emphasizing the qualities we expect to see in Griffith while simultaneously sowing the seeds of the qualities we end up surprised by. Hence the exchange that emphasizes Guts’ rape trauma – because it also foreshadows/calls back to the sacrifice.
tl;dr the first duel is rapey as part of a comparison between Guts’ childhood trauma and being sacrificed eventually, and it serves as a starting point on which Miura builds a shitload of complexity and basically immediately begins tearing down the image of Griffith as a haughty evil sociopath. Plus at this point idek if Miura had the Eclipse rape in mind – he’s mentioned he decided to have Guts and Casca get together for the sake of more Eclipse drama partway through, and this is pretty early on.
Okay, that’s one out of three. Now, as for scene #2
no I’m kidding, I’ve already written a lot about the other two scenes so I’m not going to reiterate it all here esp since my first answer was already way too long lol.
So I got a more thorough explanation here, but basically the narrative treats the night with Charlotte as consensual sex despite her “no,” and therefore I do too in my reading of the narrative, it’s shitty but so is Miura, the end. Like, I consider this scene the equivalent of Guts grabbing Casca’s tit during an argument. Yk, was that foreshadowing for Guts sexually assaulting her (again but in a dramatic scene next time), or was it Miura being a dumbass?
The super short version of that is that Griffith does have issues with consent – his own – and if you tilt your head a bit you can argue that it might inform the Eclipse rape as a reversal of power dynamics. But it’s not a preview of it, it’s a contrast.
One thing I’ll finish with, though, is that there is a scene that I think can arguably foreshadow the Eclipse rape better than any scene you mentioned, and it’s chapter 39.
This is my very very thorough explanation of it (in like the last 3rd or so of that post), but long story short everything Griffith calls the king out on is something he hates/fears about himself, and I would definitely argue that this scene shows the guilt + self-loathing Griffith feels after trying to keep Guts at his side by force, through a really unsavoury parallel to the King’s predatory lust for Charlotte, as well as the parallel between how their respective “rejections” destroy them.
So yeah, if there’s any scene that I think foreshadows Griffith’s inner darkness being rapey, it’s Griffith comparing himself to the King in a fit of self-loathing. But there’s a reason my explanation is like a million words long lol, it’s pretty subtle, and therefore kind of hard to state definitively.
Okay, and one very last thing to throw out there as a conclusion to this mess:
The Eclipse rape only has the shock value Miura wanted it to have if it’s a contrast. It’s there to demonstrate that new Evil Demon Griffith is a bad dude who does horrible things Our Griffith wouldn’t do, and draw a hard line between regular human Griffith and Femto, which is also what enables Guts to express his feelings thru murderous rage.
This is lost on a lot of fans because people are really, really eager to see Griffith as Pure Evil The Whole Time, but straight up, objectively, that is what the text is going for – the Eclipse rape is a defining character moment for Femto because it’s a harsh contrast to the Griffith we, and Guts, have come to know and love. It’s meant to shock the reader and make them – or remind them to – hate Femto lol, it’s not meant to give them a pat on the back and tell them they were right about Griffith being an evil predatory gay all along. That’s just a very unfortunate side effect.
There is really something to be said about the significance of physical contact between Guts and Griffith.
Like the fact is that this intense moment of Guts racing for Griffith, wondering what on earth he can possibly do, is a lead-up to a single touch that sends Griffith into despair. This touch is what causes the Eclipse.
A similar physical touch marks the moment Griffith thinks of when he wonders when Guts gained such a strong hold over him:
Their first duel is the only fight either of them ever engage in, as far as I recall, featuring direct physical contact rather than swords (or other weapons) clashing, and moreover, the scene depicts the sense of a gradual physical pull between them. Before the duel, Guts wakes up from a nightmare featuring his childhood trauma, falling into a near panic as he wakes up and feels a body on top of him, until he realizes she’s a woman, not a man.
Touch is highlighted as a concept to take note of here, particularly Guts’ aversion to it.
Guts remembers Griffith as the figure on a horse that he couldn’t reach before collapsing, gazing down at him:
Then they duel. The fight begins at a distance, with swords. Griffith nearly wins without touching him, and again while on a higher plane than Guts bc goddamn Miura gets a lot of mileage out of that imagery:
But then Guts bites Griffith’s sword, they lose those swords, roll down a hill, and Guts just starts punching. We get significant commentary from onlookers highlighting the uniqueness of this fight bringing Griffith down from his heights of untouchability:
As well as from Guts:
Griffith wins with a hold, and finally:
The sequence leads up to this intense moment of physical contact: Griffith pulling him up and gazing into his eyes.
Throughout the Golden Age there aren’t a lot of casual touches between them, but when we do see them touch (pre-torture) it’s usually during a very significant moment.
(Or once, casually, right after Griffith has reminisced about this particular fight:
Not particularly emphasized, but still during a nicely fitting and illustrative moment.)
Griffith remembers another moment of physical contact between them while thinking about how he loses his composure when it comes to Guts:
And this is the scene that leads to the highest point in their relationship, when Griffith admits he had no logical reason to save Guts and Guts dedicates his sword to him in turn. Plus Casca’s outrage also serves to highlight touch as a feature of the closeness of their relationship – and that relationship’s potential to destroy Griffith(’s dream):
And of course, at the climactic moment of the arc as a whole, we get this moment:
Griffith reaches down to pull Guts up to him at the beginning of the first scene we see between them (a contrast to Guts looking up at a distant Femto at the top of the stairs):
We get a nice close up of their handclasp the first time Griffith saves Guts’ life (again, pulling Guts up):
A full page the very last time Griffith saves Guts’ life:
And we get another panel of their hands when Guts lets him go and falls away from him:
Which brings me to the way there is also a particular emphasis given to the lack of
touch between them, compounding the impression that the physicality
between them is significant.
For instance, in contrast to their first fight where they lost their swords, swords – which each represent their respective dreams here – uh… come between them in chapter one, foreshadowing how dreams tear them apart and also highlighting Guts’ more immediate concern that Griffith is growing distant as he gets promoted and draws closer to attaining his dream:
(also i love having an excuse to post those 2 subsequent panels)
Eyes meeting across a vast ballroom and through a window as they smile at each other, after another reminder that Guts is planning to leave very soon:
Guts’ sword falling where we later see Griffith with self-inflicted scratch-marks:
I obviously can’t skip over Griffith thinking about Guts’ departure at the exact moment he
penetrates Charlotte, followed by Charlotte reflected in his frantic
eyes, emphasizing Guts’ absence here in contrast to Charlotte’s presence. All on the same page in 4 subsequent panels. While he’s fucking Charlotte.
Like, this is by far the gayest hetero sex scene I’ve ever seen.
Guts reaching for him fruitlessly here:
Frankly, and not fun but still unfortunately significant to the story, Femto raping Casca while staring at Guts, later compounded by the Beast of
Darkness telling Guts to do the same to get closer to him.
There’s also Femto’s use of telekinesis rather than physical force to keep Guts away from him in the Black Swordsman arc, and the aforementioned staircase of inequality between them.
And of course NeoGriffith’s distance. Both literally:
And symbolically:
Physical touch emphasizes their closeness. It punctuates the strong emotions between them. It pulls Guts up and brings Griffith down until they meet together in the middle, illustrating the fact that their emotions for each other make them equals despite their predetermined + false notions of what equality is.
Again:
It’s highlighted during the moments of their relationship that signify their emotional closeness:
It’s a contrast to the distance which signifies their relationship falling apart:
For instance, Guts holding Griffith throughout like half of the post-torture content shows us that he doesn’t want to leave again long before the story tells us that directly.
Griffith asking for his armour rather than taking off his mask, placing a physical barrier between them, shows us that he wants to keep some emotional distance from Guts, because their closeness is devastating to him. And that foreshadows his choice to sacrifice Guts to escape his vulnerability. His demon form incorporates his mask and, so far, they never touch again.
Basically physical touch is one of the tools Miura uses to illustrate their intense relationship, either through its presence or its pointed, painful absence, and I just wanted to take a moment to illustrate some of that, bc I dig it.
UGH i hate how entirely plausible this all is because it makes everything that’s already terrible even more tragic 😦 … and running with it being a possibility, it’d give guts a really bad association with his very thoroughly thwarted near-attempt at being purposefully affectionate towards griffith, possssibly even an acceptance of his own gayness. i know this is all just wild speculation but, jesus. ughhhhhhhhh it hurts.
oh man i kinda want to explore that now
like i always say the eclipse puts everyone’s potential character development on hold/cuts it down in its tracks, imagine if it also slammed the door shut on guts’ potential realization that he’s not straight
i mean it’s all there – the parallels to casca realizing she was in love with griffith when she stopped seeing him as a god, the realization that he fucked up because griffith was in love with him, guts taking this away from griffith’s sacrifice:
Like ending up burying a burgeoning realization about himself and his feelings fits right in here
(idt i ever posted it but i remember thinking once that guts’ post-eclipse character development would work so well if there was an element of him coming to terms with his sexuality. i think i was thinking about a hypothetical “what would change about the story of Berserk if all the subtext was intentional and going somewhere” angle lol. i bet that half baked thought is in my drafts somewhere.)
And then guts have sex wt casca and that stops. Now hes just a strong
character,never defeated, afraid only of himself bc ooh theres a scary
monster inside him teehee,like every shonen.He wants to defeat his evil
former bff with lingering sentiments (naruto?). His vulnerabilities, his
dependance on smo else opinion,his loneliness and lack of meaning of
his existence,which were rare traits in protag?disappeared. GA was how
life conditions impacted real ppl,now bersek is just a shonen wt rape
2/2
Yeaaaaah I agree with a lot of this. I’ve ranted about it before but I can always go on more about how much it bugs me that Guts’ personal trauma is basically ignored during and after the Eclipse in favour of switching to being angry about someone else’s trauma (someone who didn’t even get her own reaction to it, at least not for 20 years).
Cause yeah like ia, Guts’ trauma – and not just the csa trauma but also the more overarching abuse from Gambino as he was growing up – is so vital to his entire character in the first two arcs. It informs everything about him from his insecurities, to the way he fights, to the reason he stayed with the Hawks and the reason he left the Hawks, etc. In the Black Swordsman arc, the reason he’s so angry is because Griffith sacrificing him wasn’t just a betrayal, but a replay of that childhood trauma. The ghosts haunting him and claiming him are an echo of Gambino calling him cursed and selling him to someone else. It all fits together perfectly and it’s so good.
And it is a relatively unique backstory when it comes to badass manly man action hero protagonists. I mean to be nitpicky Berserk is a seinen, not a shonen, but the csa backstories seem to be more inspired by classic shojo, based on some of the influences Miura cites (like Kaze to Ki no Uta), and combining those elements with typical seinen action stuff, especially since imo Miura did it very thoughtfully and very well up til the end of the Golden Age, does create a unique and v interesting story.
And then during and after the Eclipse Guts’ trauma is basically dropped, and he does feel more generic to me – more typically cool and badass, much less interestingly vulnerable. Like eg, his very personal, actual fear-for-himself during the Black Swordsman arc was a really compelling element! And the only post-Eclipse instance I can think of where he was shown to be genuinely afraid for his own life and well-being, rather than afraid of his own potential to do harm or afraid for the people he’s trying to protect, is when Slan shows up in the troll cave. And because there was a sexualized threat there I do think that was a deliberate reference to Guts’ own trauma. But it was one scene over a hundred chapters ago that didn’t really have any emotional resonance (unlike, say, the early Golden Age Zodd encounter which changed everything, or the Wyald encounter which imo shed a lot of light on Guts’ dream), and was far from overt.
So like I unfortunately also get the impression that Miura has largely dropped Guts’ personal trauma as a significant factor of his character and story in favour of the far more common and boring fridged girlfriend backstory.
But! I also still have hope that that’s not the case. I feel like Guts’ post Eclipse monster hunting rampage was largely a way to avoid dealing with his complicated feelings, and I feel the same way about Guts’ fix Casca quest. Like, maybe it’s not Miura dropping Guts’ personal trauma to focus on manpain – maybe it’s Guts deliberately cultivating rage to avoid confronting his more difficult feelings like fear and loneliness and longing etc.
Avoidance is kind of his thing, after all.
This may be (is probably) wishful thinking, but it does give me hope
that if the fix Casca quest goes pear shaped (eg Casca uses the behelit,
or something), Guts’ issues – his childhood, guilt, all his mixed feelings regarding Griffith, etc – will come back front and centre. We
have all the ominous foreshadowing about the Beast of Darkness and the
armour,
and if something makes him go wild and succumb to it it would be nice if it wasn’t just like a one-off bad event but rather a cumulation of everything he’s (I hope) been spending the last 3 years trying to distract himself from.
And then at some point after that he can be pulled back from the armour and yk, actually grow as a person by confronting his issues rather than hitting stuff with a sword, now armed with the knowledge that avoiding stuff just makes them fuck you up harder when your avoidance strategies fail you.
ofc that said, even if that is the case I think Miura’s fucked up w/ pacing. It’s been 250 chapters since the Eclipse, there’s a reason I feel like this is a vain hope even if it does make perfect sense to me as an explanation lol. Plus like… some details do seem to not be pointing in that direction. Like:
Are we meant to regard his choice to take Casca to Elfhelm to be immersing himself in sorrow? Because that is absolutely not the vibe I’m getting, but the dichotemy between chase Griffith for revenge = avoidance vs stick with Casca = positive healing is so explicitly drawn here that maybe Miura’s just half-assing the positive healing to the point where it looks like avoidance lmao. Like that is my genuine fear, is that everything from chapter 130 on is actually meant to be seen as Guts dealing with his shit lol.
But idk like there are still intriguing elements that may be evocative of Guts’ deeper issues, back even to his childhood, that pop up now and then, that I can point to as evidence that they may still be actually dealt with in the future. Like the aforementioned Slan scene, the way he’s still drawn to Griffith as his “true light,” the fact that the Beast of Darkness is personified as a dog
uhhh the self-destructiveness of the armour (the way he doesn’t feel pain and it knits his broken bones together etc) as a metaphor for the way fighting is basically a form of self-harm for him… idk like none of these things are addressed, but they’re there to be picked up on and therefore will hopefully cumulate in something more interesting eventually.
me: tbh guts’ sad wistfulness and his inability to hate griffith for sacrificing him to the point where femto had to do something ridiculously ott just to piss him off was a terrible writing choice and completely flattens guts as a character post-eclipse while contradicting like half of the black swordsman arc
also me:
i
love
this
tragic
romance
As a sacrificial offering for the Invocation of Doom, not just any lump of flesh and blood will do. It must be someone important to you, part of your soul… someone so close to you that it’s almost like giving up a part of you.
Yeah I really feel like the Eclipse just, hugely cheapened just about everything that was interesting about Guts in the Black Swordsman arc by putting all the focus on a) how someone else’s pain affects Guts and b) like you said, the suggested emasculation of Guts watching someone else give his girlfriend an orgasm. And that might be seen as an uncharitable take on the scene lol but Casca’s arousal seriously is the central visual focus, and it’s what the rape scene builds up to, and it remains all about Guts’ feelings, and it’s so simultaneously offensive and just… cheap and boring.
It straight up mystifies me how Miura decided to add g*tsca for more Eclipse drama (ie the rape scene) and somehow didn’t realize that not only does the Eclipse not require any additional drama, but it overwrites the actual drama the Eclipse should’ve had as a personally traumatizing event to Guts. It’s just so frustrating lmao.
Wrt the fetus you can kind of tilt your head and still see it as a symbol for the futility of revenge – in hindsight now it’s more like a haunting reminder of Guts abandoning Casca – but it doesn’t work nearly as well because in the BS arc it’s visually depicted as a representation of like, Guts’ own inner demon – the pathetic monstrousness left when revenge consumes the rest of you.
So you have things like Guts’ nightmare where it’s chasing him which is echoed in his chapter 13 nightmare where it’s Donovan chasing him, and then echoed again in his vision after killing Adonis where it’s Zodd/Donovan/himself. How’s that supposed to work thematically if the fetus is a symbol of a relationship/his humanity lmao? Or the vision Guts had of the fetus with Vargas’ face?
And I mean I love the Beast of Darkness bc i’m easy for evil dark sides lol, but honestly the vibe the fetus had in the BS arc was better, because of that patheticness. It wasn’t cool, it wasn’t powerful, it was just sad, like the Vargas parallels.
Anyway ty for this ask and giving me an opportunity to complain some more, I’m glad you agree.
I wouldn’t change either Guts or Griffith’s backstories tbh, I think they’re actually pretty well done, and important to their characters and narratives without being the be all end all. Well, I’d like to make Gennon less of an evil gay stereotype and Donovan less of a scary black man stereotype but yk, other than those details the existence of rape in their backstories isn’t something I’d change.
With Casca… tough call. Her story is all about gendered violence to the point where if you got rid of the rape attempts you’d have to come up with a whole new story for her. But it’s still a shallower and less well-rounded depiction of abuse than either guts or griffith’s backstories, bc it’s so emphatically gendered, like, rather than informing her personality or her choices it’s just framed as being a woman.
So actually I guess for Casca what I’d change is (actually pretty obviously lol) her motivations. She’s not in love with Griffith, she idealizes his dream because she knows he wants to dismantle those power structures that fuck her over and create a place where those w/ power can’t easily abuse their power over others. She hates Guts not because she’s jealous of him (tho she could still be jealous of his emotional closeness with Griffith, like she’d still admire Griffith here even if she’s not in love with him and I like that rival dynamic), but because she recognizes that he could end up destroying Griffith’s dream.
Also I think we can still cut out most of the rape threats she gets while still showing that she has something to fight against. Maybe keep Adon being a gross dick (in all fairness he kind of mirrors Gennon towards Griffith which kind of shows how they’re fighting for the same dream – ie a world where those kinds of dudes are shut down) but have Casca just fighting for her life rather than against rape attempts as she runs from the 100 man fight.
So nothing really changes much until Guts comes back from his vacation. And now Casca is genuinely, genuinely angry and hateful towards him, because he did exactly what she’s been afraid he was going to do – destroyed Griffith’s dream, and her hope for a better future.
Which means they don’t have sex lol, Casca was never into Guts, they began a friendship towards the end of the war but nothing more. And now that Guts has come back Casca is actively hostile to him, though after Guts lets her stab him she probably forgives him a bit bc it’s not like he intended to destroy absolutely everything, and he’s clearly fucked up about it.
Also no suicide attempt.
So their dynamic during the rescue mission is resentful allies, like a throwback to their first three years knowing each other.
Wyald still happens but no attempted rape w/ Casca obviously.
Now when it comes to the Eclipse, I want it to be all about Guts, and I want it to hit the audience over the head with parallels to his childhood. It’s the Eclipse, it doesn’t need to be subtle. Rather than looking wistful when Griffith sacrifices everyone, I want Guts to look betrayed, I want him to look just as sad and horrified as he did when he was 11 and Gambino told him he sold him to Donovan.
Agh I’d hate to lose the creepy silent monster vibe from Femto, but something like a cold, “you’re still alive?” would be v fitting w/ the “you should have died” parallels. Tho idk I’m torn on that.
And ok I said I want it to be all about Guts but I can’t just kill off Casca. But if she’s gonna live the Eclipse needs some serious personal meaning for her too. So maybe her reaction to being sacrificed, knowing it’s for the dream she’s dedicated her life to and in theory she should be willing to give her life for it, and trying to reconcile that with the horrificness of the situation and her desperate desire to survive anyway. So she survives long enough for Femto to show up, because she’s not the third best fighter in the Hawks for nothing, and then…
torture? Femto has monsters hold Guts down and tortures Casca in a way reminiscent of a kid pulling the wings off a fly. She loses an arm, Guts keeps his because he’s too busy being utterly terrified and possibly flashbacking to hack his own arm off in a rage.
Like, one thing about the Eclipse rape, is that if Miura had to have it as a way of emotionally affecting Guts, how the fuck did he manage to draw like two chapters of awful awful shit with Guts being held down by monsters that he’d just watched rape Casca, and completely fail to allude to Guts’ own rape trauma? How. Hooooow it’s mind boggling. It’s absurd.
But you don’t even need the graphic rape for that, like hell, Miura has absolutely adequately set up the correlation between giant monsters Guts is compelled to fight and his own childhood trauma imo to justify Guts having a very emotional traumatic reaction to just being held down and made helpless by monsters after being essentially given to them.
There’s Black Swordsman Guts in a nutshell, and this is exactly what was implied to have caused him to go full traumatized amoral asshole. Before g*tsca was a gleam in Miura’s eye all he had were those parallels to Guts’ childhood trauma – Guts being given away to monsters by someone he trusted – and that’s all he needed.
So anyway, because Casca lives, she has her own reaction to being casually tortured by Femto before being rescued, which is also a replay of her childhood trauma but without the agency of killing her attacker herself with a sword. So her reaction could very well be similar to Guts’ – a desire to kill monsters and get revenge. Maybe she’s lost her idealism wrt the dream, and she’s more cynical now – a better world is impossible, best you can do is survive this one.
She and Guts go their separate ways because they’re barely friends, let alone lovers, and remember 2 brands = big ghost problems.
After this the narrative splits 3 ways between NGriff, Guts, and Casca.
I’m reaching the limits of my creativity lol. So I’m just gonna suggest that Guts gets the behelit, Casca gets the armour and the rpg group, Casca gets the moving on arc and hooks up with Farnese while maybe finding a happy medium between changing the world and lashing out against the world, and Guts succumbs to his inner darkness and gets a highly emotional confrontation with Griffith. Since he has the behelit maybe he uses it upon realizing that Griffith’s heart is still beating for him, bc the emotional conflict is just too much, and sacrifices Griffith to become a Zodd-esque apostle wandering battlefields and fighting for no reason, basically returned to his pre-Griffith state.
It’s probably shorter than 355 chapters too lbr. I’d say NGriff creates Falconia right before the confrontation with Guts, so yk he achieves his dream b4 ironically getting sacrificed. Otherwise his story doesn’t change much. Maybe stronger suggestions that he’s not as unemotional as he looks, to build up to a guts confrontation better.
Like… I’m not a very creative or good writer lol but I feel this general outline could be written in a very good and satisfying way by someone with talent, like Miura.
Seems like a fair take. I mean becoming Femto was very much shown as a rebirth – you could definitely say he was reborn into a new family, the godhand, to begin a new life. I always particularly loved this panel as an illustration for this ngl:
the very image of a newly hatched (evil) baby bird right there.
But yeah like, the chapter where the hand begins to unfold to reveal Femto is called “quickening” and the next chapter is “birth.” There’s no doubt it’s def a monstrous gestation thing.
Makes me wonder about NeoGriffith’s similar birth tbh. It gets a series of chapters titled “birth ceremony,” he hatches from an egg there too, rapidly grows from fetus to adult, etc.
Though we don’t know enough about NeoGriffith to conclude whether it means there’s significant differences between him and Femto/it’s another new start in a way. But I mean the parallels and contrasts between the Eclipse and the Conviction Arc’s shadow Eclipse were hammered through the reader’s head for a reason right? There’s got to be something to it.
welcome to controversy country
Griffith’s decision to sacrifice the Hawks was perfectly reasonable not just taking into account Griffith’s own values and priorities, ie ensuring the thousands of dead posthumously achieve the thing they died for, but taking into account the Hawks’ own attitudes towards their lives, including Guts’.
It’s all there in Requiem of the Wind.
“More than half of us’ve been killed…”
These are the core group of Hawks. These are the ones who believe in Griffith so strongly that they’re willing to spend a year living as outlaws, dying in raids, so they can rescue him – so Griffith can lead them again.
There were lots of deserters over that year. People who didn’t think it was worth risking their lives for a chance at achieving Griffith’s dream. They’re presumably out there living happily ever after.
These Hawks are the ones who are willing to risk their lives, not out of friendship or loyalty to a man, but out of loyalty to what the man symbolizes for them, what he can bring them, the success that comes to them when they follow him. Out of loyalty to the dream.
Corkus is the only one throwing a tantrum, but he’s voicing all their thoughts, as we can see when his words are placed over their depressed faces.
Wyald spells it all out.
This is who Griffith is to them. He’s the facilitator of their dreams, dreams that each and every one of them is willing to risk their lives for.
And when he can’t be that to them anymore, what happens? He becomes a burden to them.
Judeau offers to take care of him because it’s the least he can do, because he owes it to him, but mostly because if he doesn’t he thinks Casca will, and he thinks it will be a life ruining burden for her. His offer is a personal sacrifice.
Casca offers to take care of him because it’s the least she can do, he’s so small now, he needs someone, and because if she doesn’t Guts will, and she thinks it will be a life ruining burden for him. Her offer is a personal sacrifice.
Guts’ offer is probably the only one based on a genuine desire to stay with Griffith.
Now, Guts doesn’t see Griffith as the guy who can grant him his dreams. Guts is the exception to that. He sees Griffith as a guy he wants to be friends with.
But here’s Guts’ take on the situation:
Finish the battles you start.
Well, that’s exactly what Griffith chose to do. The Eclipse is, in part, a narrative rebuke of Guts’ stubbornness lol, it happens because he seized on the concept of finding his own dream and couldn’t let it go until it was a moment too late.
When Guts finally drops his own “battle” in favour of staying with Griffith, ie makes the right choice contrary to his dogged nature, it comes too late because he’d successfully convinced Casca that he was dedicated to his dream at the expense of his friendships with the Hawks. “I want to draw a line, keep things separate.” He told her he didn’t want to stay with the Hawks, and she believed him, and that attitude is what ruins everything.
And ironically that’s the exact path Griffith chose when he agreed to the sacrifice. Drop his friends and relationships in favour of renewing his committment to a dream, and finishing his own battle.
For the rest of the Hawks, the Eclipse is a rebuke of their choice to live and risk their lives for tomorrow’s success rather than today’s existence.
Now, this absolutely isn’t me arguing that the Hawks deserved to die or anything lol, this is just me saying that Requiem of the Wind is largely set-up for the sacrifice, and I think it’s a clever way of like… depicting the sacrifice not just as a random tragedy that befell a group of people, but as a darkly fitting end to the way they live their lives.
It shows that the sacrifice is consistent with everything the Hawks profess to believe in.
They are all willing to lay down their lives for a victory they may never see.
The Eclipse is the fucked up yet logical conclusion to the Hawks’ very existence as a mercenary band that fights for an ideal, a dream, rather than just day to day living. They agree to potentially sacrifice their lives in every battle. The Eclipse is just one more battle, by this logic, and it’s one they win by losing their lives in it. By dying, they achieve their ultimate victory.
And I think by taking this whole philosophy of dedicating one’s life to a dream to its logical and horrific conclusion, Berserk is basically critiquing the concept of living for an ideal. In making the sacrifice, Griffith gave the Hawks what they wanted at a cost they’ve already agreed to by choosing to risk their lives for Griffith’s victories and the success he can bring them.
Of course, in the moment, knowing that death was inevitable, they would have preferred to live. None of them would knowingly trade their life for a future they won’t live to see. But that’s essentially what they’re doing by fighting battles for future hopes and dreams.
At the end of the day, the moral of Berserk’s story is really simple and basic: live for the sake of being alive. Guts had it right during his three years with the Hawks, before overhearing the Promrose Hall speech: no grand dream, no living for a potential future, nothing but doing the job of a mercenary with a group of people he considered family, enjoying life day to day, fighting just to live a life he considered worthwhile.
Personally I have mixed feelings about this message, but I’m pretty sure that’s basically the point of Berserk.
Black Swordsman: living for revenge (and, for extra irony, Guts’ own dream of fighting stronger and stronger enemies) is bad, living day to day with those “irreplacable things” – friends – is good. Golden Age: “I was too stupid and stubborn to notice it, but what I really wished for back then was here.” Guts left for a dream and by leaving threw away what he truly wanted – companionship. Conviction arc: the people who survived the shadow Eclipse were the people who acted to save their own lives, rather than out of a conviction, their faith in a higher power. Millennium Falcon: “Dreams can make for courageous challenges or opportune escapes” – emphasis on escapes. Troll village dude wanted to escape the darkness of life through a dream as a child, but eventually found greater fulfillment just living an ordinary life in his village. etc etc. Stop dreaming, focus on living.
And essentially the despair we see from the Hawks upon their realization that the fight is over and Griffith is no longer able to lead them to a greater dream leads directly to the Eclipse and gives it a layer of dark irony.
yk what as much as i absolutely adore guts’ total lack of rage here, i feel like this is a huge writing mistake.
and not only because miura basically used guts’ resignation upon being sacrificed to try to narratively justify the eclipse rape as a way of actually pissing him off, but also because, frankly,griffith sacrificing him should send guts into a giant tailspin of rage and hurt.
it’s a very clear replay of his childhood trauma.
like while i think it’s not necessarily ooc for guts to feel sad and wistful after griffith makes the sacrifice, rather than heartbroken and rageful, I think a) it would be just as in character for the sacrifice itself to send Guts into Black Swordsman mode, esp with watching all his friends die horribly and b) it would be thematically tighter and fit with what we see of the Black Swordsman arc better if that had been the case.
As of like, chapter 12, we know everything we need to know to understand Guts during the Black Swordsman arc. He’s a walking bundle of trauma because someone he loved essentially handed him over to a hoard of monsters and ghosts, and that reminds Guts of Gambino both calling him a cursed child who should’ve died and selling him to Donovan.
And having Guts be not really all that upset over the sacrifice, but more upset over Femto’s petty demonstration of evil afterwards completely shifts the focus from Guts’ personal trauma and feelings of betrayal to manpain over his girlfriend’s trauma.
like this?
Is extremely good shit, especially after we see his childhood later.
Guts’ frantic denial after Griffith does make the sacrifice, as he’s trying to “save” him, is also perfect set up for this in the way it echoes Guts denying Donovan’s assertion that Gambino sold him. But then instead of giving way to rage and betrayal, Guts just… resigns himself.
The rage and betrayal could’ve even be put on hold until Femto appears. All we’d need to see to justify Guts shifting from regret and dull sadness to pure unadultrated rage and pain would be something akin to what we saw in the Black Swordsman arc – Femto coldly telling Guts he should be dead/he’s nothing but a sacrifice/he belongs to the apostles/something along those lines. Ie an echo of Gambino telling Guts he sold him before trying to kill him.
(and we could have femto sic the apostles on guts + guts survive just long enough for skull knight to show up. we don’t even have to lose femto failing to kill him as he escapes.)
Imo the sense that Guts is personally very fucked up by the fact that he’s once again been traded away by someone he loves, respects, and admires is lost after the Golden Age in favour of the sense that Guts is fucked up by losing someone he loves and gaining an evil demon antagonist in his place, with a side of being mad about Casca.
On the plus side we get the sense that part of his rage comes from just missing Griffith, and I can’t deny that I absolutely enjoy the fact that Guts isn’t angry at human Griffith, but is only angry at demon Griffith. The way Guts separates the different versions of Griffith in his mind and still feels love and regret and guilt and fondness etc for human Griffith is good shit and it’s hard for me to say I’d give that up for anything lol.
But I think it would still be better writing if he was directly angry about the sacrifice, and if his feelings of love and regret and guilt were all mixed together with rage and betrayal and all aimed at all three versions of Griffith. And despite everything I would ultimately rather have that + no Eclipse rape than what we got.
i think berserk is walking that “revenge will destroy you” route and im not against a kind of emotional catharsis here but that would ideally be between guts and griffith and like that kind of reconciliation (given thats the angle were taking here) would leave an awful taste in my mouth bc of the eclipse rape lol.
tbh this is why i hope berserk isn’t so much going for a ‘revenge is bad and futile’ thing as it’s going for a ‘guts getting revenge in this particular case is bad and futile because it’s not his right to get revenge for the eclipse and also he wants revenge for the wrong reasons, ie bc it’s an easy outlet for his very complex feelings, but casca’s the hawk representative who never abandoned the band and also the person who suffered most so she’s the one who should get revenge.’
kind of suggested in part here at least:
and yea youre right about the
railroading thing ughhgh that really gets me (im a broken record but it
reminds me of vriska and like that shit gets me). it feels pretty hallow
when you have to acknowledge this in the context of the whole story
especially bc griffiths helplessness to the waters of fate and destiny
isnt emphasized as overtly tragic as it really is. which is a valid
storytelling choice ic it just, again, gets me.
also femto is the consequence of guts actions and its clearly framed that way idk what people get out of insisting otherwise.
yeah i feel you, griffith’s narrative is so sad to me, but a lot of what’s tragic about it isn’t in your face.
and yeah it’s like, you can say guts didn’t deserve to experience the eclipse, which is obviously true bc v few people deserve that shit, and def not for making a mistake based on low self esteem lol, but narratively it’s the consequence of his actions bc berserk is a very dark story. guts is the main character who actively made a choice which set all the tragedy dominos falling. it’s even ironically fitting – his choice to “abandon” the hawks and griffith resulted in losing everyone permanently.
like i think ppl equate saying the eclipse/femto/griffith’s breakdown/etc is a consequence of guts’ actions to saying either a) guts deserved to suffer and/or b) if this happened in real life it would be right to blame guts for everything lol, neither of which are statements that necessarily follow the first one, and are clearly untrue. but fiction operates by different rules than reality.
i love the detail of guts’ eye dripping blood here
it’s a symbol of despair that’s rly effective in illustrating guts’ feelings here (moreso than the run imho lol) despite not actually having any literal correlation to his emotions – yk bc it’s reminiscent of griffith crying blood after the behelit opened – and it’s gr8 that it comes right after that last memory of griffith.
it’s like a little mirror. each the source of the others’ despair.
I think it really just comes down to how you interpret Miura’s facial expressions but to me this looks tender and loving.
It’s Griffith’s last glimpse of Guts, after choosing to sacrifice him but before he starts shedding pieces of himself and transforming, and seeing that love in his eyes just makes this moment for me lol.
He’s content with his decision, there’s no anguish there or second guessing or wishing it could’ve been another way. It’s maybe even relishing this last glimpse of Guts, and of being able to feel that love without it also like, causing him pain, because he knows this is the end of it.
I mean I’m just reading really into it because this is how I see Griffith and his feelings at the end of his story, but I think it fits the image.
I think your interpretation is fair and makes sense, like, he does look pleased and I think he is, but the look in his eye is just so damn tender, yk? Like he’s saying goodbye, without malice, and just drinking in the last sight of Guts he’ll ever have. I think love is definitely part of this moment.
I’m going to lay out some visuals here real quick bc I just noticed another good detail lol
Griffith on a black background, Guts on a white background. Light and dark, connection and loneliness, and Guts as Griffith’s last connection to humanity before he’s carried up into darkness.
Guts and Griffith brightly lit in contrast to the surrounding darkness as they clutch each others’ hands, because this is what they are to each other. Their connection is what illuminates the darkness, what staves off loneliness.
Guts is both the source of Griffith’s despair and the only thing capable of preventing him from succumbing to it. “He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive.” Same kinda thing.
Guts falling away, lit in comparsion to Griffith blending in with the background. Griffith losing that light.
These pages are just a great illustration of Guts and Griffith as each others’ brightest things, and what they lose when they give up each other.
holy fuck this just hit me like a brick. the way “do you think i’m cruel” is slightly separate from the other two memories, coming after Guts stops denying it and begins thinking “is this…”
“do you think that I’m cruel?”
“is this… what you wanted?”
it’s the moment griffith has least wanted this.
guts’ answer is what the godhand use to convince him to agree. it’s the moment that could’ve changed what happened here, if griffith had gotten a different answer.
Yeah I think his heart was in the right place, it seems like he genuinely just wanted what was best for everyone even if his methods were a little… underhanded and dishonest. Like towards the end eg, he probably thought Griffith would be better off with him and his thieves than with Guts and Casca as well as vice versa (and if Guts and Casca stayed together while taking care of Griffith he might’ve even been right, bc lbr that would’ve been a shitshow lol.) He’s likeable, and fun, and he has some great moments, like telling Guts he’s sure he’ll find what he’s looking for with the Hawks. Ngl his death scene always makes me cry lol, I do def like him overall, in part because he makes mistakes too.
Also I wonder if there isn’t a subtle indication from Miura that Judeau and Casca should’ve gotten together instead of Guts and Casca, and it’s its own little sub-tragedy based on stupid self-esteem issues that they didn’t. The way during the Eclipse Judeau does his best to save her and defends her with his own life while Guts is up on the hand still trying to “save” Griffith lol feels kind of starkly telling. I don’t ship them myself, I like their friendship and I kind of wish Judeau hadn’t had a crush the whole time lol, but it fits into the whole missed opportunity vibe of the Golden Age.
It is kind of a shame that the Golden Age side characters got way less backstory and development than the current RPG group, but the current group has so much more time. Like 200+ chapters vs 70. I did love the little enriching hints we got about the Hawks though, like Judeau feeling inadequate as a jack of all trades, the hints that Corkus is bitter about his own lost dreams. I’d say ‘etc’ but actually that’s about it really. Wish we got more on Pippin too.
Holy moly, what have we even been doing for the last 200+ chapters?? As much as I love the rpg group, nothing beats the original Hawks for me.
I definitely think that the Golden Age was all about people missing what was right in front of them, and losing their chances, or screwing them up on purpose. I mean, it can’t just be Guts and Griffith in this crapsack world that do it.
You mentioned how during the eclipse Guts was focusing of Griffith while Judeau was focused on Casca. Got me thinking about how his final acts were to be a literal shield over her body, and how he fell from her arm as he died. I don’t have the scans, but it reminded me of how Guts and Casca always compare themselves to swords. A sword and shield go mighty well together.
Lmao right? It really puts it into perspective when you realize the Golden Age was less than 100 chapters and we’re on 354 now.
Yeah that really sums up the Golden Age in a nutshell lol. And Judeau’s thoughts at the end do include, “I missed my chance to say it,” which fits.
tbh good call with the sword/shield imagery. Like yeah he does literally use himself as a human shield against that one weird apostle, and then Casca leaps up and kills it with her sword. I could def see that being purposeful. Also like… Judeau is Casca’s last real human interaction with someone before she’s driven insane. I’d love to see that acknowledged when she wakes up tbh.
You found the image I was talking about! I already put it on the post itself, but the way he fell off her arm reminds me of how shields are worn on the arm and get dropped when they’re broken!
This chapter was pure badassery on so many levels. I really hate that basically every female character is subjected to assault tho. All of them. (Sadly, I guess it’s not so different from the world we live in.)
On a GriffGuts note, I wonder if the reason Guts focuses so much on casca’s assault is because it drives home for him what Griffith has become. Griffith being his singular focus and all.
Whereas in the last chapter that got released, Casca’s memories encapsulate the whole Eclipse.
Yeah it’s genuinely fantastic, badass and touching and emotional and then it ends… like that
tbh ia. It’s like the way Guts wasn’t angry at Griffith, just sad and regretful, even while all his friends were dying and he was being attacked by a hoard of monsters, up until the rape scene. In a way it makes sense for Guts to focus on that since it’s like, the source of his violent rage that keeps him going and keeps him wanting to kill Griffith/Femto, as opposed to the rest of the Eclipse which is probably more a source of guilt (”was I the one who drove you…?”)
the beast of darkness pretty much suggests that this is why Guts was keeping Casca with him, basically so he could brood. (As did Miura in one interview :/)
Idk I wish it wasn’t so utterly manpain-y, with Guts being so focused on something that didn’t even happen to him, to the detriment of the person it actually did happen to, just so he can stay angry. You’d think his missing arm would be enough of a reminder. But it is what it is, and at least it’s not really portrayed in a positive light I guess.
Ye, the manpain is rlly intense. Muira basically fridged her and Farnesca is my only solace. And the hope that she gets badass again and bitchslaps N.Griffith and Guts tbh.
Personally the way I read it is that Guts put Griffith above acts like that, and what he did to Casca is a display of how corrupted Femto is compared to HIS Griffith. Guts would have gladly given an arm for Griffith under any circumstances, but to see him attack Casca was unthinkable from original Griffith in Guts’ mind.
I definitely don’t agree with the fact that it happened in the narrative, and even less with how she was treated as a character afterwards. (I feel like I’d be more ok with her insanity if the assault had been left out.) But considering I don’t buy the idea that Guts and Casca were “meant to be together”, my only conclusion in terms of Guts’ character is that it demonstrated how far the Godhand had perverted the man he loved. I’m really crossing my fingers that the upcoming chapters don’t focus too much on that part of her narrative.
yeah pretty much agreed on all counts.
While Guts accepted that Griffith made the sacrifice and even seemed to understand to an extent, raping Casca was like a harsh dividing line, and I’m sure that was the whole point from a writing perspective. Griffith saved her from rape, Femto destroys her through it, contrasts, yadda yadda yadda.
tbh it’s very telling that while Guts’ feelings towards Femto/NeoGriff are “tainted” by his love for human Griffith – eg still wanting his attention, still can’t stand to be looked down on by him, forgets his urge to kill when NGriff sheds the evil exoskeleton, acts like he got dumped when NGriff flies away on Zodd, etc – his feelings towards human Griffith haven’t changed. He doesn’t think back on him and hate him, he only feels longing/regret/loneliness/guilt/love/friendship/etc when he thinks of him.
Like it really does seem to show that Guts hates Femto/NGriff because he’s not his Griffith. When he reminds him of his Griffith, ie, when NeoGriff shows up, he suddenly finds it a lot harder to hate him.
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 ❤
brightly lit people surrounded by encroaching darkness, drawn exactly the way miura represents isolation – except that they have each other, as beacons in the darkness. the more dazzling he is in my eyes; as he shines so glaring within me…
until Guts lets go
woah woah woah
“They obtain the power of gods!”
that wasn’t in Griffith’s chapter 8 monologue.
like is this one of those things that Miura had changed between magazine publication and volume publication because it was too on the nose? and if so did he forget by this chapter? shit should i assume griffith said it or not?
if i assume he said it there are three possibilities:
1. griffith is speaking metaphorically, ie people who have the power to change the world may as well be gods.
2. griffith is speaking literally and somehow only he knows that sometimes people become gods. (the “fortune teller” that sold him the behelit maybe? does that make griffith the kind of weirdo who genuinely believes wild shit salesmen tell him?)
3. it’s generally accepted knowledge/myth/belief in berserk’s universe that sometimes people become gods and griffith is referencing that belief system.
like i’m obviously going for option #1 here since it’s the most reasonable, but still lol. and tbf griffith believes strongly in fate and clearly wants to believe in higher powers, so it’s not beyond the realm of plausibility that he’s speaking literally.
I think it would depend. like imo pretty much any tiny change would lead to no Eclipse, but if say Casca and Judeau hooked up during the year Guts was gone, I could see that leading to either
the best case scenario for Griffith of Casca and Judeau taking off together and leaving Griffith with Guts
or the worst case scenario of Guts leaving Griffith with Casca and Judeau and taking off.
tho tbh I can’t see the latter happening if Guts still had his revelation that he broke Griffith’s heart, and he would’ve still had that revelation if Casca still attacked him and screamed it at him, which probably still would’ve happened, so yeah I think it’s more likely than not that the outcome would’ve been a lot better generally if Judeau and Casca got together.
Also if they did get together and the Eclipse still happened, a lot would probably change because they both would’ve died, and Guts’ probably would’ve too without a prolonged rape scene to waste time while Skull Knight fought Zodd. But like, assuming the events of the Eclipse somehow didn’t change, I don’t think Guts’ feelings towards mentally regressed Casca would be very different if they’d stayed platonic friends rather than hooking up. Their sexual relationship is mostly downplayed after the Eclipse (except when it comes to Guts assaulting her and I sure wouldn’t miss that) with Guts mostly thinking of her as a reminder of his time with the Hawks, and I think he’d feel about the same amount of regret and responsibility when it comes to her.
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
please look at guts facial expressions as he fights then thinks of griffith waugh
lmao can i just say i love that in the black swordsman arc miura was obviously thinking: well guts is pissed off about being sacrificed and stuck fighting ghosts and causing ppl’s deaths just by hanging out with them. that’s a reasonable reason to want revenge
and by the end of the golden age he was like ‘lol that’s not even close to enough to make guts hate griffith. all his friends dying horribly? nope. griffith offering him up for sacrifice and making his life an unmitigated hell? nope. better go above and beyond in the worst way possible for this one.
and guts still doesn’t hate griffith lmao. he hates femto and wants revenge but every time he thinks about human griffith he still just feels regret and sadness lol.
It was the last time Griffith decided to keep what’s most precious and preventing him from reaching his goals.
oh man, you know especially considering the godhand had already pretty much explained everything (you’ll sacrifice everyone here and become a god, cool huh?) this really is like, the last time Griffith chose him over his dream.
you're the only one 