Can I just say all of chapter 2? I was tempted to go with the end of chapter one as a character establishing moment, yk Guts looking scarier than snake man as he gleefully tortures him, but honestly chapter 2 is where it’s at when it comes to Black Swordsman Guts.
4.
Guts finally, somberly realizing he shouldn’t’ve left, telling Judeau and Casca he’ll stay with Griffith, both of them telling him to leave because he did such a thorough job of proclaiming he’s got a nobler goal and separating himself, just hammering home how it was a mistake.
3.
This is a double feature because I couldn’t decide between these two scenes and they essentially say the same thing anyway:
and
Guts haunted by the fear and temptation of becoming a monster. I love the sewer nightmare, especially coming right before Promrose Hall. The way it conflates Zodd, Donovan, and Guts after he kills Adonis. Guts’ self-loathing here informing why he reacts so badly to the overheard speech too.
And then after Rosine and a fun child-killing spree, these ghosts voicing his inner thoughts. The self-loathing, muddied by the temptation of giving in and following in Griffith’s footsteps, ironically the same choice he made after Promrose Hall. Griffith’s dream made him a monster, and Guts’ dream is doing the same – and the Black Swordsman content is absolutely Guts pursuing his own dream, to fight stronger and stronger opponents.
2.
Guts channeling all his painful feelings into rage here. I can’t really say the whole rampage through Midland lol, there are moments I like less, but definitely the start of it, the reunion in the depths, killing the torturer, one man army-ing up the stairs and out the door. It’s just so good. Exactly how Guts avoids dealing with his feelings, really awesome to watch, nice sense of protectiveness, and excellently illustrative of how devastated he is to find Griffith after a year of torture.
1.
Guts finally, finally beginning to accept that he’s found a new home, the place where he belongs, here with the Hawks and Griffith, after Griffith risked his life to save him from a monster (in a particularly meaningful contrast to his childhood). Finally beginning to move on and heal a bit. This is the moment of greatest potential for Guts and p much the pinnacle of his life and it’s so effective at putting the reader and Guts at like, a height from which to fall.
Bonus 6:
This only gets a bonus spot bc I’ve mentioned it a few times before as one of my favourite Guts moments and I don’t want to be too predictable lol, but it’s so good. This whole scene. Guts ostensibly wanting to fight Femto but more than anything wanting his attention and only being spurred on to even stand up when Femto says that.
1. This is another one of my favourite expresions in Berserk tbh
2. I’m not saying this is deliberate, I’m not sure it would even be in character, but I can’t help but imagine this as Guts taunting Femto/Griffith about the fact that he was in love with him, his life was destroyed because of him, Guts drove him to make the sacrifice by leaving him, and Guts knows it.
Like yeah logically it’s just Guts being pissed off over the fact that Griffith sacrificed him to become a demon, especially with the follow up “thanks to me who’s fighting an army of the dead because of you,” but man, I’m js that knowing how the Golden Age goes gives this line potential Layers. You’re where you are now because this petty existence had all that power over you.
On the other hand this whole scene exists to set up Griffith making the sacrifice to bury his fragile heart bc of whatever went down w/ Guts, so like, it could be that deep?
Plus Femto’s response:
Just gonna reiterate that you mean absolutely nothing to me.
Whether that’s what Guts meant to say or not, I’m pretty sure he’s well aware of the irony of Femto emphasising his insignificance now, considering everything that went down between them. He might even stubbornly refuse to go back to post-Speech-to-Charlotte Guts, clinging to the fact that, no, I meant something to you and you meant something to me, and we both know that.
But then he would also have to know that it’s his fault that Griffith went this far. Which we know that he does, but idk, whenever I re-read the manga I feel like we should get to see more guilt from him.
Anyway, I don’t think Miura was fully taking all this into consideration while writing these first few chapters, but in retrospect you have to think about all the layers of meaning behind nearly every word Femto & Guts exchange. Like, this is off topic, but it’s in these chapters that Guts first finds out what sacrificing someone really means, and he doesn’t really react in any significant way, when realistically he should.
To be fair he’s unconscious when the Godhand actually explain the sacrifice and tell the Count that a sacrifice has to be someone you love so much it’s like they’re part of you. Which imo is kind of a hmmmm in and of itself, like there’s no reason Guts had to be unconscious at any point at all since he could barely move anyway, except to miss the explanation of who can be sacrificed. When he does wake up he just lies there and listens to the Count’s backstory before finally telling Puck to heal him. So I feel like it kind of suggests that Guts knowing that info might affect some things.
But otherwise yeah ia. I’m actually kind of rly into the idea of Guts stubbornly clinging to the knowledge that he was important to Griffith, hard earned as it was, now that you mention that. At least between the Eclipse and Griffith’s rebirth.
It’s like… idk I think there’s an argument that he left the Hawks because he knew he did mean something to Griffith, and that gave him the confidence to believe he could truly become his bff4ever if he changed his whole life lol. Whereas if he thought Griffith genuinely couldn’t give a shit about him he wouldn’t even try.
And then I think a similar way of thinking could be informing his behaviour during the Black Swordsman stuff. Like, I know I meant something to you, deny it all you want, I’m going to find you and force you to acknowledge me.
But after NGriff ditches him I think he kind of gives that up? Which is why he’s able to put his revenge thing on hold – it starts to feel futile when he genuinely believes NGriff feels nothing at all towards him. (Which is why that beating heart is a game changer in waiting js.)
idk lol I’m just thinking outloud.
And yeah like, it’s textual that he feels guilty for Griffith’s breakdown, from letting Casca stab him to:
But I do wish we saw more of that post-Eclipse other than the recurring moments when he thinks about Griffith kneeling in the snow and mopes lol. It kind of makes sense to me that we don’t see Guts feeling guilty after the Eclipse because I feel like the point of the Eclipse rape was to piss Guts off enough that he’d basically channel his guilt into rage, but I feel like we should still see more inner conflict. Not that we don’t see any, but yk, I always want more.
Ohhh, man, I remembered he got knocked out but I thought we didn’t get to see the exact moment when he came to … so I thought, you know, we don’t know exactly how much he’s heard?
But I went to check and this is him twitching awake after all the juicy details have been laid out:
Which is honestly even better than him hearing all that and not reacting.
He does get to hear these parts though:
I honestly like to interpret his expression here as loathing directed specifically @ the God Hand sans Griffith/Femto, for waltzing in and ruining everything lol.
And I agree with everything else you brought up! Like, Guts can actually be pretty confident and even cocky, so it’s not like he’s constantly putting himself down. He’s just a little naive, bless his heart.
I can’t WAIT for Neo-Griff to finally snap lol
It’s gotta happen. Even if Guts’ storyline is wall-to-wall disappointment I know in my soul NGriff’s is going somewhere good.
And yeah I’m sure the parallels aren’t lost on Guts lol, but i guess it’s not quite as direct as essentially saying ‘being able to sacrifice someone is proof that you love them.’ Also yeah I’m into that interpretation of his anger there, like imo he hates Femto on a personal level for being an evil version of the dude he loves, but he def hates the rest of the Godhand for facilitating it. His reaction when seeing Slan in the troll cave was even more overwhelmingly rage-y than when he saw NGriff on the Hill of Swords, eg.
THANK YOU i think in particular the part abt the sacrificed person being who you most love *and* hate in that moment gets ignored, like the fact that in the canon examples the person(s) you love the most has betrayed you or ruined your life etc etc is glossed over??
it’s very easy to say
“well, *i* wouldnt do it” and pat your back smugly for being a good and
moral person if you can’t imagine ever facing that level of betrayal
from your loved ones
yeah it’s an important part of the whole equation. maybe it’s not the case in every single sacrifice, but it seems to generally hold true and it makes sense because in Berserk fate basically arranges circumstances for the highest possibility of someone saying “yes.” Except with Theresia, the sacrifice is always the reason for the behelit owner’s despair. It’s, ‘cut this out of your life and you will never feel despair like this again.’
idk I guess it’s less obvious with Guts and Griffith because Guts like, didn’t just try to kill him or anything, the betrayal Griffith perceives from him is a lot more subtle and blameless. More of a, I destroyed my dream because I’m in love with you and you’re going to leave me again, kind of thing. He says, “you’re the only one who made me forget my dream,” like an accusation. But I mean Guts himself acknowledges that he’s the one who drove Griffith to despair while he’s riding after him, so Guts being the source of Griffith’s pain is pretty explicitly part of the Eclipse.
So like yeah, even if you wouldn’t sacrifice someone you love who is totally innocent under any circumstances, let’s be real most of the people who say they’d never sacrifice someone aren’t thinking of a cheating spouse, or a son who just tried to kill them, or someone they love whose perceived rejection lead to a year of torture.
I love this as an introduction to Griffith so, so much.
It establishes the bare bones of his philosophy and his motivation in the first two pages, in a way that’s not untrue, but also exists to start the audience off with an assumption that Miura then complicates as we learn more about Griffith. We start off thinking of him as driven by grandiose thoughts of destiny, and wanting to be part of this true elite, beyond nobility. Again, not untrue, but as we learn more about him, we learn how much of a driving role guilt plays in this philosophy. “Martyrdom for a merciless God. What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth even a single piece of silver.” We see later how much this weighs on him, how driven he is to make that martyrdom not wasteful.
But even better than that, this brief scene starts with philosophical questions, but the real point, the real establishing character moment, is, “you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” It’s such an effective contrast that sums up Griffith’s entire narrative arc throughout the Golden Age. The dream vs Guts. We establish the dream here, but even more important than that, we establish that Guts is singular to Griffith.
The keys speech builds to that final statement, it practically serves as a handy preamble to our first direct depiction of what Guts is to Griffith, and I love it.
Thesis statement of this goddamn thesis: Guts is sexually attracted to Griffith.
Now, this is long. This is the shortest part of a four-part series, and this isn’t a short post. And basically my intention is to show why I find it so incredibly easy to read Guts as attracted to Griffith, and explain how this reading adds layers of meaning that fit neatly within Berserk’s themes and enrich the story. I’m not going to speculate on Miura’s motives for adding a ton of gay subtext, like, it could be anything from trying to be as gay as possible without pissing off his publishers to it all being totally coincidental and meaningless with an alternate explanation for every point I have, or anywhere in between.
My point is only that Berserk readily lends itself to gay readings, with a focus on Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith (as I feel like it tends to be neglected in favour of interpretations that Griffith has a one-sided crush.)
Part one covers the Black Swordsman stuff and the way Guts and Griffith’s relationship is revealed to the audience, part two covers the first several chapters of the Golden Age with a focus on visuals and how Guts sees Griffith, part three tackles Casca’s role in the story, and part four is more of an overview on why I think reading Berserk through a gay lens works so well.
So here we go.
Part One – Our Introduction to the Concept of Guts and Griffith
We’re introduced to Guts and Griffith’s relationship near the end of the Black Swordsman arc. Before the appearance of the Godhand we know that Guts is really fucking angry, we know he’s monster slaying because he’s out for revenge, we know he’s looking for a group called “the Godhand,” and thanks to Puck spelling some stuff out we know that he’s also sad and deeply afraid that he’s fighting a losing battle.
The comparison to Vargas hints that maybe he lost some loved ones, plus an eye and a limb to an apostle which is close enough to the truth to be decent foreshadowing.
But it’s not until the Godhand show up as the Count’s about to die that we learn what’s really going on with Guts. The information is given to us surprisingly straightforwardly, and the way the information is revealed to us is pretty telling.
The first six chapters have been teasing the mystery of what happened to Guts to piss him off so much, from the way we kick off in media res, to hints about his issues and trauma (eg the aforementioned Vargas comparison, the way he lets the possessed corpse of the kid stab him, etc), to Puck directly asking what the hell happened to him outloud for the benefit of the audience. We start to get our answer in chapter 7.
The Godhand that Guts has been searching for shows up, Femto front and centre, and Guts’ rage is directed right at him. When Guts screams “Griffith!” at him we see Puck asking “Griffith? Who’s Griffith?”
My point with this is just to emphasize that the driving hook of the Black Swordsman arc is the build-up of the mystery and what makes Guts tick, the tension pretty much entirely coming from the audience wondering why Guts is so obsessed with revenge, and the reveal of the sacrifice is the climax of this arc.
And our example of a sacrifice, which we are explicitly told is also what happened between Guts and Griffith? A husband and wife.
In fact, the sacrifice that serves the main purpose of setting us up for Guts’ story is the only sacrifice of a romantic partner we ever see – the rest are all parent/child, weirdly abstract a la Eggman sacrificing “the world,” and ofc Guts and Griffith’s undefined, suggestive thing.
The details of this sequence make the parallels stand out even more.
First of all, before we learn much of anything, we see Guts’ reaction to Griffith/Femto. The rage we expect:
Guts taken aback and offended, which is less expected:
And then begging for attention when Femto turns away from him to address the matter at hand, which should definitely come as a surprise for a first time reader:
The audience is expecting rage and violence, and what we get is neediness. Guts, more than anything, wants Femto’s attention.
Guts is finally spurred into action when Femto directly says he doesn’t give a fuck:
(Something, btw, that Guts is still brooding about a chapter later lmao:
like, this arc couldn’t be more blatant about Guts wanting Griffith/Femto’s attention.)
But even now the focus is on the potential for more revealed backstory, not on Guts’ attempt at turning talk into action.
Throughout this arc the audience is lead to expect a dramatic, action-packed, and revealing confrontation between Guts and the object of his ire. By the time we get to the climax, Guts can barely stand, we discover the guy he’s mad at is a god he can’t even touch, and his feelings are a lot more complex and vulnerable than just rage and fear of failure. The focus is taken away from possible action and given to hints of backstory. When Guts is standing with sword in hand, advancing on Femto, these are the moments that pique our interest:
Guts makes a very impressive stand considering how fucked up his body is but he can’t even touch Femto before getting telekinesised against a wall. A fight is out of the question – Guts’ willpower, and what spurs him on and makes him fight through the pain, are what the audience is meant to be interested in.
After Guts is magically thrown against a wall we get more hints. The Count tries to offer Guts as an offering. Slan tells him, The boy is merely your enemy. 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.
Femto points at Theresia.
That should be more than enough, right? We’ve learned like, everything we need to know. Griffith/Femto is responsible for the brand of sacrifice on Guts’ neck, therefore he sacrificed Guts at some point, therefore they were close friends or maybe related, but Griffith betrayed Guts for demonic power, now Guts is real mad and Griffith has become a monster, as you do.
But we don’t stop there.
Now, in fairness, this does pad out the chapter and give us more build-up to the Count’s decision wrt Theresia. Miura obviously needed something to make the pacing work. And hey Ubik likes to fuck with potential sacrificers and make them feel like shit, so it makes sense for him to start telling everyone the Count’s backstory for funsies. But it’s here that the implications really ramp up, which tells us what the real point of this sad backstory is.
It’s during this story that Guts wakes up:
We get some pissed off reaction shots from him as they all watch the drama:
On the image of monster Count eating his wife:
And in the panels immediately following:
Here’s when Femto is most explicitly compared to the Count. That thoughtful over-the-shoulder look in reaction to Ubik’s words – The life of the person you loved the most and hated the most! – tells us everything we need to know. Especially since Femto’s been absent for the last few pages of Godhand reactions and this is our first image of him (aside from one long shot of the back of his head) since Ubik started telling the story, despite getting several reaction shots from the rest of the Godhand. This panel feels significant, and it exists to tell us that Ubik’s words fully apply to him as well.
And, while this is pretty obvious I’ll note it just in case, it’s only after Ubik’s story is over that Guts is like, “oh yeah,” and asks Puck to heal him so he can hold a sword, so those reaction shots are all about Guts reliving painful memories and not about his injuries or getting Puck’s attention.
Basically, the Count being told to sacrifice Theresia tells us what a sacrifice is and who it applies to, but the Count and his wife are our window into Guts and Griffith’s turbulent past, as we can clearly see by how they react to it, and how the narrative and visuals frame the story in relation to them.
And, if you already know the plot of Berserk, you should also be able to see some parallels here – “a family, the very picture of happiness.”
When it comes to infidelity, I actually don’t think that jealousy was Griffith’s main source of despair, but boy do these many panels of Griffith watching Guts and Casca and looking upset between the rescue and the Eclipse demonstrate that it was a factor. Eg:
Part of the point of the Count’s backstory is to show that it’s not lust for power that leads to someone making a sacrifice, or at least, not necessarily – the Count wanted to bury his human heart. He felt betrayed; his wife was the direct cause of his suicidal despair, and he was desperate to escape that despair.
As Guts was the direct cause of Griffith’s despair. The behelit only opens when Guts touches Griffith again – not after losing his dream, not after losing the use of his limbs or his tongue, not even after believing he was losing Guts again too – but the touch of Guts’ hand.
Guts eventually recognizes how Griffith’s feelings for him caused his despair as well.
All things considered, the Count’s sacrifice is certainly closer to Guts’ story than any other sacrifice we’ve seen, making it pretty fitting as our first introduction to Guts and Griffith’s epic love/hate relationship.
Plus as a bonus:
Griffith has been described as half of Guts as well in the same sacrificial context:
Just fyi.
This whole first arc has been building up to a climactic reveal about Guts’ past and the reason for his revenge quest, from pacing and emphasis to Puck, the audience expy, straightforwardly asking, “what happened between those two?” And the answer we’re given is that something similar to the Count’s backstory happened.
So now the apparent answer to Puck’s question is, “oh, well, I guess they were like in love, but then some shit went down, maybe Guts betrayed Griffith? Idk, Guts must’ve done something that made Griffith fall into pure despair and decide to sacrifice him to become a demon. So Guts is pissed off because Griffith branded him and now he has to fight ghosts all the time. Cool.“
And really, does anything in the following 344 chapters disabuse you of that notion? Sure it’s a lot more complex, there’s a lot of additional factors, but that’s the bare bones of it in a nutshell.
So then the next chapter opens on our very first glimpse of Guts and original flavour Griffith together. Early days, Guts is his 15 year old self pre 3 year flash forward. Still sullen lol. Griffith gives his keys that set the world in motion speech which, while illuminating thematically, is paced to set up this particular, emotionally revealing moment:
With the additional context of the parallel we’ve just seen between the Count and his wife, how does this come across? I mean come on, from Griffith’s side we have the statement that Guts stands alone as closer to him than anyone else has ever been, already – he’s the first and only person Griffith has ever felt comfortable voicing his internal thoughts to, his deep desire to know who he is at his core and what he’s capable of.
From Guts side we have “At that time he shone before me as something beautiful, noble, and larger than life.”
This reads as the beginning of a romance as far as I’m concerned, and not a one-sided one. Griffith’s quote tells us they have a uniquely close and emotionally intimate relationship, Guts’ quote tells us it’s a relationship that encompasses admiration/awe and thinking about how “beautiful” the other is.
The best illustration Miura came up with to introduce us to the nature of their epic love/hate relationship is a happy marriage broken by betrayal. And it’s not just because Griffith is in love with Guts (which hopefully we can all agree is fairly obvious), because, even beyond Guts’ neediness when confronted by Femto and the many suggestions of his complex not-just-rage emotions, I mean the first thing we see after 20 pages worth of that married couple parallel is Guts calling Griffith beautiful.
And boy do the first seventeen chapters of their relationship demonstrate that Guts is calling him beautiful for a reason.
Guts: tbh… his tenacity – his
attitude that you have to see things through to the end, and how in most
stories this would be shown to be a virtue, but in Berserk while it is
often shown as admirable, it’s also one of his biggest flaws at times.
It’s there in touching moments, like when teenage Guts risks his life to
take a flower to a hill, and it’s also there when he vows revenge and
abandons Casca and Rickert to go off on a two-year monster hunting
spree. It’s there when he insists on getting Casca magically healed
despite Skull Knight’s warnings and his own musing that things could
turn out very bad if her sanity is forced back. It’s there when he
becomes obsessed with becoming Griffith’s equal, explicitly ignoring all
evidence that Griffith already cares for him. It’s there every time he
refuses to die.
The closest Guts came to abandoning a course
of action once he’d decided on it is when he switched from his “dream”
to realizing he wants to stay with Griffith, right before the Eclipse,
and that would’ve been the best thing Guts could’ve done, if he’d had
the chance. Switching from revenge to helping Casca is close too (and
pretty explicitly paralleled to leaving Griff vs returning and staying),
but he’s doing it with the thought in his head that it’s temporary
(”when this journey ends, I’ll…” [pictures Griffith]), and his
tenacity is still there in how he’s not letting doubts and warnings
deter him from fixing Casca, so it’s a bit of a double-edged sword.
Idk man I love Guts’ doggedness, both as a virtue and a flaw.
My
favourite Guts moment though, now that’s difficult. I’ll go with one of
the best early moments, during the Black Swordsman arc, for the sake of
making things easy. It’s my first favourite moment, at least:
Like
half his bones are broken, he couldn’t do more than crawl on his
stomach and beg for attention before this when faced with the object of
his revenge obsession, but he stands up and marches up the stairs with
his sword when Femto says he’s beneath his notice. I love him.
Griffith:
Griffith is one of my all-time favourite characters period so narrowing
it down to one thing is hard, but I think if I had to settle on one it
would be his emotional repression? The way he doesn’t realize he’s in
love with Guts until it’s too late, the way he refuses to acknowledge
his feelings of guilt and self-loathing, the way he comes so close to
getting more emotionally healthy and open with Guts at his side but then
Guts leaves without a word and everything falls to pieces, the way he
falls back on the fact that he “won” Guts in a duel and fights for him
again because he can’t articulate why he can’t stand the thought
of Guts leaving, the way he self-sabotages himself into a dungeon
because he’s so unfamiliar with his own emotions that he can’t deal with
his feelings after Guts leaves, etc.
Funnily enough, in contrast
to that, I think my favourite Griffith moment (lbr my favourite Berserk
moment) is probably his moment of greatest self-awareness:
But like the reason this monologue is so effective is because
he’s so emotionally repressed, and it took him a year of nothing but
torture and self reflection for him to recognize his feelings. It makes
this moment really, really shine.
Casca: I love that
she genuinely commands respect among the Hawks. It’s one of the few
really satisfying aspects of her character role and her treatment by
other characters to me – from Corkus getting scared and apologizing when
she threatens him, to Griffith giving her the most important job in his
capture Doldrey ploy, to the Hawks stepping back so she can take out
Adon herself and cheering her on, to being able to rally the Hawks as
their leader in the most panic-inducing circumstances, etc etc.
I think my all-time favourite Casca moment is this:
God she deserves this moment of glory.
Farnese: I love
her “you just have to become a storm yourself” thing. The way her
reaction to fear is to join the thing that frightens her and become the
frightening thing. I loved it when it lead to her doing terrible things
like burning people alive and I loved it when it lead to her doing great
things like joining Guts and learning to defend herself and Casca and
becoming a witch.
My favourite Farnese moment is a pretty obvious one but what can I say it’s so good:
Fighting
off a demon tiger taking out whole crowds with a swipe of its paw, with
a candlestick, at a fancy ball, man, how can you not love her?
Serpico:
I like the contrast between his chill and diplomatic
go-with-the-flow-ness vs how solid and immovable he is when it comes to
protecting the people he loves, and how what ties those contrasts
together is a willingness to be hurt for their sakes, from dueling
people to a draw to avoid feelings of resentment towards Farnese, to
standing between her and Berserker Guts.
My favourite Serpico moment is:
Putting
himself in danger while defusing a tense situation with that chill
diplomacy. And not even for Farnese, but for Guts this time.
Was I the only one who thought they might actually kiss in this scene the First time you ever saw/ read it? Because I did . I was ready to react. I was about to go on all those sites and say. “ YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD FOOL ME INTO THINKING THIS WAS NOT GAY. I WAS NOT FOOLED. I ALWAYS KNEW!! “
But it never happened.
And I was like “oh” as I calmly shut the page I’d just opened to rant and go nuts on.
So, I thought Griffith would go for a kiss after taking Guts’ face in his hand and saying he belonged to him forever and ever. This scene also is a good place for it.
If this were a man and a woman everyone and their mother would be making gif sets of this and saying how they were so close to kissing after having the “what is this relationship” talk only to be interrupted by the plot. They would be doing this even if they never verbally said their feelings and everyone would accept it as a fact because straight people.
i never thought they’d kiss because I never expect anything I really want to happen lol. but like, this scene is as romantic as you can get without a kiss. if one of them was a woman people would call you delusional for suggesting their feelings are platonic lmao, like:
gentle breeze wafting griffith’s long hair across his face? check declaration of feelings while looking away followed by a turn and hard eye contact? check awkward, surprised response? check inconvenient interruption? checkmate
going back to the manga but you cannot look at these panels and then tell me with a straight face that we’re supposed to think their feelings are brotherly or whatever:
and yk what while i’m on this and since yesgabsstuff brought up the duel, you don’t have your characters ask each other if they’re gay, fail to confirm or deny, and say things like, “if you win you can have my sword or my ass,” if you’re not trying to point the audience in a certain direction.
it’s subtext, but it’s like, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence style subtext, where it’s not just a nice bonus if u recognize the symbolism or the gay audience reaching bc we’re desperate, but it’s the clear intended reading.
In fact, I’ll go one further – the very first parallel we have for Guts and Griffith, the first example we’re given to contextualize the mysterious, intense relationship between Guts and Griffith/Femto and the nature of the sacrifice – which we already know is what happened between them – is the Count and his wife. “The person you loved the most and hated the most!” Cue that shot of Femto looking slightly over his shoulder so there can be no doubt who also buried his fragile human heart.
(like i just re-read this scene and i love it so much because everything leading up to these panels exists to make the audience go “what the fuck is their deal?” like puck even directly asks “what happened between those two?” And then we get the Count’s story and it’s like, ohhh ok i guess they were in love at one point and then betrayal and despair followed and now one’s a demon and one’s really pissed off. gotcha. And then nothing in the golden age disabuses you of that notion.)
(ps “That’s right… you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t cut away half of yourself.” The Godhand to the Count. “[…]And that unkingly half of yours shall all be gathered then in that place.” Skull Knight to Guts.)
you're the only one 