mostly berserk meta. i'm into berserk mainly for griffguts and i'm a huge fan of griffith.
Tag: ship: gtsca
vague spoilers for the newest chapter, rambly not-really-theorizing
I am just gonna pray that ‘for now’ is still in place and nothing’s been forgiven or forgotten and assuming things don’t proceed immediately to hell it’s gonna be Farnese supporting Casca emotionally rn while Guts stays tf out of it, and Farnese’s little statement about blowing Casca’s darkness away or whatever gives me hope for that.
ALSO
I’m torn about this. Because on the one hand, I’d be inclined to guess that this is foreshadowing for a moment in which Guts will be under the threat of being consumed by the Beast of Darkness but will manage to overcome it because he’s grown as a person and his friends come through and save themselves or whatever. Potential for terrible things to happen, but with a different outcome this time.
But on the other hand Guts has never been properly taken over by the stupid Beast of Darkness and I feel like that’s something that has to happen at some point, and we’ve already had Eclipse-but-with-a-different-outcome-thanks-to-Guts’-companions back in the Conviction arc with Isidro saving Casca for him so either way it’s going to feel repetitive, so idfk.
I guess my biggest hope is that Casca’s trauma specifically re Guts and the Beast of Darkness isn’t forgotten, and the BoD remains a giant barrier between them preventing a happy romantic reunion, and I’m gonna cling to every scrap of ominous foreshadowing bc I need that hope.
(And ftr no I’m not hoping Casca is assaulted again or anything like that just in case anyone wants to read this in extremely bad faith, I’m hoping Casca resoundingly rejects him, or Guts like, doesn’t trust himself and leaves (in a way that doesn’t lead to this turning out to be a mistake w/ a tearful reunion near the end), or something else not completely terrible.)
Like I’m trying to think of what Miura would do with Casca, and the past g*tsca relationship knowing that the relationship wasn’t intended from the beginning and was never portrayed as a grand romance but rather just a hook up with potential and a reason for Guts to be angry, and Miura said he added it for the sake of Eclipse drama. Also knowing that Casca only survived the Eclipse so Guts would stay pissed off, and the whole Beast of Darkness issue. And then there’s that fetus too. So I honestly just don’t know, but I’m hoping it doesn’t add up to either a happily ever after for them, or the two of them resuming their relationship only for more tragedy to fuck them up, or a potential future relationship as a happily ever after reward hovering over my head for the rest of the fucking manga.
All I truly want is a nail in the guts/casca coffin asap, and then mb I can finally know peace.
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.
“You bled so much for me. These are wounds from the hundred man battle, right? Even the wound I gave you…”
“I too want a wound… that I can say you gave me.”
When it comes to Guts’ guilt issues surrounding Griffith’s tragic narrative, and the highly sexually charged nature of the scene where the Beast of Darkness suggests this, and the fact that the Guts and Casca sex scene is already chock full of references and parallels to Griffith, I’m feeling like this is a legit comparison, at least from Guts’ guilt-ridden and Griffith-obsessed point of view.
(brought to my attention by therainykitty here, ty! also s/o to this post)
I don’t think I could find a panel where she seems attracted to Guts, partially because I agree with you and partially because my memory of the het interactions in Berserk is not the greatest lol.
But yeah I think part of the reason I find her relationship with Guts so unconvincing, and part of why I find it really easy to hc her as gay, is because her relationships to men are based around wanting to be needed, rather than her own desire.
With Griffith she wants to be something indispensible to his dream, a “sword” he can’t do without. Later on we get Judeau saying, “If she loves him… shouldn’t she want to be held by him?” And Casca saying, “Griffith’s not a god… and I am a woman.” And it’s like, if you’re going to describe a woman’s attraction to a man in terms of falling into the natural hetero order of things, it makes it easier to see it as internalized homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality lol. Casca like, hmmm my feelings for Griffith are extremely strong, he’s a man I’m a woman, this must be attraction? Without realizing there are other possibilities.
I’m sure Miura didn’t mean it that way, but that’s why it’s a headcanon.
And anyway it’s the same with Guts – it’s all about Casca’s desire to be needed, to be able to comfort someone and feel necessary to them. And I think partly it’s an obligation to her, pay back for being rescued, by Griffith, by Guts in the 100 man fight. She notices Guts’ scars from that fight before they have sex and says she wishes for a wound from Guts. And it’s what she thinks about while they have sex: “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.”
I think that’s purposeful on Miura’s part. That’s a consistent part of Casca’s characterization that seems to stem from her childhood trauma and being rescued by Griffith, and it’s what informs her two major relationships. She only started warming up to Guts after he rescued her. Miura wants us to see it as attraction, but he didn’t really show us any actual desire from Casca, it’s something the characters, and the audience, take as read just based on the fact that she’s a woman and they’re men lol, and since I don’t agree that woman + man = automatic sexual attraction it’s pretty easy to take another route imo.
ALSO can I just say “I don’t know what’s ahead. Whether bein with you will get in the way of what I want to do… or the opposite… I can’t tell now.”
Well what Guts wants to do is fight stronger and stronger enemies, like Wyald. He’s been thinking about fighting monsters since he left and decided he was sore about losing to Zodd.
And then he does get to fight a monster, and this is what happens when Casca’s with him:
so like, you’re telling me they would’ve lived happily ever after pursuing Guts’ monster-fighting dream together if Griffith turned out to be fine and fit to lead the Hawks after all?
Bc this is directly telling me that Guts would see Casca as a liability to that dream and Casca would probably stop supporting it pretty quickly if Guts kept on going the way he’s going.
(same anon) on second thought maybe the nose treatment allusion after
sex could refer to him being comforted, but not wrt Griffith but his
childhood trauma? Like of course Casca can’t help him there but she
alleviated the pain for a bit. This still doesn’t let me glimpse at
Miura’s intentions. I truly agree w your meta I am just getting mixed
signals. No disrespect or anything, feel free to ignore/delete since I’m
basically rambling in your inbox!
no worries, i always love getting messages and I have no problem clarifying my thoughts!
lol
sorry this took a while to answer, first I almost wrote an essay in
response but then I decided to clean up a post I already had in my
drafts that addresses some of this instead.
But to address
your message in more detail than that post does, tbh I think it’s kind
of meant to be a little contradictory. Miura tends to write in a way
where he presents the positive and negative aspects of something and
trusts the audience to make up their own minds. The narrative could def
lean one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean a decision/an event/a
character/etc is wholly negative or wholly positive. It’s usually some of both.
When
it comes to Guts and Casca hooking up I think there are positive
aspects. Guts opening up and telling her about his past is a good thing.
Casca deciding to try to move on from her obsession with Griffith is a
good thing. Despite the violent flashback and the virginal fumbling both
of them consider sex together to be a positive experience.
But
despite that, I think the narrative itself depicts Guts and Casca
hooking up to be ultimately a mistake. Not a mistake you can blame Guts
or Casca for because they should’ve known better or smthn like that, but a mistake in the
sense that it lead to a lot more bad than good happening, the same way
Guts leaving the Hawks was ultimately the wrong call even though he had
the best of intentions and it arguably seemed to have a positive affect on him as an individual.
And like, tbh I don’t think Miura really
gives much of a fuck about Guts/Casca as a romantic relationship lol. I
think what happened is he went with it as a way to make the Eclipse more
dramatic/give Guts a stronger reason to want revenge bc frankly
Griffith just sacrificing the Band isn’t nearly enough to make Guts that
angry lol – but he’s actually a pretty good writer when he wants to be
so rather than pushing it as a more generic and pasted on True Love Ruined By Tragedy thing he
added it as a two people on the rebound thing and incorporated it into
part of the pile-up of bad decisions and things going wrong in the lead
in to the Eclipse.
It has to be a little sweet, a little positive,
the audience has to believe Guts genuinely cares for her and they had
potential in order for the Eclipse bullshit to have the effect he
wanted, but at the same time the main thing Guts and Casca’s short lived
relationship adds to the story, other than set-up for a prolonged rape
scene, is reinforcement of Guts’ stupid dream imo.
I think there’s a strong argument to be made that, rather than being
depicted as burgeoning true love ruined by the Eclipse for the
sake of extra tragedy, Guts and Casca getting together is depicted as a mistake from the start.
Let’s look at Guts’ conversation with Judeau, where he seems to consider the possibility of Casca as a romantic interest for the first time.
“The one who has her eye… is Griffith. That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this.”
I see two possible ways of interpreting this statement. Either the narrative and Guts just reframed Guts entire raison d’etre, his whole motivation for leaving and the reason he wants to be Griffith’s equal, thanks to a few leading statements from Judeau, or Guts is framing a potential relationship with Casca as another step on the journey of becoming Griffith’s equal.
The former defies belief. We just spent 22 chapters knowing exactly why Guts wants to leave and become Griffith’s equal. There’s no mystery there, there’s no detail left to be uncovered. Suddenly doing a 180 and saying actually, he wants to leave so he can be worthy of Casca, even though he never considered Casca a romantic possibility until approximately 30 seconds earlier, would just be impossibly bad writing from an otherwise extremely solid story.
But the latter, well, that fits right in.
After they have sex, Casca symbolically becomes Guts’ sword instead of Griffith’s:
To Casca, Guts is a more open, emotionally available replacement for Griffith, as I’ve discussed in detail in this post. Guts is in fact coming closer to his goal of becoming Griffith’s equal by sleeping with Casca, because after this Casca begins to transfer her obsession with Griffith and his dream to him.
And Casca isn’t an endgame for Guts. She’s not the goal, she’s not the motivation – she’s an addition to his overarching desire to have Griffith see him as an equal. He still plans to leave to continue fighting stronger and stronger enemies after they hook up. He invites her along – just so long as she doesn’t get in the way of his more important dream:
Non-committally inviting her along mollifies her, but it doesn’t address her point lol – he’s still selfishly prioritizing his dream. She’s become support for that, just the way she supported Griffith’s dream as his “sword.” Eventually that is exactly what leads to everything crashing down around them – Casca telling Guts to leave, because his dream is all-important.
And while we then leave Guts and Casca on a sweet moment where they kiss, that very same page shifts to pure ominousness to end both the chapter and Guts and Casca’s newly changed relationship on:
Cue snake man walking around and the Behelit floating down a river on its way to a date with Griffith.
And then the next chapter returns us to Griffith, a year since the last time we saw him, and his monologue about how his feelings for Guts are so strong and bright they make even the dream fade into dullness.
Guts is trying to “unbind” himself from Griffith. In his dream speech to Casca he says he can’t stay with the Hawks because he refuses to ever swing his sword in service to another again. And Casca tells Guts that she can’t continue defending the almost broken dream of someone who may not even be alive. Both he and Casca are trying to move on from Griffith in their own ways, and they try to do this through a connection with each other.
But the thing is, if you’re writing the kind of relationship triangle where two people help each other get over a third, if you want it to really feel satisfying and right, wouldn’t you want to establish that they both should be getting over Griffith, and that a relationship with each other is a more positive step for them?
The problem is that Guts’ whole thing, his whole desire to leave to become Griffith’s equal, is motivated by wanting to be closer to Griffith lol. He wants to be someone Griffith can call a friend. And it’s based on a falsehood: he thinks Griffith looks down on him.
When this is how Griffith feels about him:
Guts trying to unbind himself from Griffith doesn’t feel satisfying when we’re immediately reminded through a passionate monologue that Griffith is just as bound to Guts as Guts is to him, and that Guts only wants to become independent of Griffith because he doesn’t know that.
As for Casca, her obsession with Griffith came at the expense of
herself. Spending a year fighting for Griffith’s dream
and leading the Hawks while he was in a dungeon drove her to the point
of suicide.
But her encounter here with Guts doesn’t solve any of
that, she just transfers her obsession and her dedication to someone
else’s dream to Guts, as we see clearly through that sword metaphor,
through the parallels I linked to earlier, and through Casca telling
Guts he has to leave because his dream is the most important thing.
Casca trying to get over Griffith and move on doesn’t feel satisfying when she immediately falls into the same self-destructive patterns with a new person at the centre of her obsession.
Guts and Casca’s romance has
its postive aspects – Guts opens up to her about his childhood trauma,
eg, and is comforted. But there’s
dissonance beneath the surface. They have sex right after Guts let Casca
stab him because a part of him realized she was right about Griffith needing him. Casca had just tried to kill herself after telling Guts that Griffith doesn’t need her, as though she can only live in relation to someone else. In
deciding to leave the Hawks together, Guts continues suppressing his
eventual revelation that leaving in the first place was a mistake.
And
Guts recalls
Gambino giving him medicine – the one act of kindness from him which
Guts latches onto to help him deny the rest of Gambino’s abuse – while Casca is compared to a sword, which to me seems like a strong, not all that positive statement on their relationship: it doesn’t fix their underlying issues, it doesn’t change anything, it just helps them live in denial of those issues – Casca’s lack of independence, Guts’ dream being a mistake*** – for a while longer.
Basically, rather than moving forward and truly healing with each other, they’re revisiting the past, repeating negative patterns, maintaining denial, and essentially, well, licking wounds.
And by trying to move on from
Griffith by taking solace in each other, they only add to Guts’ original
mistake, which is failing to realize that there was no reason for him to move on in the first
place. Guts couldn’t stand the thought of Griffith looking down on him,
but this is who he is to Griffith, as we are told immediately before and
after he has sex with Casca:
And this is when Guts finally acknowledges his mistake, about 10 seconds after Griffith overheard Casca telling him to leave:
We know that Miura didn’t
intend Guts and Casca to get together from the start, let alone for it
to be a grand true love style romance. He’s said that he hooked them up
for the sake of more Eclipse drama. And I think that the way he framed
their relationship, from its placement in the narrative to the details of the scene itself to the way it goes hand in hand with Guts’ dream, makes it feel like it’s contributing to the series of unfortunate fuck ups that lead to the Eclipse, rather than just being an incidental casualty of it.
It’s a mistake the
way Miura writes mistakes – not obviously so, with no ill intent or
obviously misguided motives behind it. Their relationship isn’t meant to
be unpleasant, it’s shown as sweet and maybe not epic, maybe not
lasting, but overall more positive than negative for them. But so was
Guts’ year long sabbatical, and we’ve seen how much he regrets that:
In Berserk characters can make the wrong decisions despite having the best of intentions, despite some good coming out of those decisions, despite doing the best they can based on what they know. And I think Guts and Casca’s relationship is shown to be one of them.
*** I think both Casca’s lack of independence and Guts’ focus on his own dream of fighting stronger and stronger enemies are at least in part poor coping mechanisms for their respective childhood traumas, which makes the sword and medicine metaphors even more apt. But to get fully into that would take its own post, and it’s not necessary to my point here, so this is just a minor aside lol.
The way Miura wrote the story I’d say Guts is by far the stronger and more relatable character. Unfortunately Casca really gets the “the token chick” treatment where her whole story and all her issues and half her personality is about being a woman surrounded by men, and written by a dude, so yk, I don’t blame anyone for being unable to relate to her lol, and personal preference is whatever, so it’s not like you should have to like her just because you’re a girl.
And I definitely agree that Casca should develop on her own, away from Guts. The way she jumped straight from being overinvested in Griffith and his dream to being overinvested in Guts and his dream was pretty fucked up imo, and a sign that she needs to get independent.
But I’d have to disagree with you about their respective feelings, because while I think they both felt genuine affection for the other, neither of them felt genuine love, and I’d say even moreso than Casca did, Guts consistently prioritized/s Griffith over her.
cut for length
Rather than staying and supporting her he still wants to go out to become Griffith’s equal, and this is how he invites her along when Casca is outraged by his priorities:
which is pretty far from romantic or commital lol.
While Casca is jealous of Charlotte during the rescue, Guts’ reaction is basically, well that kinda sucks but lbr I got it even worse than she does so it’s not like I can blame her:
When they find Griffith this is the next thing he says to Casca:
During the Eclipse this is what Guts does when he sees the Band, including Casca, about to be eaten by monsters:
And of course after the Eclipse he dumps her in a cave for two years to pursue Griffith/continue pursuing his dream of fighting stronger and stronger opponents and therefore being Griffith’s friend/equal, once again prioritizing Griffith:
When he finally does end up sticking with her to take her to Elfhelm, this is how he makes that decision:
This is what he’s thinking about when he starts off on his journey:
and of course i’d be remiss if i didn’t mention how Griffith grabbing Guts’ attention away from rescuing Casca is framed:
AND then there’s the whole Beast of Darkness fiasco.
And even when they’re on the boat, he’s still planning to run back to Griffith once his sidequest with Casca is over:
Idk basically I would argue that Guts is by far shittier to Casca than Casca is to Guts, and neither are genuinely all that invested in their potential relationship. It’s a rebound for both, an attempt to get over Griffith that doesn’t work for either, but in fairness to Casca she tried, and even when she decided to stay with Griffith she told Guts to leave because she was prioritizing his stupid dream lol, while Guts’ investment in becoming worthy of being Griffith’s friend had him refusing to stay and suggesting Casca come with him only insofar as she doesn’t fuck up his dream from the very start.
So, less one-sided, and more no-sided lol.
actually that post reminded me of a quick thing i was gonna write a while ago and forgot about
so i’ve mentioned before a few times that Guts and Judeau’s conversation here is kind of weird because Guts swivels from ‘what the hell are you talking about’ to ‘actually yeah I should totally fuck Casca, I just need to become Griffith’s equal first’ within about a minute
In other posts I suggested that this was an awkwardly written way of bringing a romance with Casca to the forefront. This seems to reframe Guts’ motivation for leaving as at least in part to become worthy of Casca, despite this never occuring to Guts before.
Now I’m thinking that this scene isn’t actually about complicating Guts’ motivation for leaving at the last minute – I’m thinking it’s set up for Guts’ motivation for romancing Casca.
Meaning, he doesn’t want to become Griffith’s equal so he can feel worthy of Casca’s love, he wants to win Casca to feel like Griffith’s equal.
And I’m js, that reading fits with the way the Guts/Casca “romance” is written throughout the rest of the story, ie, as secondary and serving the relationship between Guts and Griffith, and often falling by the wayside next to it, rather than vice versa.
Like when Guts says he can accept the fact that Casca is still obsessed with Griffith because he’s even more obsessed. Like how (as I thoroughly explained in the post linked above) their sex scene revolves around their relationships to Griffith. Like how Wyald almost raping Casca is treated as an opportunity not for compassion or comfort but for one-liners by Guts (his reaction is to tell her to go away because she’s distracting with ripped clothes !!! like !!! fucking hell). Like how Guts is focused solely on Griffith during the Eclipse, up to and including a moment where he looks down, sees the Band being eaten by monsters, and goes right back to trying to hack Griffith’s egg open, without even sparing a thought for Casca. Like how he abandons her in a cave for two years while hunting Femto down. Like how he only realizes that was a bad decision when he compares it to leaving Griffith kneeling in the snow. Like everything the Hound says. Like Miura’s direct statement that Casca only survived the Eclipse to keep Guts pissed off about it. etc etc etc
Basically I’m not saying it’s better writing this way, but it’s bad in a different way. It’s not clunky so much as plain old misogynistic, but hey p much everything regarding Guts and Casca’s relationship is misogynistic either way, so at least if the romance with Casca was never an end in itself but rather a means to the end of being Griffith’s equal, it’s consistent. At least it means we’re not supposed to read this bullshit and think “aw true love,” yk?
“the only woman guts ever loved” as if guts has ever come within breathing room of any other woman since the only one he knows personally is on account of her being his coworker and thus forced to share space with his smelly b*tch ass….
lmao true
also luv that w/ het ships ppl can declare shit like this with utter conviction despite guts never speaking or thinking of casca in terms of love, and despite the writer saying that casca and guts hooked up for extra eclipse drama and casca’s only around now so guts can keep being bitter.
but anything gay? clearly fake and just reaching
so it’s been stated that casca didn’t die literally to fuel guts angst (which, let’s leave aside how disgusting THAT is for a second) and bitterness, which leads me to believe that basically
without casca there as a very heavy reminder
guts would have 100% just forgiven griffith pretty much asap after seeing him again? ha
lmao right?
I mean yeah if Casca died with the rest of the Band during the Eclipse then sure Guts absolutely 100% would forgive Griffith/Femto immediately because it’s pretty clear that he never blamed him for sacrificing everyone in the first place lol. He was sad, sure, but he wasn’t angry about Griffith choosing to make the sacrifice. If anything he’d’ve blamed himself. But if say Casca died during the Conviction Arc, should we assume Guts would’ve gone ‘ok w/e fuck it idc anymore’ and moved on?
Actually yk what considering his “forgot my urge to kill” moment and how sad he was about NeoGriff ditching him it’s actually not that hard of a sell.
But damn either way I wish Miura would do something with Casca’s character other than continue making her an accessory to Guts’ desire for revenge.
There are two important parallels during the waterfall scene, when Guts and Casca fight, then fuck.
The first is this parallel to Guts and Griffith’s second duel.
Casca is the new leader of the Hawks, taking over Griffith’s role. She
challenges and fights Guts when he returns, in a mirror of Griffith
challenging and fighting him before he leaves. Then she falls to her
knees and has a self-destructive
breakdown. The last time the leader of the Hawks had a breakdown after
fighting him, Guts walked away. The scenario has presented itself again,
and this time Guts makes a different choice, one that might have
changed everything a year ago: he comforts her.
Sex with Casca is Guts subconsciously (from a character perspective) or symbolically (from a narrative perspective) trying to fix past mistakes, imo.
Throughout the fight by the waterfall, Casca is screaming at him that he broke Griffith by leaving, that it’s his fault. This scene is all about Griffith and their feelings towards him. For Guts, it’s the beginning of his eventual revelation that leaving was a mistake because Griffith didn’t look down on him after all – because Griffith’s “no good without” him.
The fact that Guts lets Casca stab him as she screams this tells us that her words hit home and he feels guilty, even as he denies it. It’s a pattern of behaviour for Guts that we’ve seen before and will see again, eg, when he let the zombie child stab him in the second chapter because he blamed himself for her death, and then denied feeling responsible to Puck afterwards (”If you’re always worried about crushing the ants beneath you… you won’t be able to walk.”)
He represses that guilt and doesn’t manage to acknowledge his mistake until about five minutes before the Eclipse, unfortunately, but this is how we know he feels it regardless, and this is how we know it’s informing his choices now – specifically, his choice to comfort, kiss, and have sex with Casca.
Guts’ denial of guilt while clearly feeling it is reminiscent of another character too:
This is the second parallel, to Casca finding Griffith in the river.
Casca eventually yanks her sword out of Guts, admits to him that she’s romantically in love with Griffith, proceeds to list all the ways Griffith is wholly unavailable (he needs to marry Charlotte, Guts took the place she wanted at Griffith’s side, and now he may not even be alive), bequeaths Griffith to Guts, and tries to kill herself. Griffith Griffith Griffith – the lead-in to sex revolves around him. Guts thinking about how he abandoned him in the snow, Casca thinking about how Griffith doesn’t need her, and Guts beginning to realize that Griffith needed him.
So Guts saves her from her suicide attempt, then comforts her through sex.
And Casca does the same in return:
She couldn’t comfort Griffith, she couldn’t be Griffith’s “woman,” she couldn’t be be something indispensable to Griffith’s dream, but she can comfort Guts, she can have sex with Guts, she can help Guts achieve his dream.
The situations requiring her comfort are even v similar – Guts has just had a flashback to his rape, and Griffith was calling himself “unclean” after selling himself to a pedophilic rapist. Griffith buries his feelings and refuses to be comforted, but Guts pours his heart out to Casca and lets her hold him.
My point is that Guts and Casca having sex is not about the other for either of them – it’s about their respective relationships to Griffith. Guts is presented with a similar scenario to the morning he left the Hawks, and after being told by Casca that he fucked up then and broke Griffith, he chooses a different course of action this time, and comforts and has sex with Casca. Casca is presented with a similar scenario to finding Griffith in the river after Gennon, but instead of being shut out she’s able to comfort the man in emotional turmoil this time.
tl;dr they’re both on the rebound from Griffith here, giving to each other what they didn’t or couldn’t give to him, and there are deliberate visual and situational parallels to illustrate this.
Can you believe that Guts/Griffith is so powerful the damn mangaka had to have a random character go out of his way to try to shut down the gay vibes and spend most of his screen time in the latter-half of the Golden Age steering Guts towards Casca instead?
like you know you wrote a gay romance instead of a straight romance when you need to have a side character blatantly intervene in the story to make sure the dude sleeps with a woman.
Sorry if this is a disappointing answer, but not in the slightest.
Griffith/Charlotte is a complete sham from Griffith’s side, he’s just using her to become king. His seduction of her was completely calculated, except when he was distraught after Guts left, and the way his dream and Charlotte are conjoined and presented in opposition to his feelings for Guts makes his relationship with Charlotte read as a very strong symbol of unhealthy emotional repression imo.
Also Charlotte’s obsession is so intense it seems very unhealthy, like, embroidering Griffith’s face over and over for two years is a little much lol. We don’t get much of Charlotte’s side of it but what we do get is basically a naive girl totally taken in by Griffith’s fake seduction, and it’s kind of sad to me.
As for Guts and Casca, to me their relationship reads 100% as both of them redirecting their feelings for Griffith to each other. There are very strong parallels to both their relationships with him during the scene where they hook up, they both acknowledge that they’re not over Griffith afterwards, and after the Eclipse Casca basically functions as an outlet for Guts’ feelings about Griffith.
Casca’s issues with her lack of independent identity – becoming Griffith’s sword after Griffith saves her, then becoming Guts’ sword after she sleeps with him – are not a good start to any relationship, and the licking wounds description seems very apt. It was never a grand, epic romance, but it’s not even a particularly happy or healthy hook up. They fuck right after Guts lets Casca stab him while thinking about how abandoning Griffith was maybe a bad idea, and right after Casca tries to kill herself. Then Guts has a flashback and strangles her during, and Casca is just happy to finally have someone receptive to her attempts to comfort and support them.
Afterwards Guts invites her along in as non-committal a way as possible, like ‘idk maybe you coming with me will suck and you’ll throw off my groove and i’ll end up ditching you anyway, but i want more sex so let’s give it a shot.’ Which I honestly find hilarious in how unromantic it is.
And even as a low-key licking wounds hook-up it feels very narratively forced to me (which makes sense since Miura said he had them get together just to make the Eclipse more dramatic).
Like Judeau has to practically shove Guts at Casca for him to even consider it lol.
Then of course after the Eclipse you have Guts abandoning her in a cave for two years, assaulting her twice, and redirecting his feelings for Griffith to her again – not even just in the hound scenes but also when he decides to save her directly because he compares abandoning her in a cave to abandoning Griffith in the snow, and when he decides to stick with her only after Griffith abandoned him lol.
Plus Casca is terrified of him for good reason, and the idea of their relationship turning romantic again after Casca gets her mind back is something I find fairly horrifying after how he treated her.
She’s been reduced to nothing more than a symbol of Guts trying to keep his hold on humanity, she’s suffered for it, and if she gets her mind back and gets back together with Guts as a narrative “reward” to him for suffering through a shitty life, like I think a lot of Berserk fans want, I would be extremely disappointed.
(I have a very, very long post that goes into detail on Guts and Casca’s relationship and how it largely revolves around Griffith here, if you’re interested, but I’d only recommend reading it if you’re not a fan of their romance. it’s also about griffguts and gay subtext but so is most of my blog content lol)
moments like these are depressing bc if i wasn’t supposed to find them cutely shippy i’d love them
like imagine guts and casca’s relationship without the veneer of slapped on romance. guts comforts her non-sexually after casca tries to kill herself, they renew their tentative friendship that began a year ago, they begin working in sync as comrades.
moments like these are, rather than romantic, symbolic of guts’ place as a hawk and the fact that he’s at his best with his friends – casca and guts are both badass warriors and part of a larger family which guts once abandoned.
imo without the romance berserk would actually be tighter thematically. casca would just be the last remnant of the hawks, because she was their leader in place of griffith – the way judeau said as he tried to rescue her. the whole pseudo ex girlfriend thing only complicates it and dilutes the theme of the hawks as guts’ family, and saving casca = atoning for leaving them.
like how many times post-eclipse does guts think of her as the last remnant of the hawks, the last ‘feeble flame’ left to him off the hawks’ campfire, vows not to abandon her after remembering leaving griffith, yadda yadda yadda? his sexual relationship with her is vastly de-emphasized (except when the beast of darkness starts throwing his feelings for griffith into the mix, hmmmm) bc it’s just not important to the point of the story.
like lbr here the reason guts and casca hated each other for 3 years is they were fighting for griffith’s attention
they finally warm up to each other only when guts figures he lost and decides to leave, so he’s able to be magnanimous and throw casca at him
like casca is so obviously a substitution for himself while guts is doing his weird matchmaker thing. hey casca you have a dream, you’re worthy of griffith, so you should ask him to dance.
guts may not have consciously realized it like casca did, but they were such romantic rivals, that’s their dynamic
hell they hook up after casca goes over point by point the ways griffith isn’t available: first guts, but then princess charlotte, then in a dungeon, now may not even be alive. and as soon as griffith becomes maybe possibly available after all, the jealous rivalry starts mounting again.
like i’ve talked about how casca telling guts to leave in requiem of the wind is bc she’s prioritizing his dream now and telling him to fulfill it, and i think that’s still the case buuuuuuut i can definitely see an interpretation where she tells guts to leave because now charlotte’s out of the picture, now griffith is dependant, now she can give back to griffith and comfort him the way she always wanted to and never could, and she doesn’t want guts to get in the way.
that’s kind of what the scene between her and griffith in the wagon is about rly, come to think of it. afterwards she cries about how weak he is and how there’s no way she can leave him like that, and before she muses about how his strong hands used to comfort her but they’re so small in actuality. whatever griffith’s motivations for literally flinging himself at her, it’s casca’s reaction that’s most important, casca putting her hand on his shoulder and realizing he needs her.
say she tells herself and guts that he needs to leave because his
dream is just So Important but deep down it’s bc she knows they’re still
rivals, the three of them together would get fucked up and destructive real quick, and if she can’t leave griffith and try to move on with guts then she wants to be the one to stay with him.
like it’s not a flattering interpretation for casca but i don’t want flattering interpretations for casca, i like flaws and selfishness etc in my female characters, especially as opposed to casca being a stupid selfless martyr for guts’ dream bc she slept with him so now that’s what she cares about.
Forgot to mention this when it comes to Griffith + Casca parallels (Guts leaves for a year/two years to pursue a dumb dream, abandoning someone who needs him, then he comes back, realizes he may have fucked up, and rescues them):
Im glad im not alone on this. Its so weird that casca was guts’s last chance to make the right choice but he still messed up in some way.
Ooh yk when you put it like that, what I find striking is that he did make the right choice, pre-Eclipse. He realized he shouldn’t’ve left and decided to stay with Griffith despite getting told multiple times to leave by Casca and Judeau.
It was Casca telling him to leave that fucked Griffith up lol, not Guts wanting to leave or being reluctant to stay.
Whereas with Casca he makes the same mistake again, and directly compares leaving Casca alone in a cave to leaving Griffith, but when he gets Casca back he’s his own worst enemy when it comes to sticking to his resolution to stay with her.
First he plans to leave her in the cave again anyway
and when it caves in he knows he’s not just gonna abandon her in a field somewhere but he’s reluctant af to postpone his revenge quest for her
and then when he decides taking her to Elfhelm is the thing to do he does it still fully intending to return to his revenge quest eventually. (Plus, yk, the fucked up Beast of Darkness shit that happens before he gathers some extra babysitters.)
I don’t really have a point other than Guts taking one step forward with Griffith and ending up like five steps back when the situation is repeated with Casca.
And I mean yeah a lot of shit went down in the interim and he has a pretty good reason to be obsessed with revenge, but the comparison between leaving Griffith and leaving Casca is made over and over by both Guts and the narrative so when you sit down and actually compare them it’s striking that Guts is still like, struggling to rise to the level of caring about someone over his “dream” (fighting stronger and stronger enemies/vengeful rampage) that he’d already reached once with Griffith right before the Eclipse.
In this post I’m going to discuss how Casca’s narrative role as a love interest overlaps with her narrative role as a substitute for Griffith, how those roles ultimately serve the main story that is the love/hate relationship between Guts and Griffith, and how Miura utilizes her as an emotional/sexual conduit between the two while also conveniently no-homoing them. Plus some additional straightforward stuff on Guts and his crush on Griffith here and there.
Advance warning: this is long. Looooooong. Also be warned that I do touch on the hound and the Eclipse, but only in one section of this post.
I also want to make clear upfront that I love Casca but I dislike the Guts/Casca romance subplot, for many reasons including my general dislike of most het, Guts’ awful treatment of her, and the sense I get that she’s been inserted as a buffer between Guts and Griffith, but mostly because I think the romance was added almost entirely to set up the destruction of Casca as a character for the sake of Guts’ manpain.
So yeah going in you should be aware that this is Guts/Casca negative. I don’t consider their romantic feelings for each other a valuable part of Berserk, and I spend a lot of time calling the legitimacy of those feelings into question. If that sounds like it’ll piss you off but you still want more Guts/Griffith content, you can totally just skip to part 4 without missing any necessary information for that part.
Ok that said, let’s get into it.
We’ll go back to the Golden Age eventually but I’m going to jump ahead first and start at chapter 130, during Guts’ night of self-reflection after he returns to Godo’s cave and finds Casca missing.
Guts is basically having an internal debate about whether or not his revenge rampage was worth abandoning Casca. He eventually emphatically concludes that it was in fact not worth it and he fucked right up when he draws this connection:
Again again again again. I’m starting here because it’s one of the most clear and straightforward examples of Guts viewing Casca as a replacement for Griffith. The connection is drawn explicitly – he considers abandoning Casca to be the equivalent of abandoning Griffith and drawing that parallel is what motivates him to save her.
But despite wanting to start atoning for past mistakes, he still intends to abandon her in a cave again after he gets her back.
“Actually, I only half mean it.”
Cue this #iconic page:
Now I talk about this page all the damn time because of how off the charts gay it is, but more importantly right now is that it draws a strong contrast between Casca and Griffith. It begins with “Just as I got her back… no, in the middle of swinging my sword to get her back…”
In the middle of getting her back… he… saw him. By framing Griffith’s appearance as an interruption that rips his attention away from rescuing Casca, Guts expresses the feeling that he’s torn between them. And of course he is, we see this throughout the rest of the manga, in his internal struggle not to toss Casca aside (or worse) and run after Griffith to, “give him… a heap of raw iron.”
We also see this inner conflict during NeoGriffith’s appearance when this happens:
But as of right now, Griffith has won the fight for Guts’ attention.
Guts’ half truth, as far as I can tell, is that he’s going to help make the damn cave a little homier and then take off again after Griffith.
As we saw in chapter 130 he decided to dedicate himself to getting Casca back, and we can assume that he fully intended to give up his revenge quest at that point. Godo tore him a new one over abandoning her to fight monsters, Guts realized he’s been being a dick, and he’s figured that maybe staying and helping take care of Casca is a better way of dealing with his issues than going back on a rampage, especially since last time he saw Femto he couldn’t even come close to touching him.
But then Skull Knight tells him the Godhand are going to be around, there’s going to be another version of the Eclipse, and we see Guts conflicted again:
Anyway Isidro ultimately saves Casca, she and Guts are reunited, and Griffith appears. Maybe Guts’ original plan was to stay with Casca and forget revenge, but now Griffith is reachable, he’s on the same plane of existence, and to top it all off, he’s hot again!
And no I’m not joking, I absolutely think that Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith is, for the first time since Promrose Hall, being clearly visually conveyed again. I already posted that iconic page in which Guts pictures Griffith’s ass and gets distracted from revenge, but there’s more where that came from.
Griffith’s sexiness is genuinely an important plot and thematic point lol, but it’s Guts eyes we’re shown that through, and holy shit does his gaze get a lot of attention in this scene. And why? Because Griffith’s reachable again. When he’s monstrous and demonic he’s out of reach on a whole nother plane of existence and shown as distant and untouchable:
When he’s incarnated as a physical being again he’s said to be “the desired,” he’s so beautiful no one can shut up about it, and imo Guts’ temptation to pursue him now that he’s “where [his] sword can reach,” is tied to the sexual temptation on display here.
Basically, while he’s certainly not intending to pursue Griffith so he can literally fuck him, there are blatant sexual undertones to his desire for revenge that ramp up hard and fast real soon, and they start with Griffith’s sexy as fuck rebirth.
And to elaborate on how the depiction of Griffith is a huge contrast here to the depiction of Casca:
Casca is shown at her least sexualized. She’s wrapped in a shapeless cloak and mirroring Erika, depicted as utterly childlike.
And this is Griffith:
Griffith is the temptation, he’s the one Guts wants to pursue, and Casca is the responsibility, and this is shown loud and clear through Griffith’s intense desirability and Guts’ enthrallment at the sight of him vs Casca’s desexualized childishness.
As for the Hill of Swords reunion
“More like someone out of a fairytale.”
Not overly relevant but it’s a fun detail that “He was so pretty” is on Guts’ face while “someone out of a fairytale” is on Griffith’s image.
That sound – like Griffith’s apparent acknowledgement, at long last, is a physical blow. Love it.
But of course then Griffith’s like, I came to see you to test my capacity for emotion, and it looks like this whole emotionless demon thing was a success. And this is Guts’ reaction – not rage, or at least, not solely rage, but so much hurt too:
Look at those sad eyebrows man. This scene thoroughly shows us how emotionally conflicted and confused Guts is. He’s angry, he’s hurt, he’s full of longing both for revenge and for “the way he he used to be,” and after everything he still wants acknowledgement, he still wants Griffith to look at him.
“I’ll not betray my dream. That is all.”
And it’s now that Guts finally attacks. So far he’s let Rickert hold him back, then shoved him away only to scream “you don’t feel anything?!” instead of rushing him. But when NeoGriff tells Guts in no uncertain terms that his dream is not only more important, but his sole priority, Guts snaps.
I do think it’s really easy to read this scene as Guts looking for a hint that Griffith still cares about him, along with the hope that he feels regret for what he’s done. Guts had a lot of misconceptions about Griffith’s feelings, but by the time of the Eclipse he’d realized that Griffith loved him – he’d left to seek something (love and respect and affection, friendship and equality) he already had and, in leaving, lost it.
Scroll back up to that first picture I posted, he says it right there: “Did I lose something before I even noticed it again?! Without even realizing I’d thrown it from the palm of my hand!” There’s a small part of him that was still hoping, now that Griffith is un-demonized, that his heart and his love had returned with his human body, that it’s not lost forever. But in declaring that he’s free, NeoGriffith shoots that hope down.
Anyway big fight, cave collapses, Griffith’s heart starts doing shit unbeknownst to Guts, he mysteriously saves Casca and takes off, and Guts
says he won’t abandon Casca again and decides to escort her to Elfhelm, with his dickish reluctance handily pointed out by Decent Person Puck lol.
Now look at this shit:
“Weren’t those Godo’s parting words?” Says Guts to Rickert to convince him to stay with Erika.
“You should have known. This is the man I am.”
Don’t abandon what you can’t replace. He finally learned that lesson when he compared abandoning Casca to abandoning Griffith. He frames his choice to stay with Casca as making up for it. Guts once deserted Griffith, now Griffith has deserted him, so he’s promising not to desert Casca. Given that Guts’ mind is solely on deserting and being deserted by Griffith, as opposed to that time when he left Casca in a cave for two years and she wandered off, “I won’t desert you anymore. This time… I won’t lose you,” is given a double meaning of applying to Casca while also referencing losing Griffith.
But what’s with that interlude up there of Guts remembering Griffith saving Casca? The man Guts “knows” NeoGriffith is, the man who dgaf about anything except his dream, isn’t the man who would randomly decide to save Casca from falling rocks. Guts is shown thinking about that apparent contradiction immediately before “I won’t leave you behind. I won’t… desert you anymore.”
Taken all together, to me this scene comes across as so utterly Griffith centric that it makes Casca feel like an afterthought, conveniently there so Guts can take some form of action in response to his extremely Griffith-centred emotions.
Guts charlie brown walks away because Griffith “deserted” him. Guts draws a comparison between abandoning Griffith and abandoning Casca, and being abandoned by NeoGriffith and refusing to abandon Casca. Guts remembers NeoGriffith saying he knows what kind of man he is right before recalling him saving Casca.
Then he declares he won’t desert her again – and I have to wonder if part of what gives him the willpower to take a break from his revenge quest despite NeoGriffith residing so temptingly in his plane of existence now is the ambiguity of NeoGriffith’s actions here, casting “the kind of man” he is now into doubt and deflating Guts’ rage boner the same way he says seeing NeoGriffith looking “so human… the way he used to be” makes him forget his “urge to kill.” It hardly seems like a stretch given how much of Guts’ decision here is explicitly shown to be about Griffith.
So far, post-Eclipse, Casca’s been treated as a prop for Guts’ internal conflict between revenge and not being a dick – a symbol of his lingering humanity. She exists to be put into peril so Guts can decide to save her and then waver between her and Griffith. She’s the poster girl for failing to pass the sexy lamp test. It’s real depressing, and it’s about to get worse.
Enter Beast of Darkness.
Now we’re at the really bad shit, but also the actual most explicit verbal suggestion of Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith, so it’s impossible to skip in a post on the topic. Plus there’s no point pretending that Casca isn’t done incredibly dirty by both the narrative and Guts.
It’s important to understand that the Hound is Guts. It’s not an evil malicious spirit trying to manipulate and possess Guts (which I have seen suggested before), it’s simply Guts’ dark emotions given substance. Just on the off chance this statement requires support for you, here’s a post on the subject. This scene is pretty much Guts arguing with his id.
And the way it’s framed with “dreams of him?” “let’s go to him” coming first on the image of an eager, excited puppy, followed by the teeth and “heap of raw iron” feels so deliberate to me. Guts wants violent revenge but it’s a feeling complicated by the fact that he loved Griffith, that he once strove to be his equal, to be considered his friend, and now he strives to kill him.
Like Guts facing Femto in the Black Swordsman arc, like Guts pleading for a shred of regret from NeoGriffith, there’s still an element of Guts wanting Griffith’s acknowledgement here.
More direct comparisons between Casca and Griffith and how Guts feels about them. Who’s more precious, your love interest or your arch nemesis?
And I’m not here to say that Guts doesn’t care for Casca and only cares about Griffith. As this scene shows, he’s torn between them, but he’s chosen Casca now, and he’s trying to get his doubts and his rage and his suppressed attraction to Griffith that’s now coming to the surface, coloured by hate, to shut the fuck up. But these are his own doubts.
“The wound Griffith left, because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you?” Okay, certainly an eyebrow raising description here but all right, this is about Guts’ motivation to kill Griffith. The Hound is suggesting he values Casca only as fuel for his rage. Which certainly seems like a relevant suggestion after Guts’ “I’d forgotten my urge to kill. And that… can’t be.” His rage needs fuel. So while that’s surely not all there is to his feelings for Casca, the Hound isn’t making shit up. Again, this is essentially Guts internally debating what his true motivations are.
Longing. Hell of a word choice. Granted I can’t double check the translation with others because I’m incapable of tracking down old raws (tho I did a cursory search on skullknight.net to see if anyone had criticized the translation of this scene and didn’t find anything) but this is such a boldly romanticized choice of phrasing that I feel it’s safe to assume the undertones are there in the original Japanese. You don’t accidentally describe someone’s urge to kill a dude as “longing” for him. That’s a blatantly deliberate double entendre.
And on top of that it fits right in with the Hound’s first eager, excited words to Guts in this scene. Again, it’s an illustration that Guts’ vengeful feelings are complex, and intertwined with his original feelings for Griffith.
And then the Hound tells Guts to rape Casca so he can get closer to Griffith and I throw up my hands.
There’s so much innuendo and homoeroticism in the lead up to this (including earlier, w/ Griffith’s sexy rebirth scene and the reunion on the Hill of Swords, ft Guts thinking about Griffith’s ass), and then this scene just doubles down as hard as possible. “Let’s give him… a heap of raw iron,” “because you want to keep feeling the pain he caused you,” “she’s a sacrifice so you can continue longing for Griffith,” “you’ll get closer and closer to Griffith.”
The innuendo in this scene makes it one of the most homoerotic scenes in the manga.
Like, tl;dr Guts’ vengeful pursuit of Griffith is tied so thoroughly to sex in this
nightmare that tbh I have a hard time calling this subtext.
And while it is absolutely homophobic for one of the gayest scenes in the manga to basically tie Guts’ desire for Griffith to his desire for revenge and a suggestion to rape and kill Casca, it’s also worth noting that this isn’t exactly Guts’ desire for revenge being given a dark sexual element.
This is the Beast of Darkness using Guts’ pre-existing desire for Griffith to try to tempt him into sticking a sword in him. Still fucked up, obviously, but it’s at least deeper and more interesting than the alternative.
The earlier parallels I described, Guts comparing leaving Griffith and leaving Casca, etc, draw an emotional connection between Guts and Griffith through Casca as, essentially, a bridge. Guts is assuaging his desire to go back and fix his mistakes by replacing Griffith with Casca and refusing to leave her. Casca has become an outlet for Guts’ feelings about missed opportunities with Griffith.
This chapter draws a very direct sexual connection between Guts and Griffith through Casca as a bridge. By raping the woman Femto raped, Guts can get closer to him.
And it is, of course, not the first time the manga has done this. Femto’s unwavering stare into Guts’ eye(s) during the Eclipse rape scene isn’t subtle, though I don’t intend to go into it in detail as this is about Guts’ sexual desire, not Griffith/Femto’s. I feel like the stare (the fucking stare omg) speaks for itself.
I mention this only to make the point that there’s an established precedent for Casca bearing the brunt of these dudes’ repressed feelings for each other, whether it’s genuinely intended to be interpreted as repressed sexual desire or whether it’s meant to be platonic spite/longing to get closer and closer to Griffith no homo. It’s not fair, it’s bad writing on several levels, it’s both misogynist and homophobic, but there you go.
Ultimately my main takeaway here is that Berserk would be about 500x less fucked up and offensive if Guts and Griffith just cut out the middlewoman and fucked each other.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Let’s go back to the Golden Age.
So far I’ve done my best to show that, post-Eclipse, Guts’ relationship with Casca largely revolves around his feelings for Griffith, both regretful and vengeful, and the fucked-up sexual component of his relationship with her also relates to the sexual component of his relationship with Griffith. So what about pre-Eclipse? Does the same principle hold true then, back when Casca was an actual character and not just a plot device and projection screen for Guts?
And I would argue that it does. It’s less in-your-face about it, but tbh not by a whole lot.
Casca and Guts start off as romantic rivals for Griffith’s affection. Only Casca is aware of this, since Guts’ attraction to Griffith is subconscious and repressed imo, but that’s their early dynamic. Their first emotionally intimate scene together, when they finally stop hating each other and start to bond as friends, is when Casca tells Guts her backstory, which happens to be almost entirely about Griffith.
The Casca chapters end with Casca crying about Griffith having fallen in love with Guts and not her (”Why… why did it have to be you?”), but all Guts manages to get out of Casca’s story is that she’s into Griffith, so after he decides to leave he starts trying to be a good bro and set them up. Finally, right before Guts leaves, Judeau introduces him to the concept of hooking up with Casca.
During the course of this conversation Guts does a kind of 180:
to
“The one who has her eye… is Griffith. That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this.”
This is presented like part of Guts’ motivation for becoming Griffith’s equal is to be worthy of Casca, but we’ve seen his thought process for wanting to be Griffith’s equal, and Casca has never figured into it. He’d completely written her off before this chat with Judeau, as we see at the start, and he certainly never seemed to be consciously aware of the possibility of getting with her.
He’s been trying to set her up with Griffith for several chapters – pushing her into his arms, mentioning her dress to him, suggesting she ask him to dance, carrying her down to see him after Doldrey, saying “good luck with Griffith,” to her as he heads out, and now telling Judeau he expects them to get together.
There are three possible explanations for this behaviour:
1. Guts just wants to be a good bro and help his friends be happy together. 2. Guts is sublimating his unconscious desire for Casca into trying to hook her up with Griffith. 3. Guts is sublimating his unconscious desire for Griffith into trying to hook him up with Casca.
I think maybe Miura wants us to think it’s #2. Hence Guts’ awkward sweatdrop when Judeau brings her up, hence Guts complimenting her dress before mentioning it to Griffith, hence Guts carrying her down to him bridal style after Doldrey, hence Guts swiveling from “Less a woman I see her as… a comrade,” to “That’s why… right now… I’m no good for her… like this,” within seconds.
Yk, he’s subconsciously attracted to her now and acts on that attraction by trying to hook her up with Griffith to make her happy, but once Judeau tells him that’s not an option, he can admit that he’s attracted to her.
(And, just to throw something out there, once we establish that Berserk has subtextual, repressed sexual desire in this love triangle it only adds more validation to the other combinations. Even if we are genuinely meant to read Guts as unknowingly attracted to Casca, it puts unknowing attraction on the table. Who else might he be unknowingly attracted to? Casca also apparently took some time to recognize her feelings for Griffith as potentially romantic. Lots of subconscious desire wrapped up in this love triangle, I’m js. But lol I digress.)
That said, I’m here to argue that, whatever Miura’s intentions may be (and hell they may be exactly this), it comes across as option #3.
I’ve already gone through the first part of the Golden Age to highlight how Guts looks at him and how visuals suggest attraction. After Promrose, that fades away because Guts no longer views Griffith as reachable, rather, he puts him on a pedestal. Enter Casca, right at the point where Guts is deciding what to do with the “fact” that Griffith doesn’t give a fuck about him.
Suddenly he gets invested in setting Griffith up with Casca, who he views as more worthy of Griffith because she has a dream (be Griffith’s sword) and he doesn’t.
This is when Guts starts pushing them together. He’s encouraging Casca to take his place at Griffith’s side, whether he realizes the implications of that or not – at the very least he knows that Casca believes Griffith feels things for him she wishes he felt for her, even if Guts doesn’t believe that Griffith truly values him.
“Until that day. The day you showed up…”
What’s interesting to me is that Guts recognizes that Casca wants to fuck Griffith lmao. He’s hooking them up romantically, even though Casca never directly says she’s in love with Griffith, and only alludes to her feelings in terms of being pissed off at Guts for stealing Griffith away from her side.
Guts doesn’t believe he himself is close to Griffith after overhearing the Promrose speech, but he seems to realize that Casca is jealous of him, manages to interpret that (correctly) as Casca wanting to bone Griffith, and yet still doesn’t realize that Griffith’s feelings for him may be a lot more significant than he thinks. Feels like repression at work to me.
Guts wants Casca to take his perceived place at Griffith’s side, except Casca’s theoretically able to do so romantically bc she’s a woman, so there’s plenty of heteronormativity at work too, though whether that’s coming from Miura or Guts I can’t say.
So yeah after Judeau explains the plot of Berserk to him and keeps nudging him towards Casca, Guts agrees that maybe he could hook up with her… but only if he becomes Griffith’s equal first.
So the other way of looking at this is that, rather than suddenly changing Guts’ entire motivation out of nowhere from “become Griffith’s equal to be his friend” to “become Griffith’s equal to get with Casca,” and generally being bizarrely terrible writing, this instead neatly situates a future relationship with Casca, in which she sees him as just as good for her as Griffith, as proof that he’s on the road to achieving his goal of becoming Griffith’s equal.
Which holds true later on – Guts and Casca’s relationship is not an endgame for Guts, it’s not his goal, it’s another step. He still intends to go back out and keep pursuing his own dream. He’s still motivated by wanting to be Griffith’s equal.
So yeah, Judeau’s like, whatever, I tried, Guts ducks out, and shit proceeds to go down.
Fast forward a year.
Guts comes back. Casca, interestingly, has taken over Griffith’s most notable narrative role as leader of the Hawks. Everyone sits down around the campfire.
Rickert tries to explain things to Guts:
Look what Judeau does! He’s telling Rickert to shut up.
Judeau is… weirdly invested in Guts and Casca getting together. Setting them up is largely his motivation in the latter half of the Golden Age, as far as I can tell.
After this moment he changes the subject to:
Subtle, Judeau.
I think it’s telling that Guts never comes up with the idea of hooking up with Casca on his own. He’s led to it by resident shipper on board Judeau, every time. The same dude trying to avoid any mention of Griffith’s feelings for Guts now. Why? Because he wants Guts and Casca to leave together after they rescue Griffith, and he has a feeling Guts won’t want to if he figures out how Griffith actually feels about him.
Hey here’s something interesting about this scene:
This is when Guts first starts trying to fix his mistakes by substituting Casca for Griffith, imo.
Casca attacks him while screaming that he ruined Griffith by leaving. As the point finally hits home, so does the point of Casca’s sword as Guts, shocked, lets her stab him.
Before Guts can really draw a useful conclusion from Casca’s diatribe, she offers a distraction from the subject at hand by trying to kill herself while bequeathing Griffith to him.
“I couldn’t be a woman. Or something invaluable. To keep on protecting the almost broken dream of someone who might not even be alive…“
Guts didn’t save the last Hawk leader who had a self destructive breakdown after dueling him.
Presented with another person who seems to need him, who is desperate and lost and needs comfort, this time he does something.
And what really makes me believe this is actually, for real the correct reading of this scene – that, to Guts, Casca is a substitution for Griffith here – is that Casca is doing the exact. Same. Thing.
Griffith is (seemingly) unreachable, (seemingly) emotionally and romantically unavailable, but Guts and Casca aren’t.
And they kiss for the first time right after Casca tells Guts how Griffith felt about him, right after Guts lets Casca stab him because of it, right after the memory of Griffith kneeling in the snow, and the beginnings of
the realization that by leaving he lost what he set out to earn, hit him, right after Casca tells him that Griffith is his responsibility now. It’s hard not to take that as Guts using Casca as a substitution for Griffith, giving her what he’s now very slowly beginning to realize he should’ve given Griffith.
Guts and Casca getting together here is two people obsessed with the same person trying to offer the other what they couldn’t offer him: comfort. And sex.
Once again a scene that looks like it’s going to be about Casca and
Guts, that should be if this was a typical romance, turns out to revolve
around Griffith.
And on the subject of Guts leaving Griffith in the snow instead of
kneeling down and kissing him the way he responds to Casca much later, how about Griffith going out and getting
self-destructively laid while thinking about Guts after the duel?
Thematically there’s a very well-defined empty space where Griffith and
Guts connecting romantically would’ve fit, is what I’m saying, but they
didn’t. They both sought out other sexual connections to compensate for the
loss of each other.
Finally, here’s the straightforward account of how Guts and Casca are feeling three days later with Griffith’s imminent return to their lives. Casca confesses to Guts that she’s still jealous of Charlotte, Guts gets pissy, but then thinks:
I hate that you’re still hung up on Griffith but I’d be a huge hypocrite if I got mad because I’m even more hung up on Griffith.
Which pretty much sums it up.
And I think I can stop there. There’s a lot more to say in the lead-in to the Eclipse about Guts’ intense feelings for Griffith, but when it comes to sexual attraction specifically, and how Casca figures into it, I think I’ll call it a day.
I hope I’ve made a decent case for Guts’ feelings for Casca, both positive and hugely fucked up, being largely built out of redirected feelings for Griffith. Whatever the reasons for this – actual authorial intent, intended redirection of Guts’s platonic bro feelings but adding sex bc Casca’s a woman so it’s obligatory without realizing how gay that looks, me totally reading into a half-assed het subplot created for the sake of more Eclipse drama, whatever – this is earnestly how Guts’ relationship with Casca reads to me.
In the final part I’m going to conclude this epic adventure in homoeroticism with what is essentially a “why I ship them,” going into why I think it makes perfect sense, from both a character and a thematic perspective, for Guts to be sexually attracted to Griffith. Stay tuned.
shout out to @mastermistressofdesire bc we’ve had a few conversations about this subject and some of your ideas really helped me coalesce these thoughts. Ty!
Guts’ reaction to Casca being threatened is usually: Don’t do it, She’ll fucking kill ya.
And Guts’ reaction to Griffith being threatened is: DON’T YOU DARE FUCKING TOUCH HIM .I WILL CLEAVE YOU IN HALF.
not that Guts’ wouldn’t step in on Casca’s behalf but whenever he does there’s always this “why am I doing this?” “Do I like her” “Don’t pop a boner on my head” “Griffith what are you doing?” it’s almost a part of a whole different train of thought?
It doesn’t seem to be the tunnel visioned desperation which comes when Griffith is concerned.
i feel like guts’s feelings for casca are really poorly written, as you kinda mention. when judeau asks him about his feelings for casca, he says he sees her as a comrade more than anything, which is appropriate – but then with further prompting, he’s like “no… i’m just no good for her… as i am now…” because she’s caught up on griffith still and all that. because miura hadnt originally planned it, having FEELINGs for casca is an afterthought on everyone’s part. it really (to me at least) comes across as a “wait, im a dude, im supposed to be into girls and this is the one girl around”. he assists her multiple times, not real sure why, so hey, guts thinks, romance?? perhaps?? basically guts doesnt know fuck shit about girls but maybe he has a concept of compulsory het. thinking on this reminds me of how griffith also had to chase het – as is characteristic for griffith, it was thought out ahead of time and part of his plan (even if it his plan kinda went to shit). guts, on the other hand, relies not on thought but rather just on acting, often really impulsively, and thats where gutsca came from. unfortunately for the girls, what it al really comes back to is each other. everybody knows griffith has like 0 sincere feelings for charlotte and is eternally hung up on guts, but gutss is a bit more vague. hes the same way tho- the girl in his life is means to an end. i posted a few panels just recently that make this evident – even post-eclipse, when guts finds out casca js missing, he swears to rescue her By Himself (that falls thru) but if he runs into griffith, “then [he’ll]…” implying he’ll redirect his attentions there. chance of another type of eclipse, AND casca’s gonna be there in need of rescuing? how convenient. there are a lot more caps that point towards this that i think bthump has either mentioned or posted, but im on mobile and cant dig em up atm.
I was just thinking about that bit when Guts is about to leave where Judeau’s like, hey Casca’s single wink wink nudge nudge and Guts is like, I see her more as a comrade than anything, and Judeau’s like, are u sure??? and Guts is like, well anyway she’s into Griffith so if I was gonna d8 her I’d have to fulfill my dream of being Griffith’s equal first either way so bye.
And it’s framed as like burgeoning romance, Guts seriously wanting to become the kind of man Casca likes, but god it comes across as such an afterthought lol. Like he already wants to be Griffith’s equal for Griffith, this Casca thing is just added on and changes absolutely nothing about his goals or motivation. It’s like, off Guts goes because he desperately wants to be Griffith’s bff, btw here’s some heterosexuality just in case you’re uncomfortable with that, heterosexual male reader.
And more re: mmod’s original post, it’s just inarguable facts that every time Guts’ feelings for Casca and Griffith are compared, Casca comes up short. He decides to leave and take her with him until it turns out Griffith needs him. He goes on an animalistic rampage while rescuing Griffith whereas Casca gets told to fuck off bc she’s too naked and distracting after her attempted rape (which I’m sure is meant as a funny manly het moment and GOD IT’S BAD). He leaves her in a cave for two years to pursue Griffith. Hell when he thinks about the last thing he saw with his missing eye it goes Casca’s assault -> naked Casca -> Femto staring at him as the very last thing given the most significance. He decides he has to rescue her in the conviction arc but still plans to ditch her again afterwards now that Griffith is human-looking and in reach of his sword. He finally decides to stay with her and take her to Elfhelm when a) Griffith tells him he gives zero fucks and ditches him and b) the cave caves in and he can’t leave her there anymore. And he still treats it as a temporary sidequest.
I’m having feelings about this and your essay about Griffith’s arc of being closeted. I kind of feel that you could write a parallel essay about moments like this with Guts honestly. Despite coming across generally as the one who is more willing to confront his feelings during the GA arc he feels like the less self aware of the two here. It’s interesting. The idea that he would throw himself into a sexual entanglement with someone who he does trust certainly but isn’t really in love with so
He could I don’t know
“enact” loving someone.(I’m pretty sure that was how Casca felt too. The
idea of her being kind of so soaked in compulsory heterosexuality that
she can’t really name or give herself room to think of her own desires
resonates with me a lot.) I don’t know how emotionally cavalier and
dangerous to himself and others that is while at the same time being
“easier” socially isn’t really all that different than Griffith’s
relationship with Charlotte to me. Honestly Guts being more normatively
“masculine” seems to give their relationship this veneer of authenticity
to a lot of the fans and I can’t see any other reason for it. His
behavior certainly doesn’t support those conclusions.
I completely agree. Like het in general almost always feels paint-by-numbers boring to me but Berserk goes an extra step – it doesn’t just feel like inauthentic he was a boy she was a girl bs, it feels aggressively… idk, harmful? Negative? The comparison to Griffith and Charlotte makes a lot of sense to me, the only difference is that Griffith knows his relationship is a sham.
Like @mastermistressofdesire said, a chapter later they’re getting weird and jealous and love-quadrangle-y with Griffith and Charlotte thrown into the mix, and then a short while after that Casca’s telling him to leave and Guts is trying to reaffirm his loyalty and love for Griffith, and then during the Eclipse they’re entirely separated in body and thought until it’s time for Casca to become solely a pawn of Guts and Griffith/Femto’s intense enmity.
At their most positive they never feel like more than friends trying something out – even Guts is like, yeah you can come with me and maybe it’ll suck and you’ll throw off my groove but w/e we’ll see.
And at their most negative Guts assaults her to feel a connection to Griffith.
Also to address the actual like, compulsory heterosexuality vibe from an in-universe perspective, god like, they are so gay. Casca’s crush on Griffith feels extremely like a lesbian with a “crush” on a gay dude, ie someone safe to focus on who will never return her feelings (and no you don’t have to know the dude is gay for this to be a thing lol, citation: me and quite a bit of anecdata of gay women who’ve nursed crushes on dudes who also later came out). And excuse my messiness wrt personal identification but as someone who started out as ambivalent wrt having sex with men and is now firmly Not Into It, Casca having bad sex with Guts and going ‘yeah this is fine i guess i could do this more’ because she feels like a relationship with him validates her as a person is also #relatable.
And obviously Guts is gay but has related trauma. The first time he slept with Casca he was freaked out until he registered the fact that she was a woman, which seems like a pretty relevant prelude to their “relationship” such as it is.
you said it more eloquently tho here:
I think the idea that they didn’t have
another way to imagine their intense feelings at that moment outside of a
romantic relationship tells you how deeply they don’t really understand
themselves at that moment and how much I think a part of them longs for
“normalcy.”
like tl;dr ia with yours and mmod’s convo in the comments lol, allow me to join in on the gay projection.
i feel like the fact that guts sees the band down there, including his pseudo girlfriend, dying horribly and turns away to continue trying to save griffith long after it’s too late should be a bigger thing, both in fandom and in canon
re-reading a few eclipse chapters and it feels so striking to me that casca is down there with judeau and the hawks facing an army of demons while guts is up there with griffith, neither sparing a thought for the other. it feels like a short, rougher and more intense version of casca leading the hawks as outlaws while griffith is being tortured and guts is off trying to become his equal.
except it comes after guts and casca have slept together and seem to be having a thing, which makes it very… stark in the way it completely doesn’t fit into a romantic narrative.
plus you’d think that while guts is bemoaning his own shittiness in abandoning casca for two years and comparing it to leaving griffith in the snow he could spare a thought for that time he left her to fight a hoarde of rapey monsters because he was wrapped up in futilely trying to help griffith.
I mentioned a while ago that the first time I feel we got a real visual* glimpse of Guts’ hound-esque inner darkness chronologically was during the rescue mission.
The way he cuts out the torturer’s tongue is very reminiscent of his tendency to torture apostles before killing them imo (which probably has its origins in the way he killed Donovan), and then he just rampages through the castle like a demonic one-man army, very black swordsman ish.
Look at this imagery like:
(i love Casca’s ‘holy shit dude’ expression)
Plus you got Charlotte saying he scares her, and the Wyald fight is when everyone starts comparing Guts to a monster and saying he’s inhuman.
So I was thinking – why? Why would we get this before the Eclipse, before he starts killing ghosts and infusing his sword with Essence of Darkness, before the brand + killing monsters make him literally superhuman? Why do we get our first look at monster slaying, revenge-obsessed, black swordsman Guts a day and only a day before the main event, the point of which is to make him revenge-obsessed, even takes place?
And I want to suggest that it’s because this is it – this is Guts’ revenge spree. It’s not one revenge spree that ends, followed immediately by another unrelated revenge spree. It’s the same rage. He killed the torturer like he kills apostles, then he fought an actual apostle to defend Griffith, then the Eclipse happened and he declared war.
It’s all intimately connected in Guts’ mind and emotions:
He started off on a vengeful rampage for Griffith in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt, and he continued on a vengeful rampage against Femto/NeoGriffith, also in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt.
We know this because as he’s running towards Griffith in the torture chamber Guts thinks about how it’s his fault that Griffith is there without actually coming to a proper conclusion (if that’s the case… then I –) – and he reaches that conclusion (was I the one who brought all this upon you?) right as he’s running towards Griffith at the site of the Eclipse. Guts’ guilt is strongly associated with his rage this way. Guilt followed by external target followed by lashing out.
Idk, there’s just such a through line to me from Casca telling him it’s his fault to the Eclipse. The most significant moments of Guts’ internal thoughts are given to him processing this information and finally concluding that he fucked up right before the Eclipse begins. The Eclipse didn’t then erase his feelings of guilt, it just let him continue to repress those feelings and gave him acceptable targets to lash out at instead of dealing with his feelings.
Now this is a bold statement, but I think that in a way, rampage part 1, kill half the soldiers of Midland, and rampage part 2, kill demons, are both about Guts avenging Griffith – the latter only in part ofc, because the rest of the Hawks need to be avenged too now.
Because the thing is, I think he still sees Griffith as a victim. After finally acknowledging that Griffith did sacrifice everyone, he still looks back at him wistfully. He thinks of Griffith while flashing back to the lost Hawks after the Eclipse. He tells Rickert that NeoGriffith isn’t the Griffith he knows (incidentally something Rickert repeats to NeoGriffith later, which NGriff acknowledges). He flashes back to Griffith in the snow a lot. To Guts, Griffith isn’t his friend who turned out to be a dick, Griffith is his friend who basically committed fantasy murder/suicide after being tortured for a year because Guts broke him by leaving.
His feelings towards Femto/NeoGriff are complicated and fucked up as all hell, but while his feelings for Griffith feed into his complicated feelings for Femto/NeoGriff, his hatred for F/NG doesn’t retroactively affect his feelings towards human Griffith. They’ve remained pretty solidly longing, guilt, love, regret. He’s not thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and feeling rage at what he would go on to do a year later, he’s thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and trying to find a way to atone for it. Griffith is still explicitly part of the “campfire from those days still [burning in his] chest.”
Idk basically I just wanted to say that a part of Guts’ fuel for his revenge rampage was feeling responsible for Griffith’s pain and not being able to save Griffith from it, both the first time against Midland and the second time against the Godhand, and I chose a very long drawn-out way to do that.
* I specify visual glimpse bc i think there’s a solid argument that it’s there when he kills Donovan, based on the way he taunts him and tortures him briefly first, but we don’t have any of the ragey demonic imagery associated with Guts’ darkness there – he just looks like a kid. So I feel like it works as a point of origin for a lot of Guts’ dark vengeful urges (Donovan is the first monster he killed), but he wasn’t anywhere close to losing himself to darkness then.
Honestly I don’t think there’s anything I have to add here which you haven’t already said. But I’ll just leave this here,
From Schierke’s trip into Guts Mindscape, where at the pit of the fire which drives Guts forward, There is a chant of Griffith’s name and a confused roil of affection and rage which comes with it. And though Friend and enemy overlap, they haven’t quite superimposed yet, they are still distinct entities.
And really you’ve said this before but I definitely agree that a part of his current motivation to fix things comes from his guilt of being unable to ‘fix’ what he had with Griffith. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have done it for Casca on her own too, but that Guttural fear, the panicked “Did I Do it AGAIN?!” that comes from a place of Guilt. A place quite firmly occupied by Griffith.
The “This time, I was the one left behind.” goes to show that Guts now wholeheartedly sees himself leaving the first time around as an act of abandonment, there’s no allusion to leaving to pursue his own dream because really even back then- :”Now I realise, this was what I’d been seeking this whole time.”
What I also like about this is that Guts seems to treat it as Griffith sort of “Paying him back’ for that offense. So he’s kind of subconsciously seeing Neo-Griffith as a very human, emotionally motivated figure with remnants of the ‘original’ Griffith’s emotional experiences and for once Guts might just really be on to something.
Also Interestingly, as mentioned before i guess, ever since the Eclipse all of Gut’s memories of Griffith have morphed into images of him standing with his back towards Guts or at a distance and the imagery is really interesting to me here. Because it could signify so much.
We know that the image of Griffith’s back, kneeling in the snow has sort of become a haunting image for Guts. What if the turned back everywhere else is an extension of this, the fact that all his memories are tinged with the same regret or guilt.
Secondly it could be simply a perceived distance and further unreachability, because the past is literally an unachievable objective. And specifically that shot he has of the entire original band during the ‘companions’ speech. Griffith is walking away in the background there, it’s almost as if Guts realises that even during what he considered his happiest memories he was already losing Griffith.
Oh and the “Campfire from those days still burns in my heart” spread?
First of all. Ahhem.
Second of all once again you compare in importance a woman you literally have an appendage of yours inside in that particular shot with this other guy who actually looms much larger. An more encompassing. With his presence literally symbolically wrapped around you for emotional warmth.
Also Under his cover but behind his back and I really wonder if that has significance too.
And then again maybe simply because he doesn’t know what face to give him. Is it the face of a friend, an enemy, something else all together? Guts doesn’t really know yet.
lol i was almost going to make my original post like twice as long by going on to guts’ decision to stick with casca this time and how it’s framed as him trying to make up for abandoning griffith etc. but then i was like, this is already rly long.
also good point about Guts interpreting Griffith rejection as payback – ia, i don’t think Guts is exactly wrong about that lol.
I’ve been reading Guts’ memories of Griffith’s back (bc yeah I noticed that too, he’s always facing away) as, I guess, recognition that that relationship has been destroyed. Whenever Guts remembers leaving Griffith he’s looking back at him kneeling in the snow, which tbh strikes me as symbolic rather than literal because Guts never looked back. It’s a visual representation of Guts’ acknowledgement that he left Griffith behind. And I think Guts’ other memories of Griffith with his back to him are similar – an acknowlegement that Guts ruined everything and now he’s back to chasing Griffith. I might say more on that in a separate post actually.
and lol the campfire from those days spread is so damn blatant in its acknowledgement of the fact that guts and casca hooked up not only while they were both in love with griffith but, tbh, because of it. at least that’s what i get when i look at a picture of 2 ppl fucking while wrapped in the symbolic flowing cape of the dude they were both acknowledgedly obsessed with plus like you said, it’s with griffith facing away. Which, to me, adds the sense of them trying to fill a hole left by his loss.
Which is why it makes perfect sense to show us this image at this point in the narrative while Guts is contemplating revenge and rescuing Casca because he’s shifting from trying to fill that hole by chasing Griffith/Femto down and “[giving] him a heap of raw iron” to trying to fill it with Casca again (tho he doesn’t actually solidify that choice until NeoGriffith ditches him).
And I think it’s going to be a mistake – we see that Guts leaving revenge behind is good, but his desperation to get Casca back is not so good and will probably have consequences. And I think we’re supposed to understand that he’s doing it for the wrong reasons – if he wanted Casca sane again for her sake he’d be giving her time and a safe place to recover, or just to live. He wants Casca sane again for his own sake bc a) he can’t let go of the past and she represents the Hawks, b) he’s trying to make up for leaving Griffith and c) he’s still trying to fill the Griffith-shaped hole in his heart.
And then again maybe simply because he doesn’t know what face to give
him. Is it the face of a friend, an enemy, something else all together?
Guts doesn’t really know yet.
Also I love this idea.
ok i’ve been trying to write a long involved thing but yk what fuck it i’m gonna be pithy for once and just point something out:
to guts, neogriffith and casca evoke similar feelings. they’re both former friends, now utterly changed, walking around reminding guts of the unreachable past. he turned his focus to casca after neogriffith showed up looking like the old griffith and acting like a stranger. physically reachable but emotionally unreachable.
and i think there’s an argument in there that guts is so wrapped up in fixing casca, despite acknowledging to himself that there’s a good chance it’s not even in her best interests, in part because he can’t do anything to fix griffith.
Scrolling thru my blog past this art and suddenly hit by a huge amount of love for Casca. If I could rescue one character from their shitty writing (in anything, not just Berserk) it would be her.
The more I think about it the more appealing the thought of her waking up and absolutely wrecking everything is. Like I know this doesn’t make sense because the same dude is still the writer, but there’s something viscerally satisfying to imagining her getting her mind back, gaining some impressive amount of power (Behelit, elf powerup, whatever), and metaphorically flipping the table and completely changing the trajectory of the plot as a pseudo-meta response to being locked away as a non-entity for 2 decades, and playing support for two dudes before that. I want her to cause something to happen that’s as epic and active and hardcore as her being a childlike waif for so long is passive and shitty and awful.
Idk I guess I’m mad about it so I want to see Casca angry – effectively angry.
Like all this thematic stuff about inner beasts becoming literal beasts ft Griffith and Guts, and the character I most want to see lose themselves to rage is Casca. Even if it’s depicted as a negative I would be fistpumping.
Those years of being locked away in your own head need to count for something. I’m a little sick of Casca’s romantic ‘feminisation’ arc which took place simultaneously to the Gatsca mini arc.
It’s almost as if, by virtue of realising her feminity and ‘gentleness’ Casca suddenly started getting more positive attention and began to be written as more likeable.
Like as long as she was the head strong commander who called Guts out on his shit and kept everyone in line she was the ‘salty bitch’ and suddenly she’s trembling and blushing and holding onto Guts’ cape and she’s everyone’s ‘waifu’ .
I don’t have a problem with the softness. I have a problem with how this is treated differently in the narrative than how she originally was portrayed. And one is positive and the other was rather unflattering.
omg strong agree
it was like as soon as casca became a love interest she started fretting about whether her muscles weren’t womanly, judeau talks about how she had to give up being a woman (lol jesus) as a mercinary, when she takes the healing powder to guts he also fondly thinks about how she’s “showing a soft side,” and then during the sex scene you have her getting self conscious of her scars and guts having to tell her he thinks she’s womanly enough.
like it’s run of the mill sexist stuff but still so annoying and unnecessary. i wouldn’t even dislike casca being self conscious when sex enters the picture because like, fine, she’s inexperienced, she’s different than most women in that she’s a strong mercinary, i could understand that affecting her self-image, but combined with the running commentary from judeau, plus like how you said, the way she seems to get consistently weaker and clingier and blushier, just doesn’t sit well with me.
(which isn’t to say she doesn’t still have some great moments after getting love interested up, but it’s like she has to be damseled extra hard to compensate.)
plus just in general what I love most about her seems to be more her informed attributes and a few moments of awesomeness (punching a wounded man in the stomach because she doesn’t like him, terrifying corkus, wholly commanding the respect and adoration of the Hawks, being called the 3rd best fighter in the Band who can take on ten strong men at once even if we never get to see that in action, taking command and leading the Hawks when Midland turns on them and at the start of the Eclipse, etc) so when she returns as a full character I’d just, really love to see that badass side in full epic action finally, without being weakened by her period or a drug or exhaustion, or up against an extra powerful enemy Guts needs to save her from, etc etc.
Strong agree. Like I’ve said a few times that if Casca wakes up and does something really important plot-wise in reaction to her trauma that has to happen at this point in the story it would at least help a little to justify Casca’s 20 year long non-existence, but Miura’s comments make it so clear to me that he had no real long game for her in mind, and it wouldn’t change that fact. Like, like Guts, he shoved her into a cave for two years to keep her out of the way until he needed a damsel in distress and then a handy reason for Guts to try conquering his rage.
She really is like a walking plot device and it seems so obvious that it’s entirely because he didn’t know how to include her as a character in the plot so he just got rid of her character for a while in a really shitty way.
When it comes to G*tsca like… I mean technically I guess I prefer the tentative, two people giving something a shot vibe to say, a planned out epic romance, but the fact that it was just to give Guts more manpain is so, so gross. On the one hand at least there’s a silver lining there in the fact that Miura did not plan G*tsca as a true love happy ending thing from the start, which hopefully makes it less likely to happen, but on the other hand if it does turn into a romance again, then extra ew.
Especially since like, if he’s making it up as he goes along, the idea of Miura writing their “relationship” the way he did throughout the last 3 arcs and then deciding romance is the way to go from there is… horrifying lmao.
But whatever I’m clinging to “your wishes may not be her wishes” like a life raft rn.
you're the only one 