real talk i’ll accept guts’ narrative as being about successfully getting over griffith and moving on and eventually getting a happy griffith-free ending if and only if guts/serpico goes canon

and not just because the idea of guts moving on from his homoerotic obsession with a dude thru a hetero relationship kills me, but also because it just makes the most sense ~thematically~ lol

this moment was built up since like 40 chapters earlier when Skull Knight warned Guts that he’d have to make a choice not to pursue Griffith. Frankly I think it’s nearly comedic how hard the narrative railroaded Guts into making this choice, ie by showing that Guts choosing Griffith over getting on a boat would’ve been effectively suicide lol, and even then he still needed someone to remind him not to be an idiot – but the fact remains that this significant step on the road to moving on from Griffith was enabled by Serpico leaping in to save Guts from Zodd, a situation with a pretty significant precedent we all remember and love.

and like tbqh it’s criminal that guts and serpico’s interactions when they’re not trying to kill each other are almost always super bland bc out of the current group serpico has the greatest potential to have an interesting and intense relationship with guts imho and like, idk miura kind of tells us this a few times but never shows it.