i am so sleepy + i have no idea what i’m really going for here but like

i think trees and branches are like, symbols of connection or reaching for connection or smthn like that. or like, at least when they’re white

“since when was it that despite her bent shape lady farnese came to have feelings for me beyond those of a mistress for her servant?“

ok those branches aren’t white but i just like the similar phrasing lol

like i just glanced at a couple pages of serpico’s backstory and was like, woah that’s a lot of branch imagery lol. and there’s obviously the whole creation of the world tree, ganeshka’s loneliness breakdown, etc.

i am putting a pin in this for if i think of more significant seeming tree imagery. or yk pending how the whole fantasia arc goes. world tree fast travel system branches, casca having a breakdown beside danann’s cherry tree, yadda yadda yadda.

i mean it just seems to fit this whole idea i got where like half the fantasy content of berserk works as a metaphor for interpersonal relationships and all that jazz.

and ok one more thing about this part

this is actually pretty damn non-wholesome, to the extent that i’m kind of surprised none of the characters were like, ‘wait a second this oppressively cutesy place attacked us with a giant cage full of the trapped spirits of people they burned alive to power it’

like it just kind of happened completely without commentary or attention drawn to it, and lbr it’s berserk so it can get away with that

but also i’m happily filing it away as strong evidence that elfhelm is more than capable of being fucked up. like, magic drawing power from the lives of sacrificed people eh? where’ve we seen that before?

ch 355, more random musing

i s2g it’s like this chapter was especially designed to fuck me personally up and leave me fretting for however long until the next one comes out, it has no chill it’s either my personal worst or best case scenario and i have no way of knowing which. mb this is premature since we don’t even have a full translation yet, but still. i’m stressed lol

and seeing all the skullknight fans pretty much just assuming that there’s going to be an emotional chapter followed by guts and casca hugging it out has me torn between thinking that’s a good sign bc it means miura isn’t using the ominousness as a fake-out, since it seems your typical berserk fan doesn’t think anything too bad is going to happen – the ominiousness is just plain ominiousness and if things go truly wrong it will still take people by surprise and be dramatically effective. but also what if it’s a bad sign because they’re just better at predicting berserk than me and more on miura’s current wavelength? 😦

also i’m eyeing that last image of the tree and how it looks similar to the falconia branches and various hearts of darkness

i’ve got my eye on you skellig

also eyeing the feathers in casca’s dress design tbqh

also guts looking scary and intimidating in that spread of him in the berserk armour w/ the eclipse scene behind him is good, and the more i look at the last few pages, eclipse flashback + guts -> tortured griffith -> ominous looking tree the more i’m like, hmmmmmm

as soon as we get a translation i’m re-reading the entirety of the skellig stuff so far to see if i feel like it all fits together in some way

How big do you think the timeskip will be after Guts and the others leave Skellig? It’ll probably happen since time flows differently there, but it can’t be too big. Maybe just enough for Falconia to get even bigger or something. Rickert could start a resistance movement? What do you think?

Yeah ia a time skip seems really likely. If I had to guess I’d say maybe 10-15 years?

If it’s like, a century then Guts would come back to Griffith running an empire as an immortal god-king, all the characters we know like Rickert and Charlotte and Silat etc would probably be dead, and I think it would change the tone of the story too much. Like yeah it’s an epic story, but at its core it’s about relatable characters, and if you start kiling those characters off for no reason other than to add to the epic-ness then it throws the balance off.

I could maybe see 50ish years, making Rickert an old wise mentor like Godo lol, and maybe aging Sonia so that she reminds Schierke of Flora? Could be interesting. But overall I’d probably prefer less time, that still seems like too much.

10-15 years gives Griffith some time to start acquiring his Gaiseric-esque empire, it’s enough time for the new fantasy reality of the world to change how things work and function, it’s enough time to Rickert to grow up and do whatever he’s doing up in the mountains with Silat and co (resistance movement sounds good tbh), enough time to make everyone sad (like say if Farnese’s parents died in the interim or something, or Isidro had a family waiting but not anymore), but it’s not so much time that the world Guts returns to is unrecognizable and without familiar touchstones.

Also just to be self indulgent for a sec, several decades is too long for NeoGriff to be chill and serene and doing his thing without Guts despite his unfrozen heart imo. It makes the whole beating heart that he blames on the fetus thing seem irrelevant if he can easily function for that long regardless. But a decade or so sounds like a perfect range of time for NGriff to start out serene, throwing himself into his empire etc and pretending he doesn’t care at all about Guts, only for the cracks to begin showing just as Guts is set to return.

Of course if he is able to put Guts out of his mind for 50 years until he’s standing in front of him, unaged, and then he has an emotional response, I’d still be okay with that. It’s just a little less fun to me.