Anon who sent me the Griffith-hate ask, I accidentally deleted your second message while trying to delete a different one lol, sorry about that. Once again I hope you see this and sorry about the lack of notif again.
But basically what I wanted to say is that yeah sure that “warming a man is a woman’s duty” bit is misogynist (and I think you mentioned the Promrose Hall speech too? as another example the person you’re hatereading gave?), but yk, so is Judeau’s “she’s our woman and we want her back” statement while rescuing Casca, so is 90% of everything Guts says to her ever, and so is 90% of the narrative voice honestly.
Idk man this is another instance where I’d say if they’re going to judge other fans for liking something w/ offensive elements, they should probably just put down Berserk and find something else to enjoy.
not to mention how that particular statement coming from griffith smells suspiciously of like heteronormativity and intense repression moreso than i think it says anything about how griffith sees women
how griffith sees women is clear from the fact that he didn’t rescue casca, he gave her a sword to rescue herself, and then let her join his band of mercenaries. imo anyway
ia.
yk i was going to say something like, “in fairness I wouldn’t use it as an argument against ppl saying that line makes Griffith misogynist bc that’s giving Miura way too much credit” but lol I’m actually torn because it’s so easy to ascribe that line to repression, especially because, like you say, it contradicts what we’re later shown and told about what Griffith thinks women are capable of, and it’s at odds with his general existence in the GA narrative as the progressive dude who scares the conservatives lol.
So either it’s a deliberate contrast to show that Griffith has a particular blind spot when it comes to physical intimacy between people, which also fits in nicely with the fact that he has trauma related to same sex desire and Casca lays all that out at the same time she tells Guts that she admires Griffith because he threw her a sword and gave her a blanket and generally treated her with respect, and expresses her jealousy of Guts because of Griffith’s feelings for him. Like, basically Casca’s flashback ties everything together in a neat little repression bow.
OR it’s a mildly ooc moment because Miura needed some kind of plot contrivance to give Casca a reason to hate Guts and potentially to get her naked in bed with him for the sake of future sex, if he was thinking along those lines this early.
I still wouldn’t use it to try to shut someone down in an argument I guess lol, but I mean, I would say “okay fair enough but here’s how I take that line and why” and consider that a fairly strong interpretation.
there’s something to be said about how this turns into a “men vs women” type of conversation where griffith takes men’s side with his bullshit dream spiel and pretends like it’s this profound thing women will never understand
and by that i mean that it comes off as trying too hard, the same way him talking about what a ‘friend’ is to him comes off as trying too hard. before i was a little hesitant to believe that griffith feels forced into masculine roles rather than choosing to take them bc it’s the fastest way to achieving what he’s trying to achieve, but after re-examining this scene i think i feel a little differently about that
#other ppl’s meta #totally it’s posturing – more for himself than charlotte too #the image that goes with the dream which is (how does this always fit so perfectly) an attempt at a heteronormative masculine ideal #the men are like this stuff fits that so well as does charlotte suggesting ‘family or a sweetheart’ which ofc sums up what griffith #is torn between (‘family’ if you don’t want to be saccharine and include the rest of the hawks he sacrifices) and what guts ends up #abandoning for /his/ dream
@bthump what you said here, “more for himself than charlotte,” that’s exactly what i mean, somehow it didn’t register to me, until today, that the part of this where he puts up a masculine facade is ALSO for himself, and not just for charlotte. you know, when i think @yesgabsstuff and i talked about how griffith would be more feminine without all this bullshit weighing on him, i said i didn’t think his choice to present and act more masculine was one he made out of fear. and i still think that, to an extent, but there’s no denying that he felt forced into that masculine role bc …………… it’s so tightly woven together with his dream. and since it’s something he has to do for the sake of his dream, then fear also has to be involved, even if in a sort of roundabout way. that is to say, i don’t think griffith is afraid of like, getting punched or called a faggot if he wears a dress or w/e. but i think there’s no denying that he is afraid of letting this image falter, and that’s what this is really about
I feel this tbh, like imo Griffith wouldn’t really have a visceral fear for his physical safety, he’s been the best w/ a sword since he was like 10 from all appearances lol, and honestly I feel like as a peasant mercenary with the force of personality he has he would in theory be able to get away with some gnc presentation and attraction to men if all he wanted was to fight and make money. Same way Casca could lead the Hawks even though she’s a woman in the world of Berserk lol.
but his fear of failure is a major aspect – he needs the correct image while climbing higher in society, to achieve his dream.
and also i think he needs the dream to justify hiding behind the image, which is partly what i get out of that speech to charlotte. it reads to me like he’s justifying his dream to himself as worthwhile in and of itself, in a contrast to how he justifies it to himself in the river w/ casca a few chapters later, as something he owes the dead.
idk it all goes into how his dream is a defense mechanism from his self loathing and a way to justify his existence, but he doesn’t think of it that way 99% of the time, he has to see it as inherently worthwhile to avoid acknowledging the actual reason (self-loathing) he’s pursuing it.
and some of that self loathing is guilt, some is a belief of his inherent worthlessness, but some is also connected to his sexuality, both in his traumatic experience with Gennon after which he called himself dirty, and his love for Guts, which is especially shown through how Guts is pitted against his dream and how Guts “made him weak” and his feelings for him led to him losing everything. Griffith’s feelings for Guts are connected to his belief of his inherent worthlessness, because they exist in opposition to his dream. (this is thematic moreso than literal)
So part of his reason for pursing the dream is to bury those parts of himself – like it goes both ways, basically, imo. He has to be a heteronormative masculine ideal for the sake of the dream, but he obsesses over the dream partly as a way to bury the parts of himself that aren’t that ideal?
um i feel like this doesn’t really make sense lol sorry. it’s hard to explain how my brain makes connections sometimes.
i actually kinda like how unconcerned griffith is. he’s just like, welp what can you do casca, naked man + naked woman = acceptable, naked man + naked man = bad, that’s just the natural way of things and I got way too much internalized homophobia to fight it. (“warming a man is a woman’s duty, he said.”)
lol i seriously cannot read griffith’s narrative as anything but dream/heteronormativity vs guts/living ur gay truth.
like i’ve seen this scene described as just tone-setting casual ye olde sexism, but it feels too significant for that. it just fits their whole messed up love triangle dynamic so perfectly, it’s like, an ideal establishing action that just sums it all up.
lol this just sums up the guts-griffith-casca love triangle so perfectly.
Like… it sets up both the way Guts and Griffith use Casca as an intermediary for physical (and emotional) intimacy with each other, making her life a living hell, and the way Casca’s whole existence revolves around her gender in contrast to the men surrounding her, and ties those two things together.
Plus, with Guts’ nightmare and subsequent relief that it’s a woman rather than a man with him, it adds trauma to the mix. It ties everything together.
And man it is thematically neat as fuck.
Like what I’m saying is that if you choose to believe this is purposeful, then what the Golden Age is about is two dudes who are both attracted to each other and can’t act on it thanks to internalized (trauma)*** and externalized (heteronormativity) homophobia, and this fucks up both the dudes in question, and the woman/en (? Charlotte isn’t shown to suffer from this, but I imagine being in a one-sided relationship will eventually take its toll on her) they end up turning to instead out of that internalized and externalized obligation.
Casca’s story is almost entirely about dealing with misogyny, and this makes heteronormativity a part of that. It’s not just a woman’s duty to warm a man – another man can’t. Men can’t be physically intimate with each other, only with women, and more, they have to be physically intimate with women to attain like, an artificial sense of self-actualization – in Berserk, their dreams. And this harms both the men in their enforced isolation from each other and the women in their enforced intimacy with men.
Like, Guts even references Casca warming him here after they have sex, again, tying physical intimacy with her to his trauma.
And while Charlotte is Griffith’s means to achieving his dream, Casca is Guts’ – because attaining Casca’s affection, being “good” for her, means he’s more like Griffith, and closer to his goal of being Griffith’s equal.
I mean Guts leaving Griffith because they couldn’t share their feelings with each other, and Griffith sleeping with Charlotte as a means of denial (“take all those sad and frightening things and cast them into the fire”) and then Guts sleeping with Casca as a means of denial (”don’t think about those things. Right now all you need is to feel alive”) both lead directly to Griffith choosing to destroy his feelings so he can live solely for his dream. Draw your own conclusions about how this culminates in the most destructive display of heterosexuality in the story.
Once the nature of Guts’ dream switches from abandoning Griffith to pursuing him in rage things get murkier on Guts’ side, but this reading still works if you consider that Guts’ problem isn’t exactly his lingering, twisted feelings for Griffith, but his refusal to actually examine and untangle them, with revenge as just another distraction.
And to be perfectly crystal clear I’m not saying this is purposeful, or that even if it somehow is purposeful Miura doesn’t still go about it as offensively as possible. Like, by this reading internalized homophobia is essentially positioned as a result of evil gay pedophiles, to a much greater extent than any vague reference to societal norms. Both these dudes succumb to inner darknesses and assault a woman explicitly because of their feelings for the other dude. I’m not giving him a round of applause here lmao. It’s probably actually less offensive if it’s all accidental.
And lbr it’s probably a side-effect of writing a) a female character whose life revolves around misogyny, b) a homoerotic relationship between 2 dudes and c) a half-assed het subplot between one of those dudes and the aforementioned woman
But like still, it just fits together so freaking well. It’s ridiculous how neat this reading is during the Golden Age.
***to be clear i’m not saying internalized homophobia is always a result of trauma lol, I’m saying that’s how the story does it.
Yeah like, in canon they are surprisingly physical with each other. Or at least it surprises me on re-read how many of their significant relationship moments not just include but revolve around and specifically highlight physical touch.
Like from Griffith grabbing Guts’ face like he’s going to pull him into a kiss after defeating him in a physical fight to Griffith’s “if you touch me now…” moment of reality-breaking despair, touch is portrayed as a really significant component of their relationship.
Actually to get on my meta shit real quick, check out their first interactions. First Griffith shoving Casca at Guts, explicitly because she’s the only woman around and only a woman can cuddle naked with a dude (and damn if her first appearance doesn’t define her role in the story to a tee). Next, they duel with swords. Extensions of themselves, but not their actual physical bodies. Then they lose their swords and end up physically grappling with each other, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m wracking my brain and I’m pretty sure this is the only time we’ve ever seen either of them fight without weapons.
Which leads to this:
Their first meeting has the sense of an inevitable, physical pull between them imo, and that is a constant of their relationship.
And their mutual desire for physical contact can only be satisfied when they have the pretense of guys being dudes to fall back on lol. A fight, in this case. In other cases it’s saving each others’ lives, and supporting each other while injured mainly, and sometimes casual friendly touches, like Guts’ hand on Griffith’s shoulder which gains significance during Griffith’s torture chamber monologue.
When they don’t have that pretense available, when sex inevitably comes into the equation, that’s when Casca or Charlotte comes between them as outlets for those decidedly non platonic feelings, as The Designated Socially (and psychologically thanks to trauma) Acceptable Woman.
(I’d elaborate on that but like, I talk about Casca as an emotional and physical bridge between them a lot and have at least one giant thorough post about it. And Charlotte is just obvious. I figure we’re all on the same page here.)
Idk it’s not like they touch in every scene they’re in or anything, more that most of their intensely emotional and narratively significant scenes either involve touch in significant ways, or the very pointed absence of it (eg Guts reaching out towards Griffith as he transforms before pulling his hand away and turning to fight apostles. Or, yk, Griffith straight up thinking about Guts at the exact moment of penetration during the Charlotte sex scene, which I still can’t believe happened. Stuff like that lol).
So while I think them being physically drawn to each other and wanting to touch is v in character, and I can easily imagine them brushing shoulders, casually grabbing arms or w/e to get the others’ attention, back and shoulder pats, arm wrestling, play fighting, etc etc, and I think there’s plenty of indication that they probably find excuses to touch a lot, more importantly I think the narrative is telling us that physical touch is a significant aspect of their expression of feelings for each other regardless of how often they might actually get touchy feely.
ANYWAY i’m realizing that i have like fifty million things to say on this topic so I’m going to write more posts later. For now I’ll get into the headcanony stuff.
So basically I think that they absolutely would get v awkward and kind of shy about touch after acknowledging that their feelings are sexual. Suddenly they realize why they want to touch each other so much, they both have hangups about it even assuming they navigate the whole sexuality issue smoothly, and it would probably take a little while to adjust even if everything goes perfectly.
But I don’t think it would take very long, because the facts are that they really like being in physical contact with each other, and even if they got awkward for a while and second guessed things like shoulder pats or w/e a lot lol, they are ultimately used to touching and it’s pretty natural to them. It’s how they express their emotional closeness, and it would become even moreso once they accepted the sexual aspect of their feelings.
If this is in the canon universe I could see trying to keep their hands off each other being more of a problem lol. I feel like if they did get together, just about everyone would figure it out pretty quickly. They are absolutely the couple who sits in each others’ laps, leans against each other, casually wraps their arms around each other, etc, and it would be hard for them to refrain in general day to day interactions i m h o.
Also they’d be adorable as fuck.
Tho also for the sake of angst I could see things going much less than smoothly wrt the sexuality angle, particularly with Guts, and if one of them realized their feelings aren’t platonic first I could definitely see him physically withdrawing and specifically avoiding contact, whether it’s Guts or Griffith, though maybe especially if it’s Guts, and subtly making the other feel kind of neglected/rejected. But they’d get through that eventually.
I think Griffith is gay, even though I feel like he doesn’t know it(maybe after a while he came to realize it, especially after Guts left him) as for Guts his sexuality is a mystery to me. I know he definitely likes men(even though he probably definitely doesnt understand that or acknowledge it) attraction to women is debatable.
The way I see it we
cant really pinpoint what Guts’ sexuality is or his thoughts on women.
Griffith was the first to give Guts something that he never had and I
feel like his affection for Griffith is dominantly based on this. No one
else in the manga, both men and women, have yet to give Guts what
Griffith gave him thus why no one has yet to win over his affections.
ia tbh
for me I think Griffith is variable, like i could see him being either super repressed about being gay thanks to a) his dream revolving around marrying a woman and b) gennon being the only textually gay dude in berserk (thx miura) and griffith being taken advantage of at probably the age where he’d be just starting to realize he had feelings of attraction to men, like, that seems extremely likely to fuck him up.
But I could also see him accepting that he’s attracted to men – I mean he reads a lot, he seems fairly worldly, maybe gennon isn’t his only exposure to same-sex attraction, etc – but also not thinking it’s important because it’s incompatible with his dream.
Either way though I definitely can’t see him as anything but gay.
Wrt Guts I see him as gay too. He could be bi easily enough, but it’s just so easy for me to see his short-lived relationship with Casca as repression at work lol. Like saying she was the only person who could touch him back in the day, which was textually because she’s a woman (and also wrong bc Griffith also could) feels really suggestive of this to me. And of course the way their relationship screams rebound from their feelings for Griffith for both of them. And post eclipse, the only times he thinks of Casca sexually are when Griffith is also somehow involved, a la
And of course the entire Beast of Darkness debacle.
But yeah sexualities aside, since I mean it still could go either way from gay to bi, so w/e, that’s a really good point about Griffith being the only person in the manga who’s given Guts what he’s so desperately wanted – ie affection and attention and respect from someone Guts respects. It’s Griffith who he wants to look at him. Not Casca, not any of his rpg group or any of the other Hawks, just Griffith. It’s Griffith whose respect he feels like he needs to earn, no one else’s. It’s Griffith who he needs to feel equal to, no one else. It’s Griffith who he’s been obsessed with, no one else.
It’s why their relationship is still so extra lol, it’s shown as singular in the story, whether Miura meant that to be sexual or not.
So yeah idk, good comment basically, I just wanted to ramble on the subject lol.
Hmm, like if the toy soldier was a symbol of the boy’s dream, the magnetic knight that goes with the female figure is a symbol of Griffith’s, and leaving it with Charlotte is symbolic of the immediate loss of his dream?
Bc I could definitely see it. I actually rly like the idea of that pendant being a symbol of Griffith’s dream bc it’s another way it’s intrinsically tied to heterosexuality in opposition to his feelings for Guts, a theme I both enjoy and am depressed by.
Plus it’s fitting since after he leaves the pendant with Charlotte and gets caught he’s able to acknowledge his feelings for Guts.
this is under a cut because it’s long, rambly, and stupid, and doesn’t even answer the question.
lol this honestly just defeats me entirely. idk man idk, I spent forever writing out an explanation for why the subject of toxic masculinity in Berserk defeats me, ie largely due to Miura’s total incoherence when it comes to misogyny, yk, the fact that’s he’s a huge misogynist himself really muddies the waters when it comes to sussing out where his misogyny ends and the characters’ misogyny begins.
Like how can I analyze toxic masculinity in Berserk when Miura frames, eg, the protagonist grabbing a woman’s tit during an argument as a cute moment? It’s absolutely possible to write useful and interesting things on the subject (shoutout to @yesgabsstuff who often has good thoughts on it), so I’m totally not saying that you’re wrong about it being important to Guts and Griffith’s characters/relationship, but the way I approach meta, from a ‘here’s what the narrative has to say on this using things like symbolism and parallels etc’ perspective, just doesn’t feel compatible, and frankly I suck at looking at stories from any other perspective lol.
But then I was like, but why can’t I write about gender roles in Berserk when I won’t shut up about things like sexual repression, which surely can’t actually be a more coherent subject?
It’s like, sexuality and Berserk? Hell yeah I got things to say. Gender and Berserk? my brain melts. idk idk idk. Maybe it’s because Miura thinks he has things to say about misogyny and gender but sucks at it, whereas the sexuality stuff could conceivably be accidental lol, and in any case is more subtle and therefore has fewer chances to be self-contradictory. And, less cynically, I’m sure there’s a cultural gap too that affects my ability to suss out what Miura is going for wrt masculinity/gender roles/etc.
And like, I feel I could almost answer this re: heteronormativity specifically, but honestly that also has a significant gendered component that I don’t feel up to tackling. Griffith as a knight in shining armour to attract Princess Charlotte and become an idealized heterosexual couple as he represses his feelings for Guts? Ok. But then when it comes to gender roles/masculinity and Griffith’s attraction to Guts I fall apart again. Is there a sense that Griffith’s attraction to Guts is partially something to shy away from because it makes him less of a masculine ideal? IDK! How does Griffith sleeping with Gennon for the sake of his heteronormative dream fit in? IDK! Does Guts shy away from his attraction to Griffith due in part to insecurity in his own masculinity? IDK! Is insecurity in his masculinity a deliberate aspect of his trauma? IDK!
I feel like his trauma absolutely informs how he leaps into danger at any given opportunity and stands against every monster he sees, which is very typically masculine, like, mb I’ve got the seed of something there (Casca wishing he’d run away sometimes? His choice to stay with Griffith in chapter 71 as turning away from fighting his own battles to regain a relationship and a sense of emotional openness that helped him heal from trauma in a much healthier way, but tragically undone by Casca urging him towards his own masculine ideal? that masculine ideal in both guts and griffith’s cases leading to an unleashed rapey dark side, and in both cases as a tragic alternative to a fulfilling relationship with each other? hmmmm) but I’m not confident in my ability to carry that thread through with an emphasis on gender roles/masculinity.
But I mean, maybe I’m just overcomplicating it lol, it’s not like everything has to fit perfectly in order to be worthwhile as a reading, and I’m not exactly married to authorial intent. Idk I’ll probably end up pondering this further and if I come up with anything I’ll definitely write it out, but as for now this is going to have to go pretty much unanswered.
tl;dr I got nothin atm, sorry anon, and idek if anything I wrote here makes sense lol.
Personally I think you should write your take on how toxic masculinity and heteronormativity affects the
characters and their relationship and @ me or link me, because I’m
interested in seeing what you have to say.
And anyone else with Thoughts on the subject should feel free and encouraged to leap in too.
So I think that he is trying to push those two together because he is
projecting his feelings on Casca. He wants to get them together because
he can’t insert himself in that situation. Casca is possibly a stand-in
for himself without him realizing it. That’s why he wouldn’t feel
jealous too imo. What do you think and what’s your take?
My probably-gayer-than-Miura-intended take is basically the same as yours, with the addition of Guts thinking that Casca is worthier of Griffith than he is.
From his silent and sullen reaction shots to Casca talking about him in the cave that definitely strike me as identifying with Casca’s feelings
to Casca directly telling him she’s jealous of him
to Guts feeling like all he’s good for is swinging his sword while insisting Casca has to live for something more important
to
this all seems like set-up for Guts throwing Casca at Griffith. He starts doing it after he decides to leave like he’s setting Casca up to take the place she wants, his place, at Griffith’s side, but Casca gets the addition of romance that Guts can’t begin to envision for himself thanks to repression and heteronormativity.
Also, good point about the bit where they’re both looking at him from a distance and Guts decides to take Casca down to bridge that gap for her, while he plans to leave. ia that seems like another moment of identification.
Idk basically yeah I totally agree, I think Guts is hardcore projecting, and the fact that the way he sets Casca up to take his place as Griffith’s confidante and “sword” involves shoving her into his arms, telling her to ask him to dance, telling Griffith she’s quite a sight in her dress, etc, is pretty telling.
Idk if it’s purposeful on Miura’s part, but it’s a really solid reading imo.
Oh yeah I see what you mean. And you could probably argue that Guts is doing the same thing with Casca right now too, idealizing the concept of her as healed and exactly the way she was before as a Hawk commander.
Also yeah while I’d say Utena was mostly about examining misogyny and patriarchy, I think you could apply a lot of the same conceptual stuff to homophobia and heteronormativity. Like ngl I only watched Utena for the first time fairly recently and I know this would be p much blasphemy to a lot of fans lol, but afterwards I immediately wanted to compare Griffith’s castle dream to the floating upside-down castle. I mean Griffith’s dream is kind of intwined with an ideal heteronormative relationship with Charlotte, noble storybook knight and princess, which is at odds with his genuine love for Guts, except he ends up choosing the dream.
I tend to err on the side of thinking that it’s not purposeful on Miura’s part, and being able to read Griffith’s narrative as about internalized homophobia and heternormativity is just a side effect of him being emotionally repressed, in love with Guts, and needing to marry a princess, but it’s still fun to think about, and imo it’s really not much of a stretch.
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.
Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how compulsory heterosexuality is the True Villain of Berserk, but then I was like, shit this actually works surprisingly well and is kind of depressing. So now I’m doing it more seriously. This isn’t meant to be some grand unifying theory of Berserk lol, it’s not even close to airtight or anything, the story just happens to lend itself weirdly well to this particular reading.
So here’s how Griffith’s narrative works as an almost certainly accidental, yet imo somewhat relatable, metaphor for being closeted and repressed:
I always thought that it’s interesting that he seems to be on the precipice between childhood and adolescence (10/11) when he revived the Egg of the King in the first place. Like you said, this is hardly a perfect metaphor but that would be around the time where he might start to notice that a) he had some kind of feelings for men b) be old enough to understand that they are not compatible with his goals/not accepted by the culture he lives it.
The situation for Guts, for example, is absolutely complicated by his experience as a CSA survivor in that I’m not sure he has a way to think of these kinds of things outside of acts of violence. The kind of implicit homophobia of this culture does nothing to dissuade him from this. Griffith has at least grown up in a similar environment and am;has probably “seen some shit”; if not suffered in a similar way by the time he has the Behelit, as well as his later experience with Gennon. What better pressure cooker to make someone utterly terrified of themselves and be willing to go to extreme lengths to repress those feelings?
I feel like there’s a really interesting character analysis waiting to happen w/ both Guts and Griffith and their relationships to same-sex desire (especially taking the official translation as a source, not one of the scanlations where Guts throws around homophobic slurs every other page. Which I mention bc those scanlations seem to be the reason a lot of Berserk fans think Guts is canonically a giant homophobe lmao).
It could be way more rooted in the actual text and authorial intention than this was bc the fact is that both Guts and Griff had non-consensual same-sex experiences at young ages that explicitly took a severe emotional toll on them, neither of them read as straight as far as I’m concerned, and you cannot tell me that it’s an accident that both of them were raped by men, they’re introduced to each other through Guts directly asking Griffith if he’s gay and wants to fuck him, and then the rest of the story is about their incredibly homoerotic relationship and how emotional repression ruins everything.
So anyway yeah you have some good points worth expanding on imo.
All of this was pretty damn excellent.
Thankyou for writing this.
I think the reading with being closeted is awfully fitting and tbh I feel that even if at age 20, Kentaro Miura wasn’t aware he was writing very gay-coded characters, after every single interviewer asked him about it and in the year 2017, he cannot still be unaware. And he’s made absolutely no tonal changes to accommodate for the fact? ( I think. Honestly i’ve been a little bummed out by the lack of griffguts feels in the most recent, post style- change chapters).
That’s just supposition though. Like I do feel that some of the inherent sexism has greatly improved over the years. And most of those issues which saw in Casca’s treatment have become slightly better with the newer characters. Just like giving credit where credit is due.
I mean it would be a greeeeat stretch to expect the same from the inherent homophobia. Like I don’t expect i AT ALL. But I think there may be at least some awareness about it.
But inspite of this the reading really makes sense.
Also you know -from how nightmarish that brief domestic dream felt, despite it seeming so superficially pleasant and ‘normal’. There was this deafening sense of -This in not you. This is not her. This is uncomfortable.
And actually for the longest time, I’d read a lot of theories about how the way Griffith saw Casca in his dream showed that he’d actually always viewed her as this hetero-normative, submissive, potential wife figure. But I don’t think so. I think the entire sequence was about how wrong it all felt. Inclusive of Casca.
It wasn’t a dream at all. I think it was always supposed to be a nightmare, his final attempt to revert from accepting his reality a la his undeniable love for Guts with what should have been the heteronormative ideal, and the knowledge that this wasn’t his reality which forced him back into a space where he had no option but acceptance.
And then being faced with the consequences he has had to face for that reality. His body, the broken arm.
And like there’s also the added fact that immediately post this realisation he attempts to commit suicide. which is sadly a pretty common consequence.
Oh nooo man I kind of glossed over a lot of stuff so that post is a bit disjointed and one of the things I glossed over was how the domestic nightmare vision actually fits into the whole narrative I plucked out beyond being disturbing and feeling relevant, but the way you have it framed here, as Griffith trying to deny his feelings for Guts and insinuate himself into the heternormative ideal (again: “this peace and quiet… isn’t so bad”), failing, and then trying to kill himself… ouch. That’s painful, but it works.
Especially with the fact that his godhand-summoning despair is brought on by Guts’ touch soon after.
also there’s at least one GriffGuts moment in recent chapters that I dug, even though it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, which was that while Farnese and Schierke are checking out Casca’s memory of the cave with Guts Farnese says straight up that she senses “jealousy…?” I mean sure we already knew that but it’s nice to reiterate it.
Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how heterosexuality is the True Villain of Berserk, but then I was like, shit this actually works surprisingly well and is kind of depressing. So now I’m doing it more seriously. This isn’t meant to be some grand unifying theory of Berserk lol, it’s not even close to airtight or anything, the story just happens to lend itself weirdly well to this particular reading.
So here’s how Griffith’s narrative works as an almost certainly accidental, yet imo somewhat relatable, metaphor for being closeted and repressed:
The only way for him to realize his dream is to marry the princess. War, battles, glory, promotions, even the Eclipse, those are all stepping stones that enable him to one day marry Charlotte. Marriage is the only door to his dream. Even when he becomes saviour of the world, he’s still gotta marry a woman to make it official.
Griffith’s all-encompassing, all-important dream is embodied by heterosexual marriage.
Set up in perfect opposition to that dream, the only one who makes him forget about it, and the one he has to sacrifice to attain his dream, is Guts, the man he’s in love with.
So it should be pretty apparent how that central conflict lends itself to a closeted gay man torn between obligation and desire kinda reading, right?
The details don’t do much to counter it either. It’s Charlotte’s presence that creates the rift between Guts and Griffith – she’s there, refocusing Griffith’s attention from Guts to his heteronormative goal during their significant, romanticized staircase conversation when Guts asked why Griffith would risk his life for him and Griffith failed to give him a reason. And she’s the one Griffith directs the speech to, inadvertantly convincing Guts that he doesn’t care about him and making Guts decide to leave.
The dream is also defined by emotional repression. To achieve it Griffith has to project a perfect image of himself to everyone – the nobles, Charlotte, the hawks, everyone. When Casca catches him in a moment of vulnerability and watches him injure himself in a river he snaps out of it, represses, and acts like nothing happened afterwards. Guts is the only person he willingly allows to see him less than perfect – when he’s conducting assassinations, for instance. He opens up to him in emotional vulnerability when he asks “do you think I’m cruel?” In that moment, Guts suggests that Griffith’s emotional expression of vulnerability is incompatible with achieving his dream – “Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?”
Guts is able to walk away and abandon Griffith because Griffith can’t tell him how he feels, he can’t tell Guts why he risked his life for him and he can’t tell him that he wants him to stay. Casca even points out that they should stop and talk things out, and we the reader know that their rift is based entirely on a misunderstanding that could be cleared up so talking things through would actually achieve something – but she’s dismissed, and they duel instead.
So a dichotemy is set up between the dream/Charlotte/heteronormativity, and emotional repression vs Guts the man Griffith loves, and expressing his feelings for him.
The tragedy of Berserk is that repression wins.
Guts leaves because Griffith can’t express how he feels. Griffith has sex with Charlotte in an attempt to seize his dream, having lost Guts, (of course this act of striving for his dream is represented by heterosexual sex) and ends up trapped in a dungeon. There he both finally admits to himself that Guts is more important to him than his dream and fittingly loses the ability to communicate at all. He’s also, to top it off, locked away behind a mask modeled after the helmet he wore while pursuing his dream. After losing Guts and having sex with Charlotte he’s not just choosing not to express his emotions, he’s forced to remain silent and hidden.
After he’s rescued the mask stays on and words remain unspoken. A lot of shit happens and eventually he has a breakdown. And interestingly, it’s not just the prospect of Guts leaving again that causes him to finally break from reality. It’s also the thought of Casca staying.
After overhearing Guts and Casca he envisions himself chasing his dream again (and isn’t it fitting that it’s described as playing? ie not real, a make-believe expression of himself), and then he sees himself – and here it gets really depressing – seemingly married to Casca. He’s still helpless and unable to communicate, as though he’s caged inside of himself. In his vision Casca wears a dress, has hung up her sword, and is raising a son with him, named after the man Griffith is in love with. Griffith is dressed up and attractive again. It’s terribly picturesque in a idealistic heternormative way. Casca leans down to kiss him and then spoonfeeds him, all the while he’s silent and motionless and seems lost as all he thinks to himself is that the peace and quiet isn’t so bad.
Tbh if you’re reading Griffith as a gay man this dream comes across as a nightmarish metaphor for being trapped in repression, trapped in a heterosexual marriage and societal expectations, his voice, body, and even his own mind lost. It’s disturbing.
And in the soup made by Casca is the behelit.
The thing is that the behelit isn’t the escape from that nightmarish vision it seems to be at first – it’s an embodiment of it. What happens when Griffith summons the Godhand, sacrifices the Band and most notably Guts, and becomes a demon?
His heart is frozen. He’s later reborn with the sole purpose of becoming a wholly emotionless, utterly perfect image of himself – the image he’d tried to project as a human: a perfect saviour, a perfect leader, and a perfect fiancee, straight out of a fairytale. One half of a perfect heterosexual couple, ruling a perfect kingdom.
Femto’s new body incorporates the mask he was forced to wear in the torture chamber. The transformation doesn’t fix the problem caused by his broken body or his lost tongue, it doesn’t return his ability to express his feelings to him, it rips them out from the source – it destroys his emotions so he has nothing left to express. “This peace and quiet… isn’t so bad.”
When Griffith chose to sacrifice Guts he didn’t choose freedom or personal empowerment – he chose to remain a voiceless, tortured man in a locked cell, he just removed his ability to feel pain or long for more.
(Or tried to at least. Time will tell how his newly bthumping heart figures into everything.)
Disclaimer: I don’t think this works as like… a great, sensitive and thoughtful depiction of the effects of internalized homophobia on a gay man lol. Berserk is offensive and homophobic af and choosing to read it like this doesn’t fix that problem at all. I just kind of dodged some of the worse stuff but yk, there’s no way around the fact that griffith/femto/ngriff is a gay-coded antagonist and most of his villainy revolves around that coding.
Also I’m mostly closeted myself so there’s definitely some projection going on here. That’s partially the point of this. I don’t relate fully to this narrative but some aspects of what I wrote do hit home, and hopefully that comes across and this doesn’t feel exploitative.
you're the only one 