I want to take a minute to explain my take on the Hound.

Basically he’s Guts’ equivalent to Griffith’s Femto, ie, the ~dark side~ of Guts, made out of swirling negative emotions like rage and fear and hatred etc. It’s likely due to the reality-warping brand on his neck that the Hound is given more form and will than most people’s dark sides, becoming more of a presence to Guts.

We know the Hound isn’t an external evil spirit trying to manipulate Guts or possess him because we see it in Godo’s spirit-repelling cave where Guts is guaranteed to be safe from mean external forces like ghosts.

Like, the nature of the Hound is basically spelled out in its first physical appearance:

This establishes that the Hound is a manifestation of Guts’ “malice” (among other negative emotions, like the fear Guts mentions). Godo says to Guts – “you ran away so that your own malice could burn within you.” That’s the dark flame Guts is referencing up there, which is essentially the Hound.

This also establishes that the Hound is real – it’s not just a metaphor for the audience’s sake, it’s a physical presence that Guts senses. It’s a part of Guts given ghostly form. When he argues with it he’s arguing with himself.

It’s explicitly compared to Femto a few chapters earlier, when the concept is shown to us, before it explicitly appears as an entity.

What Skull Knight means by “or else…” becomes clear on the following page where he finds Rosine’s behelit.

Reminding the audience that there are ways for men to become beasts.

We cut to Guts walking through a forest being taunted by all those asshole spirits, digging into his deep insecurities, locating sites of his self-loathing and using it to fuck with his mind.

They’re essentially voicing his thoughts for him.

Pointing out his inner darkness, similarly to how the spirit that possessed Farnese pointed out that she gets off on torture. They’re not making shit up here, what they say digs deep and fucks with people’s heads because it’s based on truth.

Here they explicitly compare the Hound to Femto.

And finally Guts’ response after they take off:

He’s completely right, and as we can figure out from the ominous shot of the behelit and the fact that this is Guts reaffirming his stupid self destructive revenge crusade, this isn’t the greatest attitude.

He is what he is, and the more he pursues revenge and soaks himself in blood etc the stronger the Hound part of him gets.

And just in case more evidence that the Hound is a part of Guts and not an external force is needed, there’s this:

“This… is my…”

After the armour transforms into the shape of the Hound, rather than Skull Knight’s Skull Knight:

Guts’ armour is Guts getting the power of his dark side that apostles get, without having to sacrifice a loved one first. If he became an apostle his monstrous form would look a lot like the Hound. If Griffith was in Guts’ place, his armour would look a lot like Femto.

Anyway yeah in short the Hound = Guts.

i was gonna post something that’s like, “anyone who thinks guts killing griffith and riding off into the sunset would be a happy ending needs to re-read chapter 4, because Berserk’s got something to say about the nature of revenge and it’s not subtle”

but in fairness one thing i actually really like and appreciate about berserk is that it’s not 100% anti revenge. i tend to hate narratives that are just like, revenge is bad, the end. i’m a fan of revenge lol.

guts killing donovan is not condemned. neither is griffith perfunctorily killing gennon after he’s already been defeated, neither is julius getting assassinated after trying to kill griffith (adonis is a different can of worms). even setting the queen on fire is depicted as badass and awesome, not overly fucked up. things start to get a little dicey when we get to guts slicing out a dude’s tongue before killing him, eg, and we get to see the horrified expressions of onlookers, but it’s not really condemned either – it’s dark, a little fucked up, but understandable, and the audience is probably meant to be torn between going ‘shit, dude’ and cheering him on.

what IS condemned is “living for revenge” or obsessing over the past to the detriment of your future. Guts’ revenge quest is condemned not because killing bad people who deliberately hurt you is Wrong, but because it’s actively fucking him up psychologically, harming his current salvageable relationships, preventing him from healing his own emotional wounds, forcing him to bury his vulnerabilities under a shell of darkness (the hound), and is basically a glorified years-long act of self harm.

and idk i appreciate the nuance. it’s like the best of both worlds – guts stalking around seeking revenge against griffith/femto is bad bc of the circumstances of what he’s doing and what he has to become to do it, so the final epic confrontation between them will probably be a lot more complex than guts killing him and riding off into the sunset. which is great. but it’s also great that in this story guts can kill his rapist by shooting him in the back and stabbing him through the mouth and the main reaction the audience is meant to have is “good for him.”

(incidentally this makes me wonder what the moral of the story would be if casca wakes up and ends up with the revenge torch passed to her. because i would really dislike it if she wanted revenge and got the same ‘living for revenge is bad’ message guts got, but at the same time all my good revenge examples are from the golden age and the moral of the revenge story has been pretty consistent since, so idk.)

tbh this probably didn’t help guts’ feelings of inadequacy when he overheard griffith’s speech an hour later

irony: two dudes think of themselves as monstrous and unworthy of the other; become monsters because of it

How do you think that guts’ new party would react if they knew he sexually assaulted casca?

I actually don’t know lol. It’s a tough question because I’m not sure how much Miura thinks we should condemn Guts for it – on one hand he’s getting consequences for his actions in the form of Casca hating him and I don’t think it’s likely that she’ll forgive and forget and everything will go swimmingly. On the other I think we’re supposed to feel like he should get a pat on the back for stopping, and we’re definitely not supposed to hate him for it, we’re probably more meant to empathize with him and his loss of control and his regret, and admire the steps he’s taken to protect her from himself by travelling with people, and his willpower in keeping the hound on a leash.

So I guess ideally I’d like their idealized and infatuated images of Guts to be shattered as they realize that he’s capable of some fucked up shit even without the armour. Farnese could get protective of Casca and take off with her and Serpico and whoever in the party wants to follow, quite possibly all of them, give or take Puck and Isidro. Because she’d definitely choose Casca over Guts and that would be nice to see.

But I think it’s more likely that some of them, like Farnese and Serpico, would maybe get a bit warier of him and he might lose some of his shine in Farnese’s eyes, but overall consider it a past mistake he’s overcome and atoned for, and just another signifier of how much of a struggle it is to be Guts akin to how they feel about how Guts + Berserker armour = trying to murder them all. Yk like it makes Serpico anxious but no one blames him for it even though it’s his own inability to control his rage that leads to the armour taking over without magical hand-holding to save everyone from him.

Idk that’s at my most cynical. Don’t get me wrong I love Guts and his narrative for the most part, I just think aspects of it and the magical fantasy metaphor of the Berserk armour, hound, etc aren’t handled as well as they could be lol.

Anyway it’d probably be something between those two extremes tbf.

mastermistressofdesire:

danz99:

ベルセルク

This is interesting though.
Since every major person in Guts life has at some point been ‘weak’ and in need of care which Guts has in reality always offered with enthusiasm.

Whether with Gambino, Shisu, Griffith or Casca

I seriously love this about Guts during the Black Swordsman and Conviction arcs, bc like, he is actually a natural caretaker and… yk offerer of comfort and help. It’s the very first act that defines him when he’s 3 years old and steps up to take Shizu’s hand. He genuinely has a pressing urge to help people in need, from overworked suicidal people to tortured ex bfs to parental figures to like, flowers.

And from the start Miura wasn’t trying to show a dude just letting his inner asshole shine through bc he’s had a bad time, he’s depicting a dude actively suppressing his own caring nature partly because anyone who gets close to him is probably going to die thanks to the brand, partly because it’s a distraction from his goal of revenge, and partly because he has some serious issues revolving around betrayal that got reawakened recently and he’s guarding his heart.

Like the second chapter when he decides whatever he’ll let this priest and this kid give him a ride and who gives a fuck what happens to them feels like a deliberate attempt on his part to Not Care About Them that totally fails.

And it’s why it’s so fitting that the very last thing he does in the Black Swordsman arc is instinctively save Theresia even after telling her to kill herself, and then cry about the fact that he just ruined this kid’s life and turned her into a proto-him.

Ooh actually to take that a step further, the hound is basically something he actively created himself, out of the darkest parts of his nature, as a form of self-protection. So it’s like, super fitting that it got transplanted into a living suit of armour.

Also speaking of Griffith and Casca and transformations

Once you get down to it using the behelit and becoming an apostle or godhand is in part a magical fantasy metaphor for dealing badly with trauma, right? Within the confines of the fantasy story Griffith’s dark side emerged heightened by the power of evil and turned into a demi god, his heart was frozen, and he became a monster, but metaphorically u can say he’s lashing out and repeating patterns of abuse.

Idk whether Miura would put that in the same words but yk, it’s pretty explicit that you become a monster as a reaction to profound suffering in Berserk (+fate and a magic talisman), and then you turn into a giant dick and it’s basically letting your dark side reign free bc life fucked you and you’re mad about it. It’s not the most kind or sensitive of metaphors lol, especially when it comes to victims like Rosine (and Griffith imo) rather than say a dude who was just mad bc his wife was sleeping around with heathens, but that’s a berserk for u.

Guts is also struggling with the same thing but his magical fantasy metaphor is the berserker armour making him lose control in a rage, so he’s more caught in between, struggling to better himself but occasionally falling into abusive and violent patterns. There’s also the hound, but since he got the armour they’ve basically merged into one metaphor.

Casca is the only one who didn’t get a magical fantasy metaphor, she just broke. Which is partially why I want the behelit to be hers – I dislike the woman being the only “pure” one who passively internalizes pain rather than lashing out, yk?

I feel like I had more of a point with this… idk. Let Casca go on a rampage too, basically.

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.

bersrrk:

bthump:

bersrrk:

I’ve been wondering Like is there people out there who like…don’t think of Griffith and femto as the same person you know like how some dipshits are like “oh no anakin didn’t slaughter the younglings that was darth Vader darth Vader killed anakin from a certain point of view actually” is there people who think Griffith didn’t rape casca and slaughter the entirety of the band of hawk?
That it was his fucking alter ego countess boochie flagrante

tbf unlike anakin griffith literally got an explicitly described evil injection (”a fissure in your heart will open into which evil will surge), a new body created out of the same negativity as the idea of evil, and was explicitly shown losing his capacity to feel as the Band died and he was transforming so like…

yeah i feel it’s pretty well-established canon that femto is different than griffith.

whether you’d say griffith’s dark side + extra evil + new name – ability to feel empathy and other positive emotions = technically a new person or not doesn’t really matter imo, he’s definitely shown to be magically transformed enough physically and mentally for me to be able to draw a pretty solid line between femto and griffith regardless.

I mean they don’t put it down to magic but anakin DOES actually change when he becomes a sith it’s actually shown through out the series that being apart of the dark side does change a person at least physically (I think anyway maybe that was just a theory I read..)

I know there’s a big difference between pre and post eclipse Griffith my main point here is that it was /still/ Griffith who did those things regardless of how much he changed unlike some ppl may say

I used darth Vader as a comparison mainly because I assumed it would be the most well known case

I can actually think of two characters who would probably make a better comparison for numerous reasons but since their from a series of Irish children’s novels I assumed no one would have any idea wtf I was talking about

if that’s the case than fair enough, i’ve only seen the prequels once. i guess he did get yellow eyes somehow come to think of it lol.

I mean I guess this makes this a case of semantics then? As far as I’m concerned once a character goes through a magical fantasy transformation that includes changing the way he thinks it just makes more sense for me to consider them basically different people. If that’s stated somewhere in the movies to be the case between Anakin and Darth Vader and I’ve just forgotten then I’d consider them different too.

to me saying that it was still Griffith who did those things despite changing is like saying Guts tried to slaughter his friends while wearing the berserker armour imo. Sure, it’s technically accurate, but does that mean I should hate Guts because a magical element let the part of him that wants to indiscriminately slaughter innocent people reign free? We’re shown and told in both instances that these magical fantasy processes change the way a character feels and thinks and reacts, the only difference is that Griffith was entirely subsumed by his magic evil alter ego while Guts keeps coming back bc he has a witch and a magic kid on his side. but both Femto and the Berserk armour are manifestations of a character’s dark-side augmented by magic and suppressing their light-side/humanity, so they seem pretty comparable to me.

So what do you mean when you say Griffith still did those things regardless of how much he changed? If you agree that he changed first then we’re pretty much on the same page as far as I can tell. But when that change involves an irreversible physical transformation including new name change and literal “rebirth” as he hatches from an egg, I can understand why lots of people frame that change as a new person.

Like at the core we’re talking about fantasy situations that are not applicable to real life so it really just boils down to what you make of them I guess.

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.