Like, this is a moment of Griffith’s inner darkness shining through. It’s perfect because it comes right after his long dream speech to Charlotte, as he’s learning that he’s achieved a particularly horrible step on the path to his dream. His dream just caused an innocent kid to be killed, and he’s smiling about it.
It’s a very strong way to equate dreams to darkness early on – and it’s great foreshadowing for Guts’ own descent too. This speech that ends with Griffith smiling over the death of a child – that causes that smile – is the very thing that inspires Guts to leave to pursue his own dream! Which ends up being the Black Swordsman arc.
Like compare Griffith’s evil smile to Black Swordsman Guts’ slasher smiles as he’s, yk, fighting “stronger and stronger opponents,” ie pursuing his own dream. Dreams are terrible all around for everyone and I love it.
This is also part of Griffith’s set up that’s very soon knocked down in a subversion of the reader’s expectations. Like I’ve talked about how Griffith’s narrative begins with an image and eventually peels that away to the truth – we start with Femto, then we get early larger-than-life knight in shining armour Griffith who would do anything for his dream, here w/ the assassination we get the darker aspects of that emphasized, and then only five chapters later we get our first full pull-back of the curtain style reveal of the real Griffith, in Casca’s flashback.
Compare Griffith smiling when a child dies on the path to his dream up there to:
and
It’s Griffith burying his guilt – getting much better at burying it through consistent practice lol – and demonstrating his willingness to do so in order to achieve his dream, which, ironically, he’s pursuing because of that guilt. It’s perfect.
I think I’ve phrased it before as like, after learning about Griffith’s dead child related guilt issues in Casca’s flashback shortly after, that smile when he finds out Adonis is dead can only mean one of two things:
either in the intervening years he’s changed so fundamentally that he no longer has those guilt issues, and therefore Casca’s flashback chapters are functionally meaningless and unnecessary to an almost comedic extent.
or it means he’s successfully buried his guilt so thoroughly in this moment as he’s pontificating to Charlotte about his dream that his reaction is pleased – he’s kind of like, becoming the mask, doing that good a job of convincing himself it’s all necessary for the sake of his dream.
And we see Griffith’s guilt issues crop up again in Tombstone of Flame
and again when Ubik’s convincing him to make the sacrifice, soooo we
know it’s not option one lol.
idk it’s a great example of the fucked up duality that comes from living in denial and eventually leads to choosing to become a monster because you already see yourself as one, basically, and it’s something I absolutely love about Griffith’s character.
Is it possible also that on one level he’s smiling specifically because Guts killed a child for him? Because he can take that as pretty strong evidence that Guts is loyal to him and more importantly won’t turn away from Griffith’s dark side or judge him for his darker actions? Like, on top of everything else that’s happening in his fluffy head in that moment.
Huh, interesting idea, I never thought of it that way before.
I’ve gotta give this a solid maybe, because I could see an argument either way. Like, I guess I don’t think it would be an intended reading on Miura’s part, mostly because of how completely sinister and creepy that smile is lol. Like I feel that if Miura wanted to convey a sense of Griffith being relieved in a way by Guts going the extra mile and killing a kid, his smile might seem more like… emotionally complex? Kind of tender?
I’m feeling a little deprived now because I’m imagining Griffith smiling in a more fond way rather than an evil villain way after hearing the news and I’m really loving that idea lol.
Anyway regardless of potential authorial intent, I really like this suggestion, in part because of how emotionally vulnerable and insecure he is in Tombstone of Flame, after another round of comparatively justified assassinations. I like the idea of Griffith maybe wanting to believe that Guts killing Adonis means he’s ride or die for him and won’t judge him for what he does to get to the throne, maybe letting that knowledge make him a little more secure in his relationship with Guts between Promrose and Tombstone, but still being terrified that it’s like, a really fucked-up example of Griffith dragging Guts down with him, and something that makes Guts want to run.
It adds another little layer to the rug being pulled out from under him when Guts does leave. Another action to add to his own self-loathing – it’s not that Guts killed a kid for Griffith, maybe indicating that they share a certain darkness, it’s that Griffith caused him to kill a kid, Griffith dragged him into the darkness, and Guts presumably hates him for it.
(Also there is something absolutely delightful about Guts hating himself after killing Adonis and seeing himself as a monster and unworthy of Griffith’s friendship, even as it makes Griffith feel more secure, more able to open up to Guts, and then later makes Griffith feel more like a monster dragging Guts down. Like, it fits right into the rest of their giant misunderstanding, and it’s the kind of fucked up scenario I live for.)
I think they don’t understand Griffith at all and probably willfully ignore a huge amount of his story.
A god complex is an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility.
I mean I’ve talked about my take on Griffith enough that I could collect it all into a book at this point lmao, but in essence no he is full of self loathing and guilt and exists by living in denial and trying to bury it.
He portrays an image of utter confidence and security, maintains it well enough that he buys his own con to an extent, but even that confident self-assured image isn’t god-complexy. His assessment of his own abilities is realistic. He knows he’s good, he has confidence in his abilities, but he also knows when he’s outclassed.
He doesn’t think by default he’s one of the people he believes are fated to change the world, he just hopes he is. He wants to see how far he can go, and not for the sake of being important, but in service to a greater goal which is fueled by disgust at the state of the world and his own sense of guilt.
He doesn’t have a falsely inflated perception of himself, if anything his self-image is much more negative than it should be.
You see any other mercenaries in Berserk who feel guilty for the enemy soldiers their underlings kill?
And like, eg, Griffith feels ashamed about assassinating people while Guts thinks he should be telling the rest of the Hawks all about it and has absolutely zero problem with burning a room full of nobles and royalty alive.
And as Casca lays out here
his confidence isn’t an ingrained personality trait, it’s something he manufactured and wears like armour, which is why sometimes it shatters and reveals the exact opposite – the guilt, the self-loathing, the insecurity – underneath.
Idk it seems like the same type of Berserk fan who calls Griffith a sociopath or a narcissist or a control freak or whatever. Like… no. That’s a wild misreading of his character, and honestly the story isn’t exactly subtle about his giant heap of issues that drive him so idk why so many people refuse to see it.
Like, re-read chapter 17 and this time look at the pictures of him self-harming too, bc that adds a little necessary context to statements like:
Like, this is so far from subtle that people just choose not to understand it lol.
(This isn’t directed at you anon, just yk, the fans you’re talking about.)
this isn’t a complete thought here but i wonder/hope that there’s some narrative irony happening or going to happen if anything? idk like of course the ceremony and events leading up to griffiths reincarnation as a perfect image of his dream and ideal self would try to hammer home cynicism of not needing others enough. guts kind of well with the campiness of the arc too ig. i hope this makes a little sense i haven’t read conviction in a long time.
Yeah no I get what you mean, ngl I was kind of thinking something similar while re-reading those chapters, like, everything Egg says about relationships sounds like it could come straight from a Griffith who has been burned lol. And it is the lead-up to the creation of Griffith’s perfect world, which Egg is advocating for here. So in that way it does maybe make sense to be extra cynical, reflecting back on Golden Age stuff through a whatever the opposite of rose coloured lens is.
like, maybe that’s Femto’s perception of that relationship lol.
I mean honestly this is exactly how I think Griffith thought of himself after the second duel/even tombstone of flame, word for word. And again, that’s something that could’ve changed so easily if Guts had just told him how he actually felt.
So I can’t accept it as an objective statement, but a subjective statement filtered thru bitterness + self-loathing? Kinda works.
Also yeah the extremely campy tone of this arc does kind of lend itself to more meta (in the self-referential sense, not the fandom essays sense) stuff like this imo.
My misgiving is that this seems like more thought than Miura put into it lol. But idk I should probably re-read the whole arc before I say something like that, like maybe there are indications that we’re not meant to take some of the Conviction arc themes as objective truth, and I just don’t remember/never noticed them.
Judeau’s clear agenda in the back half of the Golden Age is hilarious to me because it’s like Miura couldn’t get Guts and Casca to fuck naturally, so he had to make it a side character’s sole mission in life to arrange their hook up.
But actually to be less cynical, I think it works very well with the overall tone and thematic takeaway from the Golden Age. Why was Judeau meddling? Well, it’s strongly suggested that it’s because he was in love with Casca himself, but didn’t consider himself worthy of her. He thought Guts would be better for her, and that Casca would be better off traveling with Guts than leading the remnants of the Hawks, so he shoved Guts at her until they boned.
And look how that turned out.
Moral of the Golden Age: tell people how you feel instead of just assuming you’re not good enough for them.
And like, something I really love about Judeau’s character is that he seems to fill that character trope of friend who gives good advice and lays out some of the story’s themes and nudges the protagonist in the right direction for the plot. But like everyone else in Berserk he’s more layered than that – he has his own reasons for saying the things he does and directing Guts the way he does, and those reasons are kind of based in low self esteem. He’s another factor that helps bring everyone to the Eclipse.
Sometimes he does give good advice, but sometimes he gives genuinely bad advice, because he’s biased.
And I think there’s a potential parallel between Judeau trying to set Guts and Casca up, and Guts trying to set Casca and Griffith up before he leaves. Guts feels unworthy of Griffith because he doesn’t have a dream, but Casca does, so he shoves her at Griffith to get her to take his place as his sword, but yk with added romance because heteronormativity.
It’s not unbiased-dude-trying-to-be-a-good-bro-for-his-friends advice, Judeau’s own issues are a factor in him trying to get Guts and Casca together.
Judeau feels unworthy of Casca because idk he’s insecure about being a jack of all trades, master of none lol, so he considers Guts, who is the best at least next to Griffith, more worthy of Casca and tries to get them together.
And in his dying moments, he knows he fucked up. That he should’ve just said something.
And yk what, he may think Guts is more worthy of Casca because he’s the best at something, but Guts was up on top of a giant hand trying to save Griffith long after that stopped making sense as a course of action while Judeau was down here trying to survive with Casca, and I think we all know who Casca appreciated more in this moment.
There’s something to be said for just being there with someone instead of leaving them in the snow/trying to convince a dude to sling her over his shoulder and run lol. Same with how Judeau was with Casca throughout the year of hiding and trying to survive while Guts was fucking off on his eat pray love vacation.
It wouldn’t surprise me if we’re meant to see Judeau/Casca as a tragic missed connection and the better alternative to Guts and Casca getting together.
(On a personal note I don’t actually like the idea of Judeau/Casca both bc it’s het lol but also since it’s just, yk, dude pines, wants the girl but meddles in her life for her own good, Casca’s feelings towards Judeau aren’t explored at all, etc. But the way Miura portrayed Judeau’s regret and his presence vs Guts’ absence makes me think that the takeaway is that in the best version of events Judeau would’ve told Casca how he felt and they would’ve got together. And thematically that fits imo.)
Also while I’m on this topic, I want to take yet another opportunity to point this great moment out:
hmmmmmmmmmmm
Judeau then immediately segues the conversation to the whole “Casca’s life sucks right now, you need to save her from it, etc” bit.
But I fucking love this moment specifically because it’s telling us that not only is Judeau overtly meddling to get Casca and Guts to hook up, but Judeau believes that Guts knowing how Griffith really feels about him will impede his plans.
And I mean it’s true, he wants Guts to leave with Casca and when Guts realizes how hard he fucked up and how much Griffith desperately needs him and always did he wants to stay. But it’s just such a nice touch to tell us that Guts and Casca… only work in the absence of Griffith. Guts gets with Casca when he falsely believes Griffith looks down on him. Guts chooses to stay with Griffith when he’s convinced he was wrong about that.
(And post-Eclipse, Guts abandons Casca for his revenge campaign, and chooses to stay with her when NeoGriffith says unequivocally that he’s over him now lol.)
It adds to the sense that Guts and Casca are both rebounding from Griffith, and they only work together as long as they both want to distance themselves from him. When he’s back in their life they get weird and jealous immediately, and then they both independently choose not to leave the Hawks together (Guts telling Judeau he wants to stay, followed by Casca telling Guts she can’t leave with him) and Casca tries to break up with him lol.
said:
What are your thoughts about the current Griffith? In my eyes he has
become like the Snow Queen – Beautiful, yet cold and empty. Practically
unable to experience emotion and lacking in any humanity. A pretty
doll. A shell. A walking facade. What do you think?
My answer to this ties into the other thing you asked me to expand on, re: Griffith and contrasts, so I guess I’m just kind of doing both answers at once.
Basically I agree, but I think there’s more to NeoGriffith (ie post Femto, resurrected, godlike Griffith) than that.
Griffith as a human is so interesting to me in part because he’s full of contrasts, which is one of those hooks that really get me interested in a character. And those contrasts mostly stem from this attitude right here:
He hides away all of his weaknesses, his negative thoughts, the truth of what actually drives him on (guilt), his self-loathing, even from himself. He smiles and portrays an image of perfection so well that he essentially believes it himself most of the time.
So you have things like the Promrose Hall speech, where he’s fully embodying that image of himself:
vs Casca’s flashback, which is a glimpse of his darker, much more fucked up self underneath, and directly contradicts the above:
So you have the contrast between the perfect leader, the guy who can take down an army of 30,000 with 5,000, the guy who waxes poetic about how great dreams are, the guy who is this fucking cool while burning a queen alive:
And the guy who self-harms after prostituting himself to a pedophile to prevent as many deaths of his followers as possible despite claiming he doesn’t feel responsible for them, the guy who falls to pieces and destroys his own life when Guts leaves, the guy who hates himself and desperately wants to be told he’s not a monster:
And both are Griffith. Griffith isn’t just faking his confidence, he genuinely is that confident. He genuinely believes that his dream is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself, and he can’t call any of his followers friends because they’re clinging to his dream rather than finding their own dreams.
He’s portrayed that image so fully that it’s a real part of him. But at the same time, sometimes it shatters and reveals the exact opposite underneath: the self loathing, the fear, the fact that he’s in love with Guts and has nearly lost his dream because of that love multiple times (ie nearly dying while trying to save him from Zodd, burning his own life down after Guts leaves, even going back and rescuing him personally that first week).
And that brings me to NeoGriffith, because what NeoGriffith is, is that image, and only that image, with none of the very human weaknesses behind it.
He’s described as a painting, as untouchable, etc, like fifty million times.
He’s basically become the impression he used to leave people with.
If Griffith contradicted himself – confidence vs insecurity, conviction vs self loathing, unwaveringly pursuing his dream vs Guts making him forget his dream, etc – then NeoGriffith is one side minus the other. Confidence, no insecurity, conviction, no self-loathing, the dream, no Guts.
And it’s uncanny too. He’s pursuing the dream, but he’s no longer motivated by his very human feelings of guilt (and also fear/insecurity, which we’re shown here:
I got this whole argument about dreams in Berserk being essentially shitty coping mechanisms lol, which I won’t get into now but is worth mentioning as another aspect of human Griffith that NeoGriffith lacks)
He’s lost his human flaws, and that makes him kind of disturbing imo, because those human flaws drove him, and now he’s driven by nothing, he just is.
And, just as a side note, it’s also worth noting that Femto is the other side imo – the self-loathing, the insecurity – in the sense that Femto is the embodiment of the monster Griffith believed himself to be deep down, the monster he believed Guts saw him as too, after this exchange (and then Guts leaving):
I mean it’s ultimately the final puzzle piece that makes him agree to the sacrifice:
And I 100% believe that NeoGriffith is referencing that here with his “you, of all people”:
So like, tl;dr Griffith is a land of contradictions, and that’s embodied in 2 magical fantasy transformations that make those disparate elements of him literal personifications.
NeoGriffith is the side of himself that he showed the world as a human, stripped of his humanity, and Femto is basically a personification of his own self-loathing, in which he became everything he feared himself to be, everything Guts failed to tell him he wasn’t.
But this is just like, the thematic take lol. This is what I think NeoGriffith essentially represents. But it’s also more complicated than that, because
But when it comes to like, NeoGriffith as a character, rather than a construct, who potentially still has emotions and ties to his previous life, I guess I’ll leave you with links because I don’t really have much new to say:
Basically I think there’s plenty of indication that Griffith failed to entirely purge himself of emotion and isn’t quite the serene image of perfection he seems.
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.
griffith thinks he’s cruel for letting someone – guts – in and hence dragging him through the dirt with him; guts thinks he’s cruel for /only/ letting guts in… i don’t have a conclusion but hmmmm
that’s a really good observation tbh
my guess is that it highlights how much they see what griffith is doing as dirty? guts like, let’s be honest, doesn’t really at all. griffith asks him to kill a man and he’s like pshh just order me like you always do 😉 hey why don’t you tell the rest of our pals about this?? meanwhile griffith thinks he’s a filthy monster
Yeah it shows how non judgemental Guts is about it, and that he expects everyone else to be similarly non-judgemental. Maybe indicates that Guts thinks Griffith is only keeping them in the dark for… convenience or whatever, and subtly shows that he doesn’t realize it’s because of shame. Griffith explains afterwards, sort of, in his prevaricating way (”they need only feel as though they’re rising up”). Idk but it’s another sign of the gulf of misunderstanding between them for sure.
In the fourth and final part of this exploration of the tug of war between Griffith’s dream and his love for Guts, I’m going to look at how Griffith ultimately ends up choosing the dream over Guts despite the fact that Guts is more important to him – or, more accurately, because Guts is more important.
I’m starting by diving right into what is, hands down, my favourite part of Berserk.
The small battles we fought on the cobblestone when we were still young. The small victories we achieved. The many sparkling junk spoils we plundered.
In the evening… staring up from the back alley of brothels and taverns, where the sun never shines, I saw something. Shimmering against the setting sun, it was the brightest thing I had ever seen.
I made up my mind. The junk I would get for myself… would be that thing.
Darkness.
Deep darkness without even a trace of light.
How much time has passed since I was cast into this darkness…?
An eternity… but it also seems like an instant… All my senses are numbed and I can’t feel a thing. What of my body? It’s like it’s floating in mid-air. Have I retained my sanity? Did I go insane long ago?
Only him.
Like lightning on a dark night, he rises up within me, blazing. And again and again like a tidal wave, an infinite number of feelings surge upon me. Malice, friendship, jealousy, futility, regret, tenderness, sorrow, pain, hunger… So many recurring, yearning feelings. That giant swirl of violent emotions in which none are definite but all are implied. That alone is the bond which keeps my consciousness from vanishing amidst the numbness.
I know that I’m different from other people. Those I’ve met can by no means disregard me. They always view me with either a look of good will or animosity. I know that the good will forms into trust or fellowship and the animosity into awe or possibly dread. Thereby have I grasped… the hearts of so many in these hands.
…But why is it when it comes to him I always lose my composure?
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive. Out of so many thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies, why just him…?
How long ago did someone I was supposed to have in hand… instead gain such a strong hold on me?
Because you’re in love with him, oh my god.
At the end of the day, that’s what it boils down to. That’s the difference between Griffith shutting Casca out and letting Guts in. That’s why Casca has been jealous of Guts. Casca wanted to be Griffith’s emotional support, something indispensible to his dream – she wanted to be the one to “change him that way” – and learning that her feelings for Griffith were romantic all along points pretty conclusively imo to envying Guts for being the person Griffith loves, rather than her.
I’m going to be honest here: as much as I’ve been taking it as read that Griffith is in love with Guts (and, tbqh, vice versa) I wasn’t actually planning to make it a central point of this meta. I genuinely thought, going in, that I could focus on Guts as an emotional crutch and shield against his self loathing, as I’ve been doing so far. Yk, Griffith allows himself to become dependant on him because he loves him, but the point is the emotional dependency, not the love, right?
Fuckin wrong.
The climax of Griffith’s narrative can’t be understood without not just acknowledging that Griffith is in love with Guts, but recognizing it as the whole point and his central motivation.
This is going to be important later, but for now I’m stating that up front and I figure this is a good place to do so because, between Casca’s confession to Guts and Griffith’s monologue, it’s basically Miura spelling out the fact that this love is Griffith’s strongest motivating factor.
(And, just as an aside, despite the fact that it’s never explicitly defined, I’m calling it romantic love because a) it is, b) like, it just fucking is lol. I feel like you have to jump through hoops and twist yourself in knots to call it platonic. Without assuming that straightness is the default, saying Griffith is in love with Guts is genuinely the most straightforward, clear and concise way of reading this relationship to me. All my points hold true if you call it platonic love so ultimately you do you, but if I called it that I’d be being disingenuous.)
This monologue is our re-introduction to Griffith after a year of nothing but torture, darkness, and self-reflection. It’s the definitive statement on his relationship to Guts and how it compares to the dream now, after he’s lost both.
And the dream barely rates a mention. The matching visual of the shining/vivid thing, and the way Griffith opens the monologue by describing the dream as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, prime the reader to expect that the one vivid thing is the dream. That after losing Guts, Griffith has returned to obsessing over the dream in deluded desperation, or is maybe lamenting its demise.
But it’s a pure bait and switch because Guts is all-important to him now. Despite Guts’ rejection, despite the loss, despite the fact that he’s partially blaming Guts for having been tortured for a year, next to him the dream grows dull.
A core point of this meta was basically to show how this has been true from the very start. It’s not that Guts only outshines the dream when the dream has been lost to him, it’s that, after losing both the dream and Guts and being forced to confront himself, stripped of all those defenses that help keep him in denial, Griffith is finally able to understand, too late, what has been most important to him all along.
And this remains true. From Guts rescuing him to Griffith choosing to sacrifice him for the dream, Guts is still more important.
But if Griffith’s story up until Guts leaves has been about how his relationship with Guts had begun to replace his dream as the thing he turns to in order to shield himself from his weaknesses – guilt, self-loathing, the weight of lives on his shoulders, etc – then his story when Guts returns follows the opposite trajectory:
it’s about how he returns to his dream as his armour against his feelings for Guts.
And the place we’re starting from is Griffith letting go of his dream.
Back near the beginning Zodd gave Guts a prophecy:
If you can be said to be a true friend of this man… then take heed… When his ambition collapses… death will pay you a visit! A death you can never escape!
Because Zodd is a dramatic asshole. But the thing is, Griffith’s ambition has collapsed. His dream’s dead. The closest he can get to it before literal magic intercedes in his life is in moments of self-delusion, like when he told Charlotte he’d return to her, and when he snapped and chased a hallucination. But in the cold light of day, aware and relatively sane, he knows his dream is gone. Charlotte could still be over the moon for him and it’s not going to help him gain her kingdom without a tongue or working limbs, and he does know it.
And when Griffith watches the castle disappear over the horizon and lets the flowers in his hands go as his symbolic child self runs away from the brightest thing he’d ever seen rather than towards, when Griffith lets go of his dream, he’s… okay.
The Godhand don’t make an appearance. The behelit doesn’t come back and start screaming. Griffith is continuing on. This is acceptance. We’ve already seen the monologue about how the dream barely matters to him in comparison to Guts after all, so this isn’t too surprising either.
And then fucking Wyald shows up.
This fight’s significance to Griffith’s narrative is in his distance from the others, his alienation in being the only one who can’t pick up a sword to fight, and his helplessness as he desperately tries to do something to help Casca and Guts and can’t even manage to tear himself away from his minders, particularly in contrast to the fight against Zodd.
Eg:
Guts compares this fight to the Zodd fight a lot. When he’s briefly knocked out we see a flashback to a discussion with Erica where he talks about Zodd and Erica suspects he wants to fight him again. We see Guts thinking about Zodd as his only other frame of reference for a real live monster. And we see him think about Zodd when it comes to his and Griffith’s partnership specifically.
This emphasizes the difference between that fight and this current fight. Namely:
Whereas when Griffith tried to rescue Guts from Zodd they then squared off and faced him together, when Guts saves Casca he tells her to get lost and insists on taking Wyald one on one, because he’s got a score to settle.
Compared to the fight with Zodd, which led to the most positive and hopeful moment of their relationship – Griffith admitting he had no rational reason to leap into danger and save Guts, and Guts realizing he may have found what he’s been looking for ever since he killed Gambino – this fight with Wyald is a showcase of Griffith’s enforced distance and isolation from everyone, especially Guts.
If Griffith saving Guts from Zodd was the pinnacle of their relationship, the truest and most revealing moment of how Griffith feels, leading to Guts’ subsequent acceptance of those feelings and dedication to him in turn, then Guts pointedly fighting Wyald alone highlights the low point they’ve entered where they’re forcibly separated by Griffith’s broken body and voicelessness. They’ll never be a team again.
The chapter right after the fight is a heartbreaking mix of hope and despair. It begins, very appropriately, with Charlotte telling Anna that Griffith said he’d come back to her. Logically, like I’ve said, Griffith was deluding himself at that point. He accepts that his dream is gone a few hours later when they make it out of the sewer tunnels.
But by bringing it up and explaining that moment here, at the beginning of this chapter, it serves handily as ominous foreshadowing, and, even better, it’s a reminder that Griffith has always clung to his dream as emotional self-defense, and it still “smoulders from the bottom of [his] heart.”
The thing is, the comparison between Wyald and Zodd isn’t solely for the sake of contrast. It’s also a reminder of that pinnacle of their relationship, of
Griffith risking his life and dream for Guts, of Guts feeling like he’d found that indefinable thing he’d been searching for ever since he killed Gambino. It’s a sign of hope that the potential for their relationship isn’t lost. They’ve lost their ability to fight side by side, but their relationship isn’t predicated on just being able to fight together, or Griffith’s leadership, or the structure of the Hawks. It’s based on genuine love and mutual respect, and that isn’t gone.
Despite everything, they can still smile at each other. This scene demonstrates the potential they have just as two people who love each other, and gives readers vain hope for their future as it simultaneously sows the seeds for the destruction of their relationship.
The mask/helmet is a symbol of his former role as the leader of the Hawks, and hence, a symbol of everything that entails: the dream, repression, isolation, the image of perfection, everything I’ve been talking about for way too high a wordcount now. All those defense mechanisms.
Guts saying it’s okay for Griffith to take off the mask since it’s just the two of them is, therefore, an extremely loaded statement. Guts is offering Griffith the opportunity to be vulnerable, to be himself, no image, no mask, no leadership position, just the two of them, as equals, in each other’s company. He’s offering acceptance of Griffith, weakness and vulnerability and physical damage and all.
Instead of accepting, Griffith asks for his armour. It’s a way of reinforcing the barrier between them, and hiding his vulnerability.
The great thing about this chapter is that I don’t have to work to justify any of this because it’s literally called, “Armor to the Heart,” lol. Telling Charlotte he’d return was denial for the sake of guarding his heart against the reality of having lost everything he’d once strived for, and asking for his armour is a more literal version of that. Once Guts puts it on him he starts awkwardly denying reality too – such as telling Griffith he’ll be able to swing a sword soon.
Rather than Griffith being able to accept the truth of what’s happened – that he’s vulnerable, he’s helpless, he can no longer win for the sake of the dead, everything he’s worked for is lost – and maybe find consolation in Guts’ acceptance of him and love for him despite that, he tries to keep hiding behind the old image of perfection, the way he used to. This is basically a futile version of Griffith smiling and telling Casca, “it’s nothing.”
When Wyald returns like a bad penny, he really gets to the heart of what it means for Griffith to manufacture this image of himself to hide his vulnerability behind, and boy is it devastating:
Griffith is a symbol. He has deliberately cultivated that ideal image of himself as the perfect leader, a knight in shining armour. It keeps him distanced and detached from everyone except Guts, who has been allowed to see through it. His allies see him as a symbol of hope and change for the better, his enemies see him as a symbol of corruption in the system and change for the worse, Gennon sees him as a symbol of perfect beauty, Charlotte sees him as a symbol of a perfect relationship, and his Hawks see him as a symbol of their rise to glory.
And, of course, it all leads back to Griffith’s dream. It’s the reason it’s necessary to become this idealized image, rather than a real person. It’s an intrinsic part of his ascent to the throne.
And it’s part of how he convinces himself that he’s all right, “it’s nothing.” It helps him deny his emotions and bury them. If he can convince everyone else he’s perfect, he can convince himself. That mask of perfection is an intrinsic part of his defense against his self-loathing.
This is what he tried to hide behind when he asked Guts to dress him in his armour, and this is what Wyald strips away from him now.
He’s lost nearly every defense he has against his own self-hatred. His dream is dead in the water and he failed to prove that everything he’s done and all the lives lost in his wake were worthwhile sacrifices. He’s not one of the mover shakers of the world, he’s just an ordinary person who wanted to be special and couldn’t stand the weight of guilt on his shoulders.
Now he’s helpless and dependent; not only did he wholly fail the people who follow him, he is now reliant on them, without anything even to offer in exchange. Wyald pretty much takes away his last lingering ability to deny this.
To Griffith, this is as close to hell as you get without dying first. He didn’t keep winning for the sake of the dead, he lost, for good. He failed everyone, dead and alive, and his very existence is worse than worthless, it’s a burden on others (from his point of view).
I’d say that this couldn’t be a more perfectly tailored hell for Griffith if someone designed it that way, but, well, someone did design it that way.
Then the next scene just doubles down.
Honestly there are a shitload of possible readings of this scene, many of them not even mutually exclusive, and I think there are a number of complex factors that feed into it, but I’m landing on one for the purposes of this meta.
Based on what I perceive of Griffith’s own feelings of self-worth and his current headspace, and particularly the way the scene with Wyald right before serves as a literal and metaphorical stripping away of everything that gives Griffith a sense of worth, I think one solid reading is that he’s offering himself to Casca here because it’s the only thing left of himself that potentially has worth to someone.
Like I’ve seen other Berserk fans call this an attempted rape as a matter of course, which couldn’t be further from the truth, and not only because he literally stops when Casca says stop, and is physically incapable of even taking his clothes off. It’s not a sneak preview of the Eclipse rape, it’s a huge, pointed contrast.
This is Griffith at his lowest. He’s broken, desperate, and he feels worthless. He’s not trying to fuck Casca because he wants to, it’s because at one point that’s what she wanted.
He moves on her right after overhearing her tell Guts that she just wants to be held, after she contemplates her shaking hands and remembers how Griffith had once been able to comfort her with just a hand on her shoulder. Contextually the set-up of this scene points to Griffith desperately wanting to be that person who could comfort Casca once again, instead of being the person who needs comfort.
I also think there’s a precedent that sets this scene up with Casca comforting Guts sexually and thinking, “not just being given to… maybe I can give something as well.” The difference between giving and being given to is a recurrent theme, and I think this scene draws on it.
But he is the one who needs to be comforted. He no longer has the power or the position to be the one offering comfort. Casca refuses his sexual offer, and as he trembles above her, she lays her hand on him, in a role-reversal that just highlights everything of his past self that he’s lost.
If Griffith’s ability to once put on the mask of perfection and comfort Casca even in the midst of his own despair was a demonstration of strength, this is a humiliating demonstration of complete and utter weakness and uselessness. It seems that now he’s nothing to Casca, once his most devoted follower and admirer, except a victim who needs to be taken care of.
Guts’ hand on his shoulder in Tombstone was a sign of his emotional vulnerability to Guts specifically, because of the unique nature of their relationship. It was a symbol of Guts’ hold on him and Griffith’s weakness in loving him. Casca’s hand on Griffith’s back now is a sign of Griffith’s vulnerability in general. His armour’s been stripped off, his dream is gone, everything he once relied on to help him repress his self loathing has been ripped away, and now he can’t offer Casca anything; he can only accept her comforting hand.
Griffith has one thing left: Guts, and the possibility of absolution to be found in his love, if Guts does still love him. If Griffith needed to hear that he wasn’t cruel back in Tombstone of Flame, now he desperately, desperately needs to hear that he’s worth something to someone. That he isn’t just a cruel monster who piled up a mountain of corpses and then couldn’t even climb it all the way, who is now just a useless inconvenience to everyone with the weight of thousands of bodies on his shoulders.
And I believe, despite everything, that Guts would’ve been enough. Narratively, we’re told that he could’ve been enough. Griffith’s torture chamber monologue, Griffith letting his dream go, the way “I’ll st-” is placed on a panel of Griffith sleeping through it, conveying a sense of missed opportunity perfectly:
And the way Guts realized he fucked up by leaving only seconds after Griffith has overheard them.
Note that this line is a conclusive call-back to Guts musing on this statement a few pages earlier, making it clear that it refers to his regret over leaving, and how by leaving he threw away the thing he wished for in the first place:
If there wasn’t at least the possibility for Griffith to find some kind of happiness in a life with Guts at his side despite losing everything else, none of this would matter. Guts finally making the right choice by deciding to stay just as Griffith thinks he’s going to leave again would be dramatically pointless.
And this is a tragedy, so despite all these hope spots, this happens:
And Griffith just fucking breaks.
What do you fear in this place? asks the version of Griffith who still has a dream, and then he points to another place, a place where Griffith could leave his fears behind.
Like this is literally right after he overhears Casca telling Guts to leave. This was the part I struggled with until I just went with my gut, backed up, and realized that this isn’t actually about Griffith’s self-loathing, or his fears of being worthless or a burden. It’s not about being stripped of his coping mechanisms.
This is about being in love with Guts. This is about the visceral fear of Guts leaving him again, not because of how it might reflect on Griffith as a person with or without worth, but because he loves Guts so much he can’t bear the thought of a life without him.
Griffith’s dream is a coping mechanism. This page conveys that concept as clearly as anything. “What do you fear in this place?” Run away from it, towards your dream, your kingdom, the safe place you’ve fantasized about all your life, the place where you have the power to make things better.
He desperately chases his hallucinatory vision of his dream, and then he has a vision of a potential future:
And, true to form, the defining aspect of this short, three-page sequence isn’t the loss of Griffith’s dream or his helplessness and dependency. It’s not about his self-loathing or being unable to hide his weakness behind armour and a mask of perfection. It’s Guts’ absence. The point is that Griffith is here, with Casca, and Guts is elsewhere.
“With you and the boy… just the three of us.” Like their kid is even named after Guts, just to highlight the actual Guts’ absence as emphatically, and depressingly, as possible. The first image is Griffith surrounded by Miura’s patented black panel of symbolic isolation, Casca brings up Guts and wonders where he is, then reiterates that it’s “just” the three of them. In a total of three pages containing almost no other information what we’re given is Griffith with Casca and a nightmare kid named after the man he loves, Guts gone, and Griffith’s total mental and emotional detachment from the world.
And then he wakes up and immediately tries to kill himself.
What does Griffith fear in this place?
The first time Guts left him he ran to Charlotte, the means of achieving his dream, for comfort, denial, escape from reality, and self-destruction.
This time he tries to turn to his dream again, but it’s nothing more than a hallucination that segues into a nightmare in which Guts has left him behind, and with no dream to escape to, no armour or mask bury his heart under, no coping mechanisms left, he loses himself. “This peace and quiet isn’t so bad,” he thinks, barely even aware, his life stretching out ahead of him, without Guts.
That is, after all, the one difference between now and the torture chamber. He’d lost his dream, his tongue, the use of his limbs, his self-worth, ability to hide behind an image, and Guts then, too, and the Godhand never showed. But Griffith thought he would eventually die in the torture chamber – even if the King specified that he live through a year, that’s a lot less than a lifetime. Now he’s faced with a full life in this state, apart from Guts.
And I want to make this distinction clear. The prospect of losing Guts is what sends him into suicidal despair. It’s not the loss of his dream or the stripping away of the persona he hid under – in other words, it’s not the loss of the coping mechanisms he used to rely on that drives him to despair. Losing those is likely what makes suicide, and then sacrifice, seem like the only possible escape from his despair, hence the set-up with Wyald and Casca hammering home the fact that he’s lost all his ways of guarding his heart, but it’s not the source of that despair. The source is Guts.
Guts was replacing the dream as Griffith’s defense against self loathing. But that does not make Guts just one more coping mechanism to lose. He’s not the final straw that broke the camel’s back, he’s the whole bundle of hay.
The premise of the first three parts of this meta was that his relationship with Guts helps Griffith deal with the immense weight of everything he’s done on the path to his dream, and had the potential to fully replace achieving the dream as Griffith’s way of not hating himself.
Well the premise of this part is that the reason Guts could’ve replaced the dream is because Griffith is in love with Guts, incredibly, all-consumingly in love with him, and now that is what he needs help coping with. There’s no getting around this lol, and no way of downplaying it either.
We know this because of how his nightmarish vision of a life with Casca highlights Guts’ absence instead of, eg, his self loathing, or his lack of an image to hide behind, or his guilt, or being a burden to Casca (hell, in his imagination she’s explicitly content.) We know it because it’s the words, “even if it’s alone, you have to go,” that make Griffith snap. We know it because the entire narrative of the Golden Age has largely been devoted to establishing that Griffith feels unprecedented, incredibly powerful feelings for Guts, and this is the payoff.
We know it because Berserk thoroughly foreshadowed the Eclipse during the Black Swordsman arc, and it was absolutely not subtle about about love as a motivation:
I’ve written a post fully explaining this already so I’m not going to be that thorough here, but suffice to say, through images like Femto there on “so that you could bury your fragile human heart,” through Puck’s direct questions and statements, through the entire point of this scene being to hint at Guts’ backstory, etc, it’s made very clear that the Count and Griffith/Femto are parallels.
And we know it because of what drives Griffith past that final point of despair that opens the behelit.
Sorry for posting practically the whole scene, but damn, don’t you just want to bask in it?
After everything – the loss of his dream, the torture, the loss of his voice and working limbs, the loss of his image, of his escape, of his denial, of his pride, and the loss of Guts – what finally plunges him into the kind of despair that creates a demonic demigod is the touch of Guts’ hand. Specifically his hand on Griffith’s shoulder.
What does Griffith fear in this place? What drives Griffith into despair?
Love.
It’s the understanding how utterly fucking gone he is for Guts. That hand on his shoulder signifies Griffith’s vulnerability to Guts because of his feelings, and it’s that touch that finally opens the behelit.
To split hairs, what drives him to despair is not believing that Guts will leave him, it’s knowing that if Guts leaves him, the loss will destroy him.
After all, it already happened once.
He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness, and now he’s the sole sustenance keeping me alive.
And Griffith’s vision of the future shows us a version of what he believes will happen: if the first time Guts left his body was destroyed, the second time the rest of him will follow. We saw him existing in a seemingly permanent state of semi-dissociation, maybe living entirely in daydreams (”daydreaming again…”), barely aware of the present.
Love is the source of Griffith’s despair – the overwhelming, horrifying, life-destroying vulnerability of love.
So Griffith turns back to his first defense mechanism to escape it.
Now, I don’t want to downplay the role Griffith’s guilt plays in the sacrifice. I didn’t write three posts about Griffith’s issues only to completely ignore them at the climax of his arc just because love happens to take centre stage.
So let’s briefly recap.
Griffith is filled with guilt and self-loathing; his dream was a way of repressing those feelings with the belief that one day his very existence, and everything he’s done during that existence, would be justified. One day Guts came along and instead of continuing to live in repression and emotional denial he fell in love and started opening up. This made him vulnerable and “weak,” so when Guts seemingly rejected him because of everything Griffith hates about himself, his dream was no longer enough for him to retreat to. So he crashed and burned. Now he’s stripped of all his defenses and the horror of that vulnerability to love has sent him into pure despair.
And now some cenobite looking assholes have joined the party and they’re telling Griffith ex-fucking-zactly what he’s spent most of his life desperately hoping to one day hear, in some form or another:
And despite being plunged into crimson-behelit-opening despair by his love for Guts, despite already being told everything he wants and needs to know – that he’s been chosen by God, all is not lost, he has another chance, and to take it what he has to do is sacrifice the Band – he still irrationally, desperately prioritizes Guts when his life is in danger yet again:
This is such a tragic moment, because this is the last time Griffith chooses Guts over the dream. And, once again because he loves Griffith, Guts is the one who lets go of his hand, falling away from Griffith into darkness like a lost beacon.
So, separated from Guts, the Godhand bring Griffith up to the palm of the hand and then they proceed to play him like a fiddle, knowing exactly which buttons to push, in their exploration of his self-loathing and guilt.
Like, they’re not lying to Griffith, technically. What Ubik and Conrad are doing is playing to Griffith’s shame and guilt. They are showing Griffith his own image of himself:
Griffith sees himself as a stupid kid scaling a mountain of corpses to get to a castle. He’s consumed by guilt, which is why he can’t stop – because if he does, if he apologizes, if he repents, everything will come to an end, and that mountain of people will have died for nothing.
We already know this, of course.
The Godhand show Griffith his own perception of himself, and tell him that it’s completely accurate.
So of course, of course we have to revist the moment Griffith asked someone if they see him the same way he does, in the hopes of getting a different answer:
With Guts, Griffith could’ve taken a different route. He could’ve learned not to see himself as a monster. In showing Guts the worst of himself and being accepted, he could’ve accepted his own self-worth, independent of achieving a dream.
I mean, let’s be real here: Griffith has no real reason to feel as guilty as he does, or as driven for the sake of the dead as he does. He’s right when he says that the Hawks chose to follow him. The only people whose deaths he forced were enemies trying to kill him, give or take a pedophile who wanted to capture him as a sex slave rather than kill him, and a kid whose death was an accident and not on his orders, even if it did work out great for him. He’s a military leader, but so is Guts, so is Casca, hell so is Rickert technically, and none of them feel any guilt about the people they kill in battle, or the men they send to their deaths.
It’s heavily suggested that Griffith wants a kingdom in order to create a place of equality, where people’s lives and bodies aren’t bought and sold. (”What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth even a single piece of silver.”) When he eventually does get a kingdom that’s exactly what it is, and it exists to grant the deep desire of humanity as a collective – in other words, the people who fought and died for it considered it worth fighting and risking their lives for. It’s not just Griffith who wants this kingdom, according to the narrative, it’s humanity – certainly the non-elite majority of humanity.
Griffith thinking of himself as a monster, and the Godhand calling him one, is Griffith’s own personal self-loathing bullshit talking, not an objective moral judgement, or Miura’s moral judgement.
Like, Miura deliberately shows us that the Godhand are fucking with him, telling us that chapter 77′s magical mystery tour through “the reality within his conscious realm” is highly manipulative and far from objective:
If Guts – any close, intimate, revealing, and genuine relationship really, but Griffith’s with Guts is the one this is about – was Griffith’s potential to see himself differently, to judge himself less harshly through the eyes of another, then the Godhand is a reinforcement of Griffith’s self-loathing.
Guts could’ve told Griffith he wasn’t cruel, wasn’t a monster, that he genuinely loved and admired him even while knowing all those things Griffith is ashamed of, and left so he could be more like him and become a friend to him. But he didn’t, and now the Godhand are using his words to tell Griffith that he is cruel, he is a monster – and that it’s necessary to be.
(And, just to be clear, this isn’t a judgement of Guts. He has his own giant pile of issues contributing to this world-destroying misunderstanding, and I feel like I fully understand his reasons for every mistake he made, and I love him for them lol, just like I love Griffith for his contribution of issues to this enormous fuck up. But this is about Griffith’s side of things, not Guts’.)
So, if Guts could’ve been a healthier way for Griffith to be absolved of guilt by altering his perspective of himself, the Godhand absolves Griffith of guilt through the method I described way back in part one of this thing:
by giving him a divine seal of approval.
If it be reason that destiny transcend human intellect and make playthings of children… it is cause and effect that a child bear his evil and confront destiny.
This is your destiny, kid. You’re not responsible for anything, you have no reason to feel guilty. You’re a horrible monstrous person piling up corpses to reach a castle, but hey, it’s okay – that’s your predetermined role in life. So you’re absolved, just as long as you roll with fate, add some more bodies to the pile, and double-down on that whole monster thing.
This is everything Griffith has always wanted.
Turns out he’s special after all. Everything he’s done that he hates himself for is justified because in the end he was meant for greatness. All those dead people can still achieve the thing they died for, all the dirty things he’s done were worthwhile, even his torture and despair was part of the wheel of fate and has meaning. All he has to do to sign off is agree to sacrifice a group of people who already pledged their lives to him, who he led and fought beside in full knowledge that they might one day die on his orders, for the sake of his dream, anyway.
And also Guts.
I don’t think I need more evidence that Guts is special and stands alone among the rest of the sacrifices, but I do want to point out that right before the Eclipse Miura emphasizes that Guts is no longer a part of the Hawks.
Guts fights his own battles. Unlike the rest of the Hawks, he has very deliberately removed himself from Griffith’s dream so he can be Griffith’s friend and equal instead of his underling. Back with Casca he said he wants to, “draw the line… keep things separate.” And, “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll never entrust my sword to another again. I’ll never hang from someone else’s dream.”
This distinction between Guts and the rest of the Hawks is significant because he is not being sacrificed for the same reason as the rest of the Hawks. He’s not being sacrificed as an underling, as one more necessary evil on the path to his dream. Once again, Guts stands apart to Griffith.
I tend to think of the sequence from Griffith reaching the palm of the hand to “I sacrifice,” our very last scene with original, fully human Griffith, as a mirror to our very first scene with Griffith in structure.
That first scene was much shorter, but similarly 90% of it revolved around Griffith’s dream and the philosophy of fate and vindication behind it, building up to the moment that he said, “it’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.”
90% of this sequence revolves around Griffith’s dream, his guilt issues, his self-loathing, and Void validating it all and vinidcating him, telling him he’s one of those keys that shape the world after all. And it all builds up to this:
Among thousands of comrades and tens of thousands of enemies… you’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.
Griffith has a lot of very good reasons to say yes to the sacrifice. I sure hope somewhere in this fuckload of words about those reasons I’ve managed to show that it makes perfect logical sense for him to take the Godhand up on their offer.
And yet, the final, climactic reason given – the moment all this logic builds to, is emotional. You made me forget my dream.
Ultimately Griffith has two reasons for making the sacrifice:
1. achieve his dream, pile up some more bodies, reach the castle, let fate absolve him of guilt.
2. fuck you, Guts.
Griffith overhearing Casca telling Guts to leave, Guts’ hand on Griffith’s shoulder sending him into despair, the Count parallel, the sheer amount of Griffith’s narrative that revolves around his life-destroying, irrational feelings for Guts, the final conclusive statement from human Griffith… I feel like, given everything, it’s impossible to deny this aspect of Griffith’s motivation.
Again, the dream is an escape. In making the sacrifice, Griffith is falling back on all of his defense mechanisms to escape the pain in his heart, the pain of love.
“You’re the only one… You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream,” is a tender, tragic statement of love, and it’s also an accusation. How dare you be necessary to me, how dare you be able to destroy me just by leaving, how dare you make me love you.
It’s because of that love that Griffith lost everything, because he needed Guts, Guts made him weak, and Guts abandoned him. It’s because of that love, because he thought Guts was leaving again, that Griffith felt the worst despair of his life and tried to kill himself.
GOD he’s so in love. And that’s what he’s he’s trying to carve out of himself and escape from, by making the sacrifice. His fragile human heart.
It’s another form of self-destruction. The way he “destroyed himself,” by throwing himself at his dream when Guts left the first time mirrors the way he’s destroying himself now, with the exact same motivation behind it.
He becomes the monster he’s always believed himself to be. His armour and the mask – the one he wore in the torture chamber, the one mockingly modeled after his White Hawk persona – become an exoskeleton. Femto embodies Griffith’s self-loathing. Every part of himself Griffith hated, every reason he thought he was cruel, every assassination he was ashamed of, every body paving the way to his dream, is what Femto is made of, and his shame, his self-hatred, his love, his guilt, his despair, have all been shattered and torn away.
And if Femto is Griffith’s self-loathing, then NeoGriffith is the image of perfection.
In making the sacrifice and burying his heart, Griffith became the embodiment of everything he hated in himself, and everything those who never truly knew him admired about him. The cruelty, the monstrosity, the ruthlessness, the filth; the beauty, the immaculate perfection, the charisma, the sense of singularity.
He destroyed himself and became the false conception of Griffith.
Give or take.
Welp, that does it. I’m not going to really get into anything Femto or NeoGriffith has done or said, because this is about human Griffith’s character and narrative. Griffith’s final act as a whole person was choosing to sacrifice Guts for his dream, and lbr you couldn’t ask for a more narratively satisfying send off, so that’s where I’m ending this. And tbh if I went any further it’d lean way more towards critique than analysis anyway.
Ultimately the Golden Age is Griffith’s story. Guts may be the protagonist, but it’s Griffith’s feelings, actions, and choices that drive the plot. Griffith kickstarts the narrative and he ends it. And Griffith’s story is about falling in love. It’s about how love can strengthen you and help you overcome the worst of yourself, and it’s about how love can make you weak, vulnerable, and desperate for an escape. And, because it’s a tragedy, it’s about how and why Griffith chooses escape and succumbs to the worst of himself rather than overcoming his flaws through a mutually supportive relationship with Guts.
tyfyt
ty everyone who’s commented or said things in tags, liked these posts, etc, i really appreciate it and it’s v heartwarming to know people enjoyed reading this ❤
To Griffith, the dream is emotional security. It’s assurance that if he’s dirty, then it’s because it’s necessary to be so, so he can keep winning for the sake of the dead. It’s a way for him to repress his guilt and self loathing, because when he gets that kingdom-shaped seal of approval, it will have been worth it.
So when I say that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is beginning to replace the dream, that’s what I mean – rather than relying on the dream to reassure himself that everything he’s done, even his very existence, is worthwhile, he could rely on Guts for that. He starts opening up to Guts, rather than repressing through his dream.
Despite Griffith’s Promrose Hall speech, nothing actually changes on his end. He prioritizes Guts above the dream again when he sends a search party after him and Casca despite the nobles he’s trying to suck up to telling him he shouldn’t. He drops everything during the Battle of Doldrey to have a quiet panic attack when Guts’ sword breaks. His first reaction upon achieving a huge milestone on the path to his dream when the Band is officially integrated into the royal army is to find Guts and share the moment with him.
And boy I love how the chapter that depicts Griffith’s moment of triumph for his dream ends with Griffith just smiling at Guts across a vast ballroom.
The story between Promrose and the end of the war is filled with little moments that are suggestive of Griffith’s reliance on Guts. Another of my favourites:
I just hope he stays calm and composed.
Casca worried that volunteering to defeat an army of thirty thousand with five thousand men might be an act of recklessness because a predatory pedophile who took advantage of Griffith’s extreme self loathing when he was like fourteen is the leader of that army? Naaaaaah impossible, Griffith would never let that faze him. Oh and speaking of Griffith being calm and composed, this is my last battle, it’s almost time to leave.
But those moments are just for spice. Tombstone of Flame is where the real meat of this analysis is.
This is the second night of assassinations, and it’s a neat mirror to the first. Where Guts came away from Julius’ assassination consumed with inadequacy, self-loathing, and generally feeling like a monster, now it’s Griffith who comes away totally fucked up and filled to the brim with self hatred.
Between Promrose and Tombstone we learn Griffith’s backstory. This adds to the mirror image effect between these assassinations by revealing Griffith’s insecurities to us so we can understand his perspective, and it serves as its own parallel to this scene.
And this is the scene where we see that not only does Guts surpass the dream in importance to Griffith, but he could have potentially become a much more emotionally healthy alternative to it. This is where we see how Griffith could have not just prioritized Guts, but replaced the function of the dream with his relationship with Guts.
And I want to emphasize the emotionally healthier part. One of Berserk’s most consistent themes imo is that relationships with others are a superior way of dealing with your issues compared to dreams and swords.
eg, Godo, our favourite dispenser of wisdom, has some pretty telling lines to that effect.
You
were right beside those irreplacable things… yet you couldn’t bear to
immerse yourself together in sorrow with them. So instead… you ran
away so that your own malice could burn inside you.
Guts’ personal growth post-Eclipse is associated with making friends; his backsliding and mistakes are associated with going off on his own to fight monsters; he begins to overcome his revulsion to touch when he becomes part of the Hawks;
on the rooftop after the Zodd conversation Guts recalled the night he killed Gambino and wondered if this was the answer he’d been searching for since then (family) before dedicating his sword to Griffith; part of his healing process for his childhood trauma is talking about it to Casca; etc. And Guts and Griffith’s relationship is very much included, even though it’s far more of a tragic missed opportunity.
The second half of Tombstone of Flame Part 2, aka my favourite chapter of Berserk, abruptly shifts tone from triumph and pure badassery to quiet, contemplative vulnerability halfway through. As a chapter I feel like it really encompasses the highs and lows of Griffith’s character, from defeating his enemies and cooly predicting Foss’ actions to wrap everything up in a neat little bow, to highlighting his guilt, self-loathing, and emotional dependency on Guts.
Here, Griffith opens up to Guts in an intensely vulnerable moment.
I involved you in this filthy scheme… and I didn’t even get my hands dirty. I left all the dangerous, taxing work to you…
Idiot! What kinda question’s that for the guy who killed a hundred men?
This is another scene the significance of which cannot be overstated. There’s so much to unpack here I hardly know where to start. Like… this is the moment. This is what Griffith flashes back to when he’s fucking Charlotte and burning his life down around him. This is a moment Guts remembers when slowly realizing that Griffith loves him. This is exactly what the Godhand shows Griffith to get him to agree to make the sacrifice. Guts remembers this after Griffith makes the sacrifice. This moment is the linchpin of Berserk.
This is both a mirror to Guts overhearing the Promrose Hall speech, and a call-back to Griffith in the river after Gennon.
So first, the set-up of this chapter recalls Promrose Hall strongly. It’s the second night of assassinations, Promrose Hall took place on the first night. When Guts assassinated Julius he came away from that encounter wracked with guilt over accidentally killing Adonis as well, strongly and traumatically reminded of his childhood, and basically thinking of himself as a monster in a way inseparable from his own childhood trauma:
Guts is consumed with self-loathing, comparing himself to monsters like Zodd overtly, and like Donovan symbolically. He’s also reminded of killing Gambino, like, basically this event just brings a pile of old issues crashing down on Guts’ head.
In a concussed daze he wants nothing but to find Griffith, presumably for reassurance. I don’t want to get too heavily into Guts’ side of things here, but remember that this is shortly after he dedicated himself to Griffith when Griffith told him he risked his life for him for no reason. I think it’s safe to say that he wants that reassurance again, he wants to feel the same sense of being valued and respected that he got during that staircase conversation.
And instead he overhears Griffith telling Charlotte that he has no friends. More to the point, what he gets is Griffith’s dream blocking the emotional bridge that Guts is trying to cross like a damn troll.
In Tombstone, Guts and Griffith assassinate the Queen and this time it’s Griffith who turns to Guts for emotional reassurance in a moment of vulnerability.
The way killing Adonis reminds Guts of his many, many issues is echoed in the strong parallel between Tombstone and Griffith in the river. We don’t get to see what’s going through Griffith’s head the way we see into Guts’, but we can infer an awful lot based on this comparison.
In the river, Griffith asked someone for reassurance after doing something he considers shameful for the sake of his dream.
Casca’s response isn’t all that reassuring.
She cuts herself off in the process of automatically reassuring him and instead she asks why he was with Gennon. This is totally understandable and not at all something I blame Casca for lol. She’s a kid, she’s understandably disgusted at the thought of Griffith having sex with Gennon willingly knowing that he’s a pedophile, and she’s out of her depth in a highly charged, difficult discussion. But that doesn’t change the fact that Griffith probably took her answer as a “yes.”
Griffith then goes into his self-harming dream spiel, as he reiterates to himself exactly why it was worth it to dirty himself for his dream while tearing open his arms. What may have been his first attempt to open up to someone else in a moment of extreme emotional vulnerability was shut down, inadvertently, so he violently returns to his original justification and defense measure, his dream.
The saddest thing about Tombstone, to me, is that this time Guts brings up the dream for him.
Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?
Guts’ answer is a depressing double-whammy of both implicitly agreeing that Griffith is cruel, and reminding him that the cruelty is necessary to achieve his goals. This second time we see Griffith try to open up to someone is also shut down, inadvertently, and the fact that Guts is the one to bring up his dream this time rather than Griffith tells us that the dream wasn’t even on his mind. Guts’ answer comes as a very painful reminder.
Like, imo this is huge. In the first part of this meta I tried to show how wholly reliant Griffith is on his dream. It’s what he clings to as his shield against his intense self-loathing and guilt. It’s a way for him to tell himself that everything awful and dirty that he’s done was worth it, and that one day he’ll be able to prove that.
Well this moment shows Griffith forgetting all that in the face of Guts’ potential acceptance, until Guts reminds him and his self loathing comes crashing down on him all at once.
If his dream was what he turned to for validation from fate or some higher power, then now Guts is who he turns to for validation. He needs Guts’ reassurance that he isn’t cruel. He needs Guts to see his “dirty side” and continue to remain by his side – that is all the validation he needs now. Not fate, not a kingdom, just love.
The same way the only thing Guts needed in order to feel like he was where he belonged wasn’t his own dream, but the knowledge that Griffith loved him, the knowledge that he had after their staircase conversation about Zodd, and which dissolved after Promrose.
But instead Guts, with Griffith’s dream on his mind getting in between them again, says the wrong thing and Griffith looks the exact same way he looked when he felt like he was responsible for a kid’s death.
So, to sum up, Griffith feels self-loathing, tries to open up to other people to assuage his sense of self-loathing in the hope that, having seen him at his worst, they don’t see him as filthy/cruel the way he sees himself, and each time his self loathing is only reinforced. The first time he clings to his dream in lieu of Casca’s reassurance, while the second time Guts is the one who brings up his dream, in so many words pushing Griffith away and telling him to cling to the dream instead of him.
Each time the dream serves as a replacement for real human connection and love.
The first time Griffith was able to close himself off, place a hand on her shoulder, and tell Casca, “it’s nothing,” when he realized how emotionally vulnerable he was in that moment. But when it comes to Guts, he’s much too far gone to separate himself and play the perfect leader.
Now, as opposed to putting the mask of perfection on and saying, “it’s nothing,” with Guts he says:
Unlike Promrose Hall, Guts putting the dream in between him and Griffith and thwarting Griffith’s efforts to open up to him and take comfort in his potential reassurance doesn’t immediately ruin their relationship. I’d say that Griffith is very accustomed to seeing himself as a monster by now, so while Guts’ implicit confirmation of that fact is incredibly fucking depressing considering what could have been, it’s nothing Griffith didn’t expect to hear.
Guts remains the man allowed to see behind the mask and into the real him.
And then there’s this contrast:
This is depicted as a cute moment, but it’s also indicative of how utterly weak and emotionally vulnerable Griffith is now that he’s let Guts in. With Casca he was still able to step back and remove himself, put the mask back on, and be the one to comfort her despite clearly needing it more.
Now Guts is the one to put his hand on Griffith’s shoulder. It’s not depicted as a hugely significant and character revealing action the way this moment in the river is, but it’s a perfect illustration of what Griffith finally realizes after it’s too late:
And it’s exactly the moment Miura uses to show us how emotionally vulnerable Griffith has become to Guts. Griffith couldn’t separate himself when he tried, and now he doesn’t try, he just accepts Guts’ assessment that his cruelty is necessary with a sad smile, and intends to continue on with Guts at his side.
Finally, there’s seemingly one thing missing from this comparison between Griffith in the river and Griffith in Tombstone of Flame: the self harm.
But, well, it’s not actually missing, we just don’t get to see it until a month later:
And the reason we’re not shown Griffith’s self-harm scratches*** until this scene is because it’s actually another big contrast between Griffith’s reaction to Casca and his reaction to Guts.
Presumably, based on the other parallels I drew between Tombstone and Casca’s flashback, and based on the placement of these panels – Griffith’s memory of Guts reminding him about his dream and questioning Griffith’s resolve followed immediately by our first glimpse of those scratch marks on Griffith’s shoulder – Griffith self-harmed at some point closely following the assassinations.
One can imagine it following exactly the same pattern we saw with Casca: Griffith asks someone if they think he’s X thing he hates about himself, doesn’t hear a no, and then some time following he reinforces his resolve, tells himself that it’s ok, it’s necessary for him to do these dirty, cruel things for the sake of achieving his all-important dream, for the sake of the people who have given their lives for it, for the sake of making their sacrifices meaningful, etc, while self-harming. Just like he did in the river.
The contrast comes now, after Guts has left.
Griffith could probably convince himself after Tombstone that the things he does for the sake of his dream are necessary and important and it’s worth becoming a monster to achieve his goal. “You believe that, don’t you?” Guts had to remind him, but Griffith agrees. “You’re right.”
But after Guts leaves him?
When Guts leaves, Griffith takes it as a rejection. Those little moments that by themselves never ruined their relationship or amounted to more than mild rebuffs have probably turned into wholesale condemnations in Griffith’s mind. Guts saying, “just order me to do it,” goes from a mild reminder that they don’t have an equal relationship to, “I won’t dirty myself voluntarily, but I’ll do it if you order me to because that’s my job.” Guts saying, “ain’t this part of the path to your dream?” turns into, “your dream is paved with cruelty and I’m sick of being dragged through the dirt with you.”
Griffith winning Guts’ loyalty in a fight turns into Guts being forced to associate with him, and leaving as soon as he’s accomplished what he thinks Griffith wanted him for, thereby fulfilling his end of the bargain.
The moment Griffith is remembering here is our first glimpse of them together. “It’s funny… you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” It’s a memory of Griffith choosing to open up to someone and share his innermost thoughts for the very first time. And he’s convincing himself that Guts was disgusted by him from the very first glimpse he got of the Griffith underneath the perfect image, and wanted to escape him since the beginning.
Ironically, we know exactly how Guts felt in this moment: “At that time he shone before me as something beautiful, noble, and larger than life.” It makes the choice of this particular memory all the more painful.
The other thing this particular memory signifies is Griffith’s driving motivation behind his dream. This is the scene where he tells Guts all about his belief in fate and his desire to know what he’s destined for – it’s our first indication of what Griffith’s dream means to him. It’s a contrast: Griffith then, just beginning to open up to Guts and explaining the pragmatic philosophy behind his dream, and Griffith now, falling to pieces because he believes Guts is rejecting him.
In other words, Griffith then, reliant on his dream, vs Griffith now, reliant on Guts.
The very fact that Griffith is the one challenging him, refusing to let Guts go without a fight demonstrates how far the dream is from Griffith’s mind. Remember how important it is for the Hawks to choose to follow him? How even when Guts first joined, the duel and the stakes were chosen entirely by Guts and Griffith just went along with it? Now that’s not even a factor. The feelings of guilt lying just below Griffith’s surface don’t matter at all in the face of Guts leaving. Griffith is now so far beyond distancing himself from Guts with reminders that he may die for his dream that he’s willing to risk killing him directly, in an irrational attempt to negate Guts’ rejection.
“I guess it’s because they themselves chose to fight,” is a careful rationalization, and Griffith is no longer anywhere close to capable of rationalization in this moment. This is what happens when the emotions he buries and spends his life denying burst to the surface. Despite being more emotionally open with him than he’s ever been with anyone before, he’s never put a label on his feelings for Guts and never even identified them to himself. He asks Guts, “do I need a reason each time I put myself in harm’s way for your sake?” he tells Guts, “it’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this,” he tells Guts, “you’re rough enough to share this with. To the end,” he tells Guts, “you’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this,” but he never tells Guts that he cares for him, prioritizes him, trusts him, loves him, and I don’t think he’s ever told himself either.
Having ignored and rationalized away his emotions for most of his life, now he’s finally run out of logic and rationalizations. He has no experience dealing with feelings like this because he lives in denial of them; I genuinely don’t think he himself understands what he’s feeling or why as Guts announces that he’s leaving, so he ends up lashing out through an established framework that he does understand, that Guts himself once suggested as a way to win his loyalty, that, might I point out, Judeau, Corkus, and Pippin all think is reasonable, and Guts is reassured by lol.
Griffith won Guts in a fight, so Griffith will keep Guts through another fight, because he can’t bear the thought of Guts rejecting him.
Which brings me back to the scratch marks on his shoulder.
He remembers the moment Guts implicitly agreed that Griffith is cruel and called his resolve into question. “You believe that, don’t you?”
A month earlier his answer was yes. He scratched himself and told himself that everything was necessary for the sake of his dream.
Here’s his answer now:
No.
He doesn’t scratch himself – he traces the marks, trying to remind himself that yes, it’s worth becoming a monster for the sake of his dream, even if it drove Guts away… but it isn’t. Now instead of self-harming he curls up and cries. No blood this time, just tears.
Griffith scratching himself is tied to affirming his dream and repressing his feelings of self-loathing, and the pointed absence of scratching here tells us that he can no longer affirm his dream or repress his self-loathing. It’s not worth dirtying himself for, it’s not worth the deaths on his head, it’s not worth becoming a monster, because that, he believes, is why Guts left, and nothing was worth losing Guts, not even his dream.
This whole sequence with Charlotte*** is Griffith’s attempt to fall back on his dream after losing Guts. Charlotte represents his dream perfectly – Judeau even reminds the audience of that fact in the chapter preceding the second duel (chapter 34). The key to his dream is Charlotte, and Griffith showing up at her window is an irrational attempt to attain his dream now, no matter how premature it is, because he is in dire need of the emotional reassurance his dream provides him.
Guts is gone, seemingly having rejected him, and Griffith retreats to his dream the way it’s always been a defense against his self-loathing and a way of repressing his emotions.
Take all the frightening and sad things… and cast them into the fire.
But again, it doesn’t work this time – it’s not enough to cope with the loss of Guts.
I think there is also a strong component of self-destruction here. Griffith knows how risky sleeping with Charlotte is, she even points it out while he’s standing in a tree outside her window. The King alludes to Griffith “destroying himself,” as well, and everyone and their horse except Corkus, stubbornly, connects Griffith’s meltdown after Guts left to the way he and the Hawks are declared traitors the next morning. It may not be a planned suicide, but it’s an act of self-immolation just the same, and something Griffith did knowing the risks full-well.
It’s no surprise when he lands himself in a dungeon.
Oh this chapter. This chapter this chapter this chapter. I’ll admit, it’s been giving me some trouble, not because it doesn’t fit with my point, but because it fits too well lol. I debated for a long time whether I’d try really delving into it or whether I’d omit some stuff and just like, ignore the fact that I genuinely believe this is the meaning behind it.
But lbr I’m taking the first option, as hard as it’s been to find a way to talk about this shit that doesn’t like… give entirely the wrong impression, because it’s basically the capstone to this part of Griffith’s character arc, and therefore this part of this meta, and it encapsulates everything about Griffith’s self-loathing perfectly.
Everything he calls the King out on is something he hates about himself.
You’ve lived on by resigning yourself to the monster [war] you envision. But you’ve by no means tried to harness that monster.
The second part is fairly obvious. The King was born to the throne and didn’t even bother to use his power for anything worthwhile. Griffith wasn’t born into that power but he spent his life trying to attain it, and just as he was about to succeed he threw it away, ultimately accomplishing nothing. “This is… worthless.”
The first part, the mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, was the part that tripped me up for a while, because frankly, it’s such a parallel to Griffith’s feelings for Guts, to the point where when I tried to write this section while ignoring it it felt like a really glaring omission, but oh man, let’s be real here, it’s unpleasant as fuck.
I’m choosing to give Miura the benefit of the doubt because while I don’t think he’s above comparing gay pining to incestuous rape, I do think, as I’ve said, that this scene is about Griffith’s self loathing, and Griffith considering his own feelings to be just as pathetic and grotesque as the King’s lust for his daughter makes a depressing kind of sense to me.
First I want to explain why this parallel is so clear to me because I’d hate to look like I’m making this up. First of all, once we’re agreed that the King bemoaning the weight of lives on his shoulders and assuming Griffith has no idea what that’s like, and getting a very knowing look from Griffith in response, is as clear a parallel as you get, I feel like it’s impossible to ignore how neatly obsessive love for someone fits in as well.
Griffith’s feelings for Guts have been defined by giving himself in exchange for him, risking his life and his dream/kingdom for him, as Casca points out at every possible opportunity. And now he finally has given up a kingdom for him – or at least, because of him.***
We know why Griffith is in that dungeon. Griffith knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“He was the reason I’ve been thrown into this darkness”) Casca knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“Because you left us! Because you abandoned Griffith!”) Rickert, a little kid, knows why he’s in that dungeon. (“What I think is… it must’ve been over you, Guts.”) Eventually even Guts gets a clue. (“Was I the one who brought all thisupon you?”)
Like, just to reiterate the main point of this meta, Griffith’s narrative so far is about becoming emotionally reliant on Guts as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders, instead of the dream which had been his defense until Guts. This scene is about the King’s emotional reliance on Charlotte as a defense against the weight of death on his shoulders instead of using the “sword called the throne” to defend himself against that weight by doing something worthwhile with it – something to justify what the King’s subjects have been dying for.
And it’s no coincidence that the throne is described as a sword.
In Berserk, swords are coping mechanisms. Griffith is mocking the King for his emotional dependence on someone else to shield his heart rather than using his “sword” for that purpose, which is, of course, exactly what led to Griffith ending up in a dungeon.
The King goes on this diatribe:
I would give myself… even this kingdom in exchange for her! She’s my whole life!
What value is there in this world? Wars rage on and the people’s lives are lost like they were insects! After how many decades of war and how many tens of thousands of corpses, we’ve finally built a time of remembered peace, but it’s only for an instant! On the underside, the monster named war is always seeking new blood, starting to brew itself anew! In the face of that monster, the will of one land’s king is powerless! The wisdom of one man is folly! And yet I cannot cease being king! There’s no way I can stop! In this… blood stained, meaningless world… if there is one single ray of hope to be found… it is… warmth. Only warmth covers and protects me from this world.
You’ve taken that one flower that gives me that warmth… and plucked it! Unforgiveable!
Alas, my poor Charlotte. I’ve brought her up for seventeen years. She knowing no impurity… now that she’s given herself up to the sport of a commoner… I’d rather that… rather that…
Directly from the King lamenting that monster called war and the lives lost to it, to declaring Charlotte his one defense against the world. His one means of protection from the weight of “the lives of all the people, all on [his] shoulders.”
Again, Guts was becoming Griffith’s defense against his feelings of guilt. A large portion of Griffith’s story revolves around how his relationship with Guts is in part a coping mechanism, a defense against self-loathing.
And not in a negative way – remember, compared to dreams and swords as coping mechanisms, finding emotional support in a connection with someone else is by far the superior option, according to Berserk as a whole.
Griffith’s expression of his feelings for Guts wasn’t altogether healthy, because Griffith is not altogether emotionally healthy lol. He’s an extremely repressed guilt-ridden obsessive dude who self harms and thinks achieving an arbitrary goal will justify his existence, and who fell in love, had no way to understand those feelings, and became very emotionally dependent without even noticing.
Hence freaking the fuck out, challenging Guts to a duel and thinking as he strikes that he’d rather kill him than let Guts reject him. But despite that, overall, we’re shown that Griffith’s feelings for and relationship with Guts could’ve helped him grow as a person, had their relationship been given a chance to flourish without misunderstandings getting in the way.
I’m pointing all this out because I’m trying very hard to avoid coming across like I’m saying that Griffith’s relationship with Guts is at all equivalent to the King’s relationship to his daughter.
Griffith and Guts’ relationship falls apart because of a failure to communicate and because neither realize that their feelings are mutual. Griffith believes that Guts is rejecting him when he leaves, but we the readers know that in reality Guts is leaving entirely because he loves Griffith and wants to be worthy of his friendship.
I believe that the parallel here between Griffith and Guts and the King and Charlotte is so utterly loathsome because it reflects how Griffith feels about himself, not because it’s anything close to an objective parallel or a commentary on relying on relationships with other people as a means of emotional support.
The King is nothing more than a lonely, miserable man who can’t find any reason to live beyond the one person he loves, while Griffith threw his life away over Guts’ perceived rejection, and he knows it. As much as he represses, he can’t deny this – when he curls up and weeps beside Charlotte, that’s Griffith failing to deny his feelings for Guts, and he later describes him as the reason he’s been thrown into the darkness of the torture chamber, and the sole sustenance keeping him alive. Griffith is realizing that somewhere down the line his life had switched from revolving around the dream to revolving around Guts, and he thinks it’s pathetic.
The distinction Griffith makes between the King wanting Charlotte to have him rather than having Charlotte is relevant too. I used to take this line as little more than Miura feeling like he needed to justify why the King eventually flees instead of continuing his sexual assault attempt – ie because Charlotte’s rejection was too much to bear – but it works within the framework of Griffith’s feelings for Guts very well, particularly in light of the second duel.
I mean
And again like, ngl I hate to do this lol, like I said I’m not thrilled by this parallel, but fuck, it works perfectly and I do think it’s deliberate:
The King attacking Charlotte is a parallel to Griffith challenging Guts to the second duel. In a way. Again, not an objective way, not in a way that’s truly comparable – hell, we get Guts’ inner monologue and he’s literally comforted by Griffith’s challenge while Judeau and co think it’s perfectly reasonable as former mercenaries – but within Griffith’s self-loathing mindset where he sees himself as a rejected monster, he sees himself in the King and his fucked up attraction to Charlotte. The King’s subsequent attack and “rejection” by Charlotte mirrors Griffith’s perception of attacking Guts and then being left, rejected, in the snow.
Griffith makes the distinction between having and wanting to be had because everything about his own breakdown revolves around Guts’ perceived rejection of him. Griffith thinks Guts sees him as a monster, and, through their duel, from Griffith’s perspective, Griffith was trying to keep Guts with him despite that rejection, against Guts’ will. In hindsight, removed from the heightened emotions of the moment, he believes his actions to be as pathetic as the King’s lust for Charlotte. He tried to “have” Guts against his will, when what he wanted was to be “had” by him – wanted by him, loved by him, accepted by him. He wanted Guts to want to stay with him, not to be forced to stay.
And of course, the supreme irony is that Guts did love Griffith, and that’s exactly why Guts was leaving. He wanted Griffith to want him, he just didn’t recognize Griffith’s irrational actions as a show of desperate need until it was too late. This is directly stated in the text several times, so I’m not going to try to justify this statement through a big tangent about Guts’ decision to leave. Here’s one of the most self-explanatory moments where Miura tells us what happened from Guts’ perspective:
So, again, the King attacking Charlotte is not an actual objective parallel; it’s a parallel when filtered through Griffith’s false framing of what happened between him and Guts as a vicious rejection, which makes sense because Griffith is the one bringing it all up and condemning both the King and himself.
At the end of the day I don’t particularly care whether “If I can’t have him, I don’t care,” is taken as a super dark moment or barely a drop in the pond when it comes to dark things people do in Berserk. Judge Griffith harshly for it or go ‘meh people try to kill each other in Berserk all the time, he wasn’t even trying so much as accepting the possibility,’ I just want to draw a clear distinction between that and a father trying to rape his daughter, which I think is fair.
And now the King’s final condescending judgement.
“Such a worthless matter.” We know what that worthless matter is. The King thinks it was lust for Charlotte that landed him there, but we (and half the cast of Berserk, vocally) know that it was his feelings for Guts.
And on the very next page we transition to the King’s assault of Charlotte. The King is doing some projecting himself here – he mocks Griffith for destroying himself over lust for Charlotte (Guts) which is what the King immediately proceeds to do. This attempted rape decimates him as a person; the next time we see him he looks like he’s aged thirty years, and he’s growing senile – just as Griffith is tortured to irreversible physical damage after Guts’ rejection.
After Charlotte wakes up and screams a horrified no, we return to Griffith for the last page of the chapter:
Charlotte’s assault is perfectly bookended by Griffith in the dungeon, and the repetition of “worthless,” a word used three times in this chapter.
The first time it refers overtly to the King not utilizing his power to justify his existence and assuage the guilt on his shoulders, instead comforting himself with Charlotte, with the implication that this is how Griffith feels having thrown away his dream over Guts.
The second time the King uses it to refer to the matter that Griffith destroyed himself over, ie stupid, impulsive actions based on feelings for another person. The King thinks it’s Charlotte, but we know it’s Guts.
The third time is how Griffith feels about himself, a final conclusive statement after his mockery of the King’s feelings for Charlotte, the King’s accidental mockery of his feelings for Guts, and Charlotte’s assault. The way this chapter is structured essentially tells us that the attempted rape scene applies in some way to Griffith’s final declaration of his own worthlessness, and hopefully I’ve made a convincing case for how it’s an illustration of his self-loathing regarding his feelings for Guts.
Griffith, thrown into the darkness of the dungeon, may as well have been plunged into his own self-loathing. “Worthless.”
SO! What’s left? The torturer rips off Griffith’s behelit a short while later, nicely symbolic of the lost dream. A year passes. Guts returns. And Casca neatly condenses this enormous meta into the four sentences I stole for titles and writes the conclusion to this section for me:
Griffith had to make himself strong – remember, that refers to the way he represses his emotions and projects his image of perfection, the way he smiled at Casca and put his hand on her shoulder after violently self harming.
Guts made Griffith weak because Griffith was starting to open up to him rather than repressing those emotions and relying solely on his dream to defend against everything that haunts him. Do I need a reason? It’s for those reasons that I’m asking you to do this. Do you think that I’m cruel?
After being rejected by Guts and believing that Guts sees him as a monster, the promise of his dream was no longer enough for him to rely on, and he crashed and burned in an implosion of self-loathing and feelings of worthlessness.
Griffith’s no good without Guts anymore because his feelings for Guts made him weak. He came to rely on Guts to sustain his heart, because people need other people, and Guts was the person Griffith needed.
Wish Casca could’ve written this whole thing for me, it would’ve been a lot shorter and neater lbr.
That’s the end of Part Three. The next and final part is going to explore how Guts growing more vital to Griffith than the dream leads, contrary to expectations, to Griffith sacrificing Guts for his dream.
*** There is a common misconception that this is one big, thick scar rather than scratch marks, probably thanks to the anime depicting it as such, but frankly, the anime got it wrong. There is zero reason for Griffith to have a scar there, and it would have no significance – Guts’ sword didn’t touch him, and if it had he’d have either a bruise or a gaping wound lol, not a scar. They are two parallel lines that you can see Griffith trace with two fingers right as he starts crying, and since we already know Griffith has a tendency to scratch himself, this leaves no doubt to me that they are two scratch marks, not one big mark of unknown origin.
*** I think the scene with Charlotte is deeply flawed, and I’m treating it as consensual sex in this analysis because I believe that’s what Miura intended it to be read as, despite shitty, misogynist, tropey writing. More on that here, if you’d like a further explanation.
*** I remember an old conversation I had with I think @yesgabsstuff and @mastermistressofdesire where one of you suggested that Griffith burning his life down by fucking Charlotte could be interpreted as a childish act of bargaining, at least subconsciously. Griffith trying to trade his dream for Guts. And I’m js, that rang true to me and this comparison made me remember it.
This started as an attempt to explain my take on why Griffith is so utterly dedicated to his dream, and then it evolved into a monster when I decided to apply that reading to the rest of Griffith’s narrative. This is basically an examination of the dream, and how Griffith’s relationship with Guts comes to not only take precedence over it, but functionally replace it.
Now, while this is essentially a Griffith character study, I’m coming at him from a very specific angle so this is by no means definitive or all-encompassing. There’s so much to say about Griffith, his role in the story, his characterization and motivation etc that I just can’t fit into the purview of this meta – like, hell, I don’t even talk about class issues lol – but hopefully this serves as a thorough exploration of the aspects I did choose to focus on.
And, of course, it goes without saying that this is just my own interpretation. I’ll make the best case I can, but at the end of the day so much of Griffith’s story is left in subtext that there’s plenty of room for other interpretations.
Also, I want to lead off with a warning/advertisement:
I fucking love Griffith. I think he’s a fantastic character with a ton of depth and humanity who gets reduced to a two dimensional caricature in fandom way too often, I’m sympathetic towards him, and I take it as read that he’s blatantly in love with Guts, and indeed, that his narrative is almost entirely about being in love with Guts. I’m also writing this for a presumed audience of people who don’t need to be convinced first that Griffith is more complex than “conniving sociopath,” but if that’s your starting point you’re more than welcome to read anyway and see if anything I have to say resonates despite that.
Basically, if you’re into really really long, really gay character analyses, enjoy!
This is divided into four parts:
Part One is an analysis of what I feel are the relevant aspects of Griffith’s dream and why he’s so dedicated to it.
Part Two explores the way Guts immediately takes precedence over the dream.
Part Three explores how Griffith comes to rely on Guts more than the dream.
And Part Four explores why Griffith ultimately chooses to sacrifice Guts for the dream.
And lastly, I’m using the word “explores” deliberately because this isn’t really an argument. I don’t have to argue that Guts takes precedence over the dream, or that Griffith becomes emotionally reliant on Guts, etc, because this is all pretty clearly stated in the text. Rather, I want to use the tension between Guts and the dream as a jumping off point to dig into Griffith’s character arc. I’m not just saying that Griffith’s dream pales in importance compared to Guts, I’m trying to explainwhy,how Miura shows us, and what it tells us about Griffith’s character and narrative.
Ok that’s it for the preamble, let’s dive the fuck in.
I’m going to start us off by examining two sequences which, together, tell us pretty much everything we need to know to understand Griffith and his relationship to his dream, at least as far as this meta is concerned.
The first is his very first scene in the manga, all the way back in chapter eight, during the Black Swordsman arc. This is our introduction to pre-demon Griffith.
Martyrdom for a merciless god. What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t even worth a single piece of silver. In today’s world, most people’s lives are subject to the whims of a handful of nobility and royalty. Of course, even a king himself can’t live exactly as he pleases. We are all at the mercy of a great tide… fate, or whatever you wish to call it… And we all disappear in the end… our lives spent… never even knowing who we were.
In life, unrelated to one’s social standing or class as determined by man, there are some people who, by nature, are keys that set the world in motion. They are the true elite, as dictated by the golden rule of the universe. That’s what I want to know! What is my place in the world? Who am I? What am I capable of? What am I destined for?
This tells us Griffith’s driving philosophy. It tells us that he believes in fate, that he wants to push himself as far as he can and attain the most he can in the hopes that he is fated to be one of the few significant people who can change the world.
And it tells us that Guts is special to him. Griffith’s monologue here builds up to “You’re the first person I’ve ever spoken to like this.” We learn significant information about Griffith’s philosophy – along with some fun dramatic irony because, as we already learned by seeing Femto, Griffith is one of those keys – but the true point of this brief flashback is this moment of connection with Guts, with Griffith freely opening up to someone for the first time.
The second sequence is, of course, Casca’s flashback. From the kid’s death to Casca expressing her jealousy of Guts, these chapters are the real key to understanding Griffith’s character. That first scene is like the surface look with hints of depth, but Casca’s flashback recontextualizes everything that came before and informs everything that comes after. Like, I can’t stress enough how important this flashback is to understanding Griffith lol, it’s the axis around which his character revolves.
Miura even points out through Casca that learning what we learn about him should make us take another look at Griffith and further our understanding of what we’ve already seen, and what we’re going to see.
So I’m going to go through it and explain exactly what this flashback tells us about him.
We learn that the deaths of those who follow him weigh extremely heavily on him and fill him with guilt. Given the way the boy returns during the Eclipse this was likely a wake-up call, maybe the first instance of a death in the line of duty hitting him this hard. However, whether it’s the first time he’s been fucked up by one of his Hawks dying or whether he makes a habit of brooding over them doesn’t matter – this is the example we’re given to tell the reader how Griffith feels about the deaths of those fighting for him.
We learn that Griffith deals with this guilt through a pretty fucked up combination of self harm, rationalization, and denial. “I don’t feel at all responsible for my comrades who have lost their lives under my command,” he says, and then tears the shit out of his arms until Casca’s crying and begging him to stop. And I mean, if this scene isn’t clear enough, Miura uses self harm as an illustration of immense guilt despite denial a lot.
And not to belabor the point, but the dead kid’s relevance is demonstrated by the simple fact that Miura decided it was narratively important to include him, Griffith’s reaction to his death, and Casca making the connection and looking blatantly skeptical when he denies that the boy had anything to do with his decision to have sex with Gennon. We are absolutely supposed to understand that Griffith is lying when he says he doesn’t feel responsible, both to Casca and himself.
We learn that his dream is intrinsically tied to emotional repression. Griffith making himself strong means Griffith denying his emotional weaknesses, burying his heart, and putting on a mask of perfection at all times so he can embody the correct image for the Hawks and be what they need from him. It’s not that he can easily bear the burden of his dream and what he does for it, it’s that he forces himself to do so by repressing the emotional toll it takes on him.
By putting on this mask he is able to repress his feelings – or by repressing his feelings he is able to put on the mask. Either way, the knight in shining armour image he projects and his refusal to acknowledge his feelings of guilt and self loathing are intrinsically tied together and referred to by Casca as a sign of strength.
We also learn why Griffith is devoted to his dream.
We began with the assumption that his reasons are philosophical, theoretical, and self-serving. He wants to be special. Hell, if you really boil down the keys that set the world in motion speech, it means he wants proof that he’s special, and if he achieves his dream then it’s a sign from God or the universe or fate or whatever force beyond human knowledge that it was meant to be – that he was truly destined for great things all along.
But when we learn how driven by guilt he is, that motivation is transformed and complicated. He wants to be special, he wants fate to prove that he’s special, because that means he’s been doing the right thing all along. It means the deaths on his head were necessary. And if he achieves his dream he proves that it was worth it, that the dead didn’t die for nothing – that they were right to follow him even though it lead to their deaths, because he made the thing they gave their lives for a reality.
It makes it worth it to “dirty” himself too. If he achieves his dream then sex with Gennon was worth it, the assassinations were worth it, that hidden underbelly of his rise to power that he feels ashamed of was worthwhile after all.
If he achieves his dream, then he has no reason to feel guilty. If he achieves his dream, then he has no reason to hate himself. It was all just part of the wheel of fate.
I truly believe that this is what motivates Griffith more than anything else, and why his dream is paramount to him. And I think that when he gave the keys speech to Guts (among other instances of Griffith talking about the dream) it was also a form of rationalization and denial – a half-truth that obscures his real motivation, even to himself.
Finally, as Casca’s story concludes with Guts’ arrival in their lives, we finish with Casca coming as close as possible to saying that Griffith is in love with Guts without actually saying it. Griffith relies on Guts. Guts changed Griffith. Guts makes Griffith irrational. Griffith has never said anything like, “I want you,” to anyone else, ever. Presumably Griffith has never actually wanted anything or anyone but his dream before. In risking his life for him, Griffith also risks his all-important dream, and Casca won’t let Guts take Griffith’s dream down with him. It’s as if… as if…
So, let’s summarize what we know about Griffith now.
He needs to achieve his dream for the sake of the dead. In doing so, he can prove to himself that he has no reason to feel guilty, or dirty, or ashamed, because it was all meant to be. And he himself has no real understanding of this – he denies and rationalizes it. He would never think of himself as someone consumed by guilt or self-loathing, he’d just let a child predator fuck him so he can feel like he’s sacrificing something of himself too, then justify it with cool logic while calling himself unclean and tearing his arms up the next morning, and then bury all of that under that mask of perfection so no one else ever knows and he can even deny it to himself.
And we know Guts has changed him, to the point where Casca sees Guts as a direct threat to Griffith’s dream.
This is who Griffith is. He exists and functions in this state of guilt and self-loathing, and he is constantly repressing it for the sake of the image of a perfect leader he shows the Hawks, except in the few self-destructive moments when it seeps out. His dream is a self-perpetuating coping mechanism. He manages to live with himself through the belief that if he achieves it, it means fate is putting a seal of approval on everything he’s done on the road to achieving it, but in the meantime the bodies and the dirty deeds pile up and the emotional toll on Griffith continues to rise.
But Guts makes him forget that dream.
So let’s see what happens when Guts is introduced into his life.
neogriffith = outside perception of griffith; the image he portrays
femto = griffith’s perception of himself, coloured by self-loathing
So how about Griffith’s self loathing and his need to change the world to basically prove himself worthy of being a leader, or even just worthy of living with death on his conscience?
Lol I’m glad he doesn’t hate Griffith, it always sucks when your friends hate the characters you like. But yeah I definitely agree that his theory doesn’t really make sense. Though at the moment I only have manga related reasons because I haven’t watched the entire anime in years and years.
tbh the main thing I’d want to say in response is that if Griffith was evil all along and secretly planning to sacrifice his friends from the start then Berserk is a really boring story.
Like in what way is a story about a sinister dude manipulating his friends for power more interesting than a story about a dude with good intentions being driven to the point where he feels like sacrificing his friends is the correct moral choice?
Or how is a story about a dude whose bff turned out to be a lying dick all along better than a story about two dudes who love each other (platonically if he doesn’t ship it) accidentally ruining their relationship through a complex character-based misunderstanding and being torn apart in an epic way?
Berserk is great because its characters are complex and interesting and have a ton of layers, and interpreting Griffith as evil all along just makes it shallow and boring.
Though if you want concrete evidence that Griffith isn’t evil I’d point out stuff like Griffith asking Guts “do you think I’m cruel?” and Guts being the one to reassure him that killing people is nbd and his dream is worth it. And Griffith risking his life (and, consequently, his dream) for no reason to save Guts from Zodd. I mean I guess if you think Griffith somehow knows what the behelit is you could argue that he knew he’d survive, but lol.
There’s Griffith ignoring the nobles to rescue Guts and Casca, which is also a risk to his dream because he’s supposed to be sucking up to them.
There’s Griffith self harming while denying his feelings of guilt, which is the most obvious indication that he has extreme feelings of guilt I’ve ever seen (especially in combination with the aforementioned “do you think I’m cruel?”)
There’s Griffith reaching to grab Guts as he falls during the first few minutes of the Eclipse, even despite Guts being the source of his despair.
tbh the problem is that if his premise is “Griffith knew he needed sacrifices so he valued his friends lives only so he could sacrifice them later,” those examples still might not convince him. You could show him this bit from the manga (idk if it’s repeated at all in the anime):
Griffith’s sacrifice canonically wouldn’t work if he didn’t feel genuine love for them, and if he’s been planning to sacrifice them the whole time then he obviously doesn’t really love them. For him to be able to sacrifice Guts and Casca etc he has to care about them so much it’s like they’re part of him.
Also there’s always the fact that the Godhand had to take him on a guilt trip and convince him that he has to sacrifice his friends for the sake of thousands of people who already died for his dream, which would hardly be necessary if he already knew how the behelit worked and wanted to sacrifice everyone anyway.
(oh and btw if he’s thinking Griffith’s “I will choose the place where you die” line is an indication that he’s evil and knows about the sacrifice, the better explanation for that is that it’s a reference to Griffith’s guilt for leading people, like that one kid, to their deaths. he’s owning that fact, because as a mercenary leader it’s p much true – people die in the battles he fights on the road to his dream. by stating it up front he’s denying and repressing his feelings of guilt. It also sets up the mentality that leads to him making the choice to sacrifice, and it’s foreshadowing. But it doesn’t mean Griffith literally knows he’s going to sacrifice Guts in a magic ritual – it means he’s already mentally prepared to sacrifice his followers in battle for his dream.
Mental preparation that, as we saw in flashback, came with a dose of self-harm and sacrificing himself as well in a way by sleeping with a predatory pedophile, so, hardly an indication of evil.)
Man ia Guts’ love for Griffith is ignored way too much, but also yeah reducing Griffith’s love for Guts down to ~evil possessiveness~ is one of my pet peeves.
imo he’s possessive because he’s stunted emotionally (like most of Berserk’s cast lol), but that doesn’t mean he only loves Guts as an asset, it means he has v little ability to recognize and compartmentalize his emotions so he responds to extreme feelings generally pretty badly.
Like Guts is compared to Griffith’s dream a lot which to me is saying that when Griffith fell in love with Guts he’d never felt so strongly about anything else, other than his dream. (”I want you, Guts.” “Griffith’s never said a thing like that… not to anybody!”) And because his whole raison d’etre is seizing his dream, now that something else makes him feel the same amount of need and desire, he “must obtain” him. He has no other frame of reference for what he’s feeling lol.
But in actual action he’s not controlling. Guts does whatever the fuck he wants in battle and Griffith plans around it, eg. Griffith asks Guts to help him out with his assassinations, which the narrative specifically draws attention to, and Guts is the one who wants it to be an order. Griffith risks his life and dream for Guts multiple times and can never explain why. Griffith, according to Casca, doesn’t control Guts enough as a leader. Griffith self-consciously asks Guts if he thinks he’s cruel for asking him (or maybe ordering him after Guts’ response to Griffith phrasing it as a question for the first assassination) to help him with the bonfire assassinations. Griffith’s whole speech about friendship is about desiring an equal who he doesn’t own, and can’t control, and his monologue in the torture chamber is about realizing that Guts was that person.
I really love Griffith’s inner monologue during the second duel because it’s such a powerful emotional breakdown imo, and it feels so childish to me. It seems like he’s falling back on “you can’t leave, I own you” because he has nothing else, no other way to respond to the thought of being abandoned, no other way to contextualize what he’s feeling. He’s clinging to a sense of ownership bc it’s the only part of his relationship to/feelings for Guts he really understands, and it’s a defense against the uncontrollable messiness of his feelings – a way to repress his love and need and feelings of rejection and loss and self-loathing, and a way to repress his realization of “when did someone I was supposed to have in hand… instead gain such a strong hold over me?” – that ultimately fails.
It just feels so consistent with the childish aspects of Griffith’s character, and the part of him that represses his emotions until they seep out in horrifying ways (eg self harm, risky sex, thinking it’s better to risk killing Guts than to let him “reject” him, etc).
Idk basically I like Griffith’s possessiveness because it’s a flaw that rears its ugly head to fuck up his relationship with Guts, and is actually entirely counter-productive to the relationship he genuinely wants with Guts (equality). But it’s nowhere close to the be-all end-all of his feelings for him.
“You should have known. This is the man I am. You of all people.”
NeoGriffith’s “you of all people” imo is a reference to “ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?” The moment the Godhand shows Griffith to convince him to make the sacrifice, because Guts was prioritizing his dream more than Griffith was and telling him to do whatever’s necessary to achieve it. And the moment that made Griffith believe that Guts saw how dirty/cruel/etc he was and decided to leave him because of it.
That’s what Griffith thinks. NeoGriffith seems a little bitter about it, probably thanks to that beating heart making him less unemotional than he’d like.
Guts doesn’t actually think that. To him the kind of man Griffith was was someone who cared about people, who did some fucked up shit for his dream but felt bad about it and needed reassurance, and who was driven to a point of desperation where he’d sacrifice his friends bc Guts left him and he was tortured for a year (”[Was I] the one who drove you…? Was I the one who brought all this upon you?”)
I find it rly curious that “You of all people,” leads directly, on the same page even, to Guts thinking about NeoGriffith saving Casca, and looking like he’s wondering about it.
It’s obvious that Guts still sees NeoGriff as a monster, given how pissed off he was about his ‘lol idgaf’ attitude towards the Eclipse and the fact that it’s still a struggle not to slip back into revenge mode. But he did watch NeoGriff save Casca from falling rocks for no apparent reason, and now he’s thinking about it while thinking about NeoGriffith saying he should’ve known what kind of man he is.
I mean if you go along with my explanation that part of why Griffith was so devastated when Guts left is bc he was convinced that Guts saw him the way he saw himself,
as a cruel and filthy monster climbing over corpses to get to a castle,
then what Griffith did when he made the sacrifice is choose to transform into and fully embody that version of himself, wiping away everything about him that belies it (or trying to). “You should have known. This is the man I am. You of all people.”
tl;dr Guts left because he admired and loved Griffith, Griffith thought he left because he was disgusted by him, and NGriff is referencing his belief here.
In that final page I think Guts dismisses the issue and decides to focus his attention on Casca – after this as far as I remember he doesn’t think about NGriff’s weird contradictory behaviour again. But I have to wonder if it’s going to come back with a vengeance, alongside the fact that Guts and Griffith both have very different perceptions of what kind of man Griffith was.
i was browsing thru all the pages i have saved looking for smthn to talk about and this one here hit me with the sudden thought:
what if those scratch marks aren’t from that day, but earlier?
idk the way we’re in the midst of the sex scene and then Griffith’s first startling, intruding memory isn’t Guts leaving but Guts saying “you believe that, don’t you?” back after the assassination, followed by the reveal of the marks on Griffith’s shoulder made me go hmm.
Last time I talked about those scratches I mentioned that Griffith showed up at Charlotte’s window in the same clothes he was wearing during the duel so if the marks came from that day you have to imagine him holing up in his room, taking his clothes off, self-harming, and then redressing – which is fine, but it’s an extra step you have to add yourself as a reader, and therefore a little counter-intuitive.
Whereas the placement of panels here feels like cause and effect to me.
Last time we saw Griffith self harming it was while talking about his “blood-soaked dream,” after doing something that makes him feel dirty for the sake of that dream. This time we see SI marks after a panel in which Guts reminds him about that dream and calls his resolve into question, after doing something that makes him feel dirty for the sake of the dream (the assassinations).
Why does Guts question his resolve? Because Griffith needed emotional reassurance from Guts – he needed Guts to tell him he wasn’t cruel for involving him, for “dirtying” Guts by proxy, essentially (”I involved you in this filthy scheme… and I didn’t even get my hands dirty.”) Like I think he needs reassurance that he isn’t dragging Guts down or making him feel dirty himself by virtue of being close to him, and involving him in the darker aspects of his rise to the top. And Guts’ response to that is only to remind him that it’s necessary.
So my point is that “do you think I’m cruel” is another version of “is it… too dirty?” Is he dirty, are people going to feel disgusting too if they get close to him, if they know about what he’s done?
So imagine: Guts tells Griffith, hey, w/e man all this fucked up shit is necessary for your dream. You believe that, don’t you? Griffith does this:
And then he thinks about Guts’ words while he’s getting ready for bed that night or bathing the next morning, thinks about what he’s done and what he’s had Guts do for the sake of his dream, thinks about Guts asking, “you believe that, don’t you?” and tears up his shoulder, convincing himself that he does believe it, the same way he tore up his arms in the river as he talked himself through how necessary it is to dirty himself for his “blood-smeared” dream.
(And it’s been a month since then but lbr if he’s scratching as deep as he did last time those marks would still be very visible here.)
And then Guts leaves. And Griffith thinks it’s because he feels dirty by proxy, because Griffith revealed too much of himself and Guts didn’t like what he saw, because of his dream.
Griffith remembers, “you believe that, don’t you?” and he remembers Guts walking away.
He’s remembering when he hurt himself and why, he’s telling himself, “yes I believe it, it’s necessary, even if it’s why you left my dream is worth it. This is the evidence.” He traces those marks but this time he doesn’t scratch himself.
He’s finally lost his conviction, because losing Guts isn’t worth it and there’s no way he can convince himself that it is.
(this is kind of built on a lot of stuff i wrote here lol, hopefully it makes sense without that but just in case there’s a pseudo part one.)
ps if griffith already had those self-inflicted marks on his shoulder when guts won the duel a hair’s breadth away from wounding griffith exactly on that spot… well griffith self harms as an expression of his feelings of guilt and to drive himself towards his dream. feels symbolic of guts obliterating that dream and being a stronger force than griffith’s guilt, at least for a while.
look how surprised griffith is by the hawks’ outpouring of emotion when they learn he’s not dead after all.
guts never asked him, he only thought it, but i think that it
wouldn’t’ve even crossed griffith’s mind that faking his own death is
cruel to the hawks. he’s worried about whether asking guts to kill people for him is cruel, not about whether keeping the hawks in the dark is.
this is after he succeeded, after he’s paved
their way, and when he’s no longer useful to them as a military leader. i
don’t think he ever thought they actually cared about him beyond that
enough to be distraught over his “death.”
Yeah I once talked about this in a conversation with someone here, where the other person held the argument that Griffith was an extremely self- entitled person who was aware of his influence and used it knowingly. And they actually made really good points. But then I brought up this incident in my mind.
And I’ve realised that there is a pattern regarding Griffith looking really surprised whenever someone does something for HIM.
There’s this. There’s how surprised he looks when Charlotte starts crying after he gets shot. When Charlotte takes the dart for him. When Guts defends him in front of the Godhand.
And it’s crazy. That for someone who says things like ‘thereby have I held so many lives in this hand’ he’s strangely unaware of the affect he has on others and mostly of the autonomous actions they may take, independent of him, for him.
As confident as Griffith is in his ability to manipulate situations and people, he has very low expectations of them.
Griffith never expects anyone to care. Hell he never even expected that anyone would ever rescue him from the tower. He didn’t expect Guts to come back.
I think Griffith has conditioned himself to not expect or hope for things which are beyond the things he knows he can Induce on his own.
Which is why even the simplest unpredicted kindness throws him so off balance.
Yeah ia!
And not to sound like someone who reduces Griffith down to sociopath tendencies lol but I think part of it is that people genuinely caring for him is beyond his ability to control?
Like when he thinks about how he’s always been different than other people, some ppl hate him and some ppl love him but no one can disregard him, etc, it boils down to what he can do for people or to them. It’s his charisma inspiring people or intimidating people, and it’s the way he’s a bug in the heavily structured class system that either gives people hope or makes people afraid of him bringing change.
Idk if I really noticed surprise when Charlotte freaked out over the arrow, but definitely when she took the dart for him I got the sense that he was very taken aback bc like… he’d crafted this perfect boyfriend image around her to make her fall for him, but she still loved him after that image fell apart and he was no longer able to appear perfect to her.
Which is also partly why Guts leaving destroyed him so hard – bc once again Guts was an exception who got to see more facets of Griffith, including the less likeable and realer ones, making his response to Griffith a genuine reflection of him and outside of his control.
Yk like if someone hates you because you’ve made yourself hatable to them deliberately (eg griffith climbing the social ladder) that’s nbd, but if someone hates you because they know you, that’s tough, and it’s worse for Griffith than most people because he doesn’t let anyone else know him. Of course Guts doesn’t hate him, but yk, Griff thinks he does.
And relatedly I think Griffith receiving affection and love post-torture would’ve been a huge game-changing deal for him (and probably really emotionally intense and difficult to take too) because of this attitude, but beyond a few moments here and there misunderstandings made shit go south before Guts had the chance to demonstrate his love (Guts defending Griff from the Godhand was a gr8 moment but by then it seemed like too little too late).
Like if someone loves you because you’ve made yourself a perfect wonderful leader to them, that’s nbd, if someone loves you when you’ve been totally broken physically and nearly broken mentally and emotionally that’s a lot more meaningful. Especially if it’s Guts, because again, Guts is the one who’s seen him at his least likeable.
Idk basically this is my take on Griffith being super emotionally defensive and guarded, part 2048392002
Well so far these are probably my favourite pages of the Fantasia arc (+ the slap ofc)
Rickert’s speech as a whole is just breathtaking, Rickert pointing out the difference in the insignias, the present tense of “I am led by the white-winged Griffith” showing he still respects Griffith as he was but considers this guy not to be him, Griffith’s only words are an acknowledgement of that difference – “…so it is” -, the hair over Griffith’s eyes suggesting he is feeling feelings and we just don’t get to know what they are, Rickert’s smile of pride when he talks about the Band he considers himself a part of…
it’s just so good
I personally don’t feel that whatever is being shaded over in Griffith’s face is malice.
I think it’s him having to face the consequences, or at least feel them up close for the first time after the eclipse granted him the powers to enable his escapism. I think Griffith is slowly coming to realise that the numbness he weaponised and clung to on transforming to Femto is sort of out of commission as of his rebirth.
But he’s going to pretend it’s still there for his audiences’ benefit right till the end.
I am actually looking forward to Griffith looking back on what he did and actually looking at it from the human perspective he now has. Back when he made the decision he wasn’t even close to thinking rationally , the decision was influenced by despair and the mindscape fuckery Conrad and Ubik were indulging in and I always saw Griffith’s decision more as motivated from wanting an escape from his current emotional mess rather than a grab for power–but I digress.
My point was that the Eclipse wasn’t a result of Griffith’s clear thinking or reflection which we know he has always been capable of because he wasn’t in the state of mind to be able to do that then. But now he does. Honestly Neo- Grifffith most probably has a fair bit of time on his hand s right now. And I’d love for him to get thinking.
Put in perspective the fact that the nameless bodies he’d decided to ‘pile up’ back then to try and give meaning to the cries of the mangled corpses pleading with him in his mindscape at that very moment- were not nameless or faceless.
These were people he knew, had memories with, had cared about.
And having Rickert come up and spell it out, REMIND him.
I want that to fuck him up. And I’m pretty sure it’s happening too.
Guilt has always been an emotion Griffith feels strongly, maybe even one of the strongest tributaries to his ambition.Its what caused the Gennon incident and it’s arguably what caused the Eclipse.
Bring that back Miura, Please.
P.S. – I am a hundred percent sure it was Locus not Griffith who sent Rakshas after Rickert. Like dude was raving mad about that slap.Broke a wall.
Yk, take the “so you could bury your fragile human heart” line to the count, add Puck pointing out that the Count is still human even though he denies it (like you said in that other response – apostles are in a way almost extra human, I totally agree), add Rosine fucking up because Jill was in danger, especially add Ganeshka’s terrified isolation when he ascended to a higher plane, and add Femto’s failure to kill Guts and NeoGriff’s heartbeat, and I’m js the groundwork is so laid out for NeoGriffith to start demonstrating some intriguing emotions (to the audience if not other people) that you could build a skyscraper on that foundation.
I could see him questioning his own identity after going through 3 magical transformation sequences and Rickert straight up calling him not-Griffith, the way Ganeshka started screaming “WHO AM I.” I could definitely see isolation. I could definitely see longing – for Guts obviously, for an equal in general – and of course if the guilt made a comeback (and esp after Rickert’s speech I could see that too) I’d be ecstatic.
I could see him feeling cut off from his past as a human (or viewing it like a dream a la what the Godhand said as he transformed) and growing perturbed by that rather than content.
Like okay when he became Femto his heart “froze.” Hence the “strange… I don’t feel anything” while the Band were gruesomely dying etc. How that works with wanting to hurt Guts and then not being able to kill him is anyone’s guess, but we know that when he became NeoGriffith his heart started beating again. I could accept, if Miura wants to go this direction, that he’s basically Griffith now (I mean he’s he’s made of flesh and blood again rather than astral plane evil, and his frozen heart has thawed right back up), just ascended to a higher plane of existence and therefore much more capable of distancing himself from human concerns. At least until his past comes for him.
(Also as an aside yeah I totally agree that a big part of his motivation for making the sacrifice was escaping his own emotional vulnerability – both wrt the guilt and wrt his love for Guts.)
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