Tag: wingsfreedom

wingsfreedom
replied to your post “Have you noticed that in the movie Griffith doesn’t have the single…”

I think Griffith traumatised himself for losing the duel, so he simply hurt himself on the same place Gut’s sword “hit” him. It’s the pain of losing the battle.

yeah i could also see that as an explanation, and it’s actually what i used to think. like ngl i really like the idea of griffith scratching himself because guts’ sword didn’t even touch him. nicely fits the sexualized scar discussion later on between guts and casca too lol. “I too want a wound that I can say you gave me” js.

these days i’m very solidly on my tombstone of flame related explanation, but yeah yours is also gr8.

wingsfreedom
replied to your post “the end of the lost children arc fucks me up because i find rosine’s…”

Their mothers weren’t abusive though. In Berserk most fathers were abusive to the kids AND their wives. What often hold these poor girls from escaping is their loving mothers, even though the core problem is their dads. (Dads in general are either too nice or assholes, there’s no in betweem. But I don’t remember any nice dad in berserk)

godo is the closest we get to a good father in berserk i think lol.

but i mean yeah it’s true that the abusive fathers in the lost children arc also abuse their wives, but jill’s mother has nothing to do with why she decided to stay, she’s basically a non-entity. rosine sacrificed both her parents, but it’s not like she only regrets sacrificing her mother, she regrets sacrificing both, and no distinction is drawn between them.

their more sympathetic mothers don’t really have any effect or impact on the narrative from what i recall.

The first idea I got from the last expresstion from Griffith before he start transforming into Femto: he was pleased with the latest developments. He got his “making his dream reality” hope comes anew, and he has nothing to do with Guts anymore. What do you think about it? I saw you say he meant to give Guts last love smile. Can you explain more, please?

image

I think it really just comes down to how you interpret Miura’s facial expressions but to me this looks tender and loving.

It’s Griffith’s last glimpse of Guts, after choosing to sacrifice him but before he starts shedding pieces of himself and transforming, and seeing that love in his eyes just makes this moment for me lol.

He’s content with his decision, there’s no anguish there or second guessing or wishing it could’ve been another way. It’s maybe even relishing this last glimpse of Guts, and of being able to feel that love without it also like, causing him pain, because he knows this is the end of it.

I mean I’m just reading really into it because this is how I see Griffith and his feelings at the end of his story, but I think it fits the image.

I think your interpretation is fair and makes sense, like, he does look pleased and I think he is, but the look in his eye is just so damn tender, yk? Like he’s saying goodbye, without malice, and just drinking in the last sight of Guts he’ll ever have. I think love is definitely part of this moment.

wingsfreedom
replied to your post

“I saw someone claim to be psychiatrists with degree in psychology made…”

I really like charismatic villains with relatable qualities and have ruthless yet affective morality. I find their dark sides quite fantasting for me to explore, and discover more potential and good sides to them while still enjoying their whole characterization.
but seeing people throw around terms
like “seicopath”, “psychopath”, “pure evil”, “born evil” and tons of
hate, really pisses me off and make feel insecure. They made many great
antagonists seem nothing more than an irredeemable insane piece of shit
the moment they were born who’s just danger and deserve to die.

yeah same, most of my favourite characters have done terrible things lol, and if they’re my faves it’s usually because I find their motives or their thought processes when they do those things sympathetic and/or understandable. Part of the point of fiction is that you can explore dark stuff you can’t explore in real life. There is no safer space to engage w/ some of the darker aspects of the world/humanity because it’s not real, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with sympathizing with people who’ve done terrible things in fiction, because it’s fiction and no one was actually harmed.

It sucks that people make you feel insecure about it when there’s nothing wrong with that, and most of these villains are meant to be complex and interesting and compelling and even likeable. The ppl who flatten those characters are the ones misinterpreting the story, usually.

further thoughts/clarification under cut bc I feel like leaving this reply on “it’s fiction so who cares” opens me up to discourse I might as well nip in the bud

People like to argue this point by saying that fiction can affect reality and perpetuate harmful concepts and ideas. And this is true.

fiction can be harmful when it replicates damaging tropes and when it pushes problematic messages either accidentally or purposefully, and frankly fiction that pushes the message that some people are born irredeemably evil and some people are born good and can do no wrong is imo much more harmful than fiction that explores, say, what would drive a sympathetic person to sacrifice a bunch of his friends. (not that Berserk has no harmful tropes/messages lol, but imo the exploration of morality in Griffith’s narrative isn’t one of them)

like, to use a very well-known and v blatant example lol, harry potter with its kind of badly written black and white morality and oppression metaphors is probably more damaging than a lot of stories with moral greys.

harry potter has its offensive werewolf aids metaphor ft a metaphorical pedophile who deliberately infects children (thx jk), its pure evil villain who is evil because his mother didn’t love him enough to die for him, its magical fantasy racism parallels used to make death eaters irredeemable but also used as a source of cute humour when, eg, it comes to Arthur Weasley’s patronizing attitude towards the fictional oppressed class, its house elf slavery thing that is just weird as fuck, its pure good protagonist who can use the same “unforgiveable” torture curse as the villains and get a shoulder pat for it, etc etc.

People who uncritically sympathize with the good characters in Harry Potter and uncritically hate the bad guys and expect everyone else to do the same are buying into these offensive aspects of the story and not even realizing it.

And basically I think a lot of people just find it easier to say that sympathizing with villains is bad because they do bad things, and to flatten their characters in an attempt to ignore any complexity that leads to sympathy/relatability/empathy/etc, than it is to actually analyze fiction and figure out where the actual problematic messages are coming from.

Like this is how you get people saying Griffith fans are rape apologists in the same breath they use to excuse Guts sexually assaulting Casca. It’s easier to say the problem lies with the fans who sympathize with the antagonist, rather than the story itself, or their own flat conceptions of the characters that don’t allow for sympathy when it comes to Griffith and, conversely and kind of disturbingly, condemnation when it comes to Guts.

Boiling it down to the idea that bad people sympathize with Voldemort or Draco or Griffith or whoever and good people sympathize with Harry or Guts is idiotic. “Bad” people (this is a uselessly vague phrase but w/e) are just as capable of sympathizing with the protagonists, and in fact I think are probably much more likely to relate to the hero rather than the villain because they’d tend to lack the self awareness necessary to see themselves as the villain.

wingsfreedom replied to your post “It really bums me that people are hung up on all bad things Griffith…”

I often feel fans of righteous characters are more problematic and scary than fans of villains. They have this tendency to see villains in the worst possible light because it makes the good characters look even better. And some of them just prefer villains that’re totally evil, they find such good vs evil narrative more satisfying, it’s simple, black and white, no debate, no ambiguity, pure feel good story.

lol i completely agree.

under a cut bc i went on a long barely relevant rant about The Discourse lmao

i keep trying to turn this into an organized essay about how much i hate tumblr discourse, villaincourse in this case, but tbh i just don’t have the stamina to dig into that subject properly lol. so just like, suffice to say, hating obviously flawed and/or villainous characters and their fans while loving less obviously flawed and/or heroic characters, and calling that a moral position to take, is really fucked up and just demonstrates such a total inability to actually engage critically with fiction that idk how ppl take fans like that seriously.

and when i say “inability to engage with fiction critically” i mean they take things at such face value it’s ridiculous. The narrative says this character is good, therefore they’re good. The narrative says this character is bad, therefore they’re bad. This generally fails to take into account things like rampant gay coding of villains, heroes demonstrating mainstream conservative ideals, “loveable misogynist” protags who often still get the pure cinnamon roll treatment, the fact that pretty much all mainstream media is going to be unprogressive at its core because it’s literally “mainstream,” american exceptionalism propaganda everywhere, women reduced to love interest roles, women objectified by the camera, lack of diversity, assumption of a straight white man as the audience, assumption that anyone other than a straight white man is harder to identify with, villains who are “evil” because they take resistance against the privileged class too far, stories where the heroes and villains do the same thing but when the heroes do it it’s justified or excusable and when the villains do it it’s a sign that they’re evil, stories where ugly = bad and beauty = good, stories where ugliness is foreignness (to britain/north america/majority white countries) and beauty is white, the way there hasn’t been a blockbuster film with a textually non-straight main character ever, mental illness symptoms as signs of evil, monsters as unknowable other, etc etc etc etc

anyway all that shit has v little to do with berserk (tho some def applies), i just had to get some of it out of my system lol.

my basic point is just that, to bring this back and use an example from Berserk, if someone can’t see that eg it’s fucked up that Griffith is not only a gay coded and textually feminine antagonist, but gets even more gender non conforming looking when he becomes Femto, and it’s fucked up that the protagonist sexually assaults his girlfriend and we’re still meant to root for him, etc, then they absolutely do not have the necessary skill set to call other people out for problematic taste in fictional characters with any authority.

If you can’t or refuse to see the ways the thing you like is problematic, the last thing you should be doing is calling fans of other things problematic. Log, eye, etc. Tbh even if you can critique your own faves you shouldn’t be pointing fingers imo – you can’t know exactly why someone likes the thing they like, whether they’re aware it’s problematic (maybe more aware than you), whether they’re able to compartmentalize that fact and why, and those are all things you need to know before declaring a group of fans Bad for what fictional entertainment they like.

tl;dr

everything is problematic. golden retriever cinnamon roll characters are problematic, your favourite blockbuster is problematic, hollywood is problematic, anime is problematic, cartoons are problematic, magic fantasy oppression parallels are problematic, guts is problematic, griffith is problematic, casca is problematic, tumblr demanding that women be arbiters of morality is ironically problematic (misogynist) as fuck, etc etc. at least ime villain fans tend to be a little more aware on average that what they like is problematic, as opposed to people who think it’s intrinsically more moral to like heroes.

wingsfreedom
replied to your post

“Do you think that human!Griffith/ Charlotte and Guts/Casca are good…”

Yes all of this. And as much as I dislike this theory: I think when Casca gets her mind back Muira will continue use her as a plot device to add more drama + drive the plot, because I find Casca has a weird connection with the Moon Light Child (her son) and he share the same body with Neo-Griffith, so she may mistaken she still has feelings for Griffith? And that will throw Guts of the edge more somehow when he finds out? It’s just a theory tho…

this sounds like such a worst case scenario and i really really hope it’s incorrect, but yeah you never know. I do have to wonder how the moonlight kid figures into everything, and it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that miura would go there.

wingsfreedom
replied to your post “Oh yeah, Griffith being dead will effectively kill his potential…”

Good points. As much as I like Griffith character, I think he will die in the end. But will remembered as a hero nonetheless.

ty! and yeah tbh this seems likely to me. A hero in the eyes of the world at least. Maybe not the audience so much, but if we see a glimpse of humanity first I’ll be satisfied. (tbh I want to see him hesitate while fighting Guts or something.)

You mentioned something before about Muria’s “shit writing sometimes” what do you mean by that?

Under a cut because I don’t like to be rly critical of Berserk out in the open lol.

iirc the context of me using that specific phrase was both the Eclipse rape and Griffith’s night with Charlotte.

I think the Eclipse rape was absolutely terrible writing (well, storytelling, let’s say, because a lot of what’s bad about it is in the art) for several reasons:

1. destroys Casca as a character to make Guts feel bad and motivate him.

2. objectifies and eroticizes Casca during the rape (v sexualized angles, lots of t+a, overlong and overly graphic, etc), either to titilate the straight dude audience or bc Miura doesn’t know how else to depict the sexual assault of women.

3. totally overwrites Guts’ own childhood trauma – now his worst memories, the stuff that makes him feel the “worst he ever feels” is something that happened to someone else, who doesn’t even get a reaction to her own pain because her mind is basically wiped. I find this really unfortunate because I liked that Guts had actual personal trauma instead of the more typical for dude protagonists trauma-by-proxy. And it’s not realistic that he would get over it after one flashback and confession to Casca, but that is what we’re shown happened – because after that his childhood trauma is never referred to again, except in one flashback chapter featuring teenager Guts. It’s lazy writing imo, and it ruins an interesting and personal traumatic backstory that manly dude protagonists almost never get by replacing it with a dime-a-dozen misogynist fridged girlfriend backstory.

4. tbh it is really jarring and fucked up how you spend 2 emotional chapters with Casca, in her head from her point of view, as she fights and runs with Judeau, and then the 2nd chapter ends with a bunch of tentacles ripping her clothes off and suddenly you’re back with Guts and you never get Casca’s perspective again. tonally it’s a mess – heartfelt tragedy to pornographic objectification within a page – and it’s just so emblematic of how Miura treats Casca as a character. Her main function in the story is to be objectified and assaulted and saved by men, and when she gets good, relatable and empathetic character moments they’re short-lived before she becomes a damsel again.

4.5. and speaking of perspective, it’s fucked up that this horrible experience that breaks Casca’s mind is shown from Guts’ perspective. We’re meant to be relating to his horror at seeing his former best friend raping his girlfriend, we’re not meant to be relating to Casca in this moment. During her previous rape attempts we at least got her perspective on it, we were shown her fear, we heard her thoughts. But not here – here she’s just a violated body existing to traumatize Guts.

5. Based on Miura saying he had Guts and Casca get together just to make the Eclipse more dramatic it strongly suggests to me that not only was her rape solely there to make Guts feel bad and give Femto something to do to make everyone hate him, he wrote her out as a character afterwards because he didn’t know what to do with her – she wasn’t around during the Black Swordsman arc so he had to throw her away for a while, then turn her into nothing more than a symbol of Guts’ humanity, with no character of her own. (Actually tbh Miura didn’t even need to say he threw Guts and Casca together for drama, that comes across pretty clear to me in the writing lol. When I read that my reaction was pretty much just a sense of validation.)

6. Also regressing into a walking infant is not a realistic reaction to trauma, it’s just storytelling convenience, and Casca’s current character as basically a child with an often still sexualized adult body skeeves me out.

Okay that’s enough about the Eclipse rape. I really, really hate it tbh lol.

I also mentioned the scene where Griffith and Charlotte fuck, and more briefly I think that’s bad writing because Miura literally wrote a rape scene – Charlotte said “no” – and then he treated it as consensual sex narratively because Charlotte got into it partway through. Which is very typical male writer bad writing, it’s something you see a LOT – prim virgin has to protest to show that she’s pure and proper, but the dude is good at sex so she soon realizes how great it is and everything’s okay – and it’s really misogynist and fucked up. It’s offensive writing, and it’s just plain bad writing because what we see depicted (rape) isn’t what we’re told happened (consensual sex that Charlotte enjoyed and has no misgivings about and the negative part is that Griffith is a self-destructive idiot who seduced her too soon and ended up in a dungeon for it, not that she said no).

If there was even a hint that Miura recognizes it as rape, some context showing that Charlotte’s feelings about it are complicated, anything like that, I’d be more okay with it, but there’s really nothing. Charlotte adores him to pieces afterwards and the king is angry because he’s a rapist creep, not because he’s protective or anything. Tbh I wholeheartedly approved of the film version’s choice to give Charlotte more agency and have her ask Griffith to stay and move his hand to her chest herself. It seems more in keeping with the spirit of the scene and Charlotte’s feelings about it.

In a more general sense, basically I think Miura as a storyteller has a lot of strengths, but he also has a lot of flaws. Like overall I find Miura’s strengths as a writer are enough to keep me going through the bad stuff, but sometimes it’s a struggle lol and I like to complain about it occasionally. Not all his flaws revolve around rape or offensive writing choices (like eg I think he walks a fine line with tone and sometimes his lighthearted moments come across as jarring, interrupting the flow of action, or awkward), but those are the ones that really stand out and that I’m most likely to describe as shitty writing lol.

I have a theory that Guts will use the Behelit to sacrifice Griffith himself in their final battle. I mean Casca is already sacrificed, but Guts’ second most important person is STILL Griffith. If he did, he will turn into complete Beast of Darkness who has basically *nothing* hold him back from his pray Griff. (We don’t know what the ending of Berserk would be like, but Gruff(Femto) vs Guts is something would definitely happen). What do you think? :/

man I’m pretty into this as a concept. Like I personally think Griffith is still his most important person, and it feels appropriately cyclical to me. Guts’ vengeful obsession with Griffith finally turning him into a monster and equalizing them. (well it wouldn’t really be equals if guts just became an apostle, but symbolically it could work? or hell maybe the elfhelm timeskip is 200 some years and he comes back just in time for the next eclipse lol)

I don’t rly know how likely it is, since it seems like way more of a downer ending than Miura might like based on what he’s said in at least one interview. Especially since Guts would have to fall into despair first which probably means bye bye Guts’ rpg group. Plus it’s maybe a little too neat and on the nose? but on a v personal level I’d enjoy the hell out of Guts sacrificing NeoGriff.

I think Femto refused to kill Guts in the eclipse because he probably wanted him to live with this memory. Femto’s eyes are scarily cold and emotionless, but even then Griffith is way too complex character in any form he in. Being Griffith, Neo-Griffith or Femto don’t make him less complex. What do you think of the part I mentioned above? Is Femto wanted Guts to live with this memory or was “emotionally hesitated” or mix of both?

I think that’s a legit interpretation. I kind of like the emotionally hesitated idea a bit more because I’m a sap and I love antagonists who can’t bring themselves to actually kill their enemy lol. But yeah considering how petty and spiteful Femto is I think your interpretation def makes sense, or it could be a mix of both. Maybe Femto couldn’t bring himself to kill Guts and allowed himself to let him go by telling himself it’d be worse for him if he survived. That’s a pretty Griffith-esque type of denial.

Why do you think Neo-Griffith trying to deny the Eclipse? He even replaced each Hawk member with people similar to the old one in the Band of the Hawks. Neo-Griffith claimed that he’s “free”, but his actions speak otherwise. Is he afraid that he will feel guilty if he didn’t live in denial? Rickret’s slap surly force reality on him, and snap him out of his denial. But why Neo-Griffith pre-Rickret’s slap, trying to deny the Eclipse and perhaps his wrongdoings in it well?

@mastermistressofdesire had a post about this that I loved (i think in answer to an ask) but I can’t find it now bc I suck at tag organization 😦

But basically I agree with most of what you’re saying, I feel like NeoGriff’s half of the story with the Neo Band of the Hawk and Rickert calling him out is perfect set-up for a reveal that he has more emotions than we can see. Idk if I’d say he’s denying the Eclipse by rebuilding the Band, but I could see it being a denial of him having changed – “You of all people should have known – this is the man I am. Nothing has changed.”

mmod in her post on the subject mentioned that NGriff forming a new Band of the Hawk and inviting Rickert along seems like an indication that he wants approval/vindication from the last remaining member of the Hawks. And Rickert pointing out the differences in the insignias and saying Griffith was his leader, not the “Falcon of Light,” while NeoGriffith’s only response is to quietly agree, seems really important.

Like it’s the only time we’ve seen NGriff at a loss for words and at a disadvantage. And it’s when Rickert says he’s not his Griffith. I could easily see NGriff having some identity issues after this scene. (Especially after seeing Ganeshka ascend to a higher plane and totally lose his sense of identity.)

I do kind of wonder about NGriff’s capacity for guilt. It’s all in question bc we’ve seen his heart beating but since then we haven’t had any insight into his internal thoughts, so he’s feeling something but we don’t know what. Whether part of it is regret or guilt, idk. Guilt was such an important aspect of original Griff’s character that it wouldn’t surprise me if that returned in some form, if his emotions in general have.

(Also while searching for that post by mmod I found a different conversation with her that’s p relevant to this ask too, if you’re interested.)

Maybe this sound weird but what do you think of the people who say “I love Griffith because he’s super evil >:)” ?? Like I get why people hate Griffith but I think those Griffith “fans” miss out the whole point..

I think I pretty much agree – idk if I’ve really seen Griffith fans like this myself, but yk I’m sure they’re around.

tbh I feel like a lot of villain fans do this to avoid The Discourse about the ~evils of woobifying~ etc and I understand that. Fandom is fucking weird about moral purity rn and treating fictional characters as if they’re real people, and it’s hard in a lot of fandoms to talk about liking a villain without constantly putting a “BTW I’M NOT APOLOGIZING FOR THEM THEY’RE VERY EVIL AND BAD I JUST ENJOY VILLAINS” disclaimer up every time. So I sympathize w/ that urge. Fandom makes it hard to just enjoy characters without holding them up as either pure as the driven snow or irredeemably evil from birth.

But if they’re genuine about loving Griffith entirely because he’s oh so evil, then of all the antagonists to love Griffith makes v little sense to me bc before he becomes a demon he’s like… fine. He’s not a great person but he’s not a bad person, he has noble intentions, flaws and virtues, he’s a v good well-rounded character. I know a lot of people think Griffith was moustache-twirling evil all along but yk, they’re objectively wrong so lol.

Then after he becomes a demon he’s a petty evil dick for all of two appearances, one of which is a gratuitously depicted, grimdark-drama-for-the-sake-of-drama rape scene, and if that scene is what makes you love Griffith/Femto I’m definitely like gonna side-eye you. And I mean I don’t see anything wrong with liking Femto – I like Femto lol bc his pettiness mixed with inability to kill Guts is extremely amusing to me, plus his makeup is on point (and I love all gnc villains out of spite), but it’s very much despite the rape, not because of it.

And then as NeoGriff he comes back seemingly neutral, fulfilling the subconscious desires of humanity and committing no great acts of evil again. So yeah if you like super evil dark villains Griffith/Femto/NeoGriff is an odd choice to me.

Oh and as an aside I could kind of get liking him for his evil villainry if you liked him as Griffith and then felt personally betrayed when he sacrificed everyone. Like that was gr8 writing and feeling rly pissed off and then impressed by how mad you are, making you like him as a character bc of the emotional ride he took you on, makes sense to me. But I feel like that’s not really what you’re referring to.

So I guess tl;dr my answer boils down to it sounds p silly to me but I guess it depends on their exact reasons lol.

Do you find the word of “Griffith apologist” annoying?

You mean like, people throwing around the phrase as an accusation or insult? bc if so yeah lol. I try to avoid a lot of Berserk fandom other than my awesome little tumblr circle here so I don’t see it happen a lot thankfully. It seems like it’s mostly an accusation thrown at Griffith fans by people who are bad at nuance, compartmentalization and/or the concept of fiction and therefore believe everyone else is too, and so they think if someone likes Griffith as a character and/or empathizes with him then they must support all of his choices and actions.

Idk if it’s meant to include Femto’s actions or not lol, but either way it’s a meaningless buzzwordy phrase that doesn’t describe any kind of Griffith fan I’ve ever seen.