griffguts
berserk will never end
we're in this hell forever
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“Throbbing… A faint throbbing. My blood should have been frozen…”
I wanted to paint something to highlight the complexities of Guts’ and Griffith’s relationship post-eclipse. The hill of swords scene is really just one facet of it, but the pounding heart and forgotten rage speak volumes. I also added a few closeups because painting all of the details took me quite awhile! I learned a lot and had a ton of fun doing it, though.
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Just found out this morning that it was pocky day, and I’ve never drawn for it so I decided to do something real quick!
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“the instant i saw him, i’d forgotten my urge to kill.”
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interpreting characters as gay/sga is never going to be taken seriously because ‘gay’ stories and rich, complex, deeply compelling and relatable stories are assumed by cishets to be mutually exclusive l o l…. like the very fact people can find guts deep and compelling means he can’t be gay because to a straight dude the idea of being able to relate to a gay character is an absolute joke.
& of course straight people not being able to read the gayness inherent in a narrative (because they literally cant comprehend our lives, struggles, and discrimination) or to read between the lines, so to speak, means it’s objectively not there because they assume all literature and media is catered to them and that they’re objectively right about everything ever! therefore if they didnt pick up on it, it clearly isn’t there, because they’re not used to the idea of some experiences out there not being something meant for them to relate to!!! like, the idea of a deep and complex story being objectively well-written and compelling and NOT ABOUT STRAIGHT PEOPLE is fukin wild.
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miura was ratitouilled into writing gutsca and as such it is generally considered non-canonical by most scholars
#this is the first fundamental of berserk academia yall#how can u get into a berserk discussion without keeping this very important fact in mind =/
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I want to take a minute to explain my take on the Hound.
Basically he’s Guts’ equivalent to Griffith’s Femto, ie, the ~dark side~ of Guts, made out of swirling negative emotions like rage and fear and hatred etc. It’s likely due to the reality-warping brand on his neck that the Hound is given more form and will than most people’s dark sides, becoming more of a presence to Guts.
We know the Hound isn’t an external evil spirit trying to manipulate Guts or possess him because we see it in Godo’s spirit-repelling cave where Guts is guaranteed to be safe from mean external forces like ghosts.
Like, the nature of the Hound is basically spelled out in its first physical appearance:
This establishes that the Hound is a manifestation of Guts’ “malice” (among other negative emotions, like the fear Guts mentions). Godo says to Guts - “you ran away so that your own malice could burn within you.” That’s the dark flame Guts is referencing up there, which is essentially the Hound.
This also establishes that the Hound is real - it’s not just a metaphor for the audience’s sake, it’s a physical presence that Guts senses. It’s a part of Guts given ghostly form. When he argues with it he’s arguing with himself.
It’s explicitly compared to Femto a few chapters earlier, when the concept is shown to us, before it explicitly appears as an entity.
What Skull Knight means by “or else…” becomes clear on the following page where he finds Rosine’s behelit.
Reminding the audience that there are ways for men to become beasts.
We cut to Guts walking through a forest being taunted by all those asshole spirits, digging into his deep insecurities, locating sites of his self-loathing and using it to fuck with his mind.
They’re essentially voicing his thoughts for him.
Pointing out his inner darkness, similarly to how the spirit that possessed Farnese pointed out that she gets off on torture. They’re not making shit up here, what they say digs deep and fucks with people’s heads because it’s based on truth.
Here they explicitly compare the Hound to Femto.
And finally Guts’ response after they take off:
He’s completely right, and as we can figure out from the ominous shot of the behelit and the fact that this is Guts reaffirming his stupid self destructive revenge crusade, this isn’t the greatest attitude.
He is what he is, and the more he pursues revenge and soaks himself in blood etc the stronger the Hound part of him gets.
And just in case more evidence that the Hound is a part of Guts and not an external force is needed, there’s this:
“This… is my…”
After the armour transforms into the shape of the Hound, rather than Skull Knight’s Skull Knight:
Guts’ armour is Guts getting the power of his dark side that apostles get, without having to sacrifice a loved one first. If he became an apostle his monstrous form would look a lot like the Hound. If Griffith was in Guts’ place, his armour would look a lot like Femto.
Anyway yeah in short the Hound = Guts.
#i might have reblogged another meta about this years ago but this is important#so many ppl seem to think the hound is just some random demon and not a part of guts??#meta#Q
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I mentioned a while ago that the first time I feel we got a real visual* glimpse of Guts’ hound-esque inner darkness chronologically was during the rescue mission.
The way he cuts out the torturer’s tongue is very reminiscent of his tendency to torture apostles before killing them imo (which probably has its origins in the way he killed Donovan), and then he just rampages through the castle like a demonic one-man army, very black swordsman ish.
Look at this imagery like:
(i love Casca’s ‘holy shit dude’ expression)
Plus you got Charlotte saying he scares her, and the Wyald fight is when everyone starts comparing Guts to a monster and saying he’s inhuman.
So I was thinking - why? Why would we get this before the Eclipse, before he starts killing ghosts and infusing his sword with Essence of Darkness, before the brand + killing monsters make him literally superhuman? Why do we get our first look at monster slaying, revenge-obsessed, black swordsman Guts a day and only a day before the main event, the point of which is to make him revenge-obsessed, even takes place?
And I want to suggest that it’s because this is it - this is Guts’ revenge spree. It’s not one revenge spree that ends, followed immediately by another unrelated revenge spree. It’s the same rage. He killed the torturer like he kills apostles, then he fought an actual apostle to defend Griffith, then the Eclipse happened and he declared war.
It’s all intimately connected in Guts’ mind and emotions:
He started off on a vengeful rampage for Griffith in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt, and he continued on a vengeful rampage against Femto/NeoGriffith, also in part as a way of externalizing his own feelings of guilt.
We know this because as he’s running towards Griffith in the torture chamber Guts thinks about how it’s his fault that Griffith is there without actually coming to a proper conclusion (if that’s the case… then I -) - and he reaches that conclusion (was I the one who brought all this upon you?) right as he’s running towards Griffith at the site of the Eclipse. Guts’ guilt is strongly associated with his rage this way. Guilt followed by external target followed by lashing out.
Idk, there’s just such a through line to me from Casca telling him it’s his fault to the Eclipse. The most significant moments of Guts’ internal thoughts are given to him processing this information and finally concluding that he fucked up right before the Eclipse begins. The Eclipse didn’t then erase his feelings of guilt, it just let him continue to repress those feelings and gave him acceptable targets to lash out at instead of dealing with his feelings.
Now this is a bold statement, but I think that in a way, rampage part 1, kill half the soldiers of Midland, and rampage part 2, kill demons, are both about Guts avenging Griffith - the latter only in part ofc, because the rest of the Hawks need to be avenged too now.
Because the thing is, I think he still sees Griffith as a victim. After finally acknowledging that Griffith did sacrifice everyone, he still looks back at him wistfully. He thinks of Griffith while flashing back to the lost Hawks after the Eclipse. He tells Rickert that NeoGriffith isn’t the Griffith he knows (incidentally something Rickert repeats to NeoGriffith later, which NGriff acknowledges). He flashes back to Griffith in the snow a lot. To Guts, Griffith isn’t his friend who turned out to be a dick, Griffith is his friend who basically committed fantasy murder/suicide after being tortured for a year because Guts broke him by leaving.
His feelings towards Femto/NeoGriff are complicated and fucked up as all hell, but while his feelings for Griffith feed into his complicated feelings for Femto/NeoGriff, his hatred for F/NG doesn’t retroactively affect his feelings towards human Griffith. They’ve remained pretty solidly longing, guilt, love, regret. He’s not thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and feeling rage at what he would go on to do a year later, he’s thinking of Griffith kneeling in the snow and trying to find a way to atone for it. Griffith is still explicitly part of the “campfire from those days still [burning in his] chest.”
Idk basically I just wanted to say that a part of Guts’ fuel for his revenge rampage was feeling responsible for Griffith’s pain and not being able to save Griffith from it, both the first time against Midland and the second time against the Godhand, and I chose a very long drawn-out way to do that.
* I specify visual glimpse bc i think there’s a solid argument that it’s there when he kills Donovan, based on the way he taunts him and tortures him briefly first, but we don’t have any of the ragey demonic imagery associated with Guts’ darkness there - he just looks like a kid. So I feel like it works as a point of origin for a lot of Guts’ dark vengeful urges (Donovan is the first monster he killed), but he wasn’t anywhere close to losing himself to darkness then.
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I updated my old berserk sticker designs and added the rest of the squad! I would like to thank the academy and kentaro miura for giving everyone animal motifs so i could make this bullshit possible
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My Big Gay Berserk Analysis
Thesis statement of this goddamn thesis: Guts is sexually attracted to Griffith.
Now, this is long. This is the shortest part of a four-part series, and this isn’t a short post. And basically my intention is to show why I find it so incredibly easy to read Guts as attracted to Griffith, and explain how this reading adds layers of meaning that fit neatly within Berserk’s themes and enrich the story. I’m not going to speculate on Miura’s motives for adding a ton of gay subtext, like, it could be anything from trying to be as gay as possible without pissing off his publishers to it all being totally coincidental and meaningless with an alternate explanation for every point I have, or anywhere in between.
My point is only that Berserk readily lends itself to gay readings, with a focus on Guts’ sexual attraction to Griffith (as I feel like it tends to be neglected in favour of interpretations that Griffith has a one-sided crush.)
Part one covers the Black Swordsman stuff and the way Guts and Griffith’s relationship is revealed to the audience, part two covers the first several chapters of the Golden Age with a focus on visuals and how Guts sees Griffith, part three tackles Casca’s role in the story, and part four is more of an overview on why I think reading Berserk through a gay lens works so well.
So here we go.
Part One - Our Introduction to the Concept of Guts and Griffith
We’re introduced to Guts and Griffith’s relationship near the end of the Black Swordsman arc. Before the appearance of the Godhand we know that Guts is really fucking angry, we know he’s monster slaying because he’s out for revenge, we know he’s looking for a group called “the Godhand,” and thanks to Puck spelling some stuff out we know that he’s also sad and deeply afraid that he’s fighting a losing battle.
The comparison to Vargas hints that maybe he lost some loved ones, plus an eye and a limb to an apostle which is close enough to the truth to be decent foreshadowing.
But it’s not until the Godhand show up as the Count’s about to die that we learn what’s really going on with Guts. The information is given to us surprisingly straightforwardly, and the way the information is revealed to us is pretty telling.
The first six chapters have been teasing the mystery of what happened to Guts to piss him off so much, from the way we kick off in media res, to hints about his issues and trauma (eg the aforementioned Vargas comparison, the way he lets the possessed corpse of the kid stab him, etc), to Puck directly asking what the hell happened to him outloud for the benefit of the audience. We start to get our answer in chapter 7.
Keep reading
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Berserk (ベルセルク) // Kentaro Miura
#manga#i almost started writing an entire meta in the tags about this scene but i had to hold myself back#Q
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