Breaking Down Griffith’s Coping Mechanisms: Repression v. Self Harm
CW: extended discussion of self harm and suicidal ideation, images of torture, mentions of CSA
For anyone interested, here is my very long breakdown of how I read Griffith’s state of mind and coping mechanisms (1. repression and 2. self harm) working throughout the Golden Age of Berserk. I think this reading provides an explanation as to why Griffith acts the way he does in some of his more obtuse and “irrational” scenes (the river, Charlotte), and how these actions eventually lead him to becoming Femto at the end of this arc.
Miura may not have planned all this out explicitly, but I think he has a good understanding of the psychological reality of why people repress and why they self harm, and the story proceeds accordingly.
This essay is basically a psychological deep-dive and a reworked version of a very long conversation I had with @bthump last year, it’s taken me a while to get back to this because life n stuff.
The content of this analysis is basically going through the GA scenes where Griffith acts in a self-destructive way and explaining how and why this happens and how it informs his actions in the story more generally.
If you don’t like or understand Griffith, I would invite you to give this analysis a shot anyway, because a lot of Griffith’s story takes place in the subtext of the Golden Age, and it takes a liberal helping of interpretation to figure out what’s going on. This of course is just one reading of Griffith’s character, but as I hope to show, there remains a consistent logic behind his actions that governs his impulses to act in the way he does throughout the story.
Okay, enough preamble, let’s jump in.
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