#relentlesslyexisting

Congratz on getting over the half way point! I hope you get your writing sorted out. I look forward to the final product!

lol ty, i’m glad you’re interested in my thoughts.

honestly no I don’t think he is a good person, certainly not by my standards lol. imo Guts’ strongest drive is his immediate feelings. if he does something it’s because he wants to do it. not because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, not because he feels he has a moral duty to do something, not because he has some kind of code of ethics. he straight up doesn’t.

the closest thing guts has to a life philosophy is ‘i like to kill people when i’m upset’ lmao.

now he does have things that make him feel guilty. he doesn’t like to hurt kids, and he doesn’t like to hurt his friends. sometimes he does anyway, when he has his eyes on a longer-term reward for those actions - eg leaving the Hawks knowing it was hurting Griffith and even Casca as well; using kids as hostages for the sake of his ‘kill monsters’ goal; killing Rosine despite pitying her for that same goal, risking killing his friends by wearing the berserk armour for the sake of his get Casca to Elfhelm goal, etc.

Taking Casca to Elfhelm is arguably a more selfless goal, but he’s not exactly doing it because it’s the moral thing to do, he’s doing it because first he wanted to make up for abandoning Casca and by the end of the Hill of Swords scene his alternative was to leave her behind and let ghosts kill her, and then once Skull Knight told him she could have her sanity restored his goal became to reclaim a piece of his lost past and get one of his comrades/friends/lover back.

He’s doing it because he values and prioritizes his personal relationships, essentially. And now that Casca’s mind is restored, he’s upset and sulking because she still can’t interact with him specifically lol.

To be fair I think you can argue that one of the themes of Berserk is that everyone’s goals are ultimately selfish and when you boil people’s motivations down to basic components everyone is driven by base emotion and the desire to be happy, really.

Griffith is the most idealistic character, who does have a moral code and who wants to make the world a better place, and ultimately we’re shown that his dream is essentially a way for him to assuage his feelings of guilt and self-loathing, and towards the end of his Golden Age narrative it’s directly framed as an escape from things he fears. If you look at p much every other character in the story, they’re all ultimately motivated by personal feelings and desires too. Farnese wants to feel useful when she joins Guts and starts babysitting and learning magic, Judeau talks about the Hawks joining Griffith because they want to see great things, Guts’ campfire of dreams speech talks about everyone’s individual little motivations for joining the Hawks like wanting to be worthy of a lover and wanting the money to open a shop, etc.

Requiem of the Wind shows us the Hawks’ despair when they realize that rescuing Griffith isn’t going to help them achieve anything. “Everyone’s weak, so they rely on dreams and other people,” like, there’s your thesis statement right there. People have dreams and relationships to shore themselves up against the world. Everyone’s selfish at the end of the day.

If you look at it that way, Guts’ narrative is maybe just more honest lol. His motivations aren’t obscured by philosophical or religious beliefs or a sense of morality or desire to make the world a better place. He does what he feels like. Of course, imo this take on idealism is extremely cynical lol, so regardless of what the story as a whole may be trying to say about people’s motivations for doing good things, Guts still doesn’t come across very well to me lol.

Like basically I don’t necessarily think we’re meant to see Guts as a self-centred asshole, any more than any other character, but like, he still pretty much is. He doesn’t care about anyone unless he has a personal connection with them, he has no desire to make the world a better place, he doesn’t kill monsters to save innocent lives, he kills them because he’s mad at them. Everything is personal with Guts, everything is about his feelings. If you’re with him, if he relates to you or sees you as a friend or projects on you, then he cares. If you’re a stranger he has no personal connection to, he dgaf. If you’re an enemy, you might as well be a faceless monster, and he will deliberately stamp out any empathy or sympathy he might’ve otherwise felt.

So yeah, I don’t consider him a good person myself, tho the narrative doesn’t necessarily back me up with its cynicism lol.

I can think of a lot of possibilities, but what I think might be the most poignant and thematically relevant would be Griffith just continuing on, pursuing his dream, but becoming entirely emotionally closed off and unreachable. He truly becomes the figurehead he embodied, even his sense of comraderie with the Hawks is gone. Now he’s distant and alone, very NGriff-esque. And eventually, after three or five years or w/e, after Griffith achieves his dream and marries Charlotte, Guts would come back.

Griffith would smile and welcome him back and Guts would see the mask but not him. If he left because he thought Griffith was distant and untouchable, now he actually is. Same self-fulfilling prophecy as canon but yk, no actual ascending to evil godhood lol.

And if this was like, a griffguts fic with an eventual happy ending Guts would stay for a while and with persistence and maybe plot stuff as well he’d eventually break through and Griffith would finally be unable to deny that he still needs Guts and yk after a lot of agonizing drama and distance they’d be able to live happily ever after.

But if it was a more subtly sad tragedy then Guts would just figure he’s not good enough yet and leave again, and the implication would be that in his drive to pursue a fruitless goal (because he’s never going to be good enough, because that’s not the point because he was always good enough) he’s gonna end up getting himself killed trying to fight Zodd again or something. And Griffith will have his dream, but he’ll never be truly happy again. They both missed their shot.

Or conversely I think it would be fitting if Guts left, and the next time Griffith needed to assassinate someone he did it himself because he’s no longer able to let anyone else in to see that side of him, and because he’s on his own he fucks up and gets caught, and ends up dead or in a dungeon anyway.

7. The manga you reread the most:

Maybe Maiden Rose? But that's just because it's the only manga I can think of that I might have read twice within the year. I don't actually think I read something and then read it again within 2023. I like to wait a bit before rereading. I did a few rereads, like Ooku, but that was something I had last read a few years ago. The manga I have reread the most in my life is Loveless tho ^_^ unsurprisingly.

9. Something that was recommended to you:

WELL many things were recommended to me and not all of them were read >.< Sakura Gari was a rec, and I ended up having pretty mixed feelings on it. I also read Maya No Souretsu because @dregs-leftovers-parsley was posting about it, which I found fascinating- I don't know as much about early Yuri as I would like, and it's always nice to reconnect with that.

10. A story you related to:

MADK

3 Your author of the year

surprise surprise it’s gonna end up being hagio moto. between heart of thomas, iguana girl, hanshin, and zankoku na kami ga shihai suru she really knocked it out of the park. that said I think a lot of her scifi kinda sucks and gets weirdly orientalist at times (not a fan of marginal)

7 already answered!

16 A manga that disappointed you