#sichlitt

 I’ve come to realise that the assertion that human Griffith is somehow uniquely sociopathic and uncaring compared to other characters in the BotH is absolutely insane.

First of all, I want to lay out the moral equivalence between the Hawks and Griffith in fighting on the battlefield. A lot of people bring up the fact that Griffith was willing to kill people and use people as tools in pursuit of his own selfish goal, without realising that the Hawks did the EXACT SAME THING. 

They were willing to kill innocent soldiers on the battlefield in pursuit of their own selfish rise to power (to become lords and nobles). That is NO DIFFERENT to Griffith.

A lot of people say that the distinction between the Hawks dying in the Eclipse and dying on the battlefield is that the Hawks CONSENTED to fight in battle but did NOT consent to be sacrificed, but this is silly. 

The entire point of the Eclipse is that it highlights the hypocrisy of the Hawks and the coercive nature of medieval warfare. 

While the Hawks did CHOOSE to fight in battle, the enemy soldiers they killed most certainly did not. The foot soldiers of the armies of Midland and Tudor were FORCED to fight in battle through coercive feudal contracts. They were EXPECTED to fight for their feudal lords with punishment if they didn’t.

The Hawks knew of this, but DIDN’T CARE. They have NEVER cared about any kind of contractual agreement or mutual understanding between different sides of the battlefield. The enemy did not consent and they still thought it was fine to murder them, innocent people, for their own superfluous greed in wanting power and glory. 

To not care about and never mention this fact about the Hawks and then whine about the unfair nature of the Eclipse is ABSURDLY hypocritical. 

You might make the argument about MATERIAL NECESSITY. This has some merit, as Judeau stated that some of the Hawks were originally street urchins with nowhere else to go, but this is in the minority. He states that most of the Hawks are blacksmith’s sons, second sons of rich aristocrats or people who were merely entranced by Griffith’s charisma and wanted glory on the battlefield.

This is not material necessity. It’s superfluous greed. If you can defend an aristocrat’s son for killing innocent people on the battlefield then you can defend a suicidal emaciated man in a hallucinogenic state doing the same thing out of GREATER necessity in the Eclipse, but sacrificing more evil people who deserve it. 

What’s more, if you make this argument then you MUST also defend Griffith, who was also a dirt poor street urchin in the slums of Wyndham, who joined as a CHILD.

There’s also the argument about betrayal and loyalty and trust, because the Hawks were his “friends” and they put their faith in him, and that is why he is morally reprehensible. 

This argument makes me sick, akin to the morons who try to argue that mobsters are somehow morally upstanding people because they follow the arbitrary code of “la cosa nostra” that they use to pretend they have the slightest modicum of humanity, a code of etticut which provides these evil groups with the mechanism for more success in killing.

Griffith understands this ridiculous creed for what it is, and the God Hand play into this. They explain to him that in turn, his soldiers piled up many more corpses on his behalf, for their own selfish dreams. They are making a moral EQUIVALENCE between Griffith sacrificing his men and his men killing people on the battlefield. There’s NO difference.

Why are they making this equivalence? Because Griffith cares about ALL people, and gives them equal moral worth. Unlike the Hawks, who are only loyal to people so long as they serve some mutual self-interest to each other in strengthening their efficiency to murder and pillage, Griffith actually cares about the people he affects, even strangers. 

Guts admits it himself while having a breakdown during his sex with Casca, that he never felt a shred of remorse towards anyone he killed, only Gambino. The Hawks CHOOSE to dehumanise the enemy in their minds as justification for their killing. They CHOOSE to make it impersonal. Griffith REFUSES to do this. 

He feels OVERWHELMING guilt towards the tens of thousands of people that died because of him. He goes so far as to whore himself out to Gannon, sacrificing his pride, dignity and mental wellbeing, to ensure that no more of his soldiers have to unnecessarily die in battle. He solemnly laments the “wasted deaths” of the enemy dead while looking over them after a battle, acknowledging that they were forced to be there by their lords and that he had killed them.

Not only that, but Griffith actually wants to END the coercive nature of feudal warfare by creating a meritocratic society.

Griffith is FAR more caring and human than ANY of the Hawks, and the God Hand play on this empathetic guilt in convincing him to  sacrifice his men, to ensure that none of them died for nothing and so their souls could rest in peace. 

I actually differentiate between authorial intent and narrative intent to an extent. To me narrative framing matters the most. What Miura may have intended can be important inasmuch as he successfully conveyed it in the story, but I don't think his word is the final word on the story itself. If he gave an interview where he said he intended X, but I think the story conveyed Y, then Y is more important to my interpretation of the story.

So to use the Charlotte sex scene as an example, the biggest reason I read it as consensual (if psychologically fucked up to an extent) is because that's the narrative function of the sex. A rape scene would have a different impact on the story. The sex scene furthers Charlotte's love for Griffith, to her it's a contrast to her father's subsequent attempted assault, Charlotte has no misgivings about it, and the king doesn't accuse Griffith of rape but of theft from him. If it was intended to be a rape scene, it would be essentially nonsensical as a story beat and a bigger failure of writing imo.

And yeah, in addition to that there's the greater media context where a lot of sex that should be rape is treated as consensual.

But yeah I get what you mean about having a hard time viewing things that way. I find the terms watsonian and doylist helpful when discussing stuff like this in fandom, where watsonian refers to discussing characters and events as though they really exist, as though characters have agency and lives and make decisions, and doylist refers to taking account of the fiction of the universe, the knowledge that it's written by someone who has a point to convey and might have biases and make mistakes.

So on a watsonian level you can't really argue that it isn't rape because Charlotte says no. If it happened in real life, it would be rape, the end.

But on a doylist level it doesn't fit the story, and there are better ways to interpret that scene to suit the overall narrative better, which we can understand based on the various context clues I mentioned above.

When I discuss stuff I'm usually doing it on a doylist level because that's just how I roll lol, I enjoy analysing media as a construct created by people attempting to convey a meaning. To me, characters/setting/plot/etc are first and foremost tools to futher that meaning. But a lot of fandom is really into the watsonian level, which makes sense because that's where headcanons and fanfiction thrives, and it's a lot of fun to explore and speculate about the characters as though they're real people with real psychologies, to explain away plot holes and bad writing with in-universe explanations, etc.

It's totally cool to prefer one over the other imo! But yeah I think it's always good to differentiate between those different types of analysis, because they're trying to accomplish very different things, and to be aware of what level you're interpreting the story on. I find that it's really easy to get into discussions where people just talk past each other because one person is discussing the story as a fictional construct and the other is discussing it as if it's a real event that happened. It's how you get arguments like ''the depiction of this character is sexist because she's naked for no reason except to titilate the het male audience' 'there's totally a reason though, it's because she breathes through her skin!' or whatever lol.

Honestly I find this difficult to answer because the question doesn't really mesh with how I view fiction.

Like, idc about accountability really, except inasmuch as I think it's important from a storytelling perspective that he has agency when he makes the choice. I enjoy it when characters do bad things for justifiable reasons; I wouldn't enjoy it if, say, Void was holding a gun to Griffith's head and forcing him to say "I sacrifice." There are mitigating circumstances a lawyer might bring up if we were putting Griffith on trial lol, like he's in the middle of a suicidal breakdown and the godhand are telling him a biased version of his life story, but at the end of the day he makes the choice himself, as a cumulation of the way he's lived his whole life, and I love that.

Forgiveable is also a bit of a vague term. By who? Guts? The Hawks? Me, the reader? The narrative? I don't forgive Griffith because I don't blame him in the first place, I just think it's a great climax to a story. I don't think any of the fictional characters in the story should be required to forgive him, but I think Guts would based on my assessment of his feelings about it. But imo NeoGriffith isn't likely to be forgiven by anyone because he doesn't regret anything. And I don't expect the narrative to go in a redemptive, tearful apologies direction with him. I feel like we're kind of beyond that.

But I don't think Miura intended it to be viewed as unforgiveable because I don't think that's how the morality in Berserk operates in general. That's too black and white a perspective. Miura said himself in an interview that he's creating Berserk without the values of "good and evil," and for some people Griffith's world is the one they prefer. The whole point of his narrative is to ask the question of if the ends justify the means, probably without definitively answering it.

Sorry lol idk if this is a good answer to your questions, but yeah it's hard for me to engage with a story as if the characters were real. Like, if I was eaten by monsters because of Griffith I wouldn't forgive him lol, but I'm just reading a story so that's not relevant to me. I don't tend to evaluate stories or characters on the basis of morality, I only care whether the story works, and Griffith's story does. But part of why it works is because the sacrifice isn't a pure evil action, it's a sympathetic, understandable choice.

Wrong.

For one, there is ZERO evidence that Griffith was smiling at the dead boy in particular. It's much more likely that he was simply ignoring the boy and focusing on Julius' death alone, doing so through COMPARTMENTALISATION and EMOTIONAL REPRESSION. 

We have lots of contextual evidence that this is what Griffith does when confronted with dead children. When the child soldier in Griffith's army is killed, he is emotionally distraught, but in the lake scene with Casca he assures her that he doesn't actually care. He justifies sleeping with Gennon as a purely logical move absent of emotion. We know that this apathetic persona is a lie because when Casca brings up this boy, Griffith immediately starts shaking and resorting to self harm to quell his deep-seated emotional anguish. His persona then breaks entirely and he goes on an unhinged rant about how he must atone for the sake of the dead and that he won't allow his men to needlessly die for him. 

There's no absence of care, it's just well-hidden. 

He then successfully represses this vulnerability by insisting to Casca that he is okay. We know from his previous behaviour and Casca's response that it's a lie. He isn't fine, but his expression does a good job of HIDING that pain.

This added context recontextualises the smile at the Primrose Hall by calling into question the reliability of his outward expression in revealing his inner thoughts and feelings, while showing how fucked up his coping mechanisms are with regards to dead children. 

Some people may claim that as the two scenes are years apart, he likely grew to genuinely become more apathetic over time as he became numb to so many of his soldiers' deaths, but this can't be true because the God Hand in the ECLIPSE show him visions of the dead child soldier from over half a decade ago to play on his empathetic guilt. This draws an emotional through-line throughout the entire arc proving that he has always cared about people that die for his dream. It's not at all unreasonable to apply it to the smile. The dream speech and the lake scene are 2 chapters apart for a reason. 

What's more, if you want to apply sociopathy to Griffith through the smile, you must do the same to Guts.

These next panels might shock you, so brace yourselves.

Yep, that's right. Guts also smiles at the death of a child he indirectly killed. Shocking, I know. This scene is conveniently forgotten by Guts stans whenever they try and fail to condemn Griffith. 

This isn't all, though. He even LAUGHS about her death when Puck asks him about it.

Now of course we know from context that Guts doesn't actually believe the words he's saying here and is merely using this philosophy as a coping mechanism to emotionally distance himself from the people who die around him, just as Griffith does in the dream speech.

Guts and Griffith do the EXACT SAME THING, so if you want to condemn one, you must also equally condemn the other.

I don't think Griffith wants to be taken care of, he definitely hates it, but I think he understands that it's a necessity and he's got no choice now.

But I do partly agree, I think that Griffith's advance is definitely in part an attempt to comfort Casca and reassert his role as someone stronger, who can provide comfort to her - though while it's for himself, I also think it's partly for Casca, to keep her at his side. I get into it in a lot of depth in this post if you're interested in my really long involved take lol.

With regards to the sacrifice in the Eclipse, I'm going to be using the concept of INFORMED CONSENT to explain why Griffith did nothing wrong.

The sacrifice in the Eclipse was an agreement to a CONTRACT, and not everybody can give informed consent to those kinds of bargains. In law today, MENTALLY ILL people are unable to consent to contracts and cannot be made accountable for their consequences (I'm using legal arguments as examples of my MORAL beliefs in PRACTICE so please don't start talking about how legality =/= morality, as I'm sure you'd all agree that this law is good in that it protects vulnerable accepting parties from exploitation). This is because mentally ill people lack the capacity to fully comprehend their actions and the consequences of forming a contract.

To be more specific, not every mental illness can or should qualify as a defense. Personality disorders such as BPD and psychopathy do not qualify, because they still possess all of their faculties and are able to understand their actions and show clear intent. Mental illnesses that impede on a person's ability to perceive reality and give informed consent/intent however can ABSOLUTELY be used as a defense to absolve accountability.

This applies SOUNDLY to Griffith. 

This is a man who had just endured an entire year of ceaseless mental and physical torture in the Wyndham dungeon, being deprived of basic human necessities like sunlight or sufficient food and water. He was branded, flailed, whipped, boiled, jabbed with sharp needles, had his tendons severed, his tongue cut out etc etc.

The result left him mentally broken. He showcased erratic violent behavior in his confused and emaciated state (tried to strangle Guts), experienced frequent hallucinations (often conjured by the God Hand) during which he had NO AWARENESS OF HIS EXTERNAL SURROUNDINGS, and most damning of all, he attempted to commit SUICIDE about 10 minutes before being coerced into signing the contract. 

Even the way the Behelit only activates at the owner's most mentally unstable point indicates that the contract for the ascension to a God Hand/Apostle member is inherently coercive BY DESIGN.

These symptoms clearly prove that Griffith was not in the necessary mental state to be able to give INFORMED CONSENT to any contract. He is LEGALLY and MORALLY blameless. 

But that's not all. 

Minors are also unable to give informed consent to any contract, because they are not developed enough to truly understand its conditions or the consequences of agreeing to them. You might say that Griffith wasn't a child and so he knew what he was doing and the consequences of his actions, but that is ignoring the OTHER aspect of being a minor that means that you're unable to give consent.

Most important is the UNEQUAL POWER DYNAMIC between parties. There is such a power imbalance of understanding and trust between a knowing adult and an unknowing minor that any mutual agreement between them of this nature HAS to be considered invalid. Now, I would argue (quite controversially) that the power dynamic between a suicidal emaciated man in a hallucinogenic state being faced with a situation beyond his comprehension and SEEMINGLY OMNISCIENT ELDRITCH BEINGS who can literally READ MINDS and act on the will of God is a MUCH more severe power dynamic between an adult and a minor, and is FAR too coercive to be considered non-coercive and valid.

It's with this unequal power dynamic of knowledge and understanding that the God Hand LIED about the Hawks consenting to be sacrificed. After framing themselves as being pure objective truth tellers and emissaries of God's will, Slan says this:

"Behold, the gifts that await you, at the summit of your bloody quest. Your comrades, each a feather in your wing, have carried you to your great cause. They will surely forgive you, for they have always loved you. Entrust your wounded soul and tattered body to them and you will have life EVERLASTING."

Slan is lying about the Hawks consenting to be sacrificed as informed by the fact that she can read their minds. Griffith acted on the PERCEIVED consent of his men as MANUFACTURED by the God Hand. Her words usher up an image of an afterlife after death, where the Hawks will realize his intentions and celebrate in his successes, which is a far cry from the eternal vortex of souls with endless suffering that the God Hand NEVER told Griffith about.

It's clear from this that the only ones who we can level responsibility towards is the God Hand for taking advantage of him in a vulnerable state of mind, regardless of whether he is at fault for getting himself into that state of mind in the first place (which is much too indirect to draw a line of direct responsibility between Griffith being tortured and being manipulated by angelic beings no one knew existed beforehand). Human Griffith did nothing wrong in this context.

If you disagree with this post then you don't understand how consent works and I'm concerned for the women in your life.

(Please don't bring up Femto's rape of Casca in the replies as I am writing a follow-up post about that. Keep it about the SACRIFICE. Griffith's personality was artificially altered by the transformation so HUMAN Griffith isn't accountable for Femto raping Casca).

Hi, always nice to find another Griffith fan! There's a few of us here on tumblr.

I don’t understand how people can unironically believe that Griffith is some kind of beta boy pissbaby unlike Guts just cos he made one mistake in bedding the princess after a rough day.

Like, okay, yeah, it was a moment of weakness, but it wasn’t exactly deserving of an entire year of ceaseless torture and the loss of everything he had forever.

Guts on the other hand went off on a massive strop for 2 WHOLE YEARS to go fight demons unnecessarily for his own selfish self-destructive desires, at the expense of the happiness and safety of Casca. That to me is way more pathetic than ONE MOMENTARY MISTAKE.

You might argue that Guts had just gone through a lot during the Eclipse, but it’s no excuse. 2 YEARS he was out there. I’d understand running away in the moment of despair but after that long? Pussy.

And I think people underestimate just how much of a big thing Guts leaving was for Griffith.

It wasn’t just “oh no my pet ran away from me!” It was the moment he was forced to acknowledge that all of this time he did in fact care about Guts, and by extension his men. It was the moment he was forced to confront the fact that his distant, apathetic persona was all a lie, and all of the guilt he felt towards the THOUSANDS of men who had died for him came into the forefront. That’s more people than who died in the Eclipse. Just cos you didn’t see them onscreen doesn’t mean it’s less hurtful from Griffith’s perspective (remember the dead child soldier).

Griffith is an INCREDIBLY strong character, to keep up that front for a DECADE and carry on for his men’s sakes, despite the almost overwhelming guilt of so many of their deaths, and how he was always teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown but still managed to keep it together. Guts felt a hint of that when he felt responsible for the Hawks’ deaths, but nowhere near to the same extent, and Guts’ suffering in the Black Swordsman arc is a parallel to Griffith’s suffering in the Golden Age arc.

I also don’t understand how anyone can frame his decision in the Eclipse as weak. It was the moment he took responsibility for the perceived will of his men and his duty to atone. Just cos Void had one line about “fate” doesn’t mean Griffith gave into causality or cast away responsibility. That’s silly.

Tl;dr, Griffith has MONSTROUS willpower, and is not a weak person AT ALL. He might be the strongest character in the series.