#theme: ending

Basically, because telling Griffith why he's leaving would undermine his goal. It's a contradiction, as Guts suggests in his inner monologue that night.

To be Griffith's friend and equal you have to have your own dream you dedicate your life to, you can't be compelled by another man. But Guts leaves to find his own dream because hearing Griffith's words compels him to. If his goal is to be independent of Griffith just so he can be worthy of Griffith's friendship, and it is, that inherently means he's not worthy of his friendship. According to Griffith's dream philosophy, that makes Guts pathetic.

So if he explains to Griffith why he's leaving, he should fully expect Griffith to look down on him for it.

Guts also has major self-esteem issues stemming from his abusive childhood that make it extremely difficult for him to trust that someone loves him, and very easy for him to believe that they look down on him. Hence why all the evidence of Griffith's feelings for him is erased by one overheard speech which seems to confirm what he's already inclined to believe deep down.

(Here's a post that digs into that, mainly about why Guts leaves.)

So he also has no reason to think that Griffith will have a self-destructive breakdown when he leaves - I mean, when he comes back he even spends three days in denial before he accepts that it happened. Guts doesn't think Griffith will care that he's gone, so why give him an explanation that will only make Guts look like a pathetic loser in his eyes?

Like to be fair, I don't think Griffith is that communicative with Guts either. He has a few vulnerable moments (eg "Do you think I'm cruel?") and there's the great staircase scene where he can't give Guts a logical reason for saving his life from Zodd, but he never tells Guts that he considers him a friend, that he needs him on a personal level, etc, and Guts overhears him saying the exact opposite. He demonstrates how he feels through his actions, but again, Guts is very ill-equipped to pick up on and internalize that.

I don't think Griffith can tell Guts how he really feels because he doesn't understand his feelings himself and he doesn't consciously think of Guts as a friend, but yk. That's why the miscommunication street goes two ways here.

As for reconcilliation, I don't really think it's likely, at least not in a happily ever after sense. What I can see happening is an admission that their feelings for each other still exist, at the climax of the story, followed by one or both dying/killing the other. But tbf that's also what would satisfy me most. Especially if they die together, I think that's my ideal.

A possible scenario is Griffith hesitating or being genuinely shocked when Guts doesn’t fight back and lets the sword pierce him. (Just like it happens with Casca many chapters ago). Which gives Casca an opening to kill Griffith just like she did to that nobleman when she was first recruited by the hawks. I’d be poetic. All the parallels are right there.

That or Griffith’s gets to live as a monster and his kingdom eventually collapses after his real nature is revealed, making people abandon it. Now everyone leaves just like Guts once did. But now it isn’t out of respect, but out of true disgust. Maybe the kingdom still stands, but with no inhabitants. In the end he is a king of nothing and remained a monster. Maybe the consequences of his actions finally down on him.

I want him to realize he threw away something invaluable when was still within his reach (the band, Guts and Casca) similar to Guts’s realization. I really want Guts and Casca to haunt him the way his actions haunted them. Is only fair.

I really want Griffith to feel the weight of his guilt and shame over what he did to the band, Guts and Casca. And I want everyone to see him for what he really is, not a savior, but a broken and fragile man who committed unredeemable acts of evil on moments of desperation. There’s no way midland will stand by his side once they discover he was the reason the world went into decay and his kingdom is a fake paradise build on corpses. Not to mention he killed the Queen, Charlotte has to know the truth, about how Griffith killed her mother

Apologies if you're not the same anon, but these asks are similar enough that I'm gonna group them together.

I do love the idea of Casca being the one to kill Griffith or Griffith living but being haunted, both great possibilities! I can never really buy the idea of Falconia's residents like, turning on him when his "true nature" is revealed though - I don't think there's a whole lot to reveal, and nothing that would have an effect on a city's population. They're already cohabiting with reformed monsters, Griffith having a cool goth look and some dead and traumatized friends behind him isn't gonna change anyone's opinion. Even if it's somehow revealed and universally believed that he flooded the world with monsters on purpose, they're still gonna pick awesome city with indoor plumbing over hungry dragons.

My theories/hopes haven't really changed, except I guess that now we know the behelit will play a role in the ending, rather than a potential second act downturn.

I'll link a few posts with some speculation on the ending that I generally still think is plausible, mostly thematic:

straightforward response about my ending theories how parallels with ganishka figure into my ending theories spring flowers of distant days as foreshadowing quick list of ideas about how other characters' stories might end casca opening the behelit at the climax + why i think it's casca's behelit in the first place

do you have a version in your head that's more self indulgent but you feel like logically, narratively a different one would fit more?

so many questions but i keep thinking and rotating the alternate ending scenarios in my head and it's eating me alive lol and i love all your meta posts and your Correct opinions so would love to know your thots 👀

Thank you!

Honestly I think my ideal ending is both of them dying together in a moment framed as a sort of dual divine/mundane connection (the way Griffith killing Ganishka was framed as a divine spiritual connection, but also with the addition that they were in love as normal human teenagers yk), and their ~ods~ becoming one in the afterlife.

Griffith could fail to strike a killing blow, leaving an opening for Guts to kill him, then Guts commits suicide by apostle a la the wolves when he was a kid. Or they could fall from a height together, with Griffith catching Guts again and this time Guts not letting go. Griffith could impulsively throw himself into danger to save Guts' life again only for Guts to die with him. Lots of ways for a moment like this to feel like a significant emotional parallel to earlier stuff.

I do think that if Griffith killed Guts then Griffith would live on in like, serene misery lol, rather than dying as well shortly after, which could also be good but probably not my personal perfect ending. Though I have speculated that maybe he could kill Guts (likely when Guts hesitates, the way he does when he feels guilty and lets people stab him) and fall into that classic 'oh shit I killed him' moment of despair, leaving him vulnerable to be killed by Casca, which would also be great.

And yeah, in all of those there's a moment where Griffith's human side shines through, and I definitely feel like that's a requirement for me to love the ending lol.

what's ur opinion on the chitch chapters? i liked that they returned to guts's personal history & psyche after The Boat

lol sorry if these are both you and you thought I'd missed or ignored the first ask. I've been getting a lot of them recently and sometimes the ones that require a more in depth answer take a while for me to answer.

Anyway yeah I agree that this flashback felt like a breath of fresh air after the boat arc especially. It was also really nice to get a reference to Guts' csa trauma after it's felt forgotten about since like, the literal 90s lol. One thing I'd really missed about most of the post-Eclipse story is the sense that Guts is driven by deep-seated fear - not just of his friends getting killed or of losing control, but fear for himself. I don't know if that reference was meant to suggest a return to that aspect of Guts' psychology or was just like, a way of underlining Guts' attitude as a teenager, but it was still good to see.

Loved the Gambino flashbacks too, really gratifying throwback there. (Though it really highlights the art shift in ways I don't enjoy lol, I 100% prefer the early Black Swordsman era art to Fantasia era art.)

It was also quite touching, and had a good sense of aching futility to it. Reminds me a little of the tone of Requiem of the Wind, the chapter shortly before the Eclipse.

So yeah, that's my like, emotional response to it.

On an analytical level, I want to read it as like, essentially an allegory for the cycles of Guts' life, and foreshadowing for the ending of the story. In some ways the allegorical aspect of this sequence is really obvious lol. Like Guts is en route to die building a castle at the start, and Chitch is explicitly an aspect of Guts - his own "weakness," as Guts says, ie probably his humanity, certainly the part of him that longs for companionship and likely the part that wants to help others and do the right thing.

The hill where all of Chitch's "buddies" will find her really feels like a reference to the hill of swords to me, and probably therefore Guts' eventual death. The repeated use of "buddies" to reference both the Hawks and Chitch's flowers seems really deliberate on the translator's part, but also it's just vibes.

The rest can be filled in from there, and some inferences can be made. An older figure who parallels Gambino seems to save Guts from his fate of dying for that castle, but it turns out he was using him for his own ends, to eventually defeat the nobleman who owns that castle.

Seems like Skull Knight, who we know is using Guts for his own ends and wants to destroy Griffith and the Godhand, though I don't think we've seen the betrayal yet (unless providing him with the armour IS the betrayal and we just haven't seen the bad result of that yet.)

I don't think we can get too specific with predicting things based on this allegory (like there will surely be a climactic fight scene, but I don't necessarily think it'll be because Griffith kidnaps Guts and forces him to fight to the death yk) but I think the broad thematic strokes are here and many aspects are already being foreshadowed.

Chitch overextends herself because she gets too caught up in one thing and loses sight of the consequences, which is how Godo once described Guts.

This is likely referencing Guts relying on the Berserk armour, which saps out his humanity.

Chitch's flower ending up crushed could foreshadow Guts' death, or Guts becoming a monster through either the armour or the behelit. Or both - Guts becomes a monster, but maybe manages to die with his humanity intact, or salvages his humanity in death, rejoining the Hawks and maybe even Griffith. He is, after all, framed as the most important of the friends Guts would put his life on the line for. "For him... for them."

Or maybe he doesn't, maybe he dies (or lives) a monster and his od can only "become one" with other monsters in the afterlife. It's ambiguous whether Chitch does join the other flowers, after all.

I also love this page where Chitch describes the cycle of night and day in a way that epitomizes the cycle Guts is caught in of experiencing the potential for happiness and companionship but never fully trusting it, trying to keep it at a distance, even resenting it, because he feels like it can't last thanks to what's happened in his past. The Eclipse obviously, but maybe even the way his time with his first mercenary band ended.

Loneliness and isolation has always been depicted as darkness, and companionship has always been depicted as light, so this is very in keeping with that imagery.

So yeah, I feel like there's a lot to chew on in these chapters thematically. They kinda sum up a lot of Berserk's themes and how Guts' character intersects with them in a neat little self-contained parable.

All that and it's a satisfying throwback to early Berserk. Hard not to love this sequence imo.

Yeah it makes perfect sense from a characterization and a storytelling point of view for NeoGriffith's "unfrozen" feelings being his real actual feelings and not a magical baby's. So if the moonkid is relevant to Griffith having feelings then yeah I think it's more along the lines of: sharing a body with it has unfrozen Griffith's own feelings or something like that, rather than the kid's feelings just like, infecting him or whatever.

I've got a few posts that go into more specific reasoning for why I think Griffith's feelings are his own if you're interested.

The griffguts resolution I envision is one or both of them dying at the hands of the other in a parallel to Griffith killing Ganishka/Shiva at the climax of the Millenium Falcon arc, where hate and animosity was just replaced with a desire to join together in some way.

Here's a post about those parallels and how they could inform a homoerotic ending.

And I have a lot of griffguts-y posts theorizing about the ending in this tag if you want to check out more concrete ideas I've had over the years. Here's one post where I talk about a few specific ending ideas.

Hey, I've been good, hope you are too!

I've been theorizing/hoping for a while that we'll get an emotional confrontation that parallels Ganishka/Shiva vs Griffith, in the sense of Guts losing himself to a bestial state and finding that Griffith is his sole remaining light in the world, and their confrontation being a symbolic consummation that brings about some kind of shift in humanity that echoes their remaining human longing for each other.

Like if current humanity is defined by looking up to Griffith as a godlike saviour, ie the thing that ruined everything in the Golden Age, then humanity afterwards might be defined by looking at each other as equals. Like if Falconia is meant to be benevolent authoritarianism, maybe anarchy is the next step. Or at least democracy, which would probably fit the made up fantasy parallel to Europe better. It might be kind of trite but I want some kind of metaphysical parallel to griffguts.

Or maybe they just destroy the idea of evil and whatever comes afterwards is left up in the air? Whatever, I just want some paradigm shift.

Anyway, that confrontation should also involve one or both of them killing the other, in like, a homoerotic way.

That's all I really care about lol, idc how we get there or what the other characters do.

I have a few posts where I get into my hopes in more detail in this tag, and here's a post on some specific ideas for their potential deaths, and here's one with more details on that Ganishka parallel.

I also talked about the newest chapter the other day here, so I'll just link that instead of reiterating my thoughts.