Hi! Do you consider Guts to be a person of questionable morality? For all the good things he’s done, there’s been some messed up stuff like assaulting Casca and using children as a bait
Oh yeah for sure. I think Guts is very deliberately written as morally quite dark. He's a pretty classic edgy antihero post-Eclipse, and even during the Golden Age he pretty pointedly had fewer moral qualms than Griffith about the people they kill and stuff.
Like one of the main themes of the story is "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," and Guts becomes monstrous quite often. The very first chapter of the story showed him looking more monstrous than the apostle at the end, when he's torturing him:
And that's basically our introduction to Guts.
The Count Slug arc and then the Lost Children arc double down on this vibe harder and harder too, with Guts at his most monstrous while fighting Rosine. He even tries to kill Jill when she jumps in to protect Rosine, and only fails because he gets shot with an arrow and attacked by Farnese's troops. At that point he didn't even need to finish off Rosine either, since she dies shortly after.
He's not evil, but the story is not subtle about him having the potential to become a monster (whether literally or metaphorically) and being on the verge of it for a good chunk of the narrative.
As much as Guts may often insist he's human and that makes him inherently different from the monsters he fights, he's fooling himself. Another central theme of Berserk is that apostles/ghosts/etc and humans are not so different. His violent desires are aligned with his enemies' which is how they're capable of possessing him a couple of times, and his single minded focus on revenge leads to him harming or nearly harming innocent people multiple times too.
I'd also say that the berserker armour is essentially a symbol of this monstrous aspect of Guts, the way his singleminded obsessive rage puts people he cares about in harms way alongside his enemies, from all the way back in the Golden Age when Casca scolds him for putting troops in danger by rushing out alone, to assaulting Casca after the Conviction arc.
And relatedly, Zodd and Guts are also strongly paralleled in terms of needing to find a balance between impulse-driven monster and reason-driven man, in chapter 277.
More generally, Guts just doesn't really give a fuck about most people. He cares about his friends and he avoids hurting children, but he doesn't care about people killed in battle, people killed in assassinations, bandits hired and double crossed, starving refugees dying en masse, etc. He's not a heroic figure. He pursues his own goals, whether that's helping Griffith or revenge or taking Casca to Elfhelm.
So yeah, basically I don't think Guts is meant to be a great person. He's meant to be very dark and very flawed, and dangerous even to his friends.
Thanks for the ask!
