#theme: repression

I wouldn't say most of the time lol but he is drawn naked a disproportionate amount of the time.

I've answered a question like this before, but there I went more into the shallower and homoerotic reasons lol. Those are valid factors, but since I am a meta blog I'll go more into the thematic reasons for it here.

In the Golden Age when Griffith was naked it was usually to demonstrate relatable humanity and vulnerability, belying the idealized leader image he tries to portray. The waterfight, the river scene after Gennon, the torture chamber, all scenes where we see his humanity show through.

With NeoGriffith, I think on one level his nakedness is ironic in comparison to some extent - even when he's naked he's still otherworldly and distant. His birth of venus style hatching, and the fight where Guts is unable to hit him with his sword even when he's naked and unarmed. It's a pointed negation of Griffith's physical and sexual vulnerability as a human.

But we also see him shed a tear for the first time while naked, and arguably the brief scene in the bedroom with Charlotte implies some genuine vulnerability. So I think there's still that underlying meaning of humanity to NeoGriffith's nakedness. He's not physically vulnerable, but he may be emotionally vulnerable.

Like I think it's also kind of notable that he does wear full armour most of the time as NeoGriffith lol, even when he's like, drinking tea with Charlotte, or at a city-planning meeting. Drawing it clearly wasn't a problem for Miura because he could easily just have had Griffith in normal clothes for most of his scenes. But considering that in Berserk armour symbolizes distance from one's vulnerable humanity - or maybe more specifically, the desire to distance oneself from it - I think Griffith wearing full armour all the time is actually an indication that he is emotionally vulnerable deep down and denying it.

(also between this, skull knight calling Griffith “guts’ unkingly half”, Griffith being called “king of longing” after his reflection on guts, etc. there is a lot of VERY EXPLICIT writing that treats their relationship as love. It’s something you’d never expect from a manga that has that reputation)

Yeah I absolutely do think that! There are a couple posts on my blog here discussing the Japanese wording if you're interested, and yeah it sounds like it has the same connotation in Japanese as in English.

Plus it seems to be what the 97 anime dub changed to "love" which also feels pretty pointed to me.

I think it's impossible to deny that the homoerotic aspects of griffguts are there deliberately, if you're engaging with the story in good faith. The ultimate point of the homoeroticism is debatable, but their relationship is clearly meant to be suggestive and nebulously defined in ways that pointedly include the possibility of romance/sexual attraction.

It's like Griffith says on the same page: it's a "giant swirl of violent emotions in which none are definite but all are implied." If I'm being very analytical and completely removing my yaoi goggles, I think the narrative intent with all the homoeroticism is to heighten the intensity of Guts and Griffith's relationship, imply the theoretical potential for them to be everything to each other including lovers, and increase the sense of missed opportunity with the tragedy of the Eclipse. And that's my least gay interpretation lol.

(The even gayer and more fun interpretation is that the homoeroticism of their relationship isn't just a vague possibility to make them extra tragic, but the key to fully understanding the themes of the story and Guts and Griffith's negative character arcs that lead to tragedy. It's all tied in to Guts and Griffith's mutual inability to define their relationship because they're both repressed due to trauma, with heterosexual relationships being tied to repression and their respective "dreams" that keep them apart. But I digress.)

Anyway, I think the specific use of "hunger" in the torture chamber monologue maybe gets overshadowed by the sheer (if less sexually suggestive) romance of the rest of the monologue, which is why it gets a bit less focus. Plus it's not completely direct, in theory you can hunger for someone platonically, I guess lol. But yeah the connotations are absolutely there. I'd say it's about on par with chapter 187, where the Beast of Darkness describes Guts as "longing" for Griffith, which is just as or more romantically loaded in Japanese.

Yeah I'm with you in thinking (human) Griffith genuinely cares about everyone outside of like, people who want to personally harm him. He probably told himself that she's just a means to an end and yk that's a justification for killing half her family, but I do think he cared for her as a person, and probably felt guilty for using her deep down, the same way he feels guilty about ordering people into battle or killing enemy soldiers etc.

Like he is definitely using her, I don't think he's in love with her, but yk, I think he'd be kind to her even if his goal wasn't to marry her. I think he'd go out of his way to avoid hurting her if at all possible, though ultimately his dream would take precedence. But like, say there were two paths to achieving his dream, and one was quicker and easier but Charlotte would die and the other would take more effort on his part but Charlotte would live happily, he'd choose the latter.

This all sounds very weak lol because imo Griffith really has skewed priorities and does his best to ignore all his inconvenient human feelings, but yeah he still has them and I think he cares about Charlotte deep down, the same way he cares for any decent person he spends time with, like Judeau or Rickert.

All that said, I think there's an interesting direction you could take their relationship in like, fanfiction (either AU or with NeoGriffith) where he comes to resent Charlotte deep down, given her role in the story as his sham heterosexual relationship. She could also potentially retain some power over him as the true heir to the throne, while Griffith is named Regent or something. And she represents his dream, which is what drove Guts away. So yk, there's a lot of potential there for some subtle negative feelings that might wear on him.

Idk about deepest, I feel like that's not something I can make a good judgement call on lol. But my favourite piece of symbolism related to Griffith is the toy soldier:

It's a little on the nose but it's such a good and succinct way of showing how Griffith himself becomes a symbol to his followers, reduced to an idealized figure that represents glory and success and their dreams, rather than a flawed person in his own right.

Though I also really love the helmet and armour:

Essentially, imo, symbolizing the negative coping mechanism - the dream - Griffith clings to that causes him to shut people out and keep himself distanced and isolated. It's very fitting that the armour is eventually incorporated into his body as Femto, after he definitively rejects his relationships in favour of his dream.

I have more written on both of these things if you're interested.

This is my tag for posts about how Griffith is viewed as an image rather than a person.

This is a post that delves into more of that toy/representation imagery.

It's harder to find a good encapsulation of the helmet thing, but here's a post that contextualizes it in a quick analysis of chapter one.

And of course the gigantic Griffith essay gets into it thoroughly, mostly in part 4 iirc.

I actually have a couple of posts where I get into this, here and here.

Basically, I agree that he doesn't have feelings for her, and I don't think there's really much of a good reason for him to be sleeping with her in terms of plot or character (I imagine it would be easy for him to at least put it off until they're married given the clusterfuck premarital sex caused last time lol) but I think it's potentially an interesting choice on a thematic level.

Arguably it's suggestive of Griffith's emotional repression and discontentment in the midst of achieving his dream. His dream goes hand in hand with both feigned heteronormativity and trading sex for resources, so regardless of whether it's logistically necessary at this stage, it makes thematic sense that the maybe burdensome obligations of pursuing his dream should follow him even post-Eclipse. (More on that in those links up there.)

I really enjoy the dark irony of it being a childish game that got deadly serious and important when people started dying for it before he even had a chance to grow out of it, and that's definitely one of my headcanons for Griffith, buuuut when it comes to what I really think fits the story's themes and Griffith best, I go with a secret third option:

it's a coping mechanism, imo.

Whether that's for being a kid starving on the street, or for abuse in his childhood on top of that (something Miura has alluded to as a possibility), I think it makes the most sense to take the dream as what Griffith focuses on as a result of childhood trauma, in the same way Guts' chlidhood trauma informs his own dream of being the strongest fighter. Guts wants to become strong enough to never be victimized again, while Griffith wants to create a world free from systemic victimization.

Then he became locked into that pursuit of the dream when people started dying for it and he felt he had to keep going to justify their deaths and achieve his initial goal.

I suppose you could say that's a noble pursuit, but like, I don't think the way Griffith talks about it to Charlotte during the Promrose Hall speech is genuine. I think the lofty philosophical justification came later as a way for Griffith to make sense of his own driving need, but really what Griffith wants deep down is like, plain old safety. Physical and emotional.

The way the castle is explicitly framed as an escape from the things Griffith fears, in chapter 72, really drives that home imo.

I'd also say Rosine and her Land of the Elves is a pretty strong parallel to Griffith as well. A rough, small-scale, more flawed attempt at a utopia compared to Falconia.

So yeah, I think the dream began as Griffith's desire for a place of safety and comfort, and continued as something he had to achieve when people started dying for it. And rather than examining it and recognizing that about himself, he came up with cooler post-hoc justifications like "it's just important for a man to pursue a dream" and "I want to know if I'm special."

And I do think he really believes those things, and they do become part of his motivation as he convinces himself, but I don't think the dream began the way it's framed in eg chapter 8, as a way to find out if he's one of the "keys" that profoundly impact the world. Like honestly most characters' motivations in Berserk, I think it stems from trauma.

I think part of how he maintains his mask is by being strong for others and particularly by comforting Casca, from what we see in chapter 17 at least, so I definitely think if anything comforting her when she's at that kind of low point would only help maintain his image to himself, if we're just taking the emotions of the suicide attempt into consideration and not Casca's motivation, or the fact that Griffith has been tortured for a year. Like in an AU scenario where he catches her in a suicide attempt under other circumstances.

Since her motivation is partially that Griffith loves Guts more than her, and also he's been tortured for a year and she's had to lead the Hawks without even knowing he's alive, it's a little hard to insert Griffith into that specific scenario. Post torture he doesn't have much of a mask anymore, and it does basically drop in the scene with her in the wagon anyway.

But in that theoretical AU where nothing went wrong except Casca's life, and she explains that she's suicidal at least partly because he doesn't love her, I do actually wonder how Griffith would respond. He genuinely loves her as a friend (regardless of how he might consciously define their relationship) and I think driving her to the point of suicide would seriously, seriously fuck him up with guilt. Maybe it would be enough for him to like, panic and say something unfiltered? Give a little off-the-cuff speech about how much she means to him and how he needs her as his best friend?

tbh given how he views sex transactionally I could also see him panic pity fucking her and getting into the worst-advised most inevitably devastating secret situationship imaginable and that might be a fun fucked up idea lol. Not emotionally genuine, but certainly interesting.

Though of course the problem with this scenario is that Casca being suicidal just because she can't be with Griffith sucks even more than it does in canon where at the very least she's had a very bad year on top of that lol, so idk. But if there's some way to beef it up and make her reasoning a little less thin and misogynist, it could be worth exploring.

Based on at least this interview Miura did have a thing for androgyny so yeah that's likely a factor, though I don't find it uncomfortable. Who doesn't want to fuck Griffith, good for Miura if he wanted to too.

That said, it does fit the themes lol. There's no straight explanation, but imo there is an explanation that goes a little deeper than fun homoeroticism. I've discussed aspects of it before so I'll link a few things.

I have this post about people pedestalizing Griffith and how it facilitates the tragedy of the Golden Age.

This post about how Griffith is a symbol to people and his beauty reflects that.

And this post about his sexual vulnerability and how that's a major theme of his narrative wrt trauma.

Basically Griffith's attractiveness fits his narrative perfectly because his narrative is all about embodying an idealized image of himself to achieve his goals and deny his own vulnerabilty, and how that ultimately fucks him over when everyone including Guts believes that image and doesn't see the real person underneath, and results in him eventually losing everything human about himself and more literally becoming the image when he becomes NeoGriffith. And this is all tied up in trauma as well, which is also related to his beauty, eg Gennon.