#western fandom problems

I finally poked my head back into a well known Berserk forum, and while I always knew the Mori continuation of Berserk would be controversial, the tone of a lot of the discussion still managed to irritate me.

There’s a lot of “speaking for the dead” going on. A lot of “Miura wouldn’t have done this.” And not in the sense of close textual critique, but in the sense of fans confidently asserting moral authority over a creator they never knew, based largely on their own preferences and interpretations.

Here’s the thing that keeps getting lost.

Kouji Mori wasn’t some random editor or corporate stand-in. He was Miura’s closest friend for decades. They trained together. They competed. They talked constantly about manga, about craft, about Berserk. Miura explicitly told him the story. Mori has been very clear that he is only depicting what he remembers Miura telling him, and that he is deliberately not inventing material beyond that. That restraint alone should count for something.

Meanwhile, you have American forum users—many reading translations of translations—declaring with absolute confidence what Miura “would” or “wouldn’t” have done, as if their headcanon carries more weight than the man Miura actually confided in.

What really soured me was seeing Japanese fans ridiculed for largely supporting the continuation. Disagree with them if you want, but dismissing them outright is ugly. They’re closer to the language, the publication culture, and the creator himself. Pretending Western fandom somehow has purer insight here feels less like reverence and more like entitlement.

Is the continuation perfect? Of course not. It can’t be. Anyone expecting Berserk without Miura’s hand to feel identical is setting themselves up for disappointment. Critiquing pacing, execution, or presentation is fair game. But acting as though Mori has less understanding of Miura’s intentions than a forum consensus is absurd.

If someone wants to stop reading where Miura left off, I respect that completely. That’s a valid and emotionally honest choice. What I don’t respect is the pretense that rejecting the continuation is somehow the “ethical” position, or that continuing the story as Miura described it is a betrayal.