https://thresholds-of-transformation.blog/2020/04/28/berserk-essay-i-the-black-swordsman-arc/
https://thresholds-of-transformation.blog/2020/10/25/berserk-ii-the-golden-age-arc/
~ an essay on the Berserk manga/anime ~ volumes 4–13, The Golden Age Arc
Susumu Hirasawa — Berserk (1997) (Full OST) ~
~ The ‘Golden Age Arc‘ of Berserk is so named for it represents the origin of the hero of Kentaro Miura‘s story, Guts, as well as his closest companions of an age past, Griffith and Casca. It constitutes their primes; arguably the most significant events in all of their lives take place in their time spent together roaming battlefields and courts over a number of years constituted as this “Golden Age”. Author and artist Miura weaves a tale of medieval-era sociopolitical and military drama from inside the interpersonal relationships of knights, ladies, rulers and mercenary warriors involved in the shaping of a kingdom, Midland.
As in the ‘Black Swordsman Arc‘ before it, a hellish dark fantasy world is continually crafted before our eyes. Stark contrasts of malevolent and benevolent forces work their swords and tongues in the open air of warfare, as well as in the seedy backrooms of imperial politicking and cutthroat noble intrigue. Heroes and monsters challenge one another onto battlefields, and the monsters are only sometimes true blue demons hounding for human flesh, human hearts. A kind of spiritualistic entropy of body, mind and soul is constantly beckoning, foreshadowing tragedy, winnowing away the light that our heroes fight towards.
The arrival of a demon midway through this Age, and the fateful, sanity-blasting onslaught at the close of it, simply accelerate the fade to black we knew to be coming all along, for Guts’ fate was foretold in prior volumes. We are already familiar with the omnipresence of supernatural corruption within the kingdom of Midland from Guts’ future journeys in his black cape, scarred from this past, his expression eternally pained, his voice mostly silenced. In this Golden Age, we find out the truths of our hero’s conflicted heart through his past. From his extraordinarily bloody and vivacious origins here, we can finally observe our Black Swordsman with clarity, with moral and empathetic understanding for his future condition as the wayward, amoral demon killer.
During this arc, the rise and fall of the legendary mercenary company known as The Band of the Hawk is detailed. Readers are introduced to Griffith, before his transformation into one of the God Hand, the fearless, ambitious, charismatic, and altogether transcendently powerful leader of the prolific warrior band. We are also introduced to Casca, his second-in-command, a skilled warrior woman swinging sword and heart with equal composure in a man’s world quite unwelcome to her presence. Though the rivalry and coming companionship between Guts and Griffith takes the forefront, Casca becomes an equivalently compelling figure within this triumvirate of main characters, as an intermediary between their rivalry, as the subject of their disparate admirations, and potential love.
The play over this “Golden” era deals primarily with the relationship of these principal characters and their collective influence upon one another. Guts, Griffith, and Casca all have their distinct personalities, philosophies, pasts. And dreams. Outwardly, for themselves, and inwardly, for one another. Through their bouts and victories and facing off against monsters, both man and demon, they craft their dreams in their own way, in their own time. Griffith’s dream is set at a young age, dealing in ambition, power, continuous intrigue upon battlefields and in the kingly courts. Casca’s dream is forced upon her out of a desire for escape, to gain the strength needed to earn her place, free to choose where she wants to belong. Guts, the consummate survivalist, struggles with the forging of his dream, influenced by both of his principal companions, all the way until the end… until everything changes. In Miura’s story, perhaps more important than the dreams these characters have, is where they envision their fellow companions being within those dreamscapes.
Given their existence within this harsh world is full of horror, and violent ends upon blood-soaked fields, and the claws of demons descending upon them from unfathomable dimensions, and the dark beating hearts of ambitious men after power constantly shadowing steps within the hierarchy of society, from the beginning their lowborn warrior’s dreams seem fated to shatter. But who can say? In this story, there is no word of God here to articulate the meaning of the ultimate fate of Guts and Griffith and Casca, there is no hand of a goodly deity there to set things right, or merely into a cosmic context, for the tragedies soon to befall them. At the conclusion of The Golden Age, with Griffith fully corrupted and ascended upon a throne soaked with the blood of his comrades, and Guts and Casca surviving but fated to be hunted by monsters until they too are violently expelled from this world, a resolutely Dark Age seems certain to follow within this chronology.
ORIGINS & DREAMS
What is great about Berserk are the conditions of its characters, their strength, their believability, their causality — as in, how their individual origins so clearly influence their current dispositions, and their dreams. Among the prime triad, each is borne of harsh circumstances, bloody origins of dodged death or worse at the hands of their environs. Griffith, Casca and Guts, initially can be seen archetypal and constant: the charismatic, semi-sociopathic, supremely focused leader from the gutter, destined for greatness from his long work upon battlefields / the resolute, independent woman, nevertheless an underling to a striving paragon that she looks up to, and loves / the strong but silent warrior, the invulnerable, ‘raised-by-wolves’ loner, a proficient killer of men without ambition beyond survival.
Each character is cornerstoned by what they saw and experienced as children, providencing a foundation of motivation toward life courses culminating in individuated “Dreams.” Griffith, an impoverished streetrat raised within the kingdom, saw the king’s castle as a shining star upon a distant yet traversable hill. Casca, a peasant girl existing on the edge of society, the edge of death, is captured and nearly raped, but is saved by a shining star of a man who looks not unlike a prince in stature and strength, in Griffith. Guts, lucky to be alive at all and born from the bleakest circumstances of any, knows only abuse and pain and betrayal and blood from childhood, with nowhere to turn, no one to trust, nothing at all to look up to but the void of a silent and indifferent universe.
Thusly, our heroes’ dreams can be deduced from there. Griffith seeks a kingdom, a world he can rule over for himself, utterly maximizing his endless inner potential, creating a universe in his control and borne of his own brilliant, worldly efforts. Casca wishes to follow her princely paragon to the very end of his ambitions, as his sword or his lover, either way as his partner, equivalently empowered at his side. Guts wants a road all to himself, one he can walk without need of any companions that might betray him in the end, earning his keep by his sole strength alone, just him and his sword, invulnerable and strong. Griffith breaks from his caste; Casca breaks from the role of her gender. Guts, a perfect physical specimen with transcendent skills, endurance, and vitality, breaks from the deathly circumstances of his birth; to have survived his excruciating childhood at all is a feat as impressive as any of the conquests The Band of the Hawk will eventually make with his strong sword arm leading the vanguard.
The founding of these disparate origins, childhood environs, and inspiriting dreams for Guts, Casca and Griffith — each still united by their lives as soldiers, killers that choose to exist at the brink of worldly existence — makes their interplay as companions, slowly influencing and humanizing one another over the course of their journey together in the Band of the Hawk ~ learning to love one another ~ that much more impacting in the end.
INTERDEPENDENCE & CHANGE
“The brightest flames cast the darkest shadows.” ~ The core theme of the Golden Age becomes interdependence. Throughout their battles and journeying together in a mercenary band tasked with defending Midland against at-times superior foes, the fated trio grow upon one another, weaving a complex exchange of dependencies, yearnings, beliefs. Their development as characters, via nuanced dialogue and overt action, is aided tremendously by Miura’s extraordinary art, subtexting their courses equally with committed pitches of body language and cooperative hyperviolence. Within each of these strong-willed persons, all three preternaturally sublime swordsman — the prime currency of their world as warriors — profound changes commence over the course of their individual arcs in the thoughts, words, or mere presence of one another. In their fighting together, in their saving each other, in their united motivations in the Band of the Hawk and their shared goals — they come to totally shape each other’s dreams.
Griffith, the graceful, beautific striving warrior paragon, is changed by Guts — far along his King’s road, he is finally presented with someone that demands more than possession, more than pawnhood within his god-like game of continuous ascension. The emotionally stunted duo find within each other the missing piece of their lives, to differing endgame effects upon their psyche. Guts, the psychically invulnerable and mostly silent hyper-masculine specimen is changed by Casca — she is someone he can let his guard down around, someone he can enjoy vulnerability alongside, someone he can learn to love. At different times through their saga, Guts believes that Casca loves Griffith and could never love him; alternatively, their mate Judeau speaks to Guts and Casca as deserving of one another, their shared experiences being visceral, indelible.
The truth seems to be that Casca admires Griffith more than she loves him. She believes in him. She loves the idea of him, as a paragon of virtue and strength, as a figure she may reliably rest her own hopes and dreams upon. Griffith, in truth, as Casca comes to find out, is not emotionally available to anyone, even her. This has everything to do with the stakes of his dream, of the necessary repressions and social sacrifices that come with ascending to the limits of human power. By pursuing a kingdom to call his own, bursting from his lowborn roots, and doing it by command of an army, Griffith must present as a symbol and not a Man. Casca, in turn, is changed by both Griffith and Guts, at different points, and in a progression of meaning — and as a consequence of them changing each other. As I said, this complex of interdependence between the trio plays out subtly and overtly, over the long arc of this Golden Age. And this interdependence comprises their emotional lives, but also their material and spiritual lives as well.
Griffith, importantly, is a strong leader, but he is not a tyrant; he is a populist, engaging lowborn peasants as equal fighters into his fold. Certainly, The Band of the Hawk follows his ‘cult of personality’, though he is not manipulative nor entitled in his rulership over them as commander. Despite his striving to attain the peak of his world’s hierarchical structure, Griffith is an egalitarian, an idealist who sincerely believes that *anyone* can do anything. He proves this in word and action, and it is proven doubly so by the fact that his men join his army by free choice. Griffith’s warriors fight for him and his dream without coercion. It can be said that the Band of the Hawk, this prolific fighting force of mercenary might winning battle after battle under his supreme command, Griffith’s men — including Casca and even Guts — are dependent upon him. Their success is driven by him at the helm. It thus follows that they would care about him, to the point of gladly dying for his cause.
Conversely, the question comes: is Griffith dependent upon them? Yes, to achieve his dream he needs their collective might upon the battlefield as an army, working together throughout campaigns of attack and defense, the games of worldly conquest involved in gaining a throne. Thus, a measure of interdependence is born even between the paragon leader and his peons — Griffith needs their bodies, their energy and their blood, and they need his shining example, his ‘perfection’ in word and action, as a vessel of their own hopes and dreams to one day surpass their birth and achieve more. The Hawk’s egalitarianism within its ranks, the autonomy and trust Griffith and Casca have for the men, for each other, this can be attributed to their ultimate successes and the consistency of their conquering. At different points, Griffith conveys genuine concern for his men, the living and the dead, proving he is capable of caring for them, and has / does, beyond just Casca and Guts.
The fracturing within the triad, and the larger collective of the Hawk as a consequence, comes with Griffith’s spoken conception of a friend in the context of their own, individual ‘Dream.’ His own philosophy upon power and sovereignty and ambition are revealed in his speech to the princess outside the castle, with Guts and Casca within earshot. Fresh off of a particularly mortifying assassination mission, Guts is tired, vulnerable, perhaps resentful of what Griffith has just made him do. And so, such judgments and their influences shift the fate of Griffith and Guts, Casca caught in the crossfire between their dueling ego’s. It stands to reason that Griffith spoke these words with Guts in mind, or alternatively, from his heart, without any preconditions to his own current surroundings, a blindspot to the circumstance of Guts, his most trusted (and loved?) companion up to then. From these words it becomes painfully clear that Guts, without a discernible dream of his own, could not under Griffith’s definition, be considered a friend.
“A friend should never subsist on another’s dream…” ~ Griffith
Guts, insofar that he is captured with either Griffith’s aura as a man with so defining and transcendent a dream, or influenced by his explicit words of owning singular dreams as a necessary Truth to unlock his companionship, casts off on his own, leaving the Hawk. Against the protestations of Casca and Rickert, embraced by Judeau, sayonara’d by Corkus — opposed with bladed gaze by Griffith himself — Guts’ departure brings about the swift end of the Band of the Hawk at the height of their power. In a haze of psychosexual confusion — or stubborn, spiteful self-destructive desire — Griffith goes and fucks the princess. Everything proceeds into darkness from there. In blood and betrayal, through their actions and inactions, fate inevitably comes for Griffith and Casca and Guts.
Imperatively, Miura paints the changes in his characters as so indirect and subtle that the characters themselves do not even realize it’s happening, even as the audience is discovering and satisfactorily arriving at the realizations themselves. At what point does Casca realize her love of Guts vs. when she actually started to? It is open to interpretation of course, but I think it is true that Griffith is so traumatized by Guts’ departure not because it has anything to do with the Hawks’ prospects for continuous victory, and his kingdom quest (which it undoubtedly does) — but because Griffith loved him. He’d grown to rely entirely upon his presence in his life. To keep him happy? To keep him sane?
That initial ‘possession’ of his most-prized, Dragon-esque warrior constantly by his side, over time had turned to something much more reciprocal and real, and Griffith 1) didn’t know how to handle the weight of such emotional truths, having never really loved anyone in his life before, and 2) didn’t know how to reconcile the fact that Guts was leaving of his own volition, a real Dream in his eyes, and there was nothing Griffith could do to stop him. Guts wasn’t just leaving, he was leaving for a good reason — for a self-determining Dream that Griffith would have to respect, or brand himself as a hypocrite. It stands to reason that the changes that come this way — naturally, unconsciously, brought about by the day-to-day continuity of interactions with one’s immediate environment, and those closest companions which end up feeling as family — are the strongest, most permanent, and spiritually affecting changes.
With the force of fate behind them, these are the kinds of changes that come to these three.
BATTLE, MORALITY, FATE
Berserk‘s Golden Age showcases, as a subtext, the painstaking efforts that are required to rise above one’s birth and station in medieval times. Griffith and Casca and Guts’ gains in power within the kingdom of Midland are borne of blood and continuous existential risk. They have to literally battle tooth-and-nail for every single inch of ground.
And as a kind of Shakespearean tragedy or cosmic irony, through Guts’ seemingly harmless act of departing to romantically pursue a life of his own, their work as an army mostly done at that point, and Griffith’s desperate and bizarre response to it — we see the stark disparity between how hard it is to build something up — like an effective army dealing in continuous conquest, leading on to a potential kingdom secured in the hands of a prior peasant — and just how precariously easy it is to tear it all down.
This compulsion can be seen throughout history, with the futility of building real, long-term unity, with power defaulting inexorably toward totality in the end. Rising power seeking the throne requires constant vigilance and utter, nigh pathological commitment to its continuous attainment — such as what we see from Griffith for most of the story, when he’s willing to do anything to achieve his goal (such as when he sells his body to an elder Lord to avoid a battle with them). Established power besieged by external forces, such as from the existing King, as far as he comes to perceive the coming siege, will resist with every ounce of its will, utilize every reach of its institutions, press every weakness and punish any possible misstep — we see this with the king’s general, Julius, and his attempted assassination of Griffith, and with the King’s action in capturing Griffith and putting the hit out on the Band of the Hawk, still a most powerful asset to his kingdom’s army, after the perceived transgression against his daughter’s virginity (mostly fueled by his own incestuous desires for her…)
The constancy of battle can be seen as a master value for both Griffith and Guts; the difference between them, initially and then cycling in opposition over the course of the events of the Golden Age, is what they see within their individual battles. What do they perceive their struggles — and again, their Dreams — as ultimately amounting to? Initially, the polar distinction is this: Griffith derives meaning from his fight, whereas Guts does not.
Griffith *long, flowing hair eclipsing the rising sun* is on a quest with righteous purpose / Guts *bites coin* is just trying to get by. The former defies customs and fate itself in order to pursue their own self-crafted destiny, a kingdom built from the ground up with his sword and his loyal men backing him; the latter accepts his lot in life, seeing no inherent meaning in his bloody travails, content to fight for mere survival, intrigued by the mortal danger of the battles, with no dream to speak of or even envision. Griffith, as an avatar of ambition, the paragon striver, the “Lord of Longing” as the God Hand comes to call him in his tortured fever dreams, in Nietzschean terms can be seen as the “Übermensch.” Guts, conversely, as the “archetypal nihilist, only able to destroy, but unable to build and act upon a self-actualized ethos” can definitely be seen as the “Last Man,” the opposing dichotomy to Nietzsche’s “Superman.”
Their paths begin to alter as Guts leaves Griffith, and I believe it is inarguable that they eventually fully shift places — with Guts/The Black Swordsman as the prototypical Übermensch and with Femto-Griffith as the Last Man — after the eclipse… Guts, from then on, fights with vengeant purpose for more than survival, defying fate to create a life for himself and for psychically damaged Casca, his blade a convincing thesis against the cruelty and evil and the looming darkness he finds himself continually mired within as ‘The Black Swordsman.’
Griffith, on the other hand, acquiesces to fate for his own gain, choosing power over morality, proverbially choosing to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven (or after his body and mind are destroyed, simply embrace his death and the coming abyss of non-existence).
Questions of morality are an intriguing and necessary inquest within the universe of Berserk. Principally, they come with regard to the actions of Guts in ‘The Black Swordsman’ arc and of Griffith in ‘The Golden Age’ arc; The Black Swordsman’s tortured aspect and general amorality toward the world can be necessarily explained by Griffith’s intimately devastating presence within his past. Griffith, without a doubt, is the most morally dynamic and challenging character to analyze within the Berserk mythos. There is an entire meme, semi-serious in its implications, that “Griffith did nothing wrong” despite all evidence to the contrary at the end of the Golden Age. This is because of the complex and emergent conditions and flow of events that occur around Griffith leading up to his fateful choice, behelit in hand and eclipse dawning, the nefarious God Hand awaiting his consent to sacrifice everyone he’d ever known and loved(?) for the sake of his ascension from broken, pain-crazed Man into a dark, omnipotent God.
“I made up my mind, that I was going to win by any means necessary.” ~ Griffith
In my eyes, Griffith’s choice to consummate the eclipse, embracing the power of the behelit — “The Egg of the King” — sentencing his entire Band of the Hawk to grisly deaths, including Guts and Casca, acquiescing to a dark transformation borne of their collective blood at the hands of extradimensional Gods with unknowable designs, cannot be morally justified. But it can be explained, even rationalized. As I said before, complex forces converge to create the singular moment where Griffith is faced with the choice of sacrificing ‘everything he holds dear’ for the sake of his own life returned and his power amplified to that of a godlike being. Concisely, these forces in chronology, as seen by Griffith, include:
- The entire Band of the Hawk declared by the King as knights, ascended to the status of nobles after their latest pivotal victory in Midland’s war; Griffith’s greatest noble antagonist in Julius has been assassinated by Guts, eliminated as an obstacle to his ascent — Griffith and his army are at the peak of their power
- ‘Abandoned’ by Guts, who sets off to pursue his own path, his own self-determined Dream of one kind or another…
- After choosing to go and sleep with the princess, for his own pathological and perhaps inexplicable reasoning, Griffith is captured by the King and tortured to the brink of death for over a year, his body ultimately ruined and his mind shattered to the point of madness
- Saved by Guts and Casca and his old crew from the dungeon underneath the castle, he is freed and returned to their ranks, but unable to resume his status, lead them on, or even stand or speak or be of much use to anyone any longer as an invalid beyond hope of physical recovery
- He sees Guts and Casca’s relationship progressed, now as lovers
- Guts and Casca care for him diligently, with love, but can no longer see him as he once was
- Griffith, unable to accept his life, body and mind as it is now, sets off with a carriage of horses on his own, abandoning the Hawk as the sun sets, while they engage in discourse over what their plan is now that they have rescued him. He does this — perhaps vying for the attention of Guts and Casca? Intending to commit suicide?, etc.?
- After crashing the carriage and failing to kill himself, cutting his neck against a sharp stone in the water — Griffith is reunited with his trusty behelit, fatefully returned to his fingers within the shallow water of the wilderness…
- {*E C L I P S E begins*}
- Propositioned by the God Hand with ascension into their ranks, Griffith is delivered psychic visions of his own consciousness, his past, the path he took, the blood and bodies along it, leading up to his castle atop the hill that he envisioned as a child — his original goal — all contrasted by the only thing that ever truly distracted him away from it… Guts.
- ~ Griffith makes his choice — kill The Band of the Hawk to become a God-king, the fifth finger of the God Hand — Femto.
Within the eclipse’s extradimensional space, Griffith is broken, body and (in effect) mind, crying tears of blood sitting before the extradimensional beings known as the God Hand — Void, Slan, Ubik, Conrad. His allies are far below, transported along with him to an arena of grotesque faces and hungry jaws beyond time and space. Shown his entire life’s course in visions, from the moment he obtained the behelit from an old fortune teller as a peasant boy running the streets, Griffith wrestles with the morality of his path. It is unclear to what extent the God Hand, namely Ubik (who is disguised as the old fortune teller, in the vision / in past reality (?)), influence his reasoning. Griffith sees the bodies of his men, killed in action through his questing with The Band of the Hawk, as tragic, reprehensible — he feels regret at all the death.
Along with all of the previous conditions and memories and the raw state of his current body — two primary trains of thought strike Griffith in this strangely vivid examination of his consciousness –
1) The path to power always lay atop bodies — that was the whole game of him building his army, commanding it against opposing legions, sacrificing the blood of his followers to ascend the steps, eventually, to the throne itself, his men willing to die for his dream anyway — everyone was *always *expendable;
2) Sadness, regret, and empathy for those killed under his command, wishing he could go back to the beginning, in that childhood moment, before his path began and he made this choice to pursue power — all this, all of these emotions are now meaningless. He is here now, and all that matters is what he does *from here.*
In a kind of dark enlightenment, in which Griffith experiences the exact opposite of what one could call “ego death” ~ as in, an immaterial connection to all life, all other beings and material in the universe, in a transcendent moment of selfless clarity ~ Griffith instead falls utterly into himself, consumed by his ego. Ultimately, as Griffith is propositioned by these dark gods inside his solipsistic bubble out of time and space, and Guts, screaming with determination, climbs to oppose them and try to ‘save’ Griffith from whatever their intent may be, his final moral conclusion amounts to the following axiom, koan, or finalizing philosophical sentiment:
‘Fate transcends human intellect; if that is the nature of truth, then it is inevitable for children to resist fate with acts of evil.’ ~ Griffith’s realization during the eclipse
Evil can be a hard word to define. True evil. Perhaps the best definition is “a betrayal of love.” Did Griffith love Guts and Casca? To me, that seems certain. What about the Band of the Hawk, the remainder of his men? Judeau, Corkus, Pippin, Rickert. All the nameless living and dead mercenary soldiers that fought dutifully under his command. We come to find out, during the eclipse, Griffith’s love of his men can be proven by the very rules of the daemonic ritual commenced by the God Hand, surrounding the behelit and the necessary means to an ascension.
As we see in The Black Swordsman arc prior, the boons of the God Hand always requires a sacrifice. But it cannot be just anyone — it must be that which the asker loves most in their life. In the end, in his weakened state, Griffith gives in to fate and confirms the darkest path for he and his companions. The wicked and lovely irony of the God Hand accepting his sacrifice, of Griffith’s ascension into Femto: By the nature of this unholy ritual and its esoteric laws, Griffith’s love for the Band of the Hawk, in whatever complex and repressed capacity he carried it, even into his torturous isolation, is proven utterly.
Griffith chooses to sacrifice his Band, that which he loves most; he chooses evil, to cut his humanity. Saliently, this work is done by the demons and monsters within the dimension, away from his sight and hearing, without a single finger raised himself to perform the dark deeds. Transformed into the tenebrously-winged, armored entity now known as Femto, the fifth finger of the God Hand, Griffith then proceeds to commit what might be his worst atrocity, personalizing his wholesale sinning with the rape of Casca, with Guts restrained by demons, weeping and watching. Inhumanely maintaining eye contact through the act with his companion-turned-nemesis, it is at this point that Berserk‘s carnage and cruelty and chaos reaches its apotheosis, Griffith fully corrupted into demonhood and Guts made broken and berserk by their mad, intertwining, caliginous fate.
“Such beauty… It touches me. Love, hatred, pain, pleasure, life, death. All are there… This is to be human. This is to be evil.”
~ Slan, demon queen
“Causality” is mentioned many times throughout the saga by cosmic forces, such as The Skull Knight and Void; fate is spoke about as being inevitable from the demon Zodd, and more mildly from Griffith himself. Predestination seems possible within the world of Berserk; another Nietzschean metaphysical conception “eternal recurrence” is bandied with by Miura, as the eternal battle between Skull Knight and Zodd seems to herald the possibility that Guts and Griffith are merely taking part in the next generation of some predetermined and endless dance of light against dark. The behelit, lost through the grate of the torture chamber, returns as if by magical, cosmic forces right at the lowest moment of Griffith’s existence, as he tries to end himself in the shallows at dusk. Causality, predestination, predetermination, eternal recurrence, fate — all this theoretic weaving seems to proffer the possibility that Guts, Griffith, Casca never had a chance to avoid their tragedy, they never had any choice at all.
Is there no free will in this universe? What are the moral consequences of actions without this freedom? Could Griffith, events transpiring as they did, him being who he is, ever choose differently? Griffith’s realization during his final vision quest seems to perversely find solace in acts of pathology — or evil — as the only escape from fate’s cruel grasp. The narrative mythos of Berserk, forging ahead into a darker Age, offers no defined answers on these fronts.
“…a death you cannot escape!”
~ “Why do these monsters keep appearing in front of Griffith and I?”
~ That brand will be engraved throughout your existence, our offering of evil, until the last drop of blood and the anguish of death.
~ It’s futile. A human’s power is useless.
“All within the laws of causality! … All has been decided. Your lives were woven to meet this point.”
We do not know what Griffith intends to do in his reign as Femto of the God Hand; we do not know what Griffith ever intended to do in his potential reign as a human King overseeing his Kingdom earned by the blood of his many battlefields. It seems unlikely that whatever Good he might’ve done in the realm of the humane, or might do now as this ascended, astral being, no ends could ever justify the means by which Griffith gained his throne. The suffering Griffith sowed in the moments of the eclipse, unto his former companions in Casca and Guts, instantly reaps rows of corruption, his King’s reign darkened into an unforgivable abyss from its crowning moments.
“Fate is beyond human understanding.” And power, insofar that any mortal can grasp it, may be too.
Guts, in future sagas, as the Black Swordsman, in defying the God Hand their sacrifice, in his and Casca’s survival — I believe represents the countering human manifestation of breaking fate through strength of will. From his own sources of physical and metaphysical power, Guts lives out his own dark dream of resistance against fate and the God Hand — a near insurmountable foe — through conscious action. From the beginning, from a childhood hell he was perhaps lucky to escape — Guts fights for himself, in an embrace of humanity and to destroy evil, and not to necessarily create good, if such a thing is possible at all in an age so dark and demon-haunted… But now, after the eclipse, after Casca and Griffith, Guts’ mere survival is a stark defiance of fate, imbued with an inherent and indestructible meaningfulness.
Unspoken but seen in the path he walks from here in Miura’s saga, Guts’ own grand realization — his anagnorisis — coming in his view of Griffith’s betrayal, can be seen as a wayward twist upon that prior axiom ~
Fate transcends human intellect; if that is the nature of truth, then it is inevitable for warriors to resist fate with berserk and vengeant and fatalistic action.’ ~
xxx
During this arc, the rise and fall of the legendary mercenary company known as The Band of the Hawk is detailed. Readers are introduced to Griffith, before his transformation into one of the God Hand, the fearless, ambitious, charismatic, and altogether transcendently powerful leader of the prolific warrior band. We are also introduced to Casca, his second-in-command, a strangely powerful warrior woman swinging sword and heart with equal composure in a man’s world quite unwelcome to her presence. Though the rivalry and coming companionship between Guts and Griffith takes the forefront, Casca becomes an equivalently compelling figure within this triumvirate of main characters, as an intermediary between their rivalry, as the subject of their continuous admiration, and potential love.
The play over this “Golden” era deals primarily with the relationship of these principal characters and their collective influence upon one another. Guts, Griffith, and Casca all have their disparate personalities, philosophies, pasts. And dreams. Outwardly, for themselves, and inwardly, for one another. Through their bouts and victories and facing off against monsters, both man and demon, they craft their dreams in their own way, in their own time. Griffith’s dream is set at a young age, dealing in ambition, power, continuous intrigue upon battlefields and in the kingly courts. Casca’s dream is forced upon her out of a desire for escape, to gain the strength needed to earn her place, free to choose where she wants to belong. Guts, the consummate survivalist, struggles with the forging of his dream, influenced by both of his principal companions, all the way until the end… until everything changes. In Miura’s story, perhaps more important than the dreams these characters have, is where they envision their fellow companions being within those dreamscapes.
Given their existence within this harsh world is full of horror, and violent ends upon blood-soaked fields, and the claws of demons descending upon them from unfathomable dimensions, and the dark beating hearts of ambitious men after power constantly shadowing steps within the hierarchy of society, from the beginning their lowborn warrior’s dreams seem fated to shatter. But who can say? In this story, there is no word of God here to articulate the meaning of the ultimate fate of Guts and Griffith and Casca, there is no hand of a goodly deity there to set things right, or merely into a cosmic context, for the tragedies soon to befall them. At the conclusion of The Golden Age, with Griffith fully corrupted and ascended upon a throne soaked with the blood of his comrades, and Guts and Casca surviving but fated to be hunted by monsters until they too are violently expelled from this world, a resolutely Dark Age seems certain to follow within this chronology.
Origins & Dreams
What is great about Berserk are the conditions of its characters, their strength, their believability, their causality — as in, how their individual origins so clearly influence their current dispositions, and their dreams. Among the prime triad, each is borne of harsh circumstances, bloody origins of dodged death or worse at the hands of their environs. Griffith, Casca and Guts, initially can be seen archetypal and constant: the charismatic, semi-sociopathic, supremely focused leader from the gutter, destined for greatness from his long work upon battlefields / the resolute, independent woman, nevertheless an underling to a striving paragon that she looks up to, and loves / the strong but silent warrior, the invulnerable, ‘raised-by-wolves’ loner, a proficient killer of men without ambition beyond survival.
Each character is cornerstoned by what they saw and experienced as children, providencing a foundation of motivation toward life courses culminating in individuated “Dreams.” Griffith, an impoverished streetrat raised within the kingdom, saw the king’s castle as a shining star upon a distant yet traversable hill. Casca, a peasant girl existing on the edge of society, the edge of death, is captured and nearly raped, but is saved by a shining star of a man who looks not unlike a prince in stature and strength, in Griffith. Guts, lucky to be alive at all and born from the bleakest circumstances of any, knows only abuse and pain and betrayal and blood from childhood, with nowhere to turn, no one to trust, nothing at all to look up to but the void of a silent and indifferent universe.
Thusly, our heroes’ dreams can be deduced from there. Griffith seeks a kingdom, a world he can rule over for himself, utterly maximizing his endless inner potential, creating a universe in his control and borne of his own brilliant, worldly efforts. Casca wishes to follow her princely paragon to the very end of his ambitions, as his sword or his lover, either way as his partner, equivalently empowered at his side. Guts wants a road all to himself, one he can walk without need of any companions that might betray him in the end, earning his keep by his sole strength alone, just him and his sword, invulnerable and strong. Griffith breaks from his caste; Casca breaks from the role of her gender. Guts, a perfect physical specimen with transcendent skills, endurance, and vitality, breaks from the deathly circumstances of his birth; to have survived his excruciating childhood at all is a feat as impressive as any of the conquests The Band of the Hawk will eventually make with his strong sword arm leading the vanguard.
The founding of these disparate origins, childhood environs, and inspiriting dreams for Guts, Casca and Griffith — each still united by their lives as soldiers, killers that choose to exist at the brink of worldly existence — makes their interplay as companions, slowly influencing and humanizing one another over the course of their journey together in the Band of the Hawk ~ learning to love one another ~ that much more impacting in the end.
Interdependence & Change
“The brightest flames cast the darkest shadows.” ~ The core theme of the Golden Age becomes interdependence. Throughout their battles and journeying together in a mercenary band tasked with defending Midland against at-times superior foes, the fated trio grow upon one another, weaving a complex exchange of dependencies, yearnings, beliefs. Their development as characters, via nuanced dialogue and overt action, is aided tremendously by Miura’s extraordinary art, subtexting their courses equally with committed pitches of body language and cooperative hyperviolence. Within each of these strong-willed persons, all three preternaturally sublime swordsman — the prime currency of their world as warriors — profound changes commence over the course of their individual arcs in the thoughts, words, or mere presence of one another; in their fighting together, in their saving each other, in their united motivations in the Band of the Hawk and their shared goals — they come to totally shape each other’s dreams.
Griffith, the graceful, beautific striving warrior paragon, is changed by Guts — far along his King’s road, he is finally presented with someone that demands more than possession, more than pawnhood within his god-like game of continuous ascension. The emotionally stunted duo find within each other the missing piece of their lives, to differing endgame effects upon their psyche. Guts, the psychically invulnerable and mostly silent hyper-masculine specimen is changed by Casca — she is someone he can let his guard down around, someone he can enjoy vulnerability alongside, someone he can learn to love. At different times through their saga, Guts believes that Casca loves Griffith and could never love him; alternatively, their mate Judeau speaks to Guts and Casca as deserving of one another, their shared experiences being indelible, visceral. The truth seems to be that Casca admires Griffith more than she loves him. She believes in him. She loves the idea of him, as a paragon of virtue and strength, as a figure she may reliably rest her own hopes and dreams upon. Griffith, in truth, as Casca comes to find out, is not emotionally available to anyone, even her. This has everything to do with the stakes of his dream, of the necessary repressions and social sacrifices that come with ascending to the limits of human power. By pursuing a kingdom to call his own, bursting from his lowborn roots, and doing it by command of an army, Griffith must present as a symbol and not a Man. Casca, in turn, is changed by both Griffith and Guts, at different points, and in a progression of meaning — and as a consequence of them changing each other. As I said, this complex of interdependence between the trio plays out subtly and overtly, over the long arc of this Golden Age. And this interdependence comprises their emotional lives, but also their material and spiritual lives as well.
Griffith, importantly, is a strong leader, but he is not a tyrant; he is a populist, engaging lowborn peasants as equal fighters into his fold. Certainly, The Band of the Hawk follows his ‘cult of personality’, though he is not manipulative nor entitled in his rulership over them as commander. Despite his striving to attain the peak of his world’s hierarchical structure, Griffith is an egalitarian, an idealist who sincerely believes that *anyone* can do anything. He proves this in word and action, and it is proven doubly so by the fact that his men join his army by free choice, they fight for him and his dream without coercion. It can be said that the Band of the Hawk, this prolific fighting force of mercenary might winning battle after battle under his supreme command, Griffith’s men — including Casca and even Guts — are dependent upon him. Their success is driven by him at the helm. It thus follows that they would care about him, to the point of gladly dying for his cause.
Conversely, the question comes: is Griffith dependent upon them? Yes, to achieve his dream he needs their collective might upon the battlefield as an army, working together throughout campaigns of attack and defense, the games of worldly conquest involved in gaining a throne. Thus, a measure of interdependence is born even between the paragon leader and his peons — Griffith needs their bodies, their energy and their blood, and they need his shining example, his ‘perfection’ in word and action, as a vessel of their own hopes and dreams to one day surpass their birth and achieve more. The Hawk’s egalitarianism within its ranks, the autonomy and trust Griffith and Casca have for the men, for each other, this can be attributed to their ultimate successes and the consistency of their conquering. At different points, Griffith conveys genuine concern for his men, the living and the dead, proving he is capable of caring for them, and has / does, beyond just Casca and Guts.
The fracturing within the triad, and the larger collective of the Hawk as a consequence, comes with Griffith’s spoken conception of a friend in the context of their own, individual ‘Dream.’ His own philosophy upon power and sovereignty and ambition are revealed in his speech to the princess outside the castle, with Guts and Casca within earshot. Fresh off of a particularly mortifying assassination mission, Guts is tired, vulnerable, perhaps resentful of what Griffith has just made him do. And so, such judgments and their influences shift the fate of Griffith and Guts, Casca caught in the crossfire between their dueling ego’s. It stands to reason that Griffith spoke these words with Guts in mind, or alternatively, from his heart, without any preconditions to his own current surroundings, a blindspot to the circumstance of Guts, his most trusted (and loved?) companion up to then — who, without a discernible dream of his own, could not under Griffith’s definition, be considered a friend.
“A friend should never subsist on another’s dream…” ~ Griffith
Guts, insofar that he is captured with either Griffith’s aura as a man with so defining and transcendent a dream, or influenced by his explicit words of owning singular dreams as a necessary Truth to unlock his companionship, casts off on his own, leaving the Hawk. Against the protestations of Casca and Rickert, embraced by Judeau, sayonara’d by Corkus — opposed with bladed gaze by Griffith himself — Guts’ departure brings about the swift end of the Band of the Hawk at the height of their power. In a haze of psychosexual confusion — or stubborn spiteful self-destructive desire — Griffith goes and fucks the princess. Everything proceeds into darkness from there. In blood and betrayal, through their actions and inactions, fate inevitably comes for Griffith and Casca and Guts.
Imperatively, Miura paints the changes in his characters as so indirect and subtle that the characters themselves do not even realize it’s happening, even as the audience is discovering and satisfactorily arriving at the realizations themselves. At what point does Casca realize her love of Guts vs. when she actually started to? It is open to interpretation of course, but I think it is true that Griffith is so traumatized by Guts’ departure not because it has anything to do with the Hawks’ prospects for continuous victory, and his kingdom quest (which it undoubtedly does) — but because Griffith loved him. That initial ‘possession’ of his most-prized, Dragon-esque warrior constantly by his side, over time had turned to something much more reciprocal and real, and Griffith 1) didn’t know how to handle the weight of such emotional truths, having never really loved anyone in his life before, and 2) didn’t know how to reconcile the fact that Guts was leaving of his own volition, a real Dream in his eyes, and there was nothing Griffith could do to stop him. It stands to reason that the changes that come this way — naturally, unconsciously, brought about by the day-to-day continuity of interactions with one’s immediate environment, and those closest companions which end up feeling as family — are the strongest, most permanent, and spiritually affecting changes. With the force of fate behind them, these are the kinds of changes that come to these three.
Battle, Morality, Fate
Berserk’s Golden Age showcases as a subtext the painstaking efforts that are required to rise above one’s birth and station in medieval times. Griffith and Casca and Guts’ gains in power within the kingdom of Midland are borne of blood and continuous existential risk. They have to literally battle tooth-and-nail for every single inch of ground. And as a kind of Shakespearean tragedy or cosmic irony, through Guts’ seemingly harmless act of departing to romantically pursue a life of his own, their work as an army mostly done at that point, and Griffith’s desperate and bizarre response to it — we see the stark disparity between how hard it is to build something up — like an effective army dealing in continuous conquest, leading on to a potential kingdom secured in the hands of a prior peasant — and just how precariously easy it is to tear it all down. This compulsion can be seen throughout history, with the futility of building real, long-term unity, with power defaulting inexorably toward totality in the end. Rising power seeking the throne requires constant vigilance and utter, nigh pathological commitment to its continuous attainment — such as what we see from Griffith for most of the story, when he’s willing to do anything to achieve his goal (such as when he sells his body to an elder Lord to avoid a battle with them). Established power besieged by external forces, such as from the existing King, as far as he comes to perceive the coming siege, will resist with every ounce of its will, utilize every reach of its institutions, press every weakness and punish any possible misstep — we see this with the king’s general, Julius, and his attempted assassination of Griffith, and with the King’s action in capturing Griffith and putting the hit out on the Band of the Hawk, still a most powerful asset to his kingdom’s army, after the transgression against his daughter (mostly fueled by his own incestuous desires for her…)
The constancy of battle can be seen as a master value for both Griffith and Guts; the difference between them, initially and then cycling in opposition over the course of the events of the Golden Age, is what they see within their individual battles. What do they perceive their struggles — and again, their Dreams — as ultimately amounting to? Initially, the polar distinction is this: Griffith derives meaning from his fight, whereas Guts does not. Griffith *long, flowing hair eclipsing the rising sun* is on a quest with righteous purpose / Guts *bites coin* is just trying to get by. The former defies customs and fate itself in order to pursue their own self-crafted destiny, a kingdom built from the ground up with his sword and his loyal men backing him; the latter accepts his lot in life, seeing no inherent meaning in his bloody travails, content to fight for mere survival, intrigued by the mortal danger of the battles, with no dream to speak of or even envision. Griffith, as an avatar of ambition, the paragon striver, the “Lord of Longing” as the God Hand comes to call him in his tortured fever dreams, in Nietzschean terms can be seen as the “Übermensch.” Guts, conversely, as the “archetypal nihilist, only able to destroy, but unable to build and act upon a self-actualized ethos” can definitely be seen as the “Last Man,” the opposing dichotomy to Nietzsche’s “Superman.” Their paths begin to alter as Guts leaves Griffith, and I believe it is inarguable that they eventually fully shift places — with Guts as the prototypical Übermensch and with Femto as the Last Man — after the eclipse… Guts, from then on, fights with vengeant purpose for more than survival, defying fate to create a life for himself and for the damaged Casca, his blade a convincing thesis against the cruelty and evil and the looming darkness he finds himself continually mired within as ‘The Black Swordsman.’
Griffith, on the other hand, acquiesces to fate for his own gain, choosing power over morality, proverbially choosing to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven (or simply embrace his death, and the abyss of non-existence).
Questions of morality are an intriguing and necessary inquest within the universe of Berserk. Principally, they come with regard to the actions of Guts in ‘The Black Swordsman’ arc and of Griffith in ‘The Golden Age’ arc; The Black Swordsman’s tortured aspect and general amorality toward the world can be necessarily explained by Griffith’s intimately devastating presence within his past. Griffith, without a doubt, is the most morally dynamic and challenging character to analyze within the Berserk mythos. There is an entire meme, semi-serious in its implications, that “Griffith did nothing wrong” despite all evidence to the contrary at the end of the Golden Age. This is because of the complex and emergent conditions and flow of events that occur around Griffith leading up to his fateful choice, behelit in hand and eclipse dawning, the nefarious God Hand awaiting his consent to sacrifice everyone he’d ever known and loved(?) for the sake of his ascension from broken, pain-crazed Man into a dark, omnipotent God.
“I made up my mind, that I was going to win by any means necessary.” ~ Griffith
In my eyes, Griffith’s choice to consummate the eclipse, embracing the power of the behelit — “The Egg of the King” — sentencing his entire Band of the Hawk to grisly deaths, including Guts and Casca, acquiescing to a dark transformation borne of their collective blood at the hands of extradimensional Gods with unknowable designs, cannot be morally justified. But it can be explained, even rationalized. As I said before, complex forces converge to create the singular moment where Griffith is faced with the choice of sacrificing ‘everything he holds dear’ for the sake of his own life returned and his power amplified to that of a godlike being. Concisely, these forces in chronology, as seen by Griffith, include:
- The entire Band of the Hawk declared by the King as knights, ascended to the status of nobles after their latest pivotal victory in Midland’s war; Griffith’s greatest noble antagonist in Julius has been assassinated by Guts, eliminated as an obstacle to his ascent — Griffith and his army are at the peak of their power
- ‘Abandoned’ by Guts, who sets off to pursue his own path
- After choosing to go and sleep with the princess, for his own pathological and perhaps inexplicable reasoning, Griffith is captured by the King and tortured to the brink of death for over a year, his body ultimately ruined and his mind shattered to the point of madness
- Saved by Guts and Casca and his old crew from the dungeon underneath the castle, he is freed and returned to their ranks, but unable to resume his status, lead them on or stand or speak or be of much use to anyone any longer as an invalid beyond hope of physical recovery
- He sees Guts and Casca’s relationship progressed, now as lovers
- Guts and Casca care for him diligently, with love, but can no longer see him as he once was
- Griffith, unable to accept his life, body and mind as it is now, sets off with a carriage of horses on his own, abandoning the Hawk as the sun sets, while they engage in discourse over what their plan is now that they have rescued him — perhaps vying for the attention of Guts and Casca? Intending to commit suicide?, etc.?
- After crashing the carriage and failing to kill himself, cutting his neck against a sharp stone in the water — Griffith is reunited with his trusty behelit, fatefully returned to his fingers within the shallow water of the wilderness…
- {*E C L I P S E begins*}
- Propositioned by the God Hand with ascension into their ranks, Griffith is delivered psychic visions of his own consciousness, his past, the path he took, the blood and bodies along it, leading up to his castle atop the hill that he originally envisioned — his original goal — all contrasted by the only thing that ever truly distracted him away from it… Guts.
- ~ Griffith makes his choice — sacrificing The Band of the Hawk to become a God-king, the fifth finger of the God Hand — Femto.
Within the eclipse’s extradimensional space, Griffith is broken, body and (in effect) mind, crying tears of blood sitting before the extradimensional beings known as the God Hand — Void, Slan, Ubik, Conrad. His allies are far below, transported along with him to an arena of grotesque faces beyond time and space. Shown his entire life’s course in visions, from the moment he obtained the behelit from an old fortune teller as a peasant boy running the streets, Griffith wrestles with the morality of his path. It is unclear to what extent the God Hand, namely Ubik (who is disguised as the old fortune teller, in the vision / in reality (?)), influence his reasoning. Griffith sees the bodies of his men, killed in action through his questing with The Band of the Hawk, as tragic, reprehensible — he feels regret at all the death.
Along with all of the previous conditions and memories and the raw state of his current body — two primary trains of thought strike Griffith in this strangely vivid examination of his consciousness -
1) The path to power always lay atop bodies — that was the whole game of him building his army, commanding it against opposing legions, sacrificing the blood of his followers to ascend the steps, eventually, to the throne itself, his men willing to die for his dream anyway — everyone was *always *expendable;
2) Sadness, regret, and empathy for those killed under his command, wishing he could go back to the beginning, in that childhood moment, before his path began and he made this choice to pursue power — all of these emotions are now meaningless — he is here now, and all that matters is what he does *from here.*
In a kind of dark enlightenment, in which Griffith experiences the exact opposite of what one could call “ego death” ~ as in, an immaterial connection to all life, all other beings and material in the universe, in a transcendent moment of selfless clarity ~ Griffith instead falls utterly into himself, consumed by his ego. Ultimately, as Griffith is propositioned by these dark gods inside his solipsistic bubble out of time and space, and Guts, screaming with determination, climbs to oppose them and try to ‘save’ Griffith from whatever their intent may be, his final moral conclusion amounts to the following axiom, koan, philosophical sentiment:
‘Fate transcends human intellect; if that is the nature of truth, then it is inevitable for children to resist fate with acts of evil.’ ~ Griffith’s realization during the eclipse
Evil can be a hard word to define. True evil. Perhaps the best definition is “a betrayal of love.” Did Griffith love Guts and Casca? To me, that seems certain. What about the Band of the Hawk, the remainder of his men? Judeau, Corkus, Pippin, Rickert. All the nameless living and dead mercenary soldiers that fought dutifully under his command. We come to find out, during the eclipse, Griffith’s love of his men can be proven by the very rules of the daemonic ritual commenced by the God Hand, surrounding the behelit and the necessary means to an ascension. As we see in The Black Swordsman arc prior, the boons of the God Hand always requires a sacrifice, but it cannot be just anyone — it must be that which the asker loves most in their life. In the end, in his weakened state, Griffith gives in to fate and confirms the darkest path for he and his companions. ~ The wicked and lovely irony of the God Hand accepting his sacrifice, of Griffith’s ascension into Femto: By the nature of this unholy ritual and its esoteric laws, Griffith’s love for the Band of the Hawk, in whatever complex and repressed capacity he carried it, even into his torturous isolation, is proven utterly.
Griffith chooses to sacrifice his Band, that which he loves most; he chooses evil. Saliently, this work is done by the demons and monsters within the dimension, away from his sight and hearing, without a single finger raised himself to perform the dark deeds. Transformed into the tenebrously-winged, armored entity now known as Femto, the fifth finger of the God Hand, Griffith then proceeds to commit what might be his worst atrocity, personalizing his wholesale sinning with the rape of Casca, with Guts restrained by demons, weeping and watching. Inhumanely maintaining eye contact through the act with his companion-turned-nemesis, it is at this point that Berserk’s carnage and cruelty and chaos reaches its apotheosis, Griffith fully corrupted into demonhood and Guts made broken and berserk by their mad, intertwining, caliginous fate.
“Such beauty… It touches me. Love, hatred, pain, pleasure, life, death. All are there… This is to be human. This is to be evil.” ~ Slan
“Causality” is mentioned many times throughout the saga by cosmic forces, such as The Skull Knight and Void; fate is spoke about as being inevitable from the demon Zodd, and more mildly from Griffith himself. Predestination seems possible within the world of Berserk; another Nietzschean conception “eternal recurrence” is bandied with by Miura, as the eternal battle between Skull Knight and Zodd seems to herald the possibility that Guts and Griffith are merely taking part in some predetermined and endless dance of light against dark. The behelit, lost through the grate of the torture chamber, returns as if my magical, cosmic forces right at the lowest moment of Griffith’s existence, as he tries to end himself in the shallows at dusk. Causality, predestination, predetermination, eternal recurrence, fate — all this theoretic weaving seems to proffer the possibility that Guts, Griffith, Casca never had a chance, they never had any choice at all. Is there no free will? What are the moral consequences of actions without this freedom? Could Griffith, events transpiring as they did, him being who he is, ever choose differently? Griffith’s realization during his final vision quest seems to perversely find solace in acts of pathology — or evil — as the only escape from fate’s cruel grasp. The narrative mythos of Berserk, forging ahead into a darker Age, offers no answers on these fronts.
“…a death you cannot escape!”
~ “Why do these monsters keep appearing in front of Griffith and I?”
~ That brand will be engraved throughout your existence, our offering of evil, until the last drop of blood and the anguish of death.
~ It’s futile. A human’s power is useless.
“All within the laws of causality! … All has been decided. Your lives were woven to meet this point.”
We do not know what Griffith intends to do in his reign as Femto of the God Hand; we do not know what Griffith ever intended to do in his potential reign as a human King overseeing his Kingdom earned by the blood of his many battlefields. It seems unlikely that whatever Good he might’ve done in the realm of the humane, or might do now as this ascended, astral being, no ends could ever justify the means by which Griffith gained his throne. The suffering Griffith sowed in the moments of the eclipse, unto his former companions in Casca and Guts, instantly reaps rows of corruption, his King’s reign darkened into an abyss from its birth.
Guts, in future sagas, as the Black Swordsman, in defying the God Hand their sacrifice, in his and Casca’s survival — I believe represents the countering human manifestation of breaking fate through strength of will. He lives out his own dark dream of resistance against fate and the God Hand — a near insurmountable foe — through conscious action. From the beginning, Guts fights for himself, for survival and to destroy evil, and not to necessarily create good, if such a thing is possible at all in an age so dark and demon-haunted… But now, after the eclipse, after Casca and Griffith, Guts’ mere survival is a stark defiance of fate, imbued with an inherent and indestructible meaningfulness. Unspoken but seen in the path he walks from here in Miura’s saga, Guts’ own life realization — his anagnorisis — coming in his view of Griffith’s betrayal, can be seen as a wayward twist upon that prior axiom ~
Fate transcends human intellect; if that is the nature of truth, then it is inevitable for warriors to resist fate with berserk and vengeant and fatalistic action.’ ~
