#anyway i'm proud of the lore half but tbqh the character half needs work

[bthump]

Ideal Ending:

this is super difficult bc there are a multitude of good options and many I don’t even have the imagination to consider, but I’ll give it a shot. This is half serious theorizing, half hope.

OKAY here’s the thing: there are five godhand members. Once every thousand years one of them incarnates. This has to have happened at least once or twice before for it to be a known thousand year routine. The Godhand also seem to be of differing ages - Void has ye olde speech patterns, while Ubik and Slan seem relatively more modern. Who tf knows about Conrad, he’s probably second oldest. We can guess that Void came into being 1000 years ago, as he seems to be the “sage in the tower” referenced by Mozgus, who prayed until angels showed up and destroyed Gaiseric’s city.

Which means that there was an entirely different set of Godhand members pre-Void, if he’s currently the oldest, but not the first.

What happened to them?

Now I theorize that Gaiseric was originally a Godhand member who incarnated back onto Earth, the way Griffith did. He and his empire are explicitly compared to Griffith, he was said to have appeared out of nowhere to unite the nations, and Falconia is the new updated version of Gaiseric’s city. And we know Gaiseric is Skull Knight, who is now an enemy of the Godhand.

He’s also compared to Guts in many ways - Berserker armour, witch friend, hates the Godhand.

And time is a spiral.

So okay hear me out: Void destroyed Gaiseric’s “Falconia” by calling down the four angels and becoming one of them. Then those four members of the Godhand all vanished, clearing room for Void to start a new posse. My guess: Gaiseric/Skull Knight, still alive, and powerful between realms due to being an incarnate Godhand, turned against them and killed them. And this was fated to happen. Say the slate needs to be wiped clean every thousand years and the cycle begun anew, and the thousand-year incarnate is fate’s version of clearing house.

The thing NeoGriff did, cracking open the world? Lets the Godhand into the material realm. This seems sinister - oh no what are they planning, now they can directly fuck shit up! But it also makes them vulnerable - Guts couldn’t touch any of them while they’re in the deep realm the Eclipse took place in, not even SK could, but when Slan showed up in Qliphoth Guts was able to blow a hole through her. It didn’t kill her, but she definitely felt it lol.

And I believe Miura has said that Void is going to be very relevant.

SO! All that said, my guess is that Void, knowing what’s fated to happen, is going to try to take matters into his own hands and fuck shit up. He’s the big bad (plus the other godhand members probably)

And NeoGriff - for his own personal reasons, that ~just happen~ to fit into fate the way all characters and their personal motivations tend to do - is going to turn on the Godhand. Possibly in an attempt to seize more power for himself, maybe in self defense if Void tries coming for him (ironically then Void brings it on himself in trying to escape his fate.)

Cue classic enemies team up to defeat the bigger enemy plot.

So that’s the big picture theorizing.

On a more character focused level (and this is where the hardcore wishful thinking comes in):

Guts ends up going to Falconia. Either he’s consumed by revenge again because dark shit has gone down and backslid him, or he’s going for different reasons - maybe to save someone, maybe to find someone, maybe to talk, maybe to gather information, maybe to be in position for some magic plan that takes time, whatever.

He stays there for a while. I see two options: either he loses another duel or smthn and we get a fun, dark (and shorter presumably) Golden Age parallel full of scheming and conflicted feelings and hate and high emotions and Griffith slowly realizing he made a huge mistake because he’s too emotionally compromised for this but being in too deep to save himself.

Or Guts shows up, defeats Zodd in an epic showdown, tries to kill NGriff, and then instead of killing him back NGriff chains him up in his cellar and starts obsessively visiting him. In both scenarios Intriguing Kinda Gay Conversations happen.

If the former, Griffith is already plotting against the Godhand so he recruits Guts for that purpose. Maybe he covinces himself it’s sheer practicality because Guts, being branded, has a foot outside causality which helps against the Godhand or something more than his army of apostles would.

If it’s the latter, Void strikes first and Guts escapes and decides to focus on Void first as the bigger threat.

Blah blah blah, fighting happens, maybe more plot happens, Guts’ remaining rpg group shows up and Schierke probably helps metaphysically, Skull Knight dies/ascends to a higher plane of being at some point, whatever I don’t care about this.

Ending: I don’t particularly care about how the grandscale lore stuff concludes, but if they just continue the Godhand/incarnation Fated cycle, then there are indications that Fate and The Idea of Evil have different aspects to them and sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad, etc. It’s not solely an issue of “malevolent entity fucks humanity over because they’re into that.” If they do break the cycle by idk changing humanity’s perspective somehow - screw monotheism, whatever - humanity now controls its own destiny, that’s also fine.

I kind of dig when huge epic plots devolve at the very end into moments of intimate emotional catharsis, so epic shit can happen, but the true climax comes after. I think my preference would be Guts dying and Griffith breaking down and then spending a long near-immortal lifetime in mourning, but both dying together would also be gr10.

also i didn’t find a place to shoehorn this in but at some point guts and ngriff find themselves on equal footing and/or guts looks down on ngriff. well, that would be right at the climax lbr. so jot that down.

OR

fuck all of that, completely ignoring plot and lore shit and all logic and realistic expectation and not stealing the plots of old 90s shows, here’s my true ideal ending:

straight up Becoming Part II, Berserk edition. Schierke does a spell, returns Griffith’s lost humanity/non-evil parts to him and makes him complete again, they have a ~moment~ complete with first and last kiss because this is my ideal ending, then Guts kills him anyway to save the world or whatever but also dies because of reasons

everyone else lives happily ever after, farnese and casca hook up, serpico and silat hook up, schierke and sonia hook up, rickert adds 2 more swords to the hill, the end.