#anyways i love griffguts and toxic ships and problematic stories and--

[resdayn]

not the griffguts artist being an anti 🤣 my brother in christ did we read the same manga

[bthump]

What do you think separates a simple relationship between enemies/heroes and villains/etc. from a straight-up abusive relationship? And do you consider Guts and Griffith's relationship abusive?

Hmm, interesting question. It’s something I’ve always considered on a case-by-case basis rather than trying to come up with a categorical distinction. I’ll throw some thoughts on this under a cut, because it’s a fairly discourse-adjacent topic, and also it got pretty long.

First I want to make clear that I don’t think it matters if a relationship is straightforwardly abusive in canon, there’s still nothing wrong with shipping it. I could probably be more nuanced there, but honestly for me the bottom line is that I don’t gaf about the influence of fanfiction compared to mainstream media, the most problematic, abuse-romanticizing fic ever doesn’t matter at all next to a million hollywood movies where the hero is entitled to the hot love interest, even moreso when it’s a hero/villain ship which comes bundled with the expectation that it’s not meant to be #relationship goals lol.

But to answer your question, imo most hero/villain relationships have virtually nothing to do with abusive relationships. Here’s a quick defintion I got from the first google result to refer to:

Relationship abuse is a pattern of abusive and coercive behaviors used to maintain power and control over a former or current intimate partner. Abuse can be emotional, financial, sexual or physical and can include threats, isolation, and intimidation.

So first off, the characters have to have a relationship of some kind (maybe not romantic, but something other than “enemies”), secondly, a pattern of behaviour must be exhibited from one in a position of power (not necessarily overt power, it could just be the other’s emotional attachment to them) to control the other in that relationship.

So two people punching each other because one wants to destroy the world and the other wants to save the world, or because they’re on opposite sides of some other conflict, just doesn’t cut it, even if they fuck afterwards, or have a strong emotional attachment to each other, or whatever.

Even a villain imprisoning and torturing the hero over a period of time doesn’t make it an abusive relationship because their goal usually isn’t to control the hero’s behaviour in the context of a relationship, it’s to slowly kill them/hurt them for funsies/get information/prove a philosophical point/whatever. Intent matters here. Like eg, killing your bff’s other friend to isolate them and gain greater control over them bc you’re possessive? Abuse. Killing your bff’s other friend because it’s a necessary part of your Evil Plan or because they discovered that you’re evil and you don’t want to go to jail or die or whatever? Plain old villainy.

All that said there are plenty of grey areas and places where people can disagree and draw their own conclusions both about whether a relationship is abusive in canon and to what extent that even matters to them, and I think that’s perfectly fine and people should generally live and let live when it comes to others’ interpretations of and ways of engaging with fiction.

Some things to keep in mind along those lines are

authorial intent/whether something is narratively treated as abuse rather than basic hero/villian stuff

expectations within the setting and tone of the story (eg Michael Scott would be an abusive boss in real life but in a wacky comedy it’s not something we’re meant to care about)

realism and relatability (which is pretty subjective, but like eg someone might consider the protag discovering their bff tricked them into murdering their other bff to be personally upsetting bc it reminds them of a more mundane form of manipulation within irl abusive relationships while someone else might see it as too far removed from actual irl abuse for them to care about it as anything other than exaggerated villainy, and imo both reactions are perfectly fair)

power dynamic - I know this one can be a major point of contention within the discourse but in fiction if there’s no clear power dynamic and both parties actively hurt each other, as is often the case in hero/villain relationships, I’d call that toxic rather than abusive (assuming the hurts are along the lines of relationship abuse moreso than punching each other to save/destroy the world).

plain old quality of writing where something might be depicted as abuse, purposefully or not, but it sucks so you ignore it (eg technically xena is canonically a rapist but the scene where she fucks a recurring villain while he’s her prisoner was depicted as sexy so v few people in fandom give it a second thought)

As for your second question, no I don’t think griffguts is an abusive relationship. I suppose if you transpose modern mundane standards onto Berserk’s tone and setting it could have been if they’d been fucking during the Golden Age, since Griffith is technically Guts’ boss and adding sex is an abuse of a boss/employee relationship, but they weren’t, and I don’t think it’s something fic set during the Golden Age necessarily needs to be concerned with either.

The second duel contained a violently possessive internal monologue on Griffith’s part, but a) the action of fighting a second potentially fatal duel was explicitly, as Judeau directly tells us, a perfectly acceptable thing to do in the context of their lives in the setting (ie dumb mercenaries), and b) abuse is a pattern of behaviour anyway, not one bad breakup.

The Eclipse sacrifice parallels an abusive relationship (Guts and Gambino), but it’s distinct from it and extremely heightened and fantastical, and Griffith and Gambino are contrasted in terms of their relationships to Guts much more than they’re paralleled. The point of the Eclipse mirroring Gambino selling Guts to Donovan isn’t to say “this is the same kind of relationship,” it’s to say, “this is the darkness of humanity and anyone can succumb to it in the right circumstances.” Also it’s Guts’ ironic tragic consequence for abandoning the Hawks. It’s a satisfying full circle narrative and thematic thing, is what I’m saying, rather than a reflection of Guts and Griffith’s relationship as a whole, which is explicitly positioned as a positive contrast to Guts’ abusive childhood at other points in the story.

And Guts and Femto, or Guts and NeoGriffith, just don’t interact enough to have a relationship, let alone an abusive relationship.

That said, I think there’s a reasonable argument you could make that Griffith’s “if I can’t have him, I don’t care [if he dies]” attitude is a reason he makes the Eclipse sacrifice too (I think it is), and if someone wanted to take that and explore it further in fic as a potential aspect of their relationship that risks becoming, or does become, abusive that could def be IC. But conversely you could also take several aspects of Guts’ character and explore them further in a griffguts fic where Guts is abusive if you wanted.

Like Berserk deals with a lot of dark subject matter and both characters have very big personality flaws that could make either of them believably abusive in fic, but their relationship in canon, while flawed and ultimately tragic, does not constitute abuse in and of itself imo, and a fanfic where they get together and have a happy relatively healthy relationship where they deal with their issues constructively is just as in character and imo actually more thematically appropriate lol.