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alovelyburn · 2 years ago

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Rambles about the Millennium Falcon Arc Part 2

You know, I really should have just tacked the Griffith stuff here onto the last one, but it was so long.....

Anyway as a result this is a bit of a transitional piece that covers Griffith’s establishment of his Apostle inner circle as well as Farnese and Serpico’s backstory. Ahoom.

Oh and headsup for discussion of... incest I guess? Eh, you know what I mean, if you’ve read Berserk you know what they’re like in this part.

Rambles about the Millennium Falcon Arc Part 2

1. So, one thing I forgot to mention, is this kind of subtle heart theme that turns up in Neo/Femto’s stuff, like Femto’s entire chest reflects it as well...

With his chest muscle area resembling a biological heart which then heads down into a series of stylized hearts. It’s interesting – the heart theme I assume is a call to his role as the King of Longing – it seems analogous to Slan’s dildo corset. Things that represent them. I have to look closer at Ubik, Conrad and Void to see if they have anything similar.

Anyway, back to Griffith scaring the hell out of Kushans.

2. I love how Griffith just kind of waltzes over there and kills this guy. It does remind me of an old conversation I witnessed where people were arguing that Griffith in his current form isn’t a good swordfighter anymore because he doesn’t have a bunch of swordfighting feats. I think that’s a little silly though, like okay he came back to the world and just left all his skills behind, sure.

3. So, because Miura never really broadcast what Femto/Griffith could do (and sometimes showed things quite subtly, although obviously not right here), I’ve seen a lot of confusion over this and people just kind of forgetting some of the things he can do, I’m going to try to keep track of his demonstrated abilities. None of them have official names obviously but this one I call “Immunity to Violence.” Specifically physical violence, because it appears that physical weapons just don’t connect with him at all – he doesn’t block them or dodge them they just never touch him. I wonder if this is the issue Guts ran up against in recent chapters.

Guts definitely got closer than like, the arrows but that could have something to do with the amount of force or the fact that Guts was closer to begin with? Who kooooows.

Yeah, I’m sure that the dozens or hundreds of arrows that just fell out of the air and landed roughly the same distance from him all at once was a coincidence, cool. I mean, obviously this guy doesn’t even believe it, it’s just such a silly thing to say.

4. I don’t remember whether I’ve talked about this before, sob. But I often think about like, why some apostles’ human form have an actively bestial look to them, like Zodd, and some are just entirely human looking, like Locus for example. And then you also have some people in the middle like Grunbeld. There’s a few things that could explain this.

-They could get more bestial over time like vampires in some vampire mythos will tend to do. I don’t really think this is it, though, in part because Grunbeld is quite a young Apostle but he still looks partway to Zoddville.

-It could be that their “human” form as an apostle is not necessarily what they looked like in their human life, like it could be that it reflects something about them or their desires. This is probably more likely than the first, and someone like Wyald is strong evidence for that because his actual human form was a frail old man while his Apostle human form was, well, Wyald.

-It could be that they just don’t all walk around in full human or full awakened forms all the time. Maybe if they go fully into their human form they look like they did in life, but some of them choose to live in a mid-transformed state. This is the theory I like the best, because it explains a number of things, such as Grunbeld being obviously too tall to be human. It’s also probably correct, because you do see Rosine stop at different points along the human to apostle scale.

That really had nothing to do with anything but anyway.

5. Locus is one of those characters I wish we had more information on. But I also wish we had more information on.... people who have powers but aren’t mages or seemingly otherwise magical. Sonia is the obvious first example – a seer, a medium, a telepath, just kind of out of nowhere. In the Grunbeld novel, they have another character who had some kind of psychic or mystical oracling ability, and then we have this mention by Locus.

Generally speaking I find Berserk’s worldbuilding quite fascinating and well thought-out, although I do think there’s a shift in the kind of world this is meant to be between the Black Swordsman arc and the Lost Children arc. @Chainusser has discussed how the basic components of the world seem to have switched from the middle ages to somewhere approaching the renaissance, for example – Miura loved his anachronisms, but I do think that’s true. But that’s only one of the changes really – we also started getting oracles and psychic girls out of nowhere which honestly maybe shouldn’t bother me since the witches also came out of nowhere, but I do kind of want to know what their relationship to the world is. Are all their visions sent by the Godhand the way the blind priest in Conviction’s were? That’d be pretty uh interesting.

5. “The wind whispered that the world had begun to change.” I love the way the world starts to warp itself in response to Griffith’s presence or even just the approach of a time when he’ll be present. It happened in the Golden Age, and it continues to happen. It’s one of the things that makes me think the reincarnated Godhand of a given millennium is meant to change the world for its next era – the world literally starts to prime itself for major changes.

So what do you think the chances are that Raksas is actually the one who takes out Griffith? Can’t say it wasn’t foreshadowed if so.

I love this bit a lot – the brutality and chaos caused by the Apostles and the casualness with which they present it.

One of the things I like about this whole sequence, the whole thing from Griffith’s arrival through the Apostles kneeling before him is... the sheer carnage that they cause when they arrive, breaking down gates and decimating dozens of fighters in a handful of seconds. Because it does underscore the strength of the army Griffith ends up commanding but also the brutality of them, which contrasts beautifully with the more controlled and civilized way they behave once Griffith gets his talons on them.

I also like... how freaking menacing they look back there. Now this is kind of interesting, too:

6. “That’s the Hawk of Light. The savior of the world. Or perhaps...”

Schierke’s first appearance. I think it’s interesting that she refers to Griffith as both the Hawk of Light and then on the next page as the Hawk of Darkness. She also reflects some uncertainty as to what he is and what he is there to do – the savior of the world, or perhaps...

One of the things I notice about the way the mystical types perceive Griffith -- and I’m not going to claim this is universal because I’m ultimately just referring to the ones I can remember – is that they don’t tend to refer to him as an inherently malevolent force but rather as a confounding force that creates... chaos as a byproduct of his existence. Here I’m thinking all the way ahead to Elfhelm, where the people Guts talked to about Griffith perceived the monsters and destruction he created not as an end to itself but as something done in order to accommodate his creation of Falconia but I mean we’ll get into that more later I’m sure.

Anyway the point is...

Schierke obviously finds him distressing and dangerous – I think at some point he’s actually called dreadful? Maybe that was a fan translation. But it does make sense considering one of the first things he does is start burning down powerful witches. Even so, he does have this air of ambiguity to him as is appropriate for one whose actions may cause suffering or salvation.

Also, Master of the Sinful Black Sheep (Apostles), King of the Blind White Sheep (humanity). I’ve seen it suggested that the latter is the Holy See specifically which I guess would work as a messianic reference, but I do think it means humanity as a whole since his deal is that he’s leading all of mankind into one nation under, well, him.

7. The destruction, the violence, and the beauty that shines through it and overrides it, it’s very appropriate to Griffith, don’t you think?

I wonder if every incarnated Godhand becomes the master of the Apostles or if it’s just part of Griffith’s specific thing. Better than that, though, I wonder if there were Apostles when the last Godhand incarnated. That might seem like a somewhat random question, but this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now: when Void’s Eclipse is shown there are no apostles anywhere. And the name Apostle in itself suggests followers of something or someone – a messianic figure for example. Also, we’ve never met an Apostle older than Zodd, and he’s only 300. Now obviously there could be older ones out there we’ve never met, but it is interesting isn’t it? It wouldn’t be farfetched to suggest that they are, well, Apostles of Griffith specifically and that this specific form of human-turned-demon may have been created specifically for this era.

Okay so lemme talk a little bit about Griffith for a moment.

I always say NeoGriffith is my favorite of all the Griffiths – and he is. He is the embodiment of all the things that draw me so powerfully to Berserk – the embodiment of the questions raised by the worldbuilding, and his enigmatic nature is incredibly intriguing to me: what does he feel? Is it anything? How does he feel about his situation? Does he have regrets? Is he happy? Is he capable of happiness? Does he find Falconia satisfying, or does he miss the people he lost? Obviously that One Scene, you know the one, seems to imply that he does miss them and does harbor some regrets. But at the same time he also implies that he doesn’t feel that way until the transitional period between Moonkid and NeoGriffith, thus implying that on a day-to-day basis he’s fine.

NeoGriffith is, like I said, an enigma. I’ve seen people say he comes off as a bit robotic, going through the motions of fulfilling the things Griffith wanted to do for no particular reason other than that Griffith once wanted to do them. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but there is a certain emptiness to him and it’s hard to say whether it’s because he himself is empty or because honestly most of what he does amounts to going through the motions because he lives on a stage and he is in a constant state of performance. He does show hints of reactions from time to time that seem genuine – the smile as he walked away from Rickert after being rejected comes to mind – but most of the time it’s like he’s semi-sleepwalking through life, and the thing is that does make sense because ultimately Griffith as he is now is a fundamentally different kind of being than he was as a human.

Also, Miura once commented that he wrote Griffith as someone who didn’t talk about his mental state, which does imply that there’s something going on there beyond what’s immediately evident – especially since that was a response to someone noting that he seems like a secondary protagonist after his reincarnation. So he wasn’t talking exclusively about Griffith’s emotional and psychological issues during the Golden Age. There’s something happening behind his placid surface.

But all that said.... he does lack a lot of human Griffith’s charm, and sometimes it’s difficult to believe that it’s the same person – although, in fairness, it isn’t really.

But all that said as well, I will note that it’s actually pretty hard to tell how much like Hawks Griffith he really is, because when we knew Hawks Griffith we saw him through Guts’ experience, and Griffith was never “normal” about Guts. My point being its entirely possible that from the outside – from the perspective of people who weren’t the best friend Griffith was in love with and confided everything in – the personalities would not be as visibly different as they are to us.

(In fact I’d say that’s probably the case.)

Miura once said that Griffith’s return to the world was the beginning of his and Guts’ relationship as adults. So that’s interesting, too.

And now on to Farnese and Serpico!

8. The relationship between Serpico and Farnese is kind of awkward to write about, because of the Serpico/Farnese relationship being weird and because as a result I’m going to have to talk about incestish-tinged emotional relationships. But here we go.

In one of those quotes posted on Twitter, Miura talked a bit about his unwillingness to do that anime thing where someone is really strong but has a skinny body, so he felt like Serpico’s formidability had to come from his speed. I don’t think he directly mentioned Serpico’s wits, but I do think that not unlike Griffith, his mind is one of his stronger assets, and so is his ability to play pretend. I mean I can see why some people consider him to be a Griffith type even though as I’ve said before I don’t really think they’re that similar.

Anyway, for a small kid without money, developing those skills – learning how to defend himself without brawn, learning how to outsmart an enemy or let them think he’s helpless and then snap out at them becomes key to his survival. He still kind of uses that strategy – appear meek and weak and then unleash when necessary.

But even though the skills in question end up helping him later in life, when he was a kid it just made things more difficult – he talks about having to bear the pride that his mother put on him and having it stripped away daily. It seems like her insistence that he remain prideful tended to force him to his feet when he was attacked but instead of saving him, it made his tormentors even more cruel, and the beat him down until that pride drained out. And then he’d go home and have it pushed onto him again. It’s another thing he has in common with Farnese later – the weight of “family” expectations that he can never live up to. That, really, he doesn’t even want to live up to.

I guess his mother had “consumption”, aka tuberculosis? Because I don’t know that untreated advanced cancer would have allowed her to live long enough to end up burning on the stake whereas TB may give you a few years. Plus she was having coughing fits.

It’s interesting to me how this idea – the dream that is a burden – keeps coming up, particularly in reference to these poverty-stricken people who are meant to try and raise themselves up to nobility. This makes sense because in the kind of society we’re talking about here, it’s almost impossible to actually achieve that feat, so trying to do so is like trying to run on quicksand. In Serpico’s case he isn’t really allowed to let go of that and try to build a life inside the world that he actually inhabits instead of the one she dreams of him entering.

It’s a bit different with Griffith because he’s... Griffith, I mean he’s built different. But even he found it burdensome by the end. Serpico also lacks Griffith’s unrealistic charisma and I’m not saying this to bag on Serpico I’m just saying that he lacks the Griffith option of turning his enemies into followers, so all he can do is try to survive them.

Enter Farnese.

Yeah she did think that. I mean I guess the thing is, at this point in their lives they’re both needing something the other can provide. Farnese, living in this loveless house, neglected and ignored, is desperately looking for someone to love her and pay attention to her – thus the progressive set of animals she tries and fails to bond with which is a whole other issue. But I do think she initially took him in for the same reason she picked up all these animals. If he hadn’t taken to her, I’m honestly not sure what she would have done. Thrown him on the pyre too? Kicked him out into the streets? Probably something like that.

But that doesn’t happen, because Serpico has basically been primed for this moment by his mother’s insistence that he aim to enter noble society. ...he’s also been primed for it by the events of his life as a poverty stricken kid who has to support his dying mother and himself, and is constantly getting beaten half to death for it. For him, as ill-tempered as she is, Farnese is a savior of sorts – she takes him off the streets and out of the cold and gives him a better life, and because she does he is able to afford a caretaker for his mother, thus lifting that off of him as well.

The fixation he develops on her as a result of that reminds me of Casca’s fixation on Griffith, or Farnese’s fixation on Guts – though it manifests differently because Serpico is a different person. But, you know. As a result of this person upending the world they felt trapped in and showing them a new way of life, they develop this devotion to that person. Although I will say in Serpico and Farnese’s case, in many ways she didn’t free him so much as give him a more comfortable cage.

9. The way Farnese treats Serpico is, you know, completely abusive. It’s also odd because there seems to be very little motivation behind it, and it’s not as though she doesn’t care about him. I think one big thing is that at this point in her life, Farnese is still in the habit of trying to control everything that she feels threatened by or is afraid of – not to say she’s afraid of what Serpico would do to her but rather she’s afraid of being emotionally invested in someone who doesn’t invest back.

Which brings me to what I think is the primary reason she does this: as a test of his devotion. It’s something people with a fear of abandonment do sometimes: push people to see whether they come back. How much do you love me? If I say this thing, will you forgive it? Do you love me enough to overlook how mean I am? Do you love me enough to not get mad when I hurt you? Do you love me enough to stay when I tell you to go?

If the target leaves, it just confirms their fear that they’ll always be left behind. But at least it hurts less if they know it was their choice.

And if the target stays... it’s not enough. It’s never enough, because they always think the next thing will go over the line and they’ll be alone again.

Serpico recognizes that isolation and loneliness in her because he lived with it in his own life. I imagine too that part of the reason he sticks by her so hard is because of what he did to get there: he failed his mother – left her alone and unable to fend for herself, with only a caregiver to spend time with. He chose Farnese instead. Having made that choice, he can’t go back without making it all worthless.

Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love Farnese or that he wants to abandon her, I don’t think that’s the case at all.

Something ghastly compelled her – it’s the fear though, isn’t it? Farnese is afraid of a lot. And her way of staving off that fear is to try to control it and if she can’t control it, then she tries to join with it. A fire can’t burn its own flames. Lightning can’t strike itself. If she keeps dancing with the storm, then it can’t sweep her away.

Editorializing moment but while I understand what’s going on here, it’s also the only thing I have a hard time with. I’m an animal person, idk what to tell you.

I like how Miura let the reader and Serpico come to understand Farnese bit by bit together. Not that you could tell from how I frontloaded info oops.

But the fact that she’s willing to burn her beloved keepsake because of an offhand remark from her father speaks volumes. She’s chasing his shadow, trying to be seen. Trying to win affection from a rock. Basically.

Serpico understands her, though, because even if they come from different places and had different experiences, they know the same pain. They both lived in isolation and loneliness in their childhood. They both spent most of their time afraid. To bury that fear they surrounded themselves in walls that obscured their core selves from the world – even though to do that left them cut off from the things they wanted to reach for, alone in the cold.

And I think this – this moment when he comes to truly understand her and chooses to stand with her even when she tries to push him away – its really the moment when their relationship started developing in the direction that it did. For better or worse. ...mostly worse, really, at least until later.

And the reason it’s mostly worse is this little catch in the road. Because the thing is I... this is a I guess a controversial topic, but for me it was always very obvious that Serpico and Farnese were kind of... I mean, look, I’m not trying to make a statement about children having romantic feelings for each other (although I mean, they do – I remember when I was in like 5th grade people talked about who they had crushes on all the time, they even “dated,” idk, do people not do that anymore? I HAVE NO IDEA, I DON’T KNOW ANY CHILDREN) but I am saying the relationship between them is... romance...flavored? And I mean, I guess some people have a hard time seeing/accepting that because they’re siblings but like, they didn’t know that at first, and Farnese still doesn’t know. I’ll bring up some other stuff in a minute but first let’s just say... their being related changes the trajectory of their relationship in a way that neither ever fully adjusted to.

And we’re about to get into all that in this next chapter I guess!

"Time passed within the labyrinth. The two saplings beneath the snowy drift became bent and entwined as they grew. And before they knew it, trees begin to extend their branches beyond their miniature garden... bearing curious fruit.”

Farnese uses Serpico as a shield between herself and the obsequious social climbers trying to cling to her skirt. That’s the thing, like she’s obviously snubbing them but as soon as we move away from her and see what people are saying about it...

No one cares about her. No one’s talking about how sweet or intelligent she is or how charming or how beautiful, it’s just gdi I want to marry into her family. And I mean look that’s probably because the only thing of the above that they can attest to is her looks – she won’t talk to them so it’s not like they know how bright she is or even what her personality is like once you get close. But knowing that must be a turnoff for her when she has Serpico there at her side. Besides if she marries into some noble family isn’t that the same as staying there? Wouldn’t she just end up alone in a house again?

And okay here comes the uhh incestish portion of this treatise. I know it’s a touchy subject, and I’ve had some disagreements with people who don’t believe there was anything particularly romancey going on between them, but I’m going to state it and back it up, and by the way it’s not like I want them to get together ok, it’s the same thing I always do: just look at what’s on the page and take it for what it is.

Okay so the point about them that I most often see is that Farnese only asked to run away with Serpico because she was desperate to escape the arranged marriage, not because she had any particular romantic interest in Serpico himself. I’m here to say that’s incorrect and here’s why:

First – the way she treats him, the way she whips him and then gets noticeably excited by it, and the sexualized way in which her interactions with his bare skin are presented are extremely reminiscent of her reaction to whipping Guts back in the day... which was very obviously because she was attracted to him. ...and to whipping, I guess. Also....

Second - Serpico is aware that she’s into him before the arranged marriage thing comes up, he’s just kind of ignoring it. In the guidebook there’s this one bit where it says that she uses her actions toward him as an outlet for her feelings and desires. Which makes sense because the more she loves the more she fears, and so she lashes out and she gets possessive and she tests and she hurts him in order to reassure herself or comfort herself, or vent the things she wants into a more “acceptable” form if you consider whipping your servant and biting him acceptable I guess, I mean uhhhh it’s not but you know, maybe it’s more socially acceptable than having a relationship with an underling even if he is titled.

Sometimes I feel like the way Farnese treats Serpico is the way some weirdo Griffith haters think he treated Guts, lmao. You know like the people who are all, yeah he had feelings for Guts but obviously he was super-abusive. Like I don’t know if they have whipping headcanon going on or what. Anyway.

More on that in a second, but first...

The juxtaposition here is really cool – Look at the way the page is constructed with the panel layout of the bottom a reflection of the top, emphasizing the way Serpico and Farnese’s experiences and relationships with their defining but absent parents are similar and different. In Serpico’s case, his mother is mentally absent – because she’s so sick, he grew up in a state of parentification. He had to fend for himself. Farnese is the same way – she grew up in a gilded cage instead of a hovel and the streets, but even so she was left to raise herself, emotionally abandoned, and each of them were ultimately subject to the demands and expectations of those parents which forced them into roles they wouldn’t otherwise have taken on.

And this expression – the same face she had on when her father told her to throw away her beloved bunny doll. Parental relationships can just be like. Needles under your skin, I don’t know.

Okay so like, Farnese doesn’t know they’re related, you know? She isn’t asking him to do this just so she can escape – she has feelings for him, Serpico was already aware of that. That being the case, and knowing how terrified she is of abandonment or rejection, and the fact that to issue this request is to defy the orders of the father she’s been chasing all her life... imagine how hard it was for her to ask him this.

I don’t really think that she’d made this request if she weren’t in love with him, because it’s too big a risk. If it were like that – if all she wanted to do was escape – there’s no reason she couldn’t have just said let’s leave, fuck this place. She didn’t have to frame it as a romantic overture. But the fact that she comes out with this now, right after her father announces that he’s betrothed her to some guy she doesn’t know, is also pretty telling. It’s her last chance to try to say what she hasn’t been saying before it’s too late.

And I think...

The shock and pain on her face when he rejects her speaks for itself. I just think after all they’d been through together, and everything she’d thrown at him without his complaining, and all the times she tested him and found that he was always still there with her... she didn’t... expect him to reject her. This ultimately sets her off into a frenzy because...

Remember, when she hurts, or is afraid, she tries to control it, and then she tries to merge into it. It’s just the same as when she feared the burning outside her window and fought it by throwing torches on the pyre, or when she was afraid of the storm so she went out and started dancing with it, destroying things. I think... the fact that her father is trying to oust her from the house, that the person she thought returned her feelings rejected her (which to her mind means she’s now trapped into this marriage), she feels like it’s burning her down, so she expresses her pain by burning everything else down too. And that’s why....

She is able to calm down when Serpico saves her, and holds her.

The thing is, when she tried to initiate a romantic relationship with him and he turned her down, she probably registered that as the end of the road basically – the thing that finally drives him away from her. But when he saves her, when he still cares about her and stays with her, she’s able to regain enough security and stability to stop her rampage. But the thing is...

Remember she is a person who is terrified of rejection. The fact that she never brings it up again doesn’t mean that her feelings changed. It means that she is never going to take that risk again, because she barely survived it the first time. Also honestly, when someone rejects you, leaving it alone and not bothering them about it is probably the right thing to do, you know?

I think Serpico’s feelings are a little more difficult to read, in part because he’s so masked up all the time. But in an interview Miura does refer to him as analogous to Andre from Rose Versailles, which is telling if you know the story because he’s the attendant who loves Oscar and stays by her side even though he has no reason to believe he’ll ever be able to be with her. It also got into Miura’s theory on romantic ideals – the three types of man that he believed women would dream of, in Farnese’s case being the faraway one that she longs for (Guts), the one who sticks by her side (Serpico) and down to earth guy with money who woos her (Roderick). It’s also mentioned elsewhere that Serpico has “special feelings” for her, which could mean anything really. And their relationship is described as having the “outward appearance of a mistress/servant relationship, but....”

NOW, LISTEN. I don’t want anyone walking away from this thinking I want siblings to hook up, lmao. It’s not that, it’s just that I think that... it’s important to register where these characters are coming from because we’re about to go on a long journey with them, and one that both challenges and changes their dynamic. If we can’t recognize that Farnese and Serpico have this kind of like emotionally incestuous thing happening, or that those feelings never quite faded (at least up to this point in the story), then a lot of things later make less sense.

And the other thing is... Farnese has no idea that this is even an issue. She doesn’t know Serpico is her brother. To her, he’s just a guy she loved who rejected her. So this story looks very different from her angle than it does from Serpico’s or the reader’s.

Anyway, moving along.

It’s interesting to me how Serpico... is like “yeah maybe this is where she’s meant to be!” Because the last time we saw her burning things with that look on her face, he recognized it as a coping mechanism – pushing people away. But at the same time, I think at this point he was probably just relieved and pleased that she had found something, since they were no longer able to be as close as they were. The distance that came up between them after he rejected her means that he can’t warm her the way he used to, even though he’s still there at her side.

Somehow I forgot that the people they were burning weren’t even pagans, they were like... Lutherans basically, yeesh.

This is like the final boss in Serpico’s life. Sorry that’s kind of callous but what I mean is, he’s been running from his past for so long, struggling with his feelings about his mother who was ... not a good parent but through no fault of her own. And he had that... caretaker’s curse of half-wishing she’d die, and at the same time still loving her, and hating her. He ran from it really – has he even stayed in regular touch with her?

...yeah, Lutherans. It’s tragic though because it’s not like she even had the capacity to understand or decide to join this other sect, not that it’s okay to burn people for being Lutherans anyway.

This is such a heartwrenching moment. The thing is, it seems cruel – it is cruel. But she’s trying to protect him. In this moment, surrounded by the Holy See’s knights, what can they do?

The scene of the burning there, that’s from when Farnese burned her beloved worn down bunny. Because her father told her to, and she ultimately... chose to follow his edict rather than holding onto something she loved.

So. Farnese tells him to burn his mother – the broken down thing that he still loves – and he does it. So he can follow her, at the expense of losing something he held onto until now.

The metaphor of fire that keeps coming up in Berserk – fire that keeps the dark back, fire that marks the presence of a true leader. For Farnese, fire means a way out of the cold that she’s lived in her whole life. Serpico lived inside it with her, and they gave each other warmth, but as long as they were trapped inside the world defined by others – the Vandimions, the church, they would never truly be able to thaw. Serpico seems to recognize this drive in her - the way she’s drawn to Guts’ light, ironically enough, given that he is so dark.

It foreshadows, too, the way Guts will change their dynamic as Farnese develops her feelings for him, and Serpico... deals with that.

All right, well, that was longer than I expected. Just proves I can bang on forever about literally anything because I never thought that much about Serpico’s past before.

You know what I have thought a lot about though? The Beast of Darkness, which is coming up next time same hawk time same hawk channel.

#ariel talks about berserk #rambles about berserk #berserk meta

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