#he gotta express how much he loves sword making yk

[leepotp]

Haganezuka getting into it

-getting into polishing a sword 🤭

[luccislegs]

Can I have a scenario where Luffy and his s/o are hanging out someplace and some guy starts flirting with and making his s/o uncomfortable so Luffy has to step in. Not because she’s weak or head jealous (though if you want that can be a factor jealous Luffy is my jam!) but she’s too nice to tell him to take a hike. Also; side note; keep up the amazing work I just found your blog today and I really love it so far! Glad to have another one piece blog for me to binge read!

i combined these two bc they asked for pretty much the same thing. in other news, i love jealous!anyone tbh but my favorite is absolutely when they do something to unintentionally make their partner jealous then they make it up to you, generally by blatantly expressing their affections. another trope i like but am kind of ashamed of is ‘established relationships’ with rival inserted so partner is jealous, bc it’s almost always a woman that is the rival and it just feels really…i dunno, misogynistic? like if i write it i turn it around to be a huge misunderstanding bc i don’t want tear downs, yk? i’m rambling anyway enjoy!

–

“Oh, excuse me,” you said, moving down the bar for the fourth time. You were patiently waiting on the bartender, who was currently swamped with requests. He had been polite enough to acknowledge you, and you were understanding, so you had settled down on a bar stool to wait.

That hadn’t lasted long, and you were soon set upon by a few different men. Each of them had been turned down, in as nice a way as you could muster, but one in particular had made you uncomfortable. His leer and the look in his eyes said he wasn’t going to be deterred so easily, and it proved true when he came back ten minutes later and sat down next to you.

You hopped down, pretending you were going to chase the bartender, only for him to skulk along after you. It wasn’t like he was trying to hide it, either, he was openly stalking you.

You were actually beginning to be afraid that he would follow you out of the bar and kidnap you. It wasn’t like you couldn’t handle yourself, but even he seemed a little out of your league. Your best hope was probably to get back to the safety of the group.

As you turned to the crowd, a hand wrapped around your wrist and tugged. You opened your mouth to scream, or yell, or curse, but then the smiling face of your captain was in yours.“Oh, thank god, Luffy,” you said, letting your head fall forward onto his shoulder.

He snickered and patted the back of your head. “We were getting worried since you were taking so long.”

“The bar is packed and service is slow, so I’m just stuck waiting,” you said, feeling overwhelmed with relief that he was here now.

But as quick as it came, it was snuffed out when Luffy nodded and turned back to the crowd. “Well then, I’ll leave you to it. Gotta let the others know!”

Typical of Luffy, when you really needed him to pay attention the most, he was running on one brain cell. By the skin of your teeth, you managed to snag the back of his shirt before he could be swallowed by the crowd.

“Luffy wait, please,” you said, and he turned then, his eyes a bit sharper as he picked up on the note of panic in your voice. His gaze snapped to the man hovering behind you, finally realizing just how close he was and that he may have been paying a bit too much attention to the two of you. “I don’t want to start a fight, please don’t flip out,” you said when you recognized the manic glint in his eyes.

“Sure, _____, so long as he stays back,” Luffy said, wrapping his arm tight around your shoulders and pulling you close to him. His stare was still fixed on the man by the bar, who was now watching with open contempt but made no attempt to instigate.

“Thank you, Luffy,” you said, giving him a relieved side hug. The tension was almost palpable, but after a few minutes the man sidled off, throwing glares over his shoulder at the two of you. Robin and Sanji came to look for you at one point, but were quick to leave once they saw the crowded bar.

It took another fifteen minutes before you finally got your order, which Luffy was happy to point out in a whiny tone, but that was thrown to the wind in the face of all the food that now sat in front of him. The rest of the night, Luffy never let you go to the bar alone, and the whole crew was almost falling over by the time you left to go back to the ship.

This would have been funny if you hadn’t been feeling like someone was following you the whole time. More than once, you turned around to scope out behind you because, though your crew mates were being loud, in the lulls where they quieted down you were sure you heard muttering and footsteps. Hurrying to catch up to the others, you tugged on Zoro’s sleeve.

Before you could say a word, he was already nodding. “I know they’re back there.”

That was all you needed to hear, and you nodded before you moved off to Luffy’s side. You should probably have told him about it, since he was probably the only one unaware of your shadows, but he would try to pick a fight right there in the alleyway. It was more prudent to wait until you were in a more open area, plus Zoro knew what he was doing. Maybe not where he was going, but other than that you trusted him.

You linked your fingers with Luffy’s, and he grinned down at you, swinging your arm enthusiastically while he whistled. The shuffling behind you grew more obvious, coming closer and they were starting to sound aggressive.In another few steps, the alley opened out onto the port leading down to the docks, and they decided to make their move.

“You, Strawhat! I have a bone to pick with you.” As you had suspected, it was the man from the bar, and he had friends. You had thought that Luffy’s presence had scared him off, but he appeared to have kept drinking, and that had given him a dangerous amount of courage.

Luffy turned around and looked, releasing your hand in the process. “Hey, you’re that stalker from the bar! What are you doing here?” He stepped in front of you, shielding you as if the man was going to steal you from a distance.

There was a rattle of swords, and Zoro started to step forward, but Luffy’s hand on his shoulder stopped him.

“Leave him to me. He was harrassing _____ at the bar, and now he’s followed her all the way to the ship, so I’m gonna kick his ass.”

Zoro’s eyes widened but he smirked and stepped down, nodding his head in acknowledgment.

“This’ll only take a moment,” Luffy said darkly, rolling his shoulder.‘A moment’ turned out to be five minutes, and all of the rival crew members were laid out unconscious all along the sidewalk. “Now you better leave my _____ alone now, or I’ll kick your ass harder next time!” Luffy yelled at them before he jumped down to join you next to the ship.

“Jeez, Luffy,” Zoro said, staring at you with a mischievous smirk, “I didn’t know you could get so jealous.”

Luffy puffed his chest out and huffed, wrapping his arms tight around you as he said, “Yeah. Anyone tries to take _____ from me and I’ll whoop their asses! She’s mine!”

Coming from anyone else, that statement would have made your skin crawl but from Luffy, it was a comfort. “Thanks, captain.”

He grinned, rubbing his face all over yours before he stopped with his nose against yours. You could feel heat rising to your cheeks the longer he stared without blinking, until finally you felt his lips against yours.

“You’re so cute when you blush, _____,” he said when he pulled away. “Let’s go to bed, I’m tired.”

–

god i still don’t know if i like the direction this went, plus i’ve been putting a lot of energy into my fics so it’s taking attention from these. i hope you still like it, though!

[bthump]

Well this originally started out as a jokey take on how heterosexuality is the True Villain of Berserk, but then I was like, shit this actually works surprisingly well and is kind of depressing. So now I’m doing it more seriously. This isn’t meant to be some grand unifying theory of Berserk lol, it’s not even close to airtight or anything, the story just happens to lend itself weirdly well to this particular reading.

So here’s how Griffith’s narrative works as an almost certainly accidental, yet imo somewhat relatable, metaphor for being closeted and repressed:

The only way for him to realize his dream is to marry the princess. War, battles, glory, promotions, even the Eclipse, those are all stepping stones that enable him to one day marry Charlotte. Marriage is the only door to his dream. Even when he becomes saviour of the world, he’s still gotta marry a woman to make it official.

Griffith’s all-encompassing, all-important dream is embodied by heterosexual marriage.

Set up in perfect opposition to that dream, the only one who makes him forget about it, and the one he has to sacrifice to attain his dream, is Guts, the man he’s in love with.

So it should be pretty apparent how that central conflict lends itself to a closeted gay man torn between obligation and desire kinda reading, right?

The details don’t do much to counter it either. It’s Charlotte’s presence that creates the rift between Guts and Griffith - she’s there, refocusing Griffith’s attention from Guts to his heteronormative goal during their significant, romanticized staircase conversation when Guts asked why Griffith would risk his life for him and Griffith failed to give him a reason. And she’s the one Griffith directs the speech to, inadvertantly convincing Guts that he doesn’t care about him and making Guts decide to leave.

The dream is also defined by emotional repression. To achieve it Griffith has to project a perfect image of himself to everyone - the nobles, Charlotte, the hawks, everyone. When Casca catches him in a moment of vulnerability and watches him injure himself in a river he snaps out of it, represses, and acts like nothing happened afterwards. Guts is the only person he willingly allows to see him less than perfect - when he’s conducting assassinations, for instance. He opens up to him in emotional vulnerability when he asks “do you think I’m cruel?” In that moment, Guts suggests that Griffith’s emotional expression of vulnerability is incompatible with achieving his dream - “Ain’t this part of the path to your dream? You believe that, don’t you?”

Guts is able to walk away and abandon Griffith because Griffith can’t tell him how he feels, he can’t tell Guts why he risked his life for him and he can’t tell him that he wants him to stay. Casca even points out that they should stop and talk things out, and we the reader know that their rift is based entirely on a misunderstanding that could be cleared up so talking things through would actually achieve something - but she’s dismissed, and they duel instead.

So a dichotemy is set up between the dream/Charlotte/heteronormativity, and emotional repression vs Guts the man Griffith loves, and expressing his feelings for him.

The tragedy of Berserk is that repression wins.

Guts leaves because Griffith can’t express how he feels. Griffith has sex with Charlotte in an attempt to seize his dream, having lost Guts, (of course this act of striving for his dream is represented by heterosexual sex) and ends up trapped in a dungeon. There he both finally admits to himself that Guts is more important to him than his dream and fittingly loses the ability to communicate at all. He’s also, to top it off, locked away behind a mask modeled after the helmet he wore while pursuing his dream. After losing Guts and having sex with Charlotte he’s not just choosing not to express his emotions, he’s forced to remain silent and hidden.

After he’s rescued the mask stays on and words remain unspoken. A lot of shit happens and eventually he has a breakdown. And interestingly, it’s not just the prospect of Guts leaving again that causes him to finally break from reality. It’s also the thought of Casca staying.

After overhearing Guts and Casca he envisions himself chasing his dream again (and isn’t it fitting that it’s described as playing? ie not real, a make-believe expression of himself), and then he sees himself - and here it gets really depressing - seemingly married to Casca. He’s still helpless and unable to communicate, as though he’s caged inside of himself. In his vision Casca wears a dress, has hung up her sword, and is raising a son with him, named after the man Griffith is in love with. Griffith is dressed up and attractive again. It’s terribly picturesque in a idealistic heternormative way. Casca leans down to kiss him and then spoonfeeds him, all the while he’s silent and motionless and seems lost as all he thinks to himself is that the peace and quiet isn’t so bad.

Tbh if you’re reading Griffith as a gay man this dream comes across as a nightmarish metaphor for being trapped in repression, trapped in a heterosexual marriage and societal expectations, his voice, body, and even his own mind lost. It’s disturbing.

And in the soup made by Casca is the behelit.

The thing is that the behelit isn’t the escape from that nightmarish vision it seems to be at first - it’s an embodiment of it. What happens when Griffith summons the Godhand, sacrifices the Band and most notably Guts, and becomes a demon?

His heart is frozen. He’s later reborn with the sole purpose of becoming a wholly emotionless, utterly perfect image of himself - the image he’d tried to project as a human: a perfect saviour, a perfect leader, and a perfect fiancee, straight out of a fairytale. One half of a perfect heterosexual couple, ruling a perfect kingdom.

Femto’s new body incorporates the mask he was forced to wear in the torture chamber. The transformation doesn’t fix the problem caused by his broken body or his lost tongue, it doesn’t return his ability to express his feelings to him, it rips them out from the source - it destroys his emotions so he has nothing left to express. “This peace and quiet... isn’t so bad.”

When Griffith chose to sacrifice Guts he didn’t choose freedom or personal empowerment - he chose to remain a voiceless, tortured man in a locked cell, he just removed his ability to feel pain or long for more.

(Or tried to at least. Time will tell how his newly bthumping heart figures into everything.)

Disclaimer: I don’t think this works as like... a great, sensitive and thoughtful depiction of the effects of internalized homophobia on a gay man lol. Berserk is offensive and homophobic af and choosing to read it like this doesn’t fix that problem at all. I just kind of dodged some of the worse stuff but yk, there’s no way around the fact that griffith/femto/ngriff is a gay-coded antagonist and most of his villainy revolves around that coding.

Also I’m mostly closeted myself so there’s definitely some projection going on here. That’s partially the point of this. I don’t relate fully to this narrative but some aspects of what I wrote do hit home, and hopefully that comes across and this doesn’t feel exploitative.

@yesgabsstuff @mastermistressofdesire I’ve mentioned this essay b4 and I believe you’ve both expressed interest in a complete version so voila.