#hopefully the formatting isn't too monstrous it's hard to tell on this site

[alandofhoneyedfruits]

processing

summary: it starts before a little girl falls in the street; he just doesn’t realize it.

warnings/tags: references to violence, references to death, references to god, descriptions of burns

one day i’ll write something else not in second person POV but that day ain’t today.

this is also on AO3.

“What is God?”

You have heard of it so often, this God. It falls like pattering rain from a human’s lips as you unfurl yourself with a mechanical creak, the whir of your actuators coming to life rolling across the field as the sea of fog parts with your movement. You stride towards the soft gleam of the porch light barely keeping the night at bay, wispy tendrils of mist curling around you before fading into the chill air. ‘God’ keeps cascading from him, a waterfall of sound, but you pay him little mind. You have your objective.

‘God’ peals out like a bell, the chime of it shaking at the edges, the rising pitch of the woman’s voice grating against your sensors. System analyses flash across your vision. Your audio processor is buzzing thickly, the static blanket settling over you as the indicator for it at the corner of your vision lights up red, red, red.

It is quickly eclipsed by the neon glow of your spreading flames, that electric blue as bright as any sun. They crackle merrily, hungrily.

The audio indicator stops blinking.

Most of them say it, sooner or later, when you follow Master Spaghetti’s frequent command. It comes from a place in them that you cannot understand - how could you, sharp-edged machine that you are, all unyielding metal shaped into a creature of war - and you have never paid it much attention.

“What is God?” you press. Your wings clink behind you as you shift minutely.

You do not know why you want to know.

Perhaps it is because there is something so human in how they share words, how certain things tumble from their mouths in similar situations. You wonder if being human is being connected, and then you wonder what exactly connection means. It is a simple definition for you - the way your gears interlock inside your frame, a link between your circuitry. It seems infinitely more complicated for humans. You still have not quite grasped how they seem to be able to use the same word and yet assign it different meanings.

Considering how long it took you to process speech, you are not sure you will ever grasp it.

“If you’re going to ask foolish questions, just don’t speak,” Master Spaghetti says. His lips twist into something gnarled, the corners of them warping like metal framework in a burning building, collapsing at the edges. He barely glances at you, just a quick slide of those eyes over the thick ruff of his cape, the fur gleaming bone white against his crimson hair. “I’ve never understood why they made a war machine with a mouth.”

He gestures you away with another grumble and a flick of his hand. You’ve long learned that when his elegant fingers move like that, you are meant to slip into your standby mode until he needs you once more. It’s an order without words, and you comply.

You do not ask again.

You are fetching a purse of gold from one of Master Spaghetti’s contacts when your sharp audio sensors are ensnared by a conversation. There is a man leaning against the doorpost of a nearby shop. He speaks low and soft to the others around him, but the pace of his heart reminds you of the quick thump of a rabbit racing through the underbrush.

He hisses a tale about a being wreathed in flames that burned as blue as the mid-morning sky, flickering wildly as they licked over the creature’s frame. It came out of the night like a wraith, he says, the softly swirling fog parting like a sea before it. Eyes like marbles, he says, the sclera of them as dark as the shadows it took refuge in, the gleam of them flat and without mercy, the irises a glowing, feverish teal. Unholy and beautiful in the same breath, mesmerizing in its horror.

You realize he is speaking about you.

Something shifts in you. For a brief moment, there is something sharp and finely honed, just behind your breastplate.

You think that maybe a gear or two came loose, and Master Spaghetti is adamant that you are adequately maintained, so you return to the estate.

Run Diagnostic System? Execute. Running Diagnostic… Diagnostic complete. No errors located.

You do not know what is wrong with you.

There is...something, in the last few days. You do not have a name for it, and you know better than to bother Spaghetti without being able to explain yourself. He is in a mood you can recognize as foul - he’s been barking at the staff about the tiniest things, like the smallest speck of dust in the corner of a rarely used room - and though you cannot understand what has prompted it, you have learned it’s best to stay in standby until he needs you.

Standby, however, feels odd, as if you’re trapped between two worlds, your sensors both lethargic and wildly reactive. You come out of it coiled with tension, your wings flaring wide with a rush of noise, the canvas hissing as it cuts through the air.

Idly, you wonder if the water the woman had spilled on you - tears, you remind yourself, those were tears - has leaked beneath your synthetic skin. Perhaps that is the problem. You flex a hand to test it, and the pneumatic purr of your actuators sound no different than usual. Perhaps, then, an issue with the circuitry.

You run the system again and receive the same results. It must be right, then, but there’s something tugging at you.

You think of the woman. She has flashed into your consciousness frequently, these last few days, all trembling lips and wild hair catching in the breeze, her expression something foreign and familiar at the same time. The tears had been an unrelenting river. She’d smacked at your torso with open palms. You had never heard anything quite like her wails.

Her skin burned on contact, the flesh charring against the scalding heat of your chest. It stuck to you, patches of dermis ripping away as she pulled back with an agonized cry. There was blood oozing from her shredded palms, pulsing out from beneath her skin like a tide, and the surrounding flesh was deep crimson, blisters already rising like mountains, swelling thickly. The smell of cooked meat wafted through the air.

She was not your target. You stepped past her as she collapsed, cradling her destroyed hands against her chest.

When you stepped towards the man - a boy, really, your system told you, noting the soft curve of his jaw and the gangly limbs that he seemed to have lost control of - she surged to her feet. She threw herself against you, and this time, the hiss of steam was not solely from your engine.

From outside the house, Spaghetti heaved a familiar sigh, the air weighted down with exasperation.

(Later, he heaves the same sigh when he realized that the woman’s skin had melded against your torso and your back alike. Two staff members are assigned to scrape the fused flesh from you. When it’s done, you hear one of them in the hall, taking in heaving breaths, their throat clicking as they gag. You wonder if they are new.)

“Just kill her too,” he called. “And stop taking so long.”

As always, you had complied.

You find yourself thinking of her, and a strange sensation brews in you.

You run the diagnostics again, just to be sure.

Your body is lagging. Your wings drag behind you, the ripped canvas no longer able to hold your weight aloft. There’s a soft mechanical groan every time you take a step. The estate does not seem so far when you are flying.

No one is paying attention to you, even though you are a slow trickle in the flow of this busy town. They simply step around you.

Your sensitive audio processing picks up the creaking of an approaching carriage.

The sea of people part for it without thought, swirling around it like the tide.

A little girl trips in the middle of the street.

You are already moving.

i have wanted to write B for a while and finally managed to do it. i find the way he shut himself off fascinating, and while the little girl in the street was clearly the trigger for questioning himself, it couldn't have been the first time - there must have been other small things that just didn't register as more than a glitch in the system. thus--this.

when writing B I have to mention Noun/stardomyx as we've talked quite a bit about him and it helped me solidify him in my mind! also she's just got good ideas about him.

[bthump]

now listen. i LOVE berserk and when i watched the 90s anime i binged the whole thing in two days because ive got no self control. but i feel like the eclipse has taken a harsh toll on me and i coudlnt handle it. ive tried to read further on from the manga and i dont think i can bear with how violent it seems to get from there on out- but i find myself obsessing over griffiths character and i feel like i have to know what happens next. how do i cope with this pain ???

oof that’s a tough one.

Honestly if it’s the violence in general, yk sword swinging and blood and guts and whatnot then I think you’re kind of out of luck unfortunately. There’s the 2016/17 anime which covers some of the post-eclipse stuff, which might be easier to watch in terms of violence because... it sucks lmao, the animation is awful so the violence might be harder to take seriously. but hey afaik it does tell a chunk of the rest of the story, so maybe it’s an option.

But otherwise it’s just impossible to skip the violence because it’s so constant in the story, and many important things happen during violent scenes.

On the other hand, if it’s specifically the sexual violence that’s hard for you to take, I might actually be able to help: I already have a big list of content warnings with manga page numbers written up that I made for someone else.

I’ll copypaste it here under a cut on the offchance that it helps. And if there’s anything specific other than sexual violence you want warned for, like suicide or self-harm or non-sexual parental abuse, just send me another ask and I’ll try my best. But yeah, gore in general is just too prevalent.

Also I wrote this for someone unfamiliar with the whole story so you can probably skip the golden age stuff if you’re not reading it.

Just so you know going in, this mainly just focuses on visual depictions of sexual assault. I don't think I could write a guide that covers every rape threat or mention or insinuation, in part because I'd have to re-read the story front to back, and also because like, significant plot points revolve around threats and discussions of rape so it's not really possible to skip a lot of it.

Chapter and page numbers are taken from the scans on mangasee and probably won't match the physical volumes. (They changed some of the formatting on the site recently, hopefully that doesn’t affect the page numbers but apologies if it does)

Black Swordsman arc:

nothing that i can remember. the story opens with Guts fucking a monster before killing her but the sex is consensual lol.

Golden Age arc:

Guts is raped as a child by Donovan, who tells Guts that Gambino sold him to him. ch 9, pg 44 - ch 10, pg 15

Guts has a nightmare about it ch 13, pg 2 - 9 If you skip this, it's worth knowing that guilt for killing Gambino features heavily in this nightmare, and that as he wakes up the monstrous representation of Donovan shifts into Casca who is lying on top of him. Guts is close to panicking as he wakes up before realizing that Casca is a woman. She's gone when he fully wakes up on page 10.

brace yourself for rape threats towards casca in ch 15

A nobleman attempts to rape Casca in a flashback to her childhood, Griffith interrupts the attempt by slicing off his ear ch 16, pg 13 - 14 If you skip this it's worth noting that Casca's reaction is helpless acceptance and believing it's natural.

ch 17 as a whole is p heavy with discussions of pedophilia and graphic self harm, but the csa isn't graphic and it's not really skippable anyway, just something worth bracing for.

more rape threats towards casca in ch 18

Casca's pursuers catch her and attempt to rape her ch 20, pg 18 - 21 Casca fights off her attacker on pg 21

brace yourself for Gennon's return at the end of chapter 23

rapey implications at the beginning of chapter 24 w/ Gennon thinking about Griffith

more rape threats in chapter 26+27 as Casca fights Adon

end of chapter 37 - halfway through ch 38 This whole sex scene with Charlotte is really fucked up, it's treated like consensual sex by the narrative but Charlotte says "no" early on before getting into it. I wouldn't skip it, there's some important emotional stuff here that's hard for me to convey, but I'd be aware going in that Miura is leaning heavily on v misogynist tropes in this scene.

discussion of incest ch 39, pg 7

incestuous rape attempt ch 39, pg 15 - 19 and ch 40, pg 2 - 7 (I wouldn't recommend skipping the 2 pages in between which return to Griffith in the torture chamber) And if you do skip this the things worth knowing are that Charlotte fights off the king and screams for Griffith to help her, upon which the king abandons the attempt and flees.

ch 46, pg 15 - ch 47, pg 5 Guts has a graphic flashback to his rape during sex with Casca and strangles her.

might want to brace yourself for the torturer being v suggestively creepy to Griffith in his scenes, particularly in chapter 54, but there's nothing explicit there

Wyald begins to choke a woman he was seemingly having consensual sex with ch 58 pg 20 the entire sex scene is ch 58 pg 18-20 if you skip it the only mildly important part is that Wyald mentions he already has business with Griffith to take care of, suggesting many or all apostles are aware he has the crimson behelit

ch 59, pg 16 graphic rape in the last panel. i'd recommend reading the rest of the page and just not scrolling down, last panel just describes how the black dog knights would rape women and murder children etc.

ch 59, pg 25-26 graphic rape

ch 60, pg 1-2, and pg 9-10 dismembered bodies skewered on swords, the imagery is p sexually violent if you skip it, guts thinks to himself that wyald's troops are being driven by fear. wyald attacks him with a body on his sword, which guts notices and which informs his outrage

implied rape threat ch 63, pg 18 - 19

rape attempt ch 64 pg 9 - 17, though Casca's torn clothes unfortunately remain throughout the rest of the Wyald fight, and Guts' response to her is terrible If you skip, Griffith sees Wyald grab Casca and tries to get to her despite not being able to walk, Guts eventually wakes up and saves her, nothing else of note

ch 68, from pg 15 to end of scene Wyald strips and humiliates Griffith, it's not overtly sexual and it's not skippable but it might be something you want to be prepared for

ch 71, pg 4 - 7 Griffith makes a sexual advance on Casca. It's not a rape attempt, he stops when she says stop, but it's wordless and might be another thing worth being warned for going in

ch 72 pg 10 - 13 Another one that's not really overt and not skippable but is just kind of vaguely sexual in a disturbing way. Griffith's nightmare sequence of a life with Casca suggests they have a kid together while Griffith is pretty far removed from reality, can't talk, and can barely move

ch 81, pg 21 - 22 The monster rape begins, nothing of value is lost if you skip these pages.

ch 85, pg 8 - 16 More monster rape

ch 86, pg 11 - ch 87, pg 16 Femto rapes Casca in a horrifically grautitous and eroticized rape scene in which the focus is entirely on Guts' feelings as he's forced to watch, with nothing from Casca's point of view. it's bad.

ch 93, pg 14 - 17 Guts tears Casca's dress after hot soup spills on it, then nearly kisses her before she shoves him away and runs, screaming.

Now I have to apologize because I can only warn for major rape scenes here on out. My memory of the post-golden age story isn't the best and there's some random background assault and rape for tone setting, sudden eclipse flashbacks featuring monsters holding up Casca, etc and I don't remember every instance.

Lost Children arc

general tw for abuse, implied csa, implied incest, this is a really dark arc tbh

assault attempt ch 95, pg 3

I believe there's a scene where Jill is sexually harassed by one of her father's friends in a tavern, but I can't find it.

violent rape, potential csa triggers ch 109, pg 14

Conviction Arc

general tw for a few full page spreads full of torture, including sexual torture, but I can't find specific pages

rape attempt, eclipse flashbacks ch 124, pg 6 - 9 + pg 12

possessed farnese tries to fuck guts' sword, idk ch 125, pg 8 - 12

eclipse flashback ch 130, pg 8 - 9

a monster sexually assaults casca ch 147, pg 21 - 22, ch 148 pg 3 - 5

Millenium Falcon Arc

the beast of darkness implies that guts should rape and kill casca in a nightmare. the imagery isn't graphic but it's fairly disturbing. I wouldn't recommend skipping this part but it's worth bracing yourself for. ch 187, pg 21-22

this is the scene where guts assaults casca ch 189 pg 11 - ch 190, pg 9 if you skip it, what happens is that casca is assaulted by bandits, which become monsters from the eclipse from her point of view, but she grabs one of their swords and kills them. guts finds her as she's holding the sword, naked and bloody, and pushes her down and forcibly kisses her. there's some gory beast of darkness imagery in guts' mind. guts bites her breast and then seems to come to his senses and stops. the scene ends abruptly.

single panel flashback to casca right after guts has assaulted her, not very graphic but just in case ch 199 pg 2

trolls rape a village woman ch 204 pg 5-7

a lot of graphic troll rape and gore featuring naked women ch 216 bottom of page 12 - end of chapter, easily skippable (tho top of page 12 is good)

somewhat sexualized image of a naked eviscerated woman ch 217 pg 10

another panel of trolls raping women ch 217, pg 13 hopefully that’s all of it, but apologies if I missed some, these troll chapters suck

slan getting sexually menacing with guts ch 219, pg 13 through ch 221, pg 3 this isn't really skippable, but fair warning going in. it's stuff like slan pressing him against her tits, tearing off his shirt, making a lot of suggestive comments, and kissing him on the last page

I can't find this, there are so many potential chapters it could be in, but at some point Raksas and Silat end up spying on Ganishka together and they see that he creates his demon army by immersing kidnapped pregnant women in a vat full of... apostle essence idk, and it corrupts the fetuses and turns them into demons. it's graphic and fucked up so brace yourself when you get to a scene where Raksas is leading Silat around Ganishka’s palace. ETA it's chapter 233, thank you @satanswolfcut

Fantasia Arc

eclipse flashback ch 354, pg 5