#we interrupt ur regularly scheduled casca meta etc etd

[deripmaver]

Griffith, Sex, and Power

Feat. a brief special guest: Laurent of Vere from Captive Prince (spoilers, and of course canon typical content warnings for both Berserk and Capri)!

Ok time for a complete 180 from all my Berserk meta posts so far hahahah. Probably this is one that’s been made before, but I wanted to take a crack at it possibly from a different angle than before. This’ll be just sort of a ramble, no panels ‘cause those panels make me sad and I don’t want to go looking for them.

In CS Pacat’s Captive Prince, Laurent of Vere was directly inspired by Griffith from Berserk. Part of what allows the audience to forgive him for the sexual violence he causes Damen is when we learn that said abuse is just being replicated from his own experiences. Laurent has learned by being abused as a teenager that sex and power are intrinsically linked (as he says to Damen, his perception of sex is that it occurs “as a man takes a boy”), and so when the man who killed his brother (and lead to his abuse in the first place by leaving him with his uncle) is put in front of him, the ways he dominates and reasserts power over him come from his own sexual trauma.

It’s not hard to see how this characterization draws from Griffith. As a young teenager, he is given the “choice” (which isn’t really a choice at all) to make money to sustain his dream by winning battles, and thereby sending his followers to their deaths, or by prostituting himself to Gennon. As far as we know with what’s given to us in canon, up until he sleeps with Princess Charlotte this is his only sexual experience - purely transactional, a show of power from those who have it forced upon those who do not have it. 

When Griffith has sex, in Princess Charlotte’s case, or... commits sexual assault, in Casca’s case (twice), it’s not a coincidence it happens at moments where he feels at his lowest and most powerless. It’s ALSO not a surprise that he replicates the dynamics he’s familiar with during these sexual encounters. With Charlotte, he goes to see her to regain a sense of control and authority after Guts leaves, and during that encounter she expresses uncertainty at the beginning, outright saying no before eventually just kind of submitting to it. This encounter I think falls into somewhat of a gray area of fictional consent, because we see ultimately Charlotte happy with it, and thinking only fondly of it in later chapters, but it’s undeniable it’s coercive and considering how the whole thing is framed vs the sex between Guts and Casca is framed, I think the discomfort is intentional. 

Then, of course, with Casca, these encounters are outright sexual assault and rape. Again, it’s not a coincidence that these happen when Griffith is feeling completely shattered, completely without power, at rock fucking bottom. It’s heavily implied that some of Griffith’s torture was sexual in nature, if not outright rape though considering how much rape of women there is in Berserk I’ll forever be pissed as hell that Miura didn’t bother to show any of that happening to an (adult) male character if that is what he intended. 

So now, as far as what’s been shown in canon, Griffith’s sexual experience is underage prostitution, coercive sex with Charlotte, and now possibly rape combined with torture. After this, he assaults Casca in the wagon (only stopping because he physically can’t go through with it due to his injuries) and when he’s able to move again as Femto, rapes her. Rape is fully about power, and to Griffith sex is about power in general, and the eclipse to me is a very clear show from Griffith that he’s the one with power, he’s the one whose will the world bends to, and he needs to reassert that power over everyone. 

As an aside, it’s very interesting to me that in those moments of powerlessness, the people he uses to reassert his own power aren’t the men who have taken from him, but women. I mean, during the eclipse he’s hurting Casca to get at Guts, but like... He doesn’t rape Guts LOL when he easily could. I’m sure most of that is just Miura not wanting to draw sex (even if it’s rape) between adult men, but taking a more meta view, it replicates power dynamics and hierarchies of misogyny and oppression in the real world in an interesting way.

Griffith, as a character, knows what it is to be powerless, and is desperately climbing for more and more power throughout the story of Berserk to never experience that again. However, in doing so, he becomes the same as the oppressive nobles who hurt him, and once you accept that hierarchy it chips away at any intrinsic sense of justice you may have. This hasn’t come up again since his rebirth, but it will be interesting to see what his reaction will be if something happens that does shake his absolute authority over humanity, and what he’ll do about it. I think that moment might be coming up sooner than we expect.