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Guts is different from Griffith. Guts fights the beast in him every day and desperately tries to separate the beast from himself. Griffith, on the other hand, embraces femto and became one with him, even though Guts had harder life than Griffith. That's why people respect Guts more.

tbh I agree that this is part of why people respond more positively to Guts and negatively to Griffith. Griffith’s narrative ended in succumbing to despair and becoming a monster, while Guts’ nickname is “struggler” lol. People absolutely respond more positively to a narrative about fighting and persisting against all odds than a narrative about losing everything and essentially selling your soul because you feel like you’re out of options.

However, that said, I think this misses a few important points.

Like for one, to describe Griffith as embracing Femto while Guts resists the Beast of Darkness is kind of, well, loaded and not entirely correct. Griffith didn’t embrace Femto, he embraced his dream and the guilt it caused and seized the one chance he had to make tens of thousands of deaths that weigh on him meaningful.

Like, one thing I love about Griffith’s narrative is that his motivation - to ensure that thousands of people didn’t die for nothing - is heroic. In most stories that would be considered noble. Berserk twists that, because Miura likes to play with morality this way. Griffith’s noble, quite respectable goal, and his relatable and sympathetic emotional motivation (guilt) are what lead him to darkness.

Miura isn’t showing us a character who cheerfully embraces his own inner darkness, he’s showing us a character who becomes a demon ironically because of his desire to be a good person. What ultimately convinces him to make the sacrifice isn’t the promise of power, or rejuvination - it’s to ensure that so many people didn’t die for no reason.

Griffith and Guts’ narratives are different. They exist to pose different questions about what it means to be evil/human/good. But they aren’t comparable on a characterization level.

Guts hasn’t had a moment of pure despair where he’s given a choice to live out his life wholly dependant on others, mute and helpless, wracked with irreconcilable guilt and about to lose the last thing that matters to him, or sacrifice people for the sake of a goal they, among thousands of others, chose to die for, to make those deaths meaningful.

Instead, Guts has a sinister jiminy cricket telling him to murder and rape people. And Griffith doesn’t have a particularly vocal and belligerent hawk taunting him, he has a moment of despair, ordained by causality, orchestrated by the Idea of Evil for the sole purpose of having him choose to make the sacrifice.

Guts and Griffith are different people, but Guts is not inherently better or more moral than Griffith. Griffith frets about killing people for his dream, Guts tells him murder is nbd. Griffith prioritizes Guts over his dream several times before that final moment of pure despair during the Eclipse, and Guts prioritizes revenge over Casca several times before finally giving up on revenge after NeoGriffith blows him off. Griffith prostitutes himself to a pedophile at a young age to prevent as many deaths in the line of duty as he can, while Guts doesn’t really give a fuck about people dying unless he personally knows and cares about them (or if they’re children). Guts describes his dream to Casca as “I just did my own thing,” while Griffith describes his dream to Casca as, “for the sake of the dead… if there’s something I can do… that thing is to win.”

Ultimately, Griffith’s narrative illustrates a man succumbing to evil in the pursuit of good, while Guts’ narrative illustrates a man struggling to balance the good and evil within himself. The only relevant personality difference between them is that Griffith is driven towards a goal by guilt, essentially living for the dead, and Guts is living for himself and the people he personally cares about.

And to address another of your points, Guts has not had a harder life than Griffith. Maybe he’s had a harder childhood - we don’t see much of Griffith’s but it’s a fairly safe assumption - but after killing Gambino?

The narrative takes the position that during the Golden Age, Guts actually had it fairly easy compared to Griffith. Guts’ years with the Hawks are his happy place. Griffith on the other hand had a huge emotional burden on his shoulders, his guilt caused him to self harm, he had the aforementioned encounter with a pedophile bc he was driven by guilt, he had to hone himself to his limits to achieve his goal. Constantly dealing with nobles, constantly fighting at the head of his army, figuring out battle plans, carrying out assassinations that added to his guilt, maintaining an immaculate image of himself, and emotionally closed to everyone except, rarely, Guts. I mean like, the stakes of the climactic battle of the Golden Age is the risk of Griffith being captured as a sex slave lol, and he not only knows it, he incorporates it into his battle plan, like, dude is under a lot of pressure.

And of course, that’s nothing compared to a year of constant torture. Even after the Eclipse, Guts has never experienced anything on that level. Griffith was only barely sane at the end of it, totally physically helpless, mute, he’d lost everything he valued including, he thought at the end, Guts. He tried to kill himself right before the behelit opened.

Like, sorry, Guts has had a hard life, but it doesn’t compare to Griffith’s year of hell. Especially considering that, post-Eclipse, Guts had the option to bow out any time and live in relative peace and comfort with Rickert and Erika (which everyone and their dog points out to him), and now has the option to hang out in peace and comfort in Elfhelm that he probably also won’t take.

Idk basically this is a long way of saying that yeah, thanks to the thematic purposes of their narratives Griffith’s is about succumbing to evil in pursuit of good and Guts’ is about trying to find a balance between good and evil, and at a shallow glance that makes Guts look more respectable than Griffith, but that doesn’t actually reflect on their personalities, their morals, or their personal struggles.

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hey! i was marvelling at your guts meta again, because your metas are incredibly well-written. i wanted to ask, do you think guts is aware of his attraction to griffith? like not only saying 'he's beautiful' but seeing him sexually -- both in the past and present. because even after everything, the beast of darkness is taunting him with sexually charged words and i can't help but wonder whether guts realizes that he is doing that or not. maybe he represses this? idk i'd love to hear ur thoughts!

That is so nice to hear, thank you, I’m glad you think so!

This is more headcanon territory than meta but here’s what I think:

tbh…

pre-NeoGriffith, I’d say no. I think Guts had pretty thoroughly repressed his attraction to Griffith during the Golden Age. He’s got sexual hangups in general, and with men in particular, and if he thinks about Griffith naked more often than the average dude then it’s just because he’s remembering how awesome and awe-inspiring he is, ofc. His heart’s getting fluttery cause Griffith’s just so cool and dazzling. He wants Griffith to look at him because he just wants totally platonic attention.

I mean lbr during the Golden Age Guts has been doing this for three years, yk, the crush thing where he’s staring at him from afar, or watching the door every time he’s in a room where other Hawks may be as well, hoping Griffith shows up and comes to sit by him. but because of heteronormativity and his sexual trauma he’s unable to translate those feelings into attraction.

like to get a little graphically detailed for a sec, I tend to imagine that when Guts jerks off during this period his mind is generally blank or he’s just thinking about mundane things and focusing mainly on the physical sensation. if naked Griffith shows up now and then, it’s just cause his mind’s wandering aimlessly, nothing to worry about.

I think if he had another couple days with post-torture Griffith he would’ve started to re-examine this period of his life and realize what they could’ve had. He got through the revelations that Griffith isn’t a god, and Griffith has extremely intense life-destroying feelings for him. Like, recognizing the nature of his own feelings was the next logical step there.

You could maybe even argue that having sex with Casca might’ve helped that along, giving him a positive association with sex to draw on, like a stepping stone.

And I am definitely reading into things here, but yk, that’s what I do lol, so consider:

You are having a breakdown because you overheard Casca tell me to leave. It has finally really truly hit me that I broke your heart when I left. This is an extreme example of the emotions between us. How do I act on those emotions? It’ll come to me… come on… there’s got to be some way to translate these intense emotions into a positive course of action here…

But yk instead the Eclipse happened. So he spends the next 2 years thinking of Griffith either like this:

or like this

And sexual attraction is pretty much out of his mind for a while.

But then NeoGriffith shows up and Guts practically has a sexual awakening.

(i will never in my life get tired of posting this page)

After the Hill of Swords, it’s honestly really really easy for me to read between the lines and basically assume that Guts is jerking off to Griffith after waking up from sex dreams about him semi-regularly, then killing ghosts with extra vehemence bc he’s feeling weird and guilty and lonely.

I mean

You’re right, the Beast of Darkness gets really, really suggestive. It’s hard at this point to argue that Guts would be completely unaware of his feelings. His subconscious is here calling Griffith more precious than Casca, mocking him for “longing” for him, using very loaded romantic phrasing, etc etc, and Guts is having a conversation with that part of himself, so he’s got to be aware.

But what I could see is Guts associating that attraction with his ~inner darkness~ and trying to ignore it.

Considering that “forgot my urge to kill” bit (and yk the whole Golden Age) I’d ofc argue that his attraction is far from intrinsic to his inner darkness, but yk, the BoD is using it to tempt him to go chase down and kill Griffith here, and it’s probably safe to assume that some if not all of his fantasies are violent, considering. He’d probably prefer those too, because non-violent fantasies make him sad and regretful and lonely when he much prefers to feel rage.

So like basically he’s twisting his sexual feelings into violence to make them easier to deal with the way he does with all his other feelings, lumps them in with revenge as his bad “obsession” he’s trying to let go of, and tries to ignore them. But it’s never going to completely work because the core of those feelings is still real love and longing for human Griffith. That true light he wants to crush.

Ooh also you can say that this is another reason he’s so determined to force Casca’s sanity back - surely if he’s got a girlfriend those inconvenient feelings will go away. (After all, he managed to distract himself from Griffith by having sex with her last time.)

ANYWAY like I said this is all headcanon lol. I think it fits with what we see in the story, but yk, it’s just one possibility of where Guts’ mind might be at.

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don't ask !! THIS IS NOT AN ORIGINAL ART THIS IS AN EDITED PANEL FROM THE MANGA BERSERK FOR LULZ

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has this been done with them yet?

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This is how berserk went guys I swear

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A “friendly” pat on the back, honestly guts and Griffiths relationship before Griffith became evil or whatever happened there was adorable, wish it could’ve lasted longer.

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just based on guts’ first look at them, who would you guess is the love interest?

casca:

griffith:

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consider the following:

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griffith: *looks at guts*post reminds of during the wyald fight when every time guts does something badass griff makes a little :o face

tbh griffith’s reactions during the wyald fight are so good, lol reading your ask made me want to quickly re-read and find some:

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As a sacrificial offering for the Invocation of Doom, not just any lump of flesh and blood will do. It must be someone important to you, part of your soul… someone so close to you that it’s almost like giving up a part of you.

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Swords/dreams as poor substitutes for human connection in Berserk.

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this is the equivalent of an ice cold shower

and it doesn’t even help all that much

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why the portrait of neogriff at the end of chapter 250, after all the discussion of loneliness, is one of my faves:

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