aubade ;)

they/them | artist 💫 🥀 pomp, charm, and insanity🎐

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Ahh I can't wait for the rose of versailles to come out!! It'll be a dream seeing ikeda's characters animated omggg

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🚨KAZE TO KI NO UTA HOMOSEXUAL SUPPORTING CAST — REPORT TO OFFICE🚨

In all seriousness I did not expect to be FLOORED by the dynamic between rosemarine and jules, so full of toxicity and tenderness and uGHHH give me a series about them please please the dove of happiness isn’t enough! Wdym they married women who looked exactly like each other WDYM-

Uncolored ver

[nixonette]

go in my ask box & tell me what vibe i give off

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Uhm ,., hello 👉 👈 🥺

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Hello, dear friends 🇵🇸

💔 Our journey continues, but it's progressing more slowly than we had hoped. We are deeply grateful for all the support you've provided so far, but we still need more to reach our goal.🙏🏻

As the new year begins, we've set a new goal of $11,500 to support our family and rebuild our lives. 🎯 Every contribution makes a significant difference, and your support means the world to us.💓

Let's start 2025 with hope and collaboration. Your support today can transform our sorrow into strength and our pain into a new beginning.✨

❤️🤍💚🖤❤️🤍💚🖤

Please help us and share the 🙏🏻 campaign link:

https://gofund.me/abbc2759

With all our thanks and gratitude,

Majed and his family ❤️

Thank you for reaching out, I wish you and your family well.

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@wndstrrrry your kaze au is so goddamn cute!!! I love love your little fits for liliath and rose, hope you know I’m so stoked for wherever you take them and the cast <33

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/WIP

Religious experience of drawing suwon 🙏🎐

(I’m alive I’m alive, I must do artistic justice to such beautiful angelic sad pretty boys!

Fr though I sob thinking abt suwons emotional journey and how far he’s come. Without spoiling, he is loved!! as he deserves!!!)

[bthump]

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.

[nixonette]

go in my ask box & tell me what vibe i give off

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Uhm ,., hello 👉 👈 🥺

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oh yah i love mizisua too <33 3

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I adore griffith from berserk I adore luka from alien stage I adore toxic little manipulative twinks with attachment and abandonment issues

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The griff character study is going and he’s totally not suffering <33

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Good night

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Hiiiiii akayona griffith x berserk suwon, my silly sleep deprived analysis of their parallels <33

Zoom in in my thoughts, as well as the cute cell shaded layer of my scribbles

[qochita-remade-deactivated20230]

[yewfae]

So mad at Guts for leaving Griffith tbh. How can you do that to this beautiful babygirl of a man??? HAVE YOU SEEN HIS PLUMP LIPS AND HIS ITTY BITTY WAIST??? GRIFFITH IS LIKE THE BARBIE DOLL I NEVER HAD AND YOU LEAVE HIM??? Griff you deserve better I would be so much better than Guts. I'd be the boyfriend you deserve. I'd do unspeakable things to you but I would also lick your feet if you asked I would–

[alovelyburn]

Do you think the only thing that keeps Griffith and Guts so close together is their miscommunication? I read someone’s tags about them that basically were saying that if they worked pass their issues they would just find out they are completely incompatible and that’s why they never work as a pair in other AUs. I can’t stop thinking about it. Thoughts?

I'm pretty sure I saw that tag while I was bored browsing one day, and my reaction was the same then as it is now - what a weird take.

Okay we're going to address this in two parts - the fanfic/AU thing and the canon thing.

First up! Fanfic/fandom.

The claim that their apparent incompatibility is why they don't work out in AUs is already kind of odd - first of all what AUs are they reading? Because obviously they must mean fanfiction but if they don't think any Berserk fanfic ends with a happy ending for them they must not be reading a lot of Berserk fanfic? I mean I don't read a lot of fanfic and I've run into plenty of happy ending AUs.

But even more than that, speaking as someone who seemingly is incapable of writing a happy ending for them, I think any dearth of happy endings has more to do with the kind of person that tends to gravitate to G/G, really - or rather the tastes of said people - than it has to do with any like inherent incompatibility between their personalities. Because it's not exactly a happy/healthy relationship, so if you're drawn to it you probably enjoy bittersweet things or dysfunctional things or pain, so you might end up writing bittersweet painful dysfunction.

(Ima write a happy ending one day though I just have to locate an opportunity, lmao.)

Anyway that's the fanfic/fandom/au portion. Now let's talk canon.

I think the way Guts and Griffith's personalities interact, they can be incredibly good for each other or they can be incredibly destructive toward each other. I'll explain why I think that in a second, but basically it's just like, you're never going to get a middle of the road relationship dynamic with them.

So the explanation: they can be good for each other because the things one of them wants is always something the other is wholly capable of giving.

Griffith is plagued with self-doubt and thinks he's a terrible person. He's also incredibly guarded and emotionally locked up - he needs someone he can show himself to, good and bad, who won't turn away or think poorly of him because of the things he's done. Guts is absolutely a person who can do that - he doesn't think the things Griffith has been hating himself for are bad to begin with. He's a confidante, a co-conspirator, a cheerleader, and he sees Griffith's positive qualities in a way that Griffith himself struggles to do. Griffith also needs an outlet from the stress of his position, and no one else makes him laugh or relax the way Guts does. Guts also gets Griffith in touch with his own heart, which he spends a great time trying to suppress.

Guts is plagued with poor self-esteem and an inability to believe in his own worth. He has a hard time conforming himself to behavioral standards imposed by others due to his temper and his willfulness. Most of all he wants somewhere to belong, and for someone he admires and respects to respect and value him - he wants to be seen. And Griffith is absolutely the person who can do that - even before they know each other Griffith breaks his own rules to pursue Guts. Griffith provides a kind of structure to his life that he never was able to manage on his own - and still hasn't - but does so without being overbearing or controlling or taking him for granted. And Griffith, the person Guts admires more than anything or anyone, consistently demonstrates how much he values Guts not only as a soldier but as a person. He's also a package deal with the Hawks, Guts' only real family, and not only does Griffith see him, in a lot of ways Griffith can't see anything but him.

I mean that's just off the top of my head, but basically they are incredibly compatible - even the ways they're different are complementary - Griffith's mind strengthen's Guts' passion and vice versa. If they worked it out they really could do anything - secure a kingdom, sure. Leave it behind? Guts is the only one that Griffith could ever choose over his dream.

But there's also the other side of it - the way their fears reinforce and trigger one another when they make a misstep.

Take the actual canon sequence of events that destroyed everything for example:

Guts overhears Griffith saying some shit that didn't even apply to him to Charlotte, and because he has a hard time believing in his own value and worth, he immediately takes it to heart. He accepts the "fact" of his worthlessness as a given so immediately that he doesn't even bother to ask about it. Not Griffith, not Casca, no one. Instead he upends his entire life to try to address that thing that's bothering him. He doesn't tell Griffith he's leaving probably at least in part because he doesn't think it matters that much, but of course it does matter and that's where Guts' insecurity - the way he withdraws to protect himself - ends up triggering Griffith's self-hatred.

Now because of Griffith's self-loathing, he takes Guts' decision to leave via sneakout as a sign that Guts hates him and can't wait to get away from him. He accepts the "fact" of his repulsiveness as a given so immediately that he doesn't ask for an explanation or anything! He just goes into panic mode.

But because Guts is so insecure, he can't perceive Griffith's reaction as a personal issue and just takes it as a sign that he's still useful as a soldier and Griffith doesn't want to lose a tool. So it just makes him double down.

And his doubling down makes Griffith even more certain that Guts hates him because if he didn't why would he be so calm and sure about leaving?

Basically, once one of them is thrown off and takes an emotionally defensive step back, it triggers the other's insecurities which triggers the first one's insecurities and it just spirals into oblivion. Because if one of them starts the bad ball rolling, its very difficult for the other to be rational enough about it to slow the fall.

And so we can say they're perfectly capable of destroying each other, but we knew that because they do in canon.

But the thing is, it's a roll of the dice. Or more specifically, its a misplayed hand of cards or something, like they had everything they would have needed to win but they just made some missteps. And the reason they ended up making those missteps is... Destiny and Stuff.

But if you take the stringpulling deities out of the picture there's nothing that guarantees that they'd have to mess it up. There's no reason they couldn't turn out just fine.

It's a matter of trying to navigate those landmines long enough for the positive/supportive aspects of their dynamic to kind of wear those down a bit, really.

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Very very messy sketch: the soohak princess carry we never got