Hey! what is your basis within Berserk to back up your interpretation that neogriff believes his current life is his punishment, and there isn't room for anything more or less?
Thanks for the question! I’m curious as to where you’re coming from with it – like what else do you see NeoGriff experiencing? – but I’ll outline my evidence/thinking for my interpretation as well below the cut. I will clarify that I don’t think he can’t experience other feelings, I just characterize his persona/mask as being primarily about repression and self-imposed suffering.
Most of the basis for this reading comes from three scenes:
1. The apostles and Puck in Black Swordsman explaining to readers what the apostles are;
2. NeoGriffith confronting Guts on the Hill of Swords, or the infamous “bthump” scene; and
3. The Ganishka confrontation, where NeoGriffith/Femto tell him and readers that they (Femto/NeoGriffith) are one and the same
So first off, what are the apostles, and by extension the Godhand (who de/ascend by the same process)? Puck tells us that they run away from their pain (“You became this thing to run away from the pain inside your own heart. To run away from yourself”) and the Godhand says the same thing (“You gave it to us/So that you could bury your fragile human heart”). This is a perfect explanation for what these people are – they are people who have done unspeakable things (see: the necessity of the sacrifice) in order to avoid/cope with their own pain. They made themselves into monsters in order to bury their hearts.
Very neatly this description is also the exact combination of Griffith’s coping mechanisms for his guilt that we see throughout the GA – self-harm (making himself unlovable to others, disfigured, a monster), and repression (burying his heart by putting on the mask of the perfect leader and the prince to woo the princess, pushing aside his feelings in order to pursue the dream).
After the eclipse, he is reborn into this same duality (monster/Femto; mask/NeoGriffith). Femto does the unspeakable horrors that ensure we (and he) know that he is a monster, NeoGriffith is the mask that ensures his human heart is buried.
The bthumping heart scene is the most obvious demonstration of this persona as a kind of mask – he goes to see Guts in order to ensure that he did actually bury his heart, that he felt nothing for him anymore (“My blood should have been frozen”), but of course his heart is still there, it’s just buried. Hence, bthump.
This is why NeoGriffith =/= Griffith. Both his love and his pain/guilt (pretty apt encapsulations of his “heart”), the main things that motivated him before his death/rebirth, are now buried beneath the two personas/coping mechanisms. He is now primarily motivated by the dream (“I’ll not betray my dream. That is all”) – specifically insofar as he is acting as the saviour of the world (NeoGriffith); or alternatively he is motivated by causing pain to others in order to cause pain to himself (Femto).
However the scene with Ganishka shows us that these two personas, Femto/NeoGriffith are inextricable, they are two halves to the same coin (“He who bears light/exists in the deepest shadow”). His repression is also self harm. And yeah, no shit – because it fucking hurts to put aside your own feelings, to say that your life means nothing unless you live for others. NeoGriffith is the mask, the encapsulation of the perfect prince, the perfect husband, the perfect leader. But he’s also inextricable from Femto, which that tells us that this persona is psychologically damaging to him. The pain has to go somewhere.
The main things we as readers see about NeoGriffith is that he’s lonely (the many panels of him isolated), he’s placid and always smiling (being slapped by Rickert), and ignoring his heart (bthump). This is the mask, and the mask is Griffith telling himself that his heart should remain buried. But when you tell yourself that it’s better for everyone if you ignore what you want, it eats away at you. You become hollow.
And again, the pain has to go somewhere – hence Femto. The Ganishka scene explains why there has to be monsters in Falconia, because the perfect city needs to bear its “cost,” just like NeoGriffith’s dream can only be achieved through the pain and monstrosity of Femto. Femto’s hate, hurt, anger, betrayal, horror is the “cost” of him being able to put on the mask that is NeoGriffith.
That’s why I read post-eclipse Griffith as suffering. He has become a monster in order to bury his heart. A monster who can do both divine and abominable things and feel nothing while also feeling absolutely everything. As NeoGriffith self-effaces, becomes the mask, the hollow shell, Femto also lashes out and lives in the pain of doing so.
Basically, while this is communicated to us through metaphor and symbolism, I think post-eclipse Griffith is a pretty psychologically accurate representation of what it feels like to repress your emotions for the sake of others. What it feels like to become a mask. Because even if you become the mask, it still fucking hurts. Because you can’t really destroy your heart, you can only try to bury it.
The idea of this suffering as “punishment” specifically comes from my interpretation of his pre-rebirth motivations. He believed himself to be evil ("It is cause and effect that a child bear his evil and confront destiny") and so in the sacrifice he made a choice that confirmed it. He believed he’d done wrong and needed to suffer for it, to become a monster, choose the raven black wings and become something truly unloveable and unsaveable as a punishment for his own choices.
That is how Femto, at least, came into being – NeoGriffith of course came after. He was brought into the world in order to serve others, and he needs to become the mask to do so. But Femto is always there alongside, simmering beneath the surface. In this way, Griffith living the dream is shown to be monstrous, it hurts because it’s based on the subjugation of others (through Femto) and the effacement of himself (through NeoGriffith). I have more to say about NeoGriffith as living for others in particular but I’ll leave that for a later meta, this is already getting long enough lol.
Last small note though: I believe that it’s impossible to provide textual evidence that has only one concrete interpretation – meaning comes from how we interact with the text, so there’s no right answer for how to read Berserk. These are just some of the scenes that lead me to interpreting him in this way, and I think it fits really neatly with the rest of the story. Anyway I’ll stop rambling now!
Below is some rambling thematic/character analysis and vague gay flapping about how Berserk could have *ahem* or should have ended. So please enjoy my little theory brain working on overdrive again (if you like) as I discuss how Griffith and Guts’s relationship could have been resolved through one decisive act... No it’s not killing Griffith, get out of here!
To follow are some ideas including (pearl clutch):
Griffith’s “redemption”
An act of love between Guts and Griffith
Guts becoming a shield instead of a sword as the culmination of his character arc
A second (!) sacrifice
This is a bit of a grasping-at-straws deep-dive into post-GA Berserk, but one that is I think actually surprisingly well-substantiated, that is if you’re willing to follow me into the vague realm of thematic parallels. For those of you who were unsatisfied with the way this latter part of the story treated G&G's relationship, I hope you might especially enjoy it.
Caution: I’m basically reading the entire post-GA story through the lens of Griffith and Guts’s relationship, because to me that’s the emotional and narrative heart of the story. I think we can in fact view a lot of post-GA relationships and characters through this lens, and the story becomes, imo, richer for it. Think Jill and Rosine, Serpico and Farnese, just for some easy ones.
Please keep in mind that this is obviously 1000% empty speculation and useless headcanon at this point, and it relies on drawing connections between seemingly disconnected scenes and characters, but it’s fun to think through this stuff, so I hope you enjoy this little journey into my sad gay heart and hopefully it’ll at least give you some food for thought by the end.
I’m also relying on previous meta written by myself and @bthump, so if you feel you’re missing context for any of this, please check out my previous two metas and basically bthump’s entire archive (an intimidating prospect that I assure you is totally worth it).
For all those simply interested in “Guts chops off Griffith’s stupid head”-esque discussions... Well, you’re welcome to stay... but strap in.
Part 1, On Post-Eclipse Griffith: Griffith Needs to be “Redeemed,” But What Does That Actually Mean?
The way I read NeoGriffith, and basically every moment post-Eclipse for Griffith generally, is that he is living his own personal hell. He is lonely, he is miserable, he’s playing prince charming in an empty and unfulfilling (heterosexual) relationship with Charlotte. He is loved and adored by everyone around him, he is the bearer of light, but I think it’s clear that in spite of this (and perhaps because of it) he still hates himself.
His last act as a human soul was to destroy himself by destroying those around him, and that moment was crystallized into the form of Femto.
And indeed, that shadowy other half remains very much present post-Eclipse. Femto and NeoGriffith are shown to be inextricable mirrors: the charming outward persona and the festering self-hatred beneath the mask. The two are halves of the same coin – Griffith’s two coping mechanisms, forever intertwined after the Eclipse.
We see this at play in “Backlighting” especially, where it’s made clear that Femto is always “with” NeoGriffith.
(Chapter 303, “Backlighting”)
(And side note, I hope to eventually post another meta about this motif of light/darkness in post-GA Berserk at some point… probably in like three years or something given my posting history lol)
In addition to this continued presence of Femto as an embodiment of Griffith’s self-loathing, we are also clearly shown his loneliness as NeoGriffith, and also his dissatisfaction with his life, in every panel where we see him standing alone/isolated from his new Band of the Hawk.
However – and this is where I begin my pitch for reading the entirety of Berserk through the Guts x Griffith lens –  I think his mindset is also communicated to us as reader indirectly, through the voice of a different character entirely: the Pontiff. A minor character to be sure, but take a look at his inner monologue in Chapter 264. It’s both visually and rhetorically associated with Griffith.
See the parallels in the theme of repression of personal desires, a zealotry-based leadership role, light/darkness interplay and mirroring, castle and hawk wings imagery, and an assertion of worthlessness:
(Chapter 264, “Divine Revelation”)
Tell me that doesn’t sound suspiciously similar to someone else we know!
Now this is the type of thing that I find post-GA Berserk does a lot – it gives us these highly emotional moments about characters we really don’t know or care very much about as readers. It can lead to a bit of disconnect and feeling that the story has cheapened itself by highlighting these random characters. However, at least for me, this recurring pattern can be recontextualized by reading these charged moments as analogues for other characters, in that they are giving us insight through parallels with characters we know and care more about. I realize there is no in-text justification for doing this, but it provides a richer post-GA reading experience, at least for me, and hopefully for some of you as well.
So, through the Pontiff, I think we’re being granted a small glimpse into what Griffith might be feeling in his new life. Lest you think I am grasping at straws, which I totally am, nevertheless I offer you this: to Griffith too, the world in his new life has become a pretty painting, a castle on the wall, but he is left cold and lonely, stranded in the dark. “There was no love, hatred, nothing.” The absence of everything, specifically his everything, the world-shattering pain and love that Guts represents for him, remains a void in Griffith’s life.
(And as a bonus, also note the scene’s prominent light/dark reflection of the black and white Hawk – i.e., Femto and NeoGriffith, as visually paired and inverse)
Now, what does this have to do with Griffith’s capacity for “redemption”? Well, according to my previous readings of Griffith’s motivations behind sacrificing Guts and the Hawks, I do not believe that he feels any remorse or regret about the sacrifice. That’s because in order to feel regret, he would have to believe that both:
There was another choice he could have made
He deserves to feel something other than pain
I would offer that regret doesn’t belong in a headspace where Griffith thinks he is currently paying the price for his actions – with his emptiness, eternal suffering, repression, self harm, all of it. His life as NeoGriffith is, for him, both imprisonment and penance – it is the embodiment of the idea that he has to live as a monster. This is him reaping what he’s sown, "bear[ing] his evil and confront[ing] his destiny" as Void puts it.
In other words, he can’t regret his decision because he’s living with what he thinks he deserves. To admit otherwise is to admit that he doesn’t deserve this torment, which should be unthinkable to someone who still wears his self-loathing as a literal suit of armour.
And yes this perspective is extremely selfish, it’s not seeing the world from the perspective of those who he has harmed by his actions, but, evidently, that’s what self-loathing can do to people.
To conclude Griffith’s arc in a satisfying way, I would have liked to see him confront his actions, to experience regret, to repent from a non-selfish perspective. However, to do so, he would have to finally see himself as someone worthy of being loved, and to recognize that he in fact was that person once. That the sacrifice was a mistake after all, because he was loved by Guts all along.
The story has set up the fact that Griffith still absolutely needs Guts. Griffith at his most traumatized, at his moment of greatest despair needed (and now still needs) help to escape from the hell he’s living and thinks he deserves. And it’s all because he’s the victim of a misunderstanding that has led him to mistakenly believe he was never loved and was never worthy of love.
He chose the sacrifice because he was told by the Godhand that he is too dirty, too evil, to be redeemed or to be loved, in spite of Guts loving him all along. This is the belief that tore their relationship (and the world) apart. And it was a mistaken one! Guts is the one with the ability and the willingness to give him that: to right that narrative wrong. From this perspective, the only thing that will “save” Griffith, to allow him to repent and acknowledge what he’s done was a mistake, is an expression of love from Guts.
Now, I would have believed that this ending was unlikely or impossible except for the fact that Guts is not only aware that he fucked up with Griffith and is consumed with regret over it, but he has also spent the rest of the story trying to right that wrong in misguided ways (i.e., through Casca instead of through Griffith). And given Guts’s inability to fully embrace his hatred of Griffith, because he still loves him, I suspect that in fact all it would take to be swayed into redirecting this back to Griffith is for him to understand what Griffith is actually feeling (still human underneath, heart beating for him and otherwise dead inside, consumed by self loathing, believing he isn’t worthy of love).
I basically think the post-GA story was set up to end with Guts demonstrating his love for Griffith in some way. That’s the reason why the story continued after that point. And in fact, Guts being given a do-over has been foreshadowed explicitly – karma is a spiral, and “those children” have the chance to right the mistakes from the first time around.
(Chapter 222, “Claw Marks”)
Some sort of do-over seems both narratively and generically necessary here – Griffith has been operating since their second duel under a mistaken belief about how Guts felt about him all along, and Guts has the key to fix it.
If the narrative ended without righting that mistake, undoubtedly in the most juicy, melodramatic circumstances possible (e.g., perhaps it would be too late to matter as both are poised to die anyway), it would be both narratively unsatisfying and incomplete. This mistaken belief – that Guts never loved Griffith – lies, after all, at the heart of the story, it’s what made everything go wrong in the first place. Narratives about misunderstandings must correct them for the emotional payoff, I think it was simply a matter of when it happened and under what circumstances.
Part 2, On Foreshadowing: There Are Lots of Interesting Parallels Between Pre- and Post-GA Berserk, OK?
One idea for how this narrative resolution might have gone down I’m also taking from a non-directly G&G related plot beat in post-GA Berserk.
Now, we all know about the explicit and more subtle (read: gay) parallels between Rosine/Jill and Griffith/Guts drawn throughout the Lost Children Arc. But what if I were to suggest that the final note of their relationship, Jill throwing herself on top of Rosine, might have offered a thematic parallel to Griffith and Guts at the end of the story? Perhaps Guts might do the same in a moment of love and pain:
(Chapter 116, “The Way Home”)
This hope and a prayer (i.e., super amazing thematic prediction that isn’t based on any concrete evidence whatsoever) would have been a neat conclusion for the story, tying together a bunch of story threads in an incredibly simple and elegant way:
The narrative misunderstanding/wrong at the heart of the story (i.e., that Guts never loved Griffith) would finally be finally put right
It provides a neat resolution to both Griffith’s and Guts’ character arcs
The parallels are on point
To expand on this, in terms of character arcs, on Griffith’s end, a moment like this, perhaps where Guts bodily protects Griffith from a killing blow, would finally allow him to correct his fundamentally negative and damaging view of himself that has defined his entire character arc, the view that has led him to believe that he should bury himself under self hatred and repressed desires. Because if Guts sacrifices himself for him, it would not just tell but show Griffith that he was in fact loved all along. This act would finally provide him with a genuine sense of self and self worth through a love that is entirely reciprocated (instead of through dreams: either selfishly or selflessly pursued).
This would be incontrovertible evidence of Guts’s love for him; one of the main problems in resolving this narrative misunderstanding is to create a situation where Griffith can actually believe that Guts’s expression of love is genuine – how can he possibly believe this through anything other than an extreme, incontrovertible act? And so I offer Guts sacrificing his life for him.
On Guts’s end, it would finally allow him to take his life into his own hands and truly self actualize – he’s been passively reacting for most of the story, and this would be a chance for him to actively do something, to finally make a meaningful choice, and it would be an act that would allow him to unburden himself of hatred, regret, guilt, etc. It would also fulfill what I think of as one of Guts’ most deeply held personal values and beliefs – his desire to save someone through an act of love rather than through his sword (and yes I read Guts as fundamentally a caretaker at heart, more on this below).
In terms of parallels:
The theme Berserk often returns to about the merits of being with someone v. the burden of “protecting” someone would finally be resolved with Guts (likely) failing to protect his loved one, but also in doing so finally being with him in their (likely) dying together and finally fully coming to an understanding of each other.
Guts realizing that his life can mean something outside his sword (what he’s been looking for his whole life) – basically becoming a shield instead of a sword at the end of the story.
Griffith’s sacrifice at the end of the GA would finally be mirrored by a reciprocal act by Guts in the form of a second sacrifice, but this case one that is born out of love instead of hate. This idea in particular I need as a reader so badly, particularly because the acts they each took on behalf of the other across their relationship are so uneven – Guts has just been so passive overall and as a reader it would be incredibly satisfying to have him take up his role as the protagonist and take the final, decisive action to resolve their relationship. This is also why I can’t get on board with any resolution where Griffith has to take another action “for” Guts – imo the resolution of this arc should rest on Guts’ shoulders.
Basically, it would give both of their lives meaning in one swift move.
And what’s especially neat about this potential conclusion to the story is that I think the story gives us some really provocative small moments that foreshadow it, where we're shown that love can triumph over hatred.
At least some sort of reconciliation/act of love comes up again and again in the story, though in seemingly unrelated situations that imo just have too much in common with Guts/Griffith to dismiss outright. There’s of course the “karma is a spiral” moment and the Jill & Rosine parallels that I’ve mentioned, which suggest that it’s possible to still right a deep-seated wrong, to “save” (at least emotionally, if not physically) someone who has fallen into darkness through an act of love.
But there’s also the idea of saving one’s “other half” “from being torn to pieces in the storm” via Serpico and Farnese:
( Chapter 211, “Evil Horde Part 1”)
God, this passage. First off, I think Guts and Griffith's relationship is being explicitly paralleled through the word choices (“other half”/”half of me”), but also because this sentiment is basically echoing all of Guts’s paralysis and helplessness at the moment of the Eclipse.
Like Serpico, he too was unable to set his loved one free from a prison of darkness and hatred, something perfectly visualized in Guts trying in vain to pry his way in to Femto’s eggshell – as well as all the regret, hatred, and feelings of impotence (i.e., the darkness) that came along with that failure.
The “I didn’t think to try” aspect to this is also relevant and interesting given the changed context of pre- and post-Eclipse G&G. Guts during the GA didn’t see what Griffith was going through as leader of the Band of the Hawks as being a prison, a burden, or damaging to his sense of self; he simply thought he was “flying alone” above all of them but couldn’t conceive of how personally devastating that was for Griffith. Now though, after Guts has taken up the mantle as the RPG group leader, he’s probably in a better position to understand this and to also understand that something better is preferable for both of them, even if it seems like it’s forever out of reach.
And yet Serpico’s statement seems to be a really significant idea in light of all this – it’s suggesting that maybe this dilemma isn’t over – that maybe Guts can still see to it that his “other half isn’t torn to pieces” in some new storm that’s brewing.
I also submit Case B: Luca and her tribute to “the chick [child] that died within the egg”… Now, while she’s specifically addressing Eggman throughout this scene, this moment also explicitly parallels Griffith as a similar child who died within an “egg.” Compare:
(Chapter 83, “God of the Abyss” and Chapter 176, “Determination and Departure”)
This is a “sinner’s” tribute to a child who died too young, who is now buried and alone, who has no one to love or mourn him. Again, I think the parallels to both Griffith and Guts are there, telling us that even those people who have done terrible wrongs, who have lived shameful lives, can still be loved (i.e., mourned), and that trauma does not have to define you or your legacy.
And this connection doesn’t just appear through the language choices (sinner, chick) but also through mirrored imagery between the above scene and these ones:
(Chapter 59, “Devil Dogs Chapter 1” and Chapter 331, “Spring Flowers of Distant Days Part 3” although admittedly the latter one comes much later, so it only works as a retroactive parallel)
The essential thing that Luca’s tribute is telling us as readers, is that in mourning (a form of love) someone evil and despicable, love offers the counterpoint, specifically the remedy, to hatred.
Part 3, On Narrative Conclusions: Why a Second Sacrifice?
So, my dumb little brain is telling you that the conclusion of the story should have been a scene where Guts makes a sacrifice for Griffith. But why?
Well, most importantly I think it offers a crucial structural parallel to the other sacrifices we've seen throughout the story. That's because there are some important distinctions to make between this sacrifice and earlier ones. This sacrifice would not be with a behelit. It would not be the consequence of magic or the gods meddling, the strings of fate, or an action born of hatred. It would not be a sacrifice that destroys people but instead one that actualizes them.
I think this is the best possible ending to the story, in large part because Guts demonstrating his love for Griffith is what was been set up to unburden both of them from their current armours (see: Femto) of imprisonment and their respective “shackles” of hatred.
(Chapter 202, “Magic Stone”)
Now, on a character level I think it would be overly simplistic to say that the story is telling us that Guts will forgive Griffith. I think both characters too far gone for simple forgiveness between the two of them, I don’t think that was ever a realistic outcome to their story.
What they need instead is shared understanding and a shared declaration of love to help them realize who they are as people (loved and worth loving). That's why I think the Jill/Rosine parallel works so well, because it only needs to be an irrational action on Guts’s part (like throwing himself in front of Griffith to protect him) as a definitive expression about what Guts wants to do, outside of his usual waffling as well as any obligations or duties he might feel. A sacrifice by Guts would be a simple action, one taken because of him following his heart.
Guts making a genuine sacrifice for his “other half,” to save him, to finally know himself and know another person, creating a deeply honest a connection through an expression of love… tell me that’s not a perfect conclusion to a story about trauma and its devastating impacts on people and their relationships with each other.
Because I think it’s clear that the idea of not being able to truly hate Griffith is just as relevant to Guts as it is to Rickert:
(Chapter 336, “Pandemonium”)
Guts says this to Rickert while looking sad, not angry. Maybe, just maybe, Guts is aware of his own feelings on the matter too. Perhaps he's as much speaking aloud as to himself here.
The wrench in Guts’ desire for that all-consuming hatred is, of course, that residual love he feels, the structural equivalent to Griffith’s own bthumping heart. In that light, that love could very well make Guts do something spontaneous and irrational, essentially bursting through his own darkness to definitively break the hold of the hatred that’s shackling him. Especially if he somehow comes to understand the pain and love that Griffith is still feeling too.
Now to be clear, I don’t think forgiveness necessarily needs to come into the equation here, and I think it’s psychologically reductive to say that Guts can overcome his trauma this way. I think those wounds run too deep, but conversely I think that his love does too. Basically I think the resolution to their arc absolutely could and should have remained messy as fuck. An act of love born from a crippling wound is as honest as it gets for these characters.
Now, the narrative explicitly tells us after it declares that Guts is shackling himself to hatred through his sword, that that the way Guts will go about this unburdening/unshackling of his hatred is through Casca, by taking up the sword for her sake as a “protection against hellfire” AKA as a protection against his own hatred:
(Chapter 203, “Elementals”)
But we see repeatedly that this is simply a “path [he’s] chosen,” not necessarily the only path or, indeed, necessarily the correct one. In fact, we see that this path is not actually succeeding at protecting him or Casca from anything. And that’s because when we look at Guts’s actions, he isn’t actually working to protect himself from his own hatred, because he can’t help but be reminded of his own trauma as a result of Casca’s trauma:
(Chapter 287, “Bubbles of Futility”)
“At the end, it’s always.” Trauma lies at the end of this road named Casca. And I think that’s because Casca is no longer really an independent person to him; she is a symbol, a burden, and a force that keeps The Struggle alive; she’s a means, not an end in itself. At the end, instead, it’s always that wound, and purposefully so. (And this interpretation is of course aided by her being a veritable doll throughout the majority of the rest of the story).
The Struggle and Casca herself aren’t presented as what Guts objectively wants as an end consequence of his actions – they are presented as the means towards something else.
The story drills into us the idea that this goal of restoring Casca is based on neither a positive and altruistic motive on Guts’ part, nor is it something that’s destined for jolly good things. See: the ominous foreshadowing with “The power to protect someone and the power to be with someone are different,” “fixing” Casca despite her own wishes, and Casca also seeing Guts as a monster from the Eclipse in her own right. In this light, I think it’s very appropriate that Casca views Guts in exactly the same way:
(Chapter 359, “A Wall”)
The “path [he’s] chosen” – The Struggle, the burden, the guilt, or everything that Casca is to him – isn’t good for Guts. It’s a path shackled, and it’s one that makes his sword heavy with guilt, anger, and hatred.
(Chapter 188, “Winter Journey Part 2”)
But we’re told that this isn’t a path that’s been set in stone (re: “those children are not bound to choose the same paths you and I did”). Guts has the power to choose differently than continuing to fight as a sword.
To sum up, I read Guts as explicitly thinking of Casca as a duty/chain/burden rather than as something personally fulfilling or as a genuine escape from his hatred. At the end, it’s always. And that’s why the conclusion to his story, at least imo, should lie somewhere else.
(And sidenote, this dynamic between duty and desire (giri and ninjō) is a huge part of the Japanese cultural (literary, dramatic, and cinematic) tradition, and I think it’s pretty clearly at play here, where Casca represents duty, Griffith represents desire).
To me, this is the whole point of Guts still being “bound” to Griffith, because in his heart of hearts, he still wants to be, because can’t ever truly hate Griffith, because he’ll always love him/be in love with him. And accordingly, any act Guts takes for Griffith at the end of the story will not happen because he feels obligated or burdened, like he does with Casca, but because on some level he genuinely wants to embrace love and be free of the burden of his Struggle and hatred.
~~
Small tangent on Guts: the question of what Guts actually wants is obviously crucial to the story, he’s the protagonist after all. But what does he want? To save Casca? Well, he did his part there. What now? To live with Casca? Continue The Struggle? To kill Griffith? Honestly, this question is actually really fucking ambiguous, which is kind of shocking for a protagonist (supposedly) three-quarters of the way through his story. (My headcanon reason for this ambiguity is that Miura wanted to maintain plausible deniability that this story is gay AF, which is also the reason behind Griffith’s motivations being so ambiguous as well).
To make this question a bit more abstract, if Guts was free to do whatever he wanted – as in, if he didn’t feel obligated to do what he’s supposed to – what would he do? If we can’t answer that question, I think we can’t truly understand Guts as a character.
My own answer to this question lies in reading those moments we see him as a caretaker as the most genuine senses of who Guts is as a person.
(Chapter 1, “The Golden Age”)
Those desperate moments of grabbing his mother’s hand as well as him trying to return the flower spirit to its home are the moments I think he is acting in line with the person he genuinely wants to be outside of any expectations of what he thinks he’s good at or what he’s “supposed” to be, or in terms of obligations in trying to impress someone or doing what he thinks is expected of him… He just does these things instinctively, because I think fundamentally he’s a loving person who essentially just wants to be loved back.
These moments are especially important to highlight I think, because in these moments Guts has no external motivating factors. He is a child who loves his mother, who wants to reassure her and be reassured in turn; he is a young man who wants to repay an act of kindness out of genuine good heartedness.
I will submit also the following, as a pretty clear crystallization of what Guts is about:
(Chapter 33, “One Snowy Night”)
If he ended up sacrificing his life for Griffith at the story’s conclusion, it would be exactly in line with this same impulse: to love and be loved. This is what has always, at least imo, defined Guts beneath all the shame, and rage, and guilt, and shackles of duty, and his feelings of inadequacy.
In becoming Griffith’s shield, he wouldn’t be protecting him through his sword, he would be saving him through an act of love.
~~
And OK, what I see as the smoking gun for this weird little theory comes from this very innocuous page from a random, seemingly unrelated story thread and chapter.
(Chapter 206, “Troll Raid”)
This page is framed in such an aesthetically significant way – a full page spread given to such a small line, like why unless it’s about more than some random townspeople.
The key that saves us lies in those we are trying to forget.
Guts has been trying to forget Griffith, to move on, for basically half of the story – this line very easily could be read as directly commenting on Guts’ journey and his inability to unburden himself.
BUT this line goes further – it’s not only suggesting that Guts trying to forget his past is not a good thing, it’s also suggesting that Guts needs to be saved somehow, and that it can happen through the one he’s “trying to forget.”
What does Guts need to be saved from? Well, from the burden of The Struggle, from berserking, from his sword, his regret, his hatred. And how can he do this through Griffith? By giving his love/life to him, as a shield instead of as a sword… It’s just too perfect!@!
So yeah, while this is all entirely wishful thinking, I also don’t think Guts sacrificing his life for Griffith is totally unreasonable or “out there” spec – I do legitimately see this as a once-possible and honestly pretty perfect ending to the story. So that’s what I’m fucking going with, goddammit.
Part 4, Conclusions
Imo Guts making a sacrifice for Griffith would be the most important theme Berserk could ultimately endorse – because, in my reading at least, Griffith has entirely defined his choices around the belief that he does not deserve absolution (reminder: I think he ultimately made the sacrifice because the Godhand convinced him there was no coming back from what he already was, and so as a result he doubles down on that belief by agreeing to the sacrifice). For someone who believes that he isn’t worthy of love to be loved nonetheless, outside of those cycles of worth, exchange, and self loathing that he is so bound within, that would be a pretty damn powerful message. And for a character who is defined by his trauma to decide that love is ultimately more important? That's what I want from this story.
And as I noted above, on a character level, I can absolutely buy that Guts would make a sacrifice for Griffith, because I read this as being in line with Guts’s most fundamental desires as a person, and because I think Guts feels personally responsible for what happened to Griffith and still desperately wants to right that wrong, he just doesn’t know how to do so.
However, on a broader narrative level, I think this is more difficult to make a case for because to a lot of readers Griffith seems beyond redemption.
And honestly I think if Miura had wanted to do a classic redemption arc, where Griffith comes to realize that he regrets his original decision to make the sacrifice (as in a reading where he chose the dream and has now come to be dissatisfied with his current situation), this arc would have started long ago and it would have been made abundantly clear to readers.
If Miura had been gearing up for Griffith to come to realize that he did the wrong thing and eventually at the end of the story planned to have him take another action on Guts’s behalf to redeem himself, I think for a turn like this to work effectively, his emotional state wouldn’t still be so ambiguous to us – Miura would have been showing us his incremental but explicit realizations that this is not in fact what he wants in order to get us to root for his redemption. If Miura was in fact headed in that direction, it just seems like it was too little too late at this point.
OTOH, though, if Griffith already knows what he did was wrong, as with my reading, then the thing he needs to come to understand in order to be redeemed isn’t that he made the wrong choice, it’s that he doesn’t have to hate himself. And for that, he needs to be told that he is loveable, and indeed, is and was loved even at his most despicable. It’s Guts’s love he needs, narratively and emotionally, and such a realization could come right at the very end of the story, no build up on Griff’s end necessary.
To put this in slightly different terms, Griffith’s redemption involves him coming to realize that the sacrifice was the wrong choice, but not because he realizes he never actually wanted the dream after all, but because he comes to realize that he never had to punish and hate himself for all his prior actions, because he was loved all along – that his sacrifice/act of suicide was wrong because it was never “necessary” in the first place.
Basically, whether he’s chosen the dream or the sacrifice yields different stakes for Griffith’s redemption – they hinge on fundamentally different things, and I don’t buy that the first one was possible given post-GA characterizations, but the second seems not only possible but necessary to bring this interpretation of the story to a satisfying resolution.
And I think there are different scales of redemption that are possible to admit here. But I do think both Guts and Griffith need some sort of redemption for the story overall to be satisfying – they’ve both done atrocious things, but the story has also expressly shown us that neither of them are a lost cause.
Both are still fundamentally broken, vulnerable, and fragile people; especially because both still need each other, after all, they’re both still in love with each other. This isn’t the characterization of people who are fundamentally beyond some kind of redemptive final act(s). It also helps that Griffith is basically treated as a deuteragonist post-Conviction Arc.
And ultimately I think Miura has shown us that this is a state that the apostles/“monsters” of the story all have in common. I’m thinking here of this moment we see at the very beginning of the story:
(Chapter 4, “Guardians of Desire”)
As Puck says here, apostles are very much still fragile humans. The most fragile, in fact. Their deformed bodies are proof of their having broken themselves. The clearest demonstration of this is of course Griffith, who as an apostle became what he always hated. These are “fallen” people, unloved, hiding from themselves and from the world. If that’s not someone who is in need of mercy and redemption, I don’t know who is.
As to whether both Guts and Griffith still need to “pay,” narratively and morally, for their actions, this is not something I have a strong personal opinion about – I think both of them have already suffered hugely. That being said, I do think a second sacrifice narratively should lead to both of their deaths at the end of the story. That’s for two reasons, one because I think they both would both probably view death as a release more than anything, and two because it would function as the narrative consequence for their actions, especially if they were to get taken out by Apostle!Casca, who has also suffered hugely at the hands of both of these men.
Death would be what finally frees both Guts and Griffith from their pretty fucking miserable/doomed lives and would finally provide them some kind of peace as well as self-actualization – in that sense Casca’s actions could be read in the mode of both mercy and vengeance. So that’s why I lean in that direction, but then again I’ve always been more interested in mercy/forgiveness/redemption as story tropes than revenge/punishment, though I think the story was set up to be able to balance both in a really interesting way.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my senseless ramblings. If I had my druthers this is how the story would have ended, and I guess it gets to live in my headcanon forever, and maybe yours too if you like my interpretation of the story.
Sorry for any of you who were waiting for another post from me – the news of Miura’s death really kept me from thinking about Berserk for a while, for obvious reasons. But the story is what we make of it, especially now, so I hope this maybe gave you a bit of solace too.
Breaking Down Griffith’s Coping Mechanisms: Repression v. Self Harm
CW: extended discussion of self harm and suicidal ideation, images of torture, mentions of CSA
For anyone interested, here is my very long breakdown of how I read Griffith’s state of mind and coping mechanisms (1. repression and 2. self harm) working throughout the Golden Age of Berserk. I think this reading provides an explanation as to why Griffith acts the way he does in some of his more obtuse and “irrational” scenes (the river, Charlotte), and how these actions eventually lead him to becoming Femto at the end of this arc.
Miura may not have planned all this out explicitly, but I think he has a good understanding of the psychological reality of why people repress and why they self harm, and the story proceeds accordingly.
This essay is basically a psychological deep-dive and a reworked version of a very long conversation I had with @bthump​ last year, it’s taken me a while to get back to this because life n stuff.
The content of this analysis is basically going through the GA scenes where Griffith acts in a self-destructive way and explaining how and why this happens and how it informs his actions in the story more generally.
If you don’t like or understand Griffith, I would invite you to give this analysis a shot anyway, because a lot of Griffith’s story takes place in the subtext of the Golden Age, and it takes a liberal helping of interpretation to figure out what’s going on. This of course is just one reading of Griffith’s character, but as I hope to show, there remains a consistent logic behind his actions that governs his impulses to act in the way he does throughout the story.
Okay, enough preamble, let’s jump in.
On Griffith’s Guilt
So first off, we have to ask why Griffith acts in these self-destructive ways in the first place. Basically, what are his coping mechanisms are responding to – why are they necessary at all?
I think it’s pretty clear that the heart of Griffith’s pain, coping mechanisms, and self-destructiveness is his guilt. More specifically, this guilt comes from the belief that he is cruel and evil because he’s willing to continue to pile up bodies and walk that corpse-laden path to the dream, to put others in harm’s way for his own sake, to devour others’ dreams for the sake of his own.
We see this in the flashback with the doll-knight boy, when his guard slips in front of Casca:
Casca specifically flags for us that this is a significant and unusually revealing moment for Griffith, where he shows a sliver of what’s underlying his implacable façade as a mercenary leader.
Another moment where we see Griffith’s guilt directly expressed is in “Tombstone of Flame: Chapter 2.” This scene shows us more explicitly that his guilt is bound up in his pursuit of the dream and the cruelty it takes to make that dream a reality:
From this scene, we can understand that to Griffith, his “cruelty” is specifically associated with walking the path to the dream, and alongside this, his willingness to put others in danger while he himself remains out of reach of harm’s way. These are both shown to us as things he hates himself for, given that he self harms directly after these scenes (with Gennon and with the second set of scratches – and if you need evidence that the latter happens, bthump has broken this down here).
This “cruelty” that lies at the heart of his guilt is why the guilt trip the Godhand take him on during the Eclipse cuts so deep, because throughout that sequence, the Godhand emphasize exactly that aspect, his cruelty, and no other part of him (such as his remorse, his intentions to create a more equal world, etc.).
On Griffith’s Repression and Resentment of his Dream
Alright, so we know why Griffith feels guilty. The next question is how Griffith responds to this – I’m suggesting here that it’s through a dual combination of repression and self harm. So, why does Griffith repress and why does he self harm?
Generally speaking, he represses to make himself feel better. This is basically the act of redirecting his feelings – telling himself that the guilt/pain he experiences over pursuing the dream doesn’t matter because all of these acts of cruelty are in fact justifiable, because they agreed to it, because he thought about this logically, because fate said it was OK, because he feels nothing, because, because… It’s basically every time he puts aside his feelings in pursuit of the dream.
Griffith’s repression involves rationalizing away his feelings in order to retreat to a space of emotional safety as an escape from his self hatred and the guilt he feels over his willingness to pursue the dream. The repression exists to smother the negativity he feels about the dream (and what it takes to get there) however it possibly can. And it is in this way that Griffith’s ability to attain his dream becomes closely tied to his ability to repress his guilt over wanting to and trying to obtain it. The repression and the dream basically go hand and hand.
However, it’s important to acknowledge that Griffith’s repression also walks a delicate line, because it attempts to excuse the corpses for the sake of the shining end goal as the ultimate justification for all the bodies, effectively justifying death with more death in a vicious circle, where the guilt continues to grow larger and larger into a mountain of bodies that is eventually visualized for Griffith directly in the guilt trip.
To make a bit of a subtle distinction here, it's not exactly that Griffith’s ability to repress his guilt over all of this becomes necessarily weaker the more the bodies pile up around him, because the increased body toll simply demands the need for greater and greater justification. In other words, it asks that he make a huge sacrifice for a huge gain – the eclipse for a utopia, basically.
However, we see that how this plays out in practice is that Griffith’s repression works against itself if not in the short run, in the long run because it ends up feeding this vicious circle. His repression feeds and intensifies his self loathing because it effectively enables more death, which in turn necessitates the greater need for his coping mechanisms and with it a stronger and stronger ability to repress those negative feelings. So if his ability to repress ever falters, what’s waiting in the wings is an increasingly difficult-to-justify mountain of death, guilt, and self hatred.
And not only that, if we dig a bit deeper, his ability to repress also feeds his self loathing directly, even as its entire goal exists to suppress it – because if he hates himself for his “cruel” willingness to walk the corpse-laden path to the dream, and the primary way he’s able to do this is because of his repression, then his ability to repress, to put on the mask for the sake of continuing the dream, would also be something he (unconsciously) hates about himself.
And in fact I think we see some of this resentment over his ability to repress his guilt finally acknowledged in the Godhand’s guilt trip:
Read: “That’s right, I knew what this was doing, what I was excusing, what I was encouraging, and I found a way to do it anyway.”
If Griffith’s repression is what enables his cruelty, when his ability to repress falters and he’s left only with his self loathing (as we see in in the guilt trip sequence, or even to a lesser degree with Casca in the river sequence), he is thus also hit with the resentment and self hatred not just over his willingness to repress his guilt but over the dream also, because this is what all this evil has been done in the name of: this is the ultimate cause. “It’s a blood-smeared dream after all.”
Of course we can see that Griffith is still able to functionally rely on the dream as a coping mechanism all the while implicitly resenting it throughout the Golden Age, but only insofar as he’s successfully able to repress the negatives that threaten to undermine its ability to function. After all, that’s why he needs to repress his guilt over the dream in the first place, because he cannot justify pursuing the dream if he confronts that guilt directly – it’s basically always threatening to overwhelm him.
And so, as soon as the mask of repression begins to slip, this underlying resentment makes it progressively harder to put on the mask and convince himself that the dream is worth all this death and cruelty. As we see in the river scene, once overcome by negative feelings about the dream – that the dream may in fact be able to excuse nothing, it may be ultimately nothing other than a monument to his own cruelty – the repression slips and he reverts to self harm, and he can only snap the mask back in place when he realizes that other people still need him to keep up that façade.
Griffith’s repression is essentially, at its heart, a precarious coping mechanism – it is intrinsically set up to undermine itself. The repression feeds and strengthens Griffith’s feelings of self loathing and his need to turn to self harm as a backup coping mechanism, which is effectively threatening to burst through the surface at any moment.
As we’ll see in the next section, his self harm in turn functions to invalidate his belief in the positive aspects of the dream (basically that it can still redeem him or his actions), and with it his ability to repress his own negative feelings.
This is essentially why I read the climax of Griffith’s Golden Age arc being the collapse of his coping mechanisms and his belief in the dream – because it hangs on his ability to successfully repress the negative feelings he has about the dream, and it hangs on two coping mechanisms that work at cross purposes from one another.
 On Griffith’s Self Harm
Okay, so we’ve been over why Griffith feels guilt and how his repression works, but how does his self harm function in the story? First, let’s look at what it does for him emotionally.
There are a couple reasons people generally self harm – one of the main ones is that it can serve as a distraction from our problems and emotions, allowing people to focus on the pain in the moment to the exclusion of everything else. This kind of self harm would function like repression in Griffith’s case, because it would bury the guilt with a sort of distraction, by smothering it with a different kind of pain.
Now I don’t think that’s how Griffith’s self harm works, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it’s because none of the instances of self harm we see textually in Berserk actually function to help him forget or diminish his guilt or self loathing over pursuing the dream, and instead are oriented around the opposite, leading him to focus on it instead.
In the river when he’s scratching himself, he’s almost doing it subconsciously, like he’s not even paying attention to what he’s doing, and he’s instead thinking about what he’s talking about: the dream, specifically the negative aspects of the dream:
Throughout this scene, he’s not focused on his own self-inflicted suffering as a distraction, he’s focused on his own guilt from pursuing the dream. His suffering is positioned here as a direct consequence of his guilt.
Similarly, when he’s fucking Charlotte he’s thinking about Guts leaving and rejecting him, not getting lost in what he’s doing with her.
Neither of these two instances of Griffith’s self harm are functioning as distractions from his pain, they’re about intensifying it. So, why would he want to intensify his pain?
It’s because the self harm is Griffith’s backup coping response – it’s what seeps out when the repression isn’t strong enough to bury the guilt. It’s what happens when he’s hit with the full intensity of the self loathing, guilt, resentment, etc. that his repression usually protects him from. Given that he’s essentially being overwhelmed by his self hatred, it makes sense that he would want to feel worse as a result, because this is him accepting and becoming all-consumed with the idea that he is evil and cruel, and he thus “deserves” to suffer.
It is in this way that the self harm serves as a punishment in Griffith’s eyes: “dirtying” himself is essentially meting out justice, effectively giving him what he “deserves” for his own cruelty. In his eyes, this is him reaping what he’s sown.
Basically, the second reason why I think the self harm doesn’t function as a distraction is that it seems to be more centred around penance through his own suffering. The strongest evidence for this again comes from the river scene:
“[F]or hundreds, thousands of lives to hang in the balance and myself alone to not be unclean…”
This part of his monologue clearly sets up his own suffering (“dirtying” himself) as both punishment and atonement for his guilt over putting other people’s lives in danger.
Digging into this a bit deeper, Griffith is still essentially trying to prop up the dream here through his self harm, by trying to position his own suffering as constructive to his end goal. If the guilt threatens to tell him that none of this is worth it, the self harm in this instance is Griffith telling himself that it can be if he is just punished enough for it. (“What I want…won’t enter my grasp so easily as that.”)
This monologue shows us that in Griffith’s mind, his own suffering may be directly given up in response to the suffering of others. It’s what’s being offered in “exchange” – basically, if he becomes unclean enough (read: suffers enough) it’ll make all those hundreds and thousands of lives that hang in the balance “okay” (and you can see how this is some shaky and desperate logic).
In construing his self harm as a sort of atonement for the lives he’s put on the line for his dream, he is trying to absolve himself through his own suffering. This moment in the river essentially shows us Griffith’s thought process as he is in the process of self harming: “If I suffer and atone for this, then it will all be okay in the end, I can still attain my dream because I will have paid my dues.”
However, while Griffith tries to make this impulse to self harm constructive, as we’ll get into in the following section, we can see that this is still always fundamentally destructive to his goals because it always makes him feel worse about himself and his own actions, and that impulse to feel worse can easily spiral out of control when faced with a growing mountain of bodies and a shrinking sense that he can offer up anything in penance or justification for it.
This choice of the word “unclean” here basically serves as a signpost to explain why Griffith takes every single later action he associates with “dirtying” himself throughout the story. This idea of “dirtying” himself is obviously extremely loaded – these acts which make sure he’s not “unclean” are communicated as acts of self-imposed suffering that take place as a sort of punishment after he acts “cruelly” (this is not him putting himself in harm’s way during battle, he does that anyway), and they’re acts that he himself explicitly views as loathsome and disgusting.
It’s clear that he views having sex with a child predator in similar terms to scratching himself – to Griffith, “dirtying” himself is essentially his self-imposed punishment, and he’s basically trying to construe that punishment as productive by positioning his suffering as in some way equivalent to the suffering of others (basically, “if I suffer too then that’ll make their suffering okay”).
This is also why, as we’ll get into in a minute, if he doesn’t view his suffering as “worth” anything, it becomes impossible to view his suffering as equivalent to the suffering of others. And that’s also why the more the suffering and the bodies pile up around him, the more difficult it is to rationalize his suffering as equivalent to all of this pain and horror.
This is basically the process of how Griffith rationalizes his self harm, this is how he construes it as a productive enterprise instead of a self-destructive one – this is the logic that links his self harm with achieving his goal.
And clearly it’s logic that’s resting on some supremely precarious ground.
 Repression v. Self Harm
In order to see how my readings of Griffith’s self harm v. his repression play out, let’s revisit a few key scenes in greater detail before we get into discussing the wider implications of this in terms of Griffith’s story and the sacrifice as the culmination of all of this.
Let’s start with Griffith’s interchange with Guts in Tombstone of Flame:
This conversation basically proceeds as follows: do you think I’m cruel? -> yeah, but you believe the cruelty is necessary, don’t you? -> yes, you’re right, all of this is cruel, and I am too, so I deserve to be punished for it -> self harm with the second set of scratches.
That smile – that same smile as with the doll-knight boy, and indeed the same as the sacrifice – is Griffith being overwhelmed by self loathing. This is not repression. This is not “You’re wrong, I’m not cruel/it doesn’t matter because [denial/rationalization/repression/justification],” it’s “You’re right.” This is me. I’m cruel, a monster, and therefore I deserve to suffer.
And indeed, all three examples of that same smile (the river, Tombstone of Flame, and the sacrifice) lead to acts of self harm. In this case, this isn’t an example of him trying to justify or bury the guilt and pain and horror or build up his defences like the repression would, it’s him justifying an act of self-destruction to tear himself down, because he thinks he deserves it.
To really dig into this distinction, let’s turn to another example of how Griffith’s self harm works in contrast to the repression, and return to the scene where Griffith scratches himself in the river.
First of all, he’s scratching himself here because he feels guilty over putting people in harm’s way for the sake of his dream (a feeling which is specifically kicked off by doll-knight boy but I think it’s made pretty obvious that this is just over people in general), while denying this guilt out loud and spewing his BS rationalizations to Casca.
Both the self harm and the repression are working in response to the same guilt here. But why doesn’t he stop with the rationalization? Why is it narratively or psychologically necessary that he also self harms at all here?
It’s because the denial (i.e., repression) isn’t strong enough to smother the guilt – and yeah, it’s because his rationalization is flimsy as fuck – basically it boils down to “I don’t feel responsible because I am a being of pure logic.” Which: lol
Again, the rationalization exists here to suppress Griffith’s negative feelings, the guilt, self-loathing, and monstrousness – this is him telling himself the guilt doesn’t matter, basically trying to push it away so he doesn’t have to emotionally confront it, because “I thought about it logically […] I don’t feel at all responsible…”
But we see that the rationalization isn’t strong enough, and the self harm is what seeps out when the rationalization can’t bury his self loathing. When the self harm takes over directly after this, the tone of this exchange changes and specifically swings toward the negative aspects of the dream: as he gets deeper into scratching himself, he becomes more and more dream-negative, i.e., focused on how his dream is built on corpses:
We’re being visually told that his answer to this, his way to make sure he’s not unclean, is to not only have sex with a child predator, but also pay that debt through his blood and suffering. The self harm is justifying his self loathing and guilt in a different way than the rationalization is, not telling himself that “the death is okay because [repression],” but instead “the death not OK – I hate myself and I need to atone for this, which will hopefully make it OK in the end.”
And importantly, as mentioned earlier, as soon as Griffith gets a stronger angle in this exchange – protecting Casca instead of protecting himself – his repression snaps back in full force and he reins in the self harm immediately.
I see this moment as especially significant to understanding how Griffith’s self harm works, because it shows us that the self harm cannot uphold itself as a coping mechanism, it’s basically destined to collapse on itself.
This is because in order to believe you can atone for something through your actions, you have to believe that your actions, your own suffering, has worth. And since the self harm is premised on tearing himself down, as he gets deeper in the hole of self harm, it becomes more and more difficult to believe that his penance is worth a damn. It’s just as much of a balancing act as the repression is, except that it specifically hinges on Griffith’s sense of self worth… so it’s pretty much destined to spiral out of control.
To reiterate, why is the self harm still a defence mechanism if it’s designed to make Griffith feel worse and emphasize the negative aspects of the dream over the shining end goal?
The river scene shows us how Griffith’s repression works in relation to his self harm – when the repression falters, the self loathing that has him focusing on the road of corpses gets him dangerously close to thinking that the dream isn’t worth it, and obviously he can’t live with that because then he’s left with nothing. The self harm (at least in the case of the scratching and Gennon) functions as the last line of defense against that sneaking suspicion that the castle cannot in fact redeem all of this death – because it asserts that maybe the dream can still be worth it if he suffers and atones for his actions. Again, the evidence for this is in the river scene:
“But… for hundreds, thousands of lives to hang in the balance and myself alone to not be unclean… What I want…won’t enter my grasp so easily as that.”
That last part indicates that he essentially still wants to want the dream here, and the self harm is basically what’s allowing him to do so, to continue on the path to his dream through his suffering as penance.
Yet even as this recuperative logic works to some degree in the river scene, this belief is still founded on the (shaky) assumption that his own suffering is worth anything in exchange for the suffering of others. That’s why, to me, it seems apparent that Griffith’s self worth plays such an important part in the breakdown of his coping mechanisms, and why it makes sense that at a certain point he reaches such a low that the self harm no longer becomes penitent, it becomes only punishment. This is the point where self harm becomes self destruction, and this is exactly what happens with Charlotte.
 On Griffith’s Self Harm as Self Destruction
We know that Griffith having sex with Charlotte and his subsequent taunting of her father work differently than with the scratching and Gennon, because unlike these two cases, these instances of self harm involve him throwing away the dream too (or at the very least in the former case, putting the dream directly into jeopardy) – casting it into the fire along with all the other “frightening and sad things.” Like with his later suicide attempt and the sacrifice, this isn’t an example of Griffith still wanting to walk the path of the dream, this is him reaching the point where the dream no longer seems worth it, and we know this because he takes steps to actively throw it away (though I do think this understanding is still operating largely instinctually/unconsciously until the soup-behelit, as I outlined in my previous meta).
Throughout the torture sequence, as he goads the King into viciously beating him, we see that Griffith verbally associates his own failure (by implication – he is clearly referring to himself as well as the King throughout this sequence) with his worthlessness.
At this point, Griffith is masochistically relishing in the fact that he basically cannot offer anything to anyone anymore – his penance is no longer worth anything to anyone, and all that remains is the suffering he thinks he deserves.
This is the first time we see Griffith’s self harm not being mobilized in a remotely constructive way. Getting beaten doesn’t have anything to do with attaining the dream, this is a naked display of the belief that Griffith thinks he deserves to suffer for his actions without the veneer of his suffering functioning as penance. This is now simply his punishment, for daring to try to pursue the dream in the first place.
This exchange effectively reveals the naked truth to us – that Griffith’s self harm reflects his desire to suffer for what he’s done to others. Even though he may have pretended in the past that this desire to suffer for his sins can still in some way still be constructive to his goals, this moment shows us that ultimately it’s not. Here we’re seeing directly that when Griffith’s self worth is low (i.e., when he feels like shit), all he wants to do is suffer more, and that’s basically the rub.
And yeah, of course that’s how it works, because this is exactly how we see his self harm working throughout the story. Whenever he feels guilty/cruel/dirty, we watch him self harm to feel worse: the doll-knight boy and Gennon, Gennon and the scratching, “am I cruel” and the scratching, being rejected by Guts and self destructing, all culminating in the low point of the torture and “This is worthless.”
This scene shows us that Griffith’s self worth is intrinsically tied to his belief that he deserves to suffer, and this is set up as a vicious circle – the worse he feels, the worse he wants to make himself feel, and so on.
To back up a bit to the preceding scene with Charlotte, this is basically the gateway scene between Griffith as a functional human and Griffith as a self-destructing catastrophe.
Why he comes to Charlotte in this moment is open for debate – perhaps he’s simply trying to repress his pain over Guts’ leaving by attempting to seize the dream by seducing the princess. Or perhaps he secretly wants to get caught doing something risky that will fundamentally jeopardize the dream in order to punish himself for being unworthy of Guts’ love. Or perhaps it’s both at the same time.
Let’s quickly break down how this scene works in terms of Griffith’s state of mind. First we see him still trying to play the gentlemen, still repressing and putting on a show of the perfect prince for Charlotte. Soon after though, the mask drops and he basically reveals a hardened statue beneath. He’s ultimately too hurt in this moment to keep the cheeky and/or charming mask up – he looks like he feels cold and empty, and he’s still trying not to think about what’s just happened with Guts.
This is basically an exact midpoint between his repression and his self harm – he’s trying to smother the pain by not thinking about it (repression at its simplest), but at the same time what he’s choosing to do with Charlotte actually intensifies his pain, because it leads him to think about Guts anyway (self harm).
Again, Griffith’s repression exists to make himself feel better, to reassert the importance and value of the dream, and his actions don’t actually accomplish this in the slightest. It doesn’t make him feel better, because it’s functionally designed to make himself feel worse.
And yeah, we see that afterwards he clearly feels 1000% worse, not better.
Griffith’s self harm moves into the territory of self destruction here because he isn’t actually able to atone for anything by having sex with Charlotte – regardless of what he might have intended when he went to Charlotte’s room, the scene plays out to tear himself down, and the dream is no closer after he’s done so.
His isolation in that final panel is basically a visual representation of his own self-imposed punishment for his daring to think all of this was worth the price he, and more importantly everyone else, has paid for it.
In this way, this sequence and the one that follows in the torture chamber show us that Griffith’s change in attitude toward his acts of self harm v. self destruction comes down directly to the amount of self loathing he is experiencing, and in an intrinsically related way, how much value he places in himself, his own desire to feel better, and his ability to atone for his actions.
And I think it’s clear that things change for Griffith because of Guts. Whether he likes/recognizes it or not, by the time Guts leaves he’s also staked his self worth on what Guts thinks of him, because he loves him and craves his respect and admiration. Guts’ answer to “Do you think I’m cruel?” cuts deep, but not as deeply as being told that he essentially never had any of Guts’ love or respect in the first place, which is what he believes as Guts leaves (“Is this how badly you want to leave my grasp?” – see bthump’s excellent meta breaking this moment down in more detail).
It makes sense that this moment would deliver such a devastating blow to Griffith’s sense of worth that it makes his self loathing spiral out of control and leads to him tearing his life apart.
And indeed, I read something very similar going down in the guilt trip, when the Godhand essentially tell Griffith that not only did he never have Guts’ love, he was in fact never worthy of love in the first place, because he is evil, a monster, too cruel, dirty, and loathsome to deserve a way out of this hellish cycle he’s stuck in.
Redux: The Sacrifice as Self Destruction
As I broke down in my previous meta, my analysis of the Eclipse leads me to believe that during this sequence Griffith is choosing the sacrifice (self harm) and not the dream (repression).
Originally, I argued that repression played no part in the sacrifice. However, upon further reflection and lengthy discussion, I have come around to the idea that in fact it is still at play during the first half of the guilt trip. This is clearly the case, because Griffith actually does manage to make an “ends justify the means” argument with respect to his sacrifice of the BoTH, even confronted with an image of all those bodies laid at his feet.
With the Godhand’s encouragement, he is temporarily able to push past the guilt to keep proceeding toward that end goal, covered in blood, in the attempt to convince himself that all this death and suffering couldn’t be for nothing (“If I repent...”). As I noted in my previous analysis, I believe this logic would have been enough for Griffith if all he had to do is sacrifice his Hawks – but as we know, in order to become a monster, you have to sacrifice what you love most, and imo no positive or constructive logic about finally attaining his dream could lead Griffith to the conclusion that the dream is worth anything close to Guts’ life.
It seems that what actually makes the difference at the bitter end is the intervention of fate and the word of God during the Eclipse. The Godhand essentially don’t let Griffith go through with this line of utilitarian thinking, because right after emerging from “the reality within his conscious realm,” they bring him right back into the pile of corpses, only this time it’s portrayed in less abstract terms by evoking the battlefield directly.
The Godhand are effectively telling him right after he’s successfully made his rationalizations that there’s no washing that blood off – that he’s already evil (“That is you”) and there is no absolution waiting for him, only his destiny, which is to reap the evil he has sown. It’s like they specifically get him to make the justification one more time in order to condemn him for it.
They prevent him from shifting the focus back onto that end goal and instead re-emphasize what he’s done to get there (“Over those corpses…you have trampled”), to tell him that he must embrace the cause and effect of his actions (“Bear [your] evil and confront destiny”).
In this way, it’s ultimately a pronouncement of guilt from the veritable mouth of god that finally puts the nail in the coffin of Griffith’s dance between the ends and the means, repression and self harm. They definitively come out and say that there’s no more repressing this, there’s no world in which this will ever be okay. You’re just evil and all you have to look forward to is more evil. This is you.
Directly after this, at the moment of the sacrifice, Griffith has basically been brought to his absolute lowest point, where self destruction seems like the only option (keep in mind that he’s already tried and failed to kill himself). After the guilt trip he thinks he’s less than worthless – he’s been convinced that he’s evil, and deserves nothing but more evil and his own eternal suffering, to “bear his evil and confront destiny.” This is where the last moments of his (human) life swing toward self destruction once and for all.
From what we’ve seen already about how Griffith acts when he feels worthless and wants to self harm, at this point Griffith cannot possibly think that he deserves to benefit or gain anything – not a castle, not absolution, love, or care or human connection. All he deserves is eternal pain and suffering. And by making the sacrifice, Griffith is guaranteeing that belief in his own mind, by obliterating all the remaining goodness within himself by committing an evil act.
Choosing those “raven-black wings” over the lives of Guts and the Hawks is so contrary to what values we already know he believes in, this moment it’s basically just more fuel for the fire.
Contrast the sentiment behind this:
With this:
We’ve been shown that Griffith’s sense of ego is premised almost entirely on what he can do for others – he has left very little sense that he deserves anything for himself. That’s why the selfishness of the sacrifice is, imo, so personally destructive to him – because for someone who has such little sense of independent self or self worth, to make an entirely selfish choice is so contemptible, terrible, unforgivable in his mind that it completely destroys him.
We know that this same perceived selfishness is already his deepest source of guilt and trauma (the belief that he has put others in harm’s way for the sake of his own goals) – so agreeing to the sacrifice is a manifestation of that exact same guilt, just magnified a hundred times over. This act is him basically deciding to give up the pretense that any of his actions have ever been anything other than pure selfishness, cruelty, and evil, by fully embracing that evil and making an exchange for personal benefit, because in his mind there’s essentially no coming back from such a contemptible decision.
Griffith thus chooses the sacrifice as an act of self destruction, and it represents the choice to become exactly everything he always feared he was, to let go of his responsibility to do the right thing by proving that the Godhand (and Guts, or so he thinks) were right all along, by finally making a truly evil choice and thereby validating his belief that he has always been evil and therefore deserves to suffer for eternity.
This is what I mean by the sacrifice being an act of self harm and “spiritual” suicide, not just because he’s basically killing himself, but because the whole impetus is based around actively destroying all the things that he valued about himself – his own soul – everything that made him good and human in his own eyes (and like, this is exactly what Femto, the result of this choice, is). This decision is based around tearing his entire sense of humanity to shreds, by doing the worst thing to himself that he could possibly imagine (making an exchange for personal benefit and sacrificing his most dearly beloved) and becoming the embodiment of that cruel and violent world order he always hated.
The way I think of this as suicide isn’t at all about making him feel better, because it’s not ultimately giving him absolution/justification for or abdication from his actions, it’s giving him the exact opposite – proof of his cruelty in the form of raven-black wings, which are basically just the evidence he’s been looking for all along that he deserves to suffer. It’s also not a depiction of true suicide, which would be an actual escape from his pain. Though this is still an escape in a way – not from his pain but into it.
 Conclusions
While all the acts of self harm/destruction we see Griffith undertake throughout the Golden Age (the scratching, Gennon, Charlotte, the torture chamber, and the sacrifice) have varying elements of repression within them, because that’s still Griffith’s default response to his guilt, each are still ultimately acts of self harm/destruction because they result in tearing himself down and they actively function to make him feel worse – this is succumbing to the pain rather than trying to shield himself from it. None of these moments succeed at helping him along the path to the dream or making him feel better about himself, because none are functionally designed to.
And in saying this, I’m not also implying Griffith didn’t want his own suffering to end at different points in his life. I think after being tortured he wanted to die and end his suffering, after the soup-behelit/nightmare sequence he wanted to die and end his suffering, obviously, he attempts suicide after all. But the guilt trip is the ultimate difference in the end – the guilt trip is what convinces Griffith that he doesn’t deserve to end his suffering. That even his own “death” should be in the name of greater suffering.
Ultimately, what we can understand from this is that, despite the fact that he tries to pretend otherwise, when Griffith scratches himself it has nothing to do with attaining the dream, it’s not ultimately justifying anything other than his own belief that he deserves to suffer – he’s basically always just doing it to feel worse about himself.
When he has sex with Gennon, the specific act he chooses to take is one that is designed to hurt himself – there would have been many different ways to throw himself back into the dream in order to earn money without putting people at risk: for example he could have taken on some mercenary jobs personally, or sought out some non-combative work for interested Hawks – specifically why he chooses to have sex with a child predator is because he wants to punish himself for getting others killed, to atone through his own suffering. Choosing to have sex with a child predator as an act in isolation doesn’t advance the dream, only the end result (money) does. And that money could have been obtained in objectively less harmful and potentially more fruitful routes to that same goal.
Similarly, with Charlotte, his having sex with her, his leaving in broad daylight, his taunting the King, etc. – I read Griffith making those choices because some part of him wanted to destroy himself, to actively torpedo the dream because in some sense he has been brought to believe that he’s worthless and so is everything he’s staked his life on.
What he did in the river, with Charlotte, with the King, even the sacrifice – none of these events had to go down the way they did. The way they went down was basically arranged to destroy every one of those “sad and frightening things,” including the dream and his own life.
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In conclusion, I hope that this meta shows how centrally important the logic of Griffith’s self harm is to his actions throughout the narrative of the Golden Age. His beliefs about himself and his own suffering are shown to us to consistently shape his choices, and I think it’s also clear that this logic persists through Femto’s actions after the Golden Age.
I have some more metas planned where I’m thinking of fleshing some more stuff out that spawned out of my original meta and subsequent discussions around it, so keep out an eye for those if you’re interested.
As always, if you have any thoughts about any of this I would be very interested to hear from you.
On Griffith’s Sacrifice, Coping Mechanisms, and Heartbreak
This is an essay that jumps off from the amazing Griffith  meta written by @bthump (most particularly part 4). All of the groundwork for the following argument is laid out there, this is just an elaboration on Griffith’s decision to make the sacrifice, though I hope it also stands on its own.
CW for extended discussions of self harm, self loathing, and suicide
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What I love most about Griffith’s fall into villainy is that it’s not motivated by ideology. Unlike the villains we’re used to, who differ from Our Heroes on the basis of their (often warped) ideals (e.g. a belief in anarchy, vengeance, hierarchies between peoples, etc.), Griffith does not ultimately make a moral or ideological decision to perpetrate an evil act. In his choice to become a monster, as he finally capitulates and chants “I sacrifice,” he’s not justifying a utilitarian worldview that proclaims that the sacrifice of a comparative few is better for the long run for humanity as a species (even if this does end up being the ethical consequence of his actions with Falconia). No – in his final human moments, Griffith isn’t weighing the pros and cons of moral philosophy, instead, he’s making an emotionally motivated decision, one ultimately based in guilt, self loathing, and the inability to live with a broken heart.
I want to draw out (at length, I’m sorry) the motivations behind Griffith’s final decision to sacrifice the BotH and, most importantly, to sacrifice Guts. In this reading (which ofc is just one interpretation of this sequence, but one that I think hangs together rather well), I’m mainly suggesting two things: one, that this is, at its core, an act of self destruction, specifically self harm at its most extreme. And two, that when Griffith makes his sacrifice, he’s not choosing to finally attain his dream, it’s all about the choice to “cut [his] love asunder.”
In my view, this decision is a manifestation of Griffith’s impulse toward self harm finally functioning as a weapon pointing outwards instead of just inwards. In his sacrifice Griffith has been driven to such a point of unbearable emotional pain that self annihilation through harming the person he loves most in the world seems like the only option left – and so he decides to sacrifice Guts in order to not just hurt but utterly destroy himself.
So how does he get to this point?
Making the decision to hurt/kill Guts, more than the BotH (as we’ll get into), is the extreme endpoint of Griffith’s trauma and emotional damage (his self loathing, emotional dependency, etc.). Leading up to this he must reach what he thinks of as a point of no return, of unbearable emotional pain, and he must also have all other possible escapes and coping mechanisms stripped away. When he makes this decision, he is at the darkest, most emotionally damaged moment of his life.
As I see it, Griffith has two central mechanisms to cope with the pain and negative feelings he can’t deal with (usually his guilt): emotional repression/denial/rationalization (I’m considering this as a bundle) and self harm. The first is Griffith telling himself that the pain doesn’t exist; the second is telling himself that he deserves to feel it.
To recap, since reuniting with the BotH, Griffith has been grappling with the knowledge that he essentially has no worth to anyone anymore and that he is entirely dependent – not just because of his post-torture physical state, but more fundamentally because he’s realized that he’s in love with Guts.
It only makes sense, then, that his overhearing what he thinks is Guts’ plan to leave him again functions as the tipping point for that final, unbearable emotional burden of a broken heart. As a form of self protection, Griffith summons a cavalcade of coping mechanisms to attempt to avoid the heartbreak that comes with the recognition that he can’t fathom a life or a future without him.
Let’s run down how these defense mechanisms and the possibilities to escape his heartbreak are dismantled piece by piece, leading up to the moment the behelit opens:
When he first overhears Casca and Guts’ conversation, Griffith’s first instinct is to try to run away back to his dream, falling back on that familiar combo of denial and emotional repression. When he takes the cart and irrationally follows that fleeting vision of his dream, he’s once again trying to deny that Guts is more important, attempting to convince himself that the dream can still serve as an effective replacement for losing Guts.
However, once the cart is overturned and the dream vanishes, he is forced to accept that this dream of a kingdom is not an escape – it’s gone from his reach. All he has left to look forward to is a future without a dream and without Guts, a realization communicated through his hallucination of a domestic future life with Casca.
During this hallucination sequence he is still trying to rationalize away the pain of losing Guts forever. He tries to repress, tell himself that this is fine, it “isn’t so bad,” because he’s still trying to protect his heart.
But then the behelit reappears, first in his mindscape and then, afterwards, summoned by the threads of fate, and the possibility for his dream re-emerges in a tangible way. At this point, whether the behelit only serves as a physical reminder of living his dream, or whether he knows on some level the significance of its reappearance – that it means the real possibility of choosing his dream over Guts once and for all might once again be in reach – this marks a fundamental change in Griffith.
After this point he’s no longer calm, or determined, or resigned – he loses his composure completely and goes into hysterics. He’s not repressing or redirecting anymore, he just freaks out. So why is the behelit’s appearance what seems to trigger this? Personally, I read this as being the moment he truly realizes that the dream isn’t enough.
The look on his face in response to this physical reminder of the dream is nothing short of terror.
This is why, I think, immediately after glimpsing the behelit and awakening from his nightmare, Griffith tries to kill himself, as he lies, body broken, in the river. What makes the most sense to me in interpreting this sequence of events is that Griffith is confronting on a fundamental level that nothing is worth losing Guts, even the dream can’t replace him, and that ultimately nothing can.
This is the moment he accepts that he doesn’t even want to choose the dream anymore – and that, consequently, there’s nowhere left to hide from his pain.
In attempting to commit suicide he’s still trying to protect his heart; the only answer it seems to him, as a final escape, is choosing to die over living a life without Guts, dream or no dream – over living with the pain of a broken heart.
He, of course, fails, because fate has other plans, and the soul-shattering despair of his heartbreak steadily begins to creep over him (as the Eclipse monsters close in around him). At this point he is trying to hold back that unbearable, undeniable pain of knowing he is about to lose the only thing that truly matters to him, forever; this is the knowledge that he will not be able to cope with Guts leaving him again, that ultimately nothing can fill that void.
Once the behelit is actually in his hand, he begs Guts not to touch him – “I’ll never… never again with you…” – this desperate pleading is his final, futile attempt to protect himself, because he knows that at the touch of his hand on his shoulder, and all the visceral reminders of his emotional dependency bound up in that, he will be unable to hold back the floodgates of loss and despair that threaten to overwhelm him – the realization that no, in fact it isn’t “fine” to lose him forever, even if it means getting to live his dream after all.
I think you can read this scene in terms of Griffith realizing what’s about to happen or not, either works. If you buy that he does realize it, his begging Guts not to touch him has the added layer of desperate terror over the prospect of being forced to choose his dream over Guts once and for all.
When the behelit opens, this marks the utter breakdown of Griffith’s first coping mechanism – in this moment, he can no longer deny, repress, or escape from the pain of his broken heart. In and after this moment he is stripped bare, left utterly naked in his emotional vulnerability.
When he goes on to catch Guts as he falls from the pillar of heads, Griffith’s desperation is so nakedly on display it’s almost uncomfortable to look at. There are no masks left to shelter him from his emotional pain. He simply has to live it.
Despite thinking that Guts is going to leave him, that Guts was always disgusted by him, Griffith still, irrationally, impossibly, loves him and wants to save his life at any cost. He doesn’t want to choose the dream. He’s not yet ready to make the sacrifice – he still prioritizes his love for Guts over everything else, even though his heart is broken and the pain of it is clearly unbearable.
That’s where the Godhand’s guilt trip comes in.
Now, I read this sequence as working in a very particular way. In my view, their whole spiel here isn’t simply telling Griffith that the dream is still within reach – this is something I believe he’s already realized can’t replace losing Guts; it’s functionally irrelevant to help him cope with his pain at this point.
More importantly, what the Godhand is doing is persuading Griffith to make the sacrifice, by leaning on his guilt and self loathing. This may seem like splitting hairs, but this is the heart of my point: that Griffith isn’t being convinced to choose the dream, he’s being convinced to cut his love asunder.
They’re ultimately reminding him of what lies at the core of his dream: his guilt and monstrousness, in order to convince him that he ultimately deserves to feel the pain of sacrificing what he loves most, because he is, at his deepest, truest self, someone evil, dirty, cruel. They’re not getting him to choose the dream, they’re getting him to choose the sacrifice, and we can see this in the way the sequence is constructed.
What the Godhand is actually telling Griffith is that sacrificing his loved ones (not, ultimately, attaining the dream) provides an effective way out of this unbearable pain, because it will allow him to shed his own humanity: finally becoming the monster he always (thought he) was. This is ultimately what convinces Griffith to agree to the sacrifice.
As a reminder, at this point, Griffith has zero capacity to deal with the feelings of guilt that comes with the mountain of bodies the Godhand lays at his feet throughout this sequence. He’s emotionally vulnerable, his heart broken and his capacity for emotional repression at an all-time low. The Godhand also remove the possibility for Griffith to rationalize this long-standing guilt away (as being “for the greater good”) by telling him that all those choices along that road of corpses have been evil acts; that he is, fundamentally, already a monster: someone who deserves to reap what he’s sown.
As we’ll see, this tactic of leaning on Griffith’s self loathing isn’t strictly necessary to get him to sacrifice the Band, but it is necessary to get him to sacrifice Guts.
Basically, the guilt trip is designed to remind him of his inner monster, what he hates most about himself, in order to ultimately convince him to perpetrate an act of self harm, as both punishment and atonement for the actions he feels intense guilt over.
It’s not a coincidence that the same language keeps coming up in their emotional manipulation. This is who you are.
This particular reading of the guilt trip sequence circles back to the sentiment I opened with – that Griffith’s decision to make the sacrifice is not based in an ideology of utilitarianism. He’s not being convinced by the sunk cost fallacy (though this does play into it with respect to sacrificing the BotH) – he’s ultimately being convinced by being told that he is already a monster, and that accordingly the only thing he can do is embrace that self-loathing impulse to destroy everything he cares about – because this is who he is: someone who is, at his core, already evil.
(And, quick sidebar, I’m not sure I need to say this, but I don’t think anything Griffith did was actually evil up until his decision to make the sacrifice. He was just another leader who had to make hard decisions. This whole thing is just the Godhand playing into Griffith’s fucked up conception of himself.)
Remember that Griffith already associates the guilt of pursuing his dream with both self loathing and what he believes to be his own monstrousness. His willingness to put others in harm’s way for the sake of his dream is what he’s always hated most about himself and why he feels he deserves to suffer and be punished over it. We know he feels guilt about allowing people to be sacrificed for the sake of his dream, his “filthy schemes,” etc. – basically he feels guilt about putting others in harm’s way in order to further his own goals. These goals, of course, are not evil in themselves, but instead are ironically and perversely motivated by justifying those same acts as a sort of vicious circle.
And remember that he already has a pattern of coping with this guilt primarily through self harm, because this capacity for monstrousness is the greatest source of his self loathing. Having sex with a child predator, viciously self harming, and the risky behaviour that ultimately lands him in a torture chamber are just small steps on the road to “I sacrifice.” This final act is framed by the Godhand as the ultimate way to punish himself for continuing to pursue the dream, by embracing what is cruel, dirty, and loathsome about himself.
Up until this point, the guilt trip has been centred around Griffith’s general guilt over sacrificing people for his dream. It’s been designed around getting Griffith to agree to sacrifice the BotH, and so accordingly, this section of the guilt trip ends with this:
Here we see medium shots/closeups highlighting the faces of the BotH, who “should forgive [him],” because they have already agreed to lay down their lives for the sake of his dream. However, we also see Guts, who stands apart from the Band, depicted alone in extreme long shot in the corner of the page… and this is where the Godhand’s emotional manipulation gets really dirty.
The next pages are as follows:
This final section of the guilt trip is so utterly manipulative. The first handful of times I read this part I was really confused by why Void says this – don’t the Godhand know that the dream doesn’t matter anymore, that it’s no longer dazzling in Griffith’s eyes? That the junk has grown dull?
Without thinking any deeper about this, it’s easy to read this moment as Griffith choosing the dream over Guts – that Griffith is deciding that yes, it is more dazzling than anything. But of course, Griffith (and we as readers by this point) know it’s not. It’s been hammered home already that the dream pales in comparison, that nothing is worth losing Guts, not even for the sake of his dream.
What I think Void is actually doing here is subtly redirecting Griffith toward the deepest source of the pain he truly cannot bear: his loss and heartbreak. Void’s tactics here are indirect, he doesn’t say it outright, but he is gently pointing Griffith toward who in fact lies in the ruins of his dream, who is more dazzling than anything. It’s not a coincidence that “in the ruins of your dream” is overlaid on a panel of Guts’ face.
The way the guilt trip is laid out differentiates Griffith’s decision to sacrifice the Band from his decision to sacrifice Guts. Remember that from Griffith’s perspective, Guts has already decided to leave – he’s functionally no longer a member of the BotH. Guts didn’t want to be Griffith’s soldier, he wasn’t just meeting a fitting end for what he always wanted in life (to prop up Griffith’s dream).
Those constant reminders that he’s a monster aren’t ultimately for the purpose of getting Griffith to sacrifice the Band – in fact this is something he’s already effectively agreed to do a chapter earlier:
No, all of this been leading up to convincing Griffith to sacrifice Guts.
And, indeed, what’s promised to Griffith directly after Void’s declaration is “raven-black wings” – it’s the promise of becoming one of the Godhand, of becoming Femto, not of obtaining a castle or becoming emotionally repressed NeoGriffith. It’s the promise of becoming a monster. And in fact the kingdom doesn’t even rate a mention:
Griffith isn’t choosing the dream, in fact it doesn’t even rank anymore. The appeal is the sacrifice itself, not what comes after. No part of this sequence is designed to make choosing the dream appealing to Griffith, it’s all about the dream’s negative aspects: the self loathing, guilt, and monstrousness that come along with it. The Godhand is trying to convince Griffith that he’s already reached the point of no return, that he’s already made too many evil choices to come back from, and thus he deserves everything that comes along with making this choice.
What’s happening here is that Void is conflating Griffith’s guilt and his heartbreak into one jumbled mass of pain, and he’s telling him that he deserves to feel all of it, because he is, at his core, an evil person. The Godhand is telling Griffith that he deserves not only to have his heart broken, but to hurt the person he loves most, because he’s never been worthy of love in the first place, that he’s always been a monster. This is ultimately Griffith’s reason for choosing to sacrifice Guts – because he has been convinced that he deserves to feel the pain of sacrificing what he loves most.
So when Griffith finally acquiesces and accepts the sacrifice – finally saying “yes,” right after this, Griffith follows it up with the declaration that “You’re the only one… who made me forget my dream.” This sentiment is also, on the surface, really puzzling – because why does he say this of all things in this moment?
But what he says actually makes a lot of sense if you read this as being the moment Griffith realizes, at Void’s subtle prodding, that he’s not just going to have to sacrifice the Band, but that he’s going to have to sacrifice Guts as well. It’s working in direct response to Void’s “If even now, that castle… is in your eyes more dazzling than anything.” This is his answer to that question. No, it’s not – you’re the one who made me forget my dream. You’re the one who made the junk grow dull.
I don’t even read this as an accusation made in anger, there’s no malice in his face at all… his hatred is reserved for himself alone.
“You made me forget my dream.” Ever since the torture chamber, from when Griffith equates the dream with “junk,” to his terror at the prospect of the behelit, to the guilt trip over the road of corpses, the dream has been exclusively framed in negative, destructive terms. Pursuing it has been the most loathsome, unconscionable part of himself, the part he can’t live with, and in and through the guilt trip he’s just experienced, Griffith has fully recognized that.
In this sense, what might at first glance be read as spite (“you made me…”) actually functions as the complete opposite. Guts making him forget his dream was a good thing. You were my light out of the darkness. And that is why it has to be you.
This is actually Griffith’s final declaration of love. It could have just as easily been: “Yes. I love you most of all, more than anything in the world. It’s you I have to sacrifice to become a monster.”
This marks the extreme point of tension between love and hate, the “suffering so profound as to make someone rip himself apart.” This is loving someone so deeply that it utterly destroys you to hurt them.
And if you choose to read it this way, it sure does put a whole new spin on “The life you couldn’t take by your own hand, the life of the person you loved the most and hated the most!! You gave it to us!!” if the person you loved the most and hated the most are, in fact, different people. After all, he did actually give them both of their lives. And really, the only time we ever see Griffith’s hatred actually being directed at Guts was for all of about five seconds after he rescued him from the torture chamber.
“You’re the only one…Who made me forget my dream.” The look on his face here is one of acceptance and self loathing, not one of anger, spite, or accusation. His sad smile points directly back at those others we’ve already seen as Griffith recognizes and accepts, with utter self contempt, this aspect of himself – that he is someone willing to do wicked and cruel things that he hates and wants to punish himself for. It’s got that same sense of knowingness to it too – it’s that final confirmation of “yes, you were right, I am a fucking monster. This is the proof.”
To restate my point, it isn’t that the Godhand’s guilt trip convinces Griffith that finally grasping his dream can fill the void of his loss and heartbreak. To Griffith, the appeal of making the sacrifice doesn’t lie in his being able to finally choose the dream over Guts once and for all – it’s in being able to become a monster (i.e. someone willing to do selfish, evil deeds) in order to bury his heart. The guilt the Godhand lays over him throughout this sequence in this sense actually functions as a sort of salve, a reminder that this is, at his core, what he’s always been.
The Godhand is giving him one final escape from his pain – the annihilation of his unbearable, painful humanity. If Griffith is in no position to attempt suicide bodily, then doing it spiritually is the next best option: to destroy his soul, his humanity, in and through his sacrifice, by burying his heart in the body of a monster. And by monster I don’t mean Griffith knows he’s going to become Femto per se, just that he has been pushed to the point of believing that he is someone capable of committing a true act of evil in sacrificing the person he loved most.
At this point, Griffith has nowhere else to turn – his capacity to deny or repress his feelings is gone, his choice to kill himself as an escape has been taken away from him, and he knows he can’t live on with the intense pain and guilt that threaten to overwhelm him. The only answer left is the inward-outward pointing sword of self destruction.
To sum up, there are four main reasons (at least for the purposes of this meta)* that Griffith makes the sacrifice, which are all jumbled together in a complicated, self-loathing mess:
It allows him to justify the deaths that weigh on him by finally achieving his dream
It validates what he thinks Guts always thought he was (“You believe that, don’t you?” / “You of all people”)
It allows him to “atone” for the actions he feels guilt over by self harming/dirtying/punishing himself by hurting the person he loved the most
It provides the possibility of living with the pain of his heartbreak by becoming someone truly evil who seemingly wasn’t ever worthy of love in the first place
*Despite my saying this, there’s actually still a ton to say on this topic – but since they don’t strictly fit this meta’s argument, I’ll just briefly mention a few additional reasons (also motivated by self loathing) that Griffith agrees to the sacrifice: the chance to become able bodied/physically superior (and not just equal) to Guts (a God with wings to “soar in the heavens”), the self-destructive appeal of finally making a selfish choice (vs. “for their sakes”), etc.
Basically, in this moment Griffith is embracing that deciding to become a monster, at the highest pinnacle of self loathing, is doing the worst thing he could possibly imagine and killing the one thing he loved most and thought he had left in his life (“take all you have left”) – turning that sword outward onto Guts in order to turn it most damningly back on himself. Through this act he has actually become the monster he always thought he was.
Because, let’s be real, Griffith’s decision to sacrifice Guts is an evil choice: he is doing harm to another person from a selfish, morally indefensible place. While the BotH’s sacrifice can still be rationalized away as their meeting a fitting end – a death they had already agreed to in service of “the greater good/dream” – sacrificing Guts is the actual step he needed to take to bury his heart and self destruct completely.
Griffith’s decision is still coming from a place of extreme self loathing and psyche-shattering pain. We may completely understand and sympathize with him in his final human moment; he is after all motivated by guilt, self hatred, and a broken heart – but his sacrifice particularly of Guts is still crossing a moral line. This act can’t be justified in any moral or ideological sense, only in an emotional one.
This why the sacrifice of one’s most dearly beloved (not soldiers) is necessary for apostlehood in the first place. In other words, to become a monster, you need to hate yourself so much that you’re willing to hurt the person you love most, in order to not just hurt but utterly destroy yourself – to turn the sword outward in order to turn it back inward once and for all.
The Afterword: Femto and NeoGriffith
Reading Griffith’s choice to sacrifice Guts as an act of self loathing also provides an interesting perspective on Femto if we read him as a manifestation of Griffith’s last, self-destructive human impulse: a crystallization of his last tear shed. Because if we read Femto as having become basically that same inward/outward-pointing sword, he is essentially an embodiment of Griffith’s self loathing, self harm, as well as his capacity for cruelty, monstrousness, and guilt.
In that sense, Griffith’s acts of cruelty as Femto are all manifestations of that same self-loathing impulse to not just hurt those around him, but to ultimately hurt himself by lashing out at those he cares about – to make Guts and Casca hate him in order to justify the hatred he feels toward himself. In that sense it makes some kind of ironic sense for him to keep Guts and Casca alive, as a parallel masochistic reminder to Guts’ of the “wound” he left him.
Even if OG!Griffith is not actually in there somewhere to actually experience that pain in whatever capacity (though he clearly is, his heart was buried, not destroyed), Femto can still be read as a crystallization and embodiment of that final act of self hatred, which becomes truly monstrous/evil when it’s finally directed outward at others.
And if Femto is Griffith’s self harm personified, then it only makes sense that NeoGriffith is an embodiment of his other coping mechanism – denial and emotional repression.
And, let me also point out, both coping mechanisms are set up to be taken down by the recognition that Guts loved him all along.
Thank you for reading,
Thoughts, critiques, and disagreements are very much welcome
The Chimera Ant Arc's Environmental Message and Indictment of Humanity
I just finished Hunter x Hunter so forgive me if this is old news you're all done talking about it, but I wanted to share my appreciation for and analysis of the extraordinary environmental themes that are embedded in the Chimera Ant arc. To me, this arc and especially Meruem's journey as a character celebrates humanity's strength as a species even as it also viciously condemns it. This is especially rare and interesting given its context in shonen animanga, which above all seems to value human beings' strength in the face of adversity. Paired alongside a strongly environmental message, this strength to persevere becomes both our greatest triumph and our most damning quality as a species.
If you choose to read this arc in terms of its environmental themes (though you can read it in several different ways), the premise of the narrative explores the idea of a struggle for the top of the food chain, where two rival groups are essentially battling for dominance. However, this is not portrayed as a battle of equals – instead, and most particularly through the character of Meruem, the Chimera Ants are shown to be our superiors: in terms of strength, intelligence, adaptability, and the potential for a radical form of empathy (I will return to this). In this light, Meruem’s character journey does not move toward his becoming more human, but is instead about moving beyond the human. Thus Meruem and his Ants function as a challenge to humanity’s dominance from a position superior to our own, where Meruem essentially transcends humanity to become a divine figure – one who brings light to all, as an all-powerful and all-understanding god.
The invasion of the Chimera Ants works as an analogy for humanity’s domination of the real-world food chain and our enslavement of beings that we have deemed lesser than us (in strength, intellectual ability, etc.). This parallel is signaled explicitly in Meruem’s sentiment about humanity’s lack of empathy for the cows we’ve slaughtered for food, as it draws a direct comparison between our enslavement of the planet and the Ants’ potential enslavement of human beings.
In this sense, Meruem and the Chimera Ants become the embodiments of a sort of karmic retribution for humanity, where the environment attempts to rewrite the injustices that have been wrought in the name of the betterment of humanity, only to be ultimately struck down in a poignant and brutal way by humanity’s triumph of the will spirit.
Meruem’s Ascendance
This indictment of humanity is communicated most distinctly through Meruem’s character arc and symbolic progression up and beyond the food chain – metaphorically evolving from an animal of pure instinct to a rationalizing human to a transcendent, divine figure.
When he’s born, Meruem is placed above humanity in terms of his strength and intellect, but he still begins the story as a sort of “animal” – driven essentially by his instinct and knowledge of his place in the world, so that he effectively abides by the set order of things. He knows that he was born to rule, and so he fulfills his destiny unquestioningly. He is a product of his nature, with no choice or desire to move beyond the position for which he was fated: occupying the top of the food chain. Of course this same theme of attempting to overcome one’s nature, circumstance, and place in the world is the same idea many other characters struggle with in the series, but most notably (in different ways) by Killua, Kurapika, and Chrollo.
As Meruem slowly “ascends” to a more self-aware, human perspective, he grows into his nature as an appointed “ruler” of the species and the surrounding (human, non-human) world by developing wisdom and gaining additional perspective, particularly through his interactions with his royal guards and with Komugi. This more rational, human perspective culminates and is best exemplified in his discussion with Netero before they begin their fight – specifically in his initial pacificism and sympathetic statements about the purpose of power: to protect the weak and to save those who he deems worthy or deserving. In this latter sentiment he’s not referring to the Chimera Ants – his own species is assumed, I think, to be superior in Meruem’s mind – but instead about humans, as a life form he deems lesser to his own.
This is not unlike how we as human beings think about life forms lesser to us – we grant our fellow humans a special status, whereas those beneath us that we have deemed worthy of life should be confined to the roles we set out for them (i.e. pets, animals that don’t pose any harm to us, etc.). Here Meruem is espousing a very recognizable, human perspective, by reasserting his species’ position of dominance, while also being willing to accommodate lesser lifeforms within his own species’ natural place at the top of the food chain. Up to this point, then, the Chimera Ant invasion has mirrored our own dominion over the world in a sort of self-reflexive condemnation of this viewpoint, though it is mainly presented as something evil because it opposes humanity’s own dominion of the earth.
However, crucially, Meruem’s character arc doesn’t end here. He effectively moves past this perspective – this human perspective – to something beyond, and better than the human, after he is reborn from the flames from his fight with Netero. In taking from his devotees their life force and powers – what he was “meant to do,” in Pouf’s words – he becomes essentially an omnipotent and omniscient figure that exits the food chain altogether. In his ascension to divinity, he comes to recognize that all beings have a right to life through a radical form of empathy. Through an update and improvement of Pouf’s Spiritual Message, he is essentially able to become “one” with everyone and everything around him through a profound form of emotional and intellectual understanding toward everyone his light touches (and it’s worth noting that if he had taken Pitou’s ability like he was perhaps “meant” to, he also most likely would have also had the power to raise the dead). He is essentially reborn as a god, and in so doing he has completely transcended the human. However, this ascension to godhood comes with a heavy price to his own previously held ideals – through his new ability to feel and understand the beings around him, to connect with them on a deeply emotional level (a compassion cultivated most tangibly through his relationship with Komugi), he develops a radical sense of empathy for those beings, however lesser to him they once seemed. As a result of this newfound divine perspective, he is able to validate humanity’s right to life, even as it means his own (and his own species’) assimilation and destruction.
In his sentiment to Welfin, Meruem recognizes the inherent value of humanity – a life form which is now utterly his moral inferior – in a way that we as humans have been unable to do to those life forms we ourselves deem to be lesser. He grants that those “beneath” him (analogously to us: cows, ants, whatever) have an essential right to life. He no longer feels that they must to serve him just because they are inferior in power, ability, and potential. This sentiment is demonstrated most poignantly in his appeal to Palm, where he bows in deference before her. In this moment, he is utterly and completely superior to us – better than all of humanity – in his acceptance, respect, and compassion for all life on this planet.
What would he have accomplished as ruler of this earth? Could he have found a better way than we have, in the enslavement and atrocities we’ve committed in the name of our species’ betterment? Thanks to the awesome and terrible strength of the human will, we will never know the answer to this question.
Netero’s Will
Netero v. Meruem was, for me, hard to watch. The brutal nature with which Netero strikes Meruem down again and again I found emotionally and intellectually devastating. In this fight, humanity deals this threat posed by the Ants a violent and ruthless smackdown, in an attempt to mercilessly obliterate something both threatening to our own position and containing the potential to do better than us – as another species with perhaps more entitlement to this world, and greater possibility for evolution and adaptation. I also think it’s no accident that our power to do this is put in the language of the twin pillars of human religion (through the Bodhisattva) and militaristic technology (through the Poor Man’s Rose). Netero’s actions and iron will throughout this battle – his refusal to parley with Meruem, and his sentiment about humanity’s superiority to ants, in particular – reflects this terrible might and will of a humanity under threat, and it paints Netero as a saviour of humanity in an incredibly damning way. Netero’s chief goal here is (species-wide) self-preservation, but in the context of these environmental themes, this sentiment becomes a devastating, horrifying thing. In our desire to remain at the top of the food chain, Togashi convinces us that we must commit evil acts – smiting down the environment, and literally destroying a god, whose radical compassion may have led the way to a better world for us all.
Here, a theme which is usually celebrated in this genre – humanity’s will to live and persevere – is recontextualized in terms of our environmental destruction and our place in the wider non-human world. In this sense, humanity’s will to live is rendered as terrible as it is beautiful in the rest of the storythreads throughout and beyond this arc.
Netero’s line about human beings’ superiority to ants is essential to his philosophy in this battle, and it serves as a damning contrast to Meruem’s later position where he recognizes the worth of all life.
A sentiment made more damning still by the anime:
Through the weight of these sentiments, we are forced to recognize that in order to support Netero’s acts and beliefs – as an embodiment of humanity’s will to live – and for us to wish for his victory in this fight, we must accept this position too. To support Netero in this battle is to support the idea that we are entitled to this earth because we believe ourselves to be better than the other beings with which we share this world. This is not unlike the religious and political dogma that has us accept atrocities against human and non-human beings we deem to be lesser than ourselves (in other words it is not a coincidence that images of religious warfare dominate Netero’s fighting style in this battle).
However, the story has rendered our acceptance of Netero’s dogma impossible – by the end of the arc we’ve been invited to not only empathize with Meruem, to see him as our equal – as being essentially human and deserving of our sympathy – but also to see him as our moral superior, in his ability to recognize the lesser being as deserving of life, even as it means his own death. Netero’s line seems so gross and so wrong because in our emotional embrace of the Ants we’ve already accepted that our lives are not better or more important than another species, and that, truly, the better way, the way represented by Meruem at the end of his journey, is to appreciate the beauty of all life without putting our own species above any others. In this sense, Netero’s self-sacrifice and bravery, qualities that would usually be celebrated in this genre, and his will to detonate the bomb is what both saves and condemns humanity, allowing us to continue to reign at the top of the food chain above beings that we deem lesser to ourselves, as a reinforcement of a profoundly unjust hierarchy. We as readers and viewers have been forced us to accept that this position is wrong, and yet in our real lives and in the world of the story, humans have chosen to shut off our brains and our capacity for compassion and continue to reinforce this hierarchy anyway.
The truly poignant nature of the end of this arc is that it rips away of the possibility for a better path because of the hubris of mankind. We will never know what Meruem might have decided is a better way forward, even though this path might have been, more than likely, his own (and his species’) death. As soon as Meruem experienced that sense of radical compassion for his fellow beings in all their essential difference to him (i.e. embracing humans as humans), once he believed that a being that is beneath him and his species on the food chain – that the other and the “lesser” – has as much right to life as he does, he could more than likely no longer subscribe to and perpetuate an unjust system that puts his own species above others. In other words, after this recognition, he and his Ants could no longer occupy the top of the food chain, and thus the only way forward for Meruem would have been his species’ ascendance (to divinity), assimilation, or death. Essentially, as soon as he became “one with everything,” it spelled the dismantling of his own and his own species’ ideology of rule. As soon as he brought his light to the world (through his Spiritual Message), he could no longer see himself above it, only as a divine part of it.
Either way, I believe Meruem’s journey was probably always going to end in his death, but what made this especially heartbreaking is that he was never allowed to make this choice for himself and for his species, because we as humans – through mechanisms of extreme violence – made it for him. Humanity here is painted as the enemy of a radical justice for the planet and for all the life in it. The fact that the Chimera Ant arc is followed by the election arc only testifies to the truly damning nature of this sentiment: that this is what the Ants were destroyed for, why we had to kill a god, and why we must continue our unjust treatment of life on earth – so that we might continue our political pissing contests (a symbolic representation of our corrupt, inane, pointless, stupid, and antagonistic system of rule) ad infinitum.
Of course, it’s important to recognize that this arc takes place in a series that is about the many facets and contradictory natures of human beings. This bleak picture of humanity is balanced out by the many, many stories which celebrate human’s selflessness, compassion, beauty. But regardless, that Togashi wrote this story in the way he did is still an incredibly brave and – I think – valuable message to send in today’s world.
I just finished my first Kurameshi fic over on AO3. After my first rewatch in many years, I was struggling to get over YYH, and writing this story helped a bit. I hope if you feel the same way it might help deepen your appreciation of Yusuke and Kurama as individuals and as a criminally underrated pairing. The relationship between the two has a bunch of sexy interesting dynamics and thematic parallels that were suggested but never fully explored canonically.
A bit about the fic: it attempts to depict a believable beginning to a partnership between Yusuke and Kurama that’s grounded in the spirit (and canon) of the series. It takes place sometime between the penultimate and final episodes of the anime, functioning as a sort of mini-adventure arc in Demon World. This seemed fitting given how rushed the end of the story always seemed to me. There’s some action and world-building (specifically on the topic of Makai religion), but mostly it’s an attempt to expand and wrap up the series by deepening and nuancing Yusuke and Kurama’s characters and their relationship. There is some violence and smut, but (hopefully) it’s tasteful.
If you’re interested, please check it out. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d very much appreciate any constructive feedback, comments, and discussion! I’m clearly still not over the series, so if you want to chat about things I’m around ;_;
