In this scene from Berserk, Guts's reflection on the ground isn't just a visual choice… it's an image of self-erasure. He sees himself as a nearly lifeless body, with no one to help him, in a world drained of meaning and comfort.
And yet, at the exact point where everything seems to signal the end, a small but decisive gesture happens: Guts gets up. Not out of hope. Not from some radiant conviction. Something more primal and hollow drives him. He doesn't want to die… or, more radically, he doesn't know how to do anything but keep living. That almost automatic motion gives birth to a way of being where survival is no longer a choice, but momentum.
This is where the core of his identity forms: not as a hero of victory, but as someone forged by trauma, marked by abandonment and the absence of protection. Living stops being a promise and becomes resistance against a hostile world. In that gesture, his "iron will" is born; not as something epic, but as the sheer inability to give up, even without a reason to go on.
Kentaro Miura builds this scene by stripping it of all grandiosity. No speech. No heroic climax. No instant redemption. Just a broken body that, against all logic, decides to keep moving. And in that silent decision lies one of the deepest threads of the work: the persistence of life even after it has lost its footing.
𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐞 Berserk • ベルセルク (1997) 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 Kentaro Miura 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐨 OLM, Inc. 𝐝𝐢𝐫. Naohito Takahashi 𝐜𝐡𝐫. 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐞𝐫 Norihiro Matsubara, Yoshihiko Umakoshi
𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦: e04 𝘮𝘺 𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘴
