So, I did write about this in some depth five thousand years ago in Rambles About the Golden Age Part 11 (I cant even deal). But the long story short is, he’s not pulling the King apart to delight in his pain or destroy him as a person. He’s recognizing parallels between the King’s emotional place and experience of life and his own.
I mean look, if you think about the King’s character, he’s a genuinely great leader who is emotionally isolated and internally fragile in ways that no one appears to understand or recognize. He feels pressured to preserve the lives of his citizens and is tormented by his inability to do so. He is frustrated by how little lives mean and his powerlessness in the face of war and destruction. He is portrayed, in short, as someone who is trapped by his own position - a position that people are envious of but which he, himself, perceives as a burden. And the thing is until this moment no one realizes that’s how he feels - it’s when he feels that he’s lost Charlotte, who is his sole source of happiness and, as he puts it, warmth, that the cracks are revealed and he falls apart. Ultimately, this loss leads to his physical deterioration (and even the commission of a sexual assault that seems wholly out of character with the person he’s been up to that point).
...sound familiar?
Many of their lines are direct parallels going all the way back to Griffith’s observation during the BSM flashback that people’s lives are snuffed out as though they’re meaningless, which the King echoes in his rant. And when the King accuses him of having no way to understand the feeling of being responsible for lives, Grififth gives him a withering look that is replicated almost to the line in the Eclipse when he finally caves under the weight of the Godhand reminding him of all the deaths he’s caused and that if he stops he will have wasted those lives.
Even the smile in the post is not a smile of pleasure, it’s an expression Miura uses when Griffith is smiling through the pain, so to speak, e.g. when Guts blows off his insecurities about being a terrible person (by accident, obviously).
The parallel is even emphasized through Griffith’s comparison of the throne to a sword.
"You’ve done nothing more than not fail, how worthless.”
This section interesting because he’s saying that the King is seen as a great man and as having accomplished something great, but in reality all he’s done is keep succeeding - it’s easy to come off as a great man when you never have to deal with a loss, but the first time he takes a real (emotional in this case) hit he breaks like a crystal cup. Again, same thing as Griffith. And it’s really driven home later when he’s alone in the cell and refers to his own situation and self as worthless - the same thing he called the King.
The only difference Griffith appears to see between them IN THIS WAY is that he, Griffith, attempted to harness the beast instead of letting it run him over as the King has done, yet in the end they both ended up in the same place.
This is something that can make people uncomfortable mostly because the King is a horrible person who wants to sleep with his daughter whereas Griffith’s a pretty good guy, he’s just in love with a man. But it does make sense if you think of it from an EMOTIONAL AND PRACTICAL rather than a MORAL standpoint - it is a yearning that controls their respective lives and provides the fuel they need to keep doing what they’re doing, but which cannot be fulfilled due to Factors.
