#brsrk

[sehlie]

griffith

[hanpetos]

sirene and slan

[comicalmomentum]

Berserk: Depature to the Front, Engagement, Casca, Prepared for Death

I’m going to kind of skim over this a bit bc a lot of it is not that interesting. Huge fight things, and completely undermining Casca in a character in every possible way.

This basically sums up the tone of the whole comic lol.

This guy manages to say all of that while swinging his spear.

And he has like... shonen anime lengthy move descriptions as well.

Sadly that amusing stuff soon gives way to a whole lot of gratuitous sexual violence. I feel like the writing’s taken a huge step back towards the shallow edgelordiness of the early comics.

The exposition of how Casca feels about Griffith, and a bit of character development for Griffith himself in backstory, is probably the most interesting part. However... there’s a bunch of stuff I’m going to talk about below the cut because, eesh.

In the present day (or, closer to present, still backstory for the opening), Casca is unable to fight properly because... she’s PMSing. Yeesh. Male writers, eh. Guts saves her in a suitably manly way, they fall off a cliff, and we get some naked hurt-comfort that calls back to Casca caring for Guts after Griffiths stabbed him.

I had an interesting discussion with Jackie about he undermining of Casca. Jackie felt that they were trying for something more interesting like, dealing with sometimes like... you just can’t win. But in practice it comes out as like, heroic manly Guts must protect this pathetic woman from rape and death, lol womenamirite? Guts expresses a bunch of misogynist tripe and it’s not really addressed; Casca, who initially was drawn very similar to Berserk, is now tiny and dainty compared to Mr Muscles, constantly drawn in weak poses with like, her knees together.

This cover kind of exemplifies the problem:

Guts: manly, broad-shouldered, square. Casca: leaning seductively on her sword, tiny compared to him, etc. etc. It’s disappointing.

And the result? You get commenters bringing readings like this:

Obviously this guy is a piece of shit, but I find it uncomfortable that I can’t really confidently say he’s misreading the narrative presented to us. Guts never seems to be anything but rewarded for his ‘manly manliness’, getting endless opportunities to show off his ability to commit violence.

I appreciated it when I thought Guts’s bloodthirstiness was going to have like, honest consequences; now it’s just back to Look At The Cool Violent Man and that’s just boring.

Anyway, in the process of defending Casca (and also because he just really likes violence), Guts takes on like a hundred dudes led by that guy up there. They threaten all sorts of awful things, the underlings let greed overwhelm their fear, and Guts cuts them all down; we watch blow by gruesome blow.

For all the ‘dark fantasy’ aspects, there’s definitely a sense that like,outside of Griffith’s possible dark intentions and Guts’s frequent killing sprees, the protagonists really are a separate kind of person from the gross lascivious dudes they’re constantly fighting. Like, since I’m drawing comparisons to Drakengard, there’s never any sense of moral doubt; the violence is extreme but it doesn’t seem to say anything. Guts’s opponents never hesitate, never show even the tiniest thread of a sympathetic trait, and the bloodsplatter seems to be more there for titillation than because there’s anything to say with all this violence.

I draw comparisons with Drakengard, but Drakengard was less about like, how manly and tough its protagonist is, and more about how war is horrifying and traumatising and morally compromises all who fight it. Drakengard was bleak in a way Berserk doesn’t seem to want to be. In Berserk, it seems like there is no problem Guts cannot solve with bold ultraviolence; in Drakengard and especially Nier, that violence is instead tragic, both sides are at least somewhat sympathetic (well, not so much in original Drakengard), and its consequences are (rather clumsily) explored.

Berserk just seems to want to wallow in filth at the moment, and the meticulously rendered fight scenes swamp whatever it might be building towards. I hope that changes, and soon...

Anyway, now the elephant in the room...

Huge content warning for: sexual violence, sexual violence, csa, sexual violence, fucking hell there’s a lot of sexual violence

We get a backstory for Griffith, revealing that he did sex work for a gay pedophile lord to help raise his army and build his ‘dream’ (what the fuck is it with “dark fantasy” and that horrific ‘gay pedophile’ trope? this is like the second time Berserk has included it, I also think of the original Nier though it was handled slightly better there, and of course Drakengard’s fucking protagonist character...). We also get backstory for Casca, revealing that Griffith saved her from being raped by giving her a sword to murder the lord who attempted to rape her.

I had an interesting conversation about this with @baeddel​. She felt that like, although the actual portrayal is gratuitous and horrible, their characterisation as a bunch of CSA survivors (now like, all the main cast) is well handled. I can see that, but the comic seems to be reaching for rape as a cheap plot device (and, disturbingly, an opportunity to draw Casca’s boobs) horrifically often.

Like... it’s just, endless rape. Just about every fight, Casca gets at least verbally threatened with rape. As she runs for help, soldiers attempt to rape her. Being a woman or child in the Berserk universe is just, endless rape. And it’s... not saying anything worthwhile or speaking to survivors or anything; it feels disturbingly like it’s titillation.

A number of comments on the page suggest that in later issues, the author gets less terrible at writing women and less reliant on rape as a plot device. That can’t happen soon enough.

[chrollo-lightbringer]

[nitemarehoerealm]

[nitemarehoerealm]

[nitemarehoerealm]

[hanpetos]

slan