yesgabsstuff replied to your post “i feel like the fact that guts sees the band down there, including his...”
I'm having feelings about this and your essay about Griffith's arc of being closeted. I kind of feel that you could write a parallel essay about moments like this with Guts honestly. Despite coming across generally as the one who is more willing to confront his feelings during the GA arc he feels like the less self aware of the two here. It's interesting. The idea that he would throw himself into a sexual entanglement with someone who he does trust certainly but isn't really in love with so
He could I don’t know “enact” loving someone.(I’m pretty sure that was how Casca felt too. The idea of her being kind of so soaked in compulsory heterosexuality that she can’t really name or give herself room to think of her own desires resonates with me a lot.) I don’t know how emotionally cavalier and dangerous to himself and others that is while at the same time being “easier” socially isn’t really all that different than Griffith’s relationship with Charlotte to me.
Honestly Guts being more normatively “masculine” seems to give their relationship this veneer of authenticity to a lot of the fans and I can’t see any other reason for it. His behavior certainly doesn’t support those conclusions.
I completely agree. Like het in general almost always feels paint-by-numbers boring to me but Berserk goes an extra step - it doesn’t just feel like inauthentic he was a boy she was a girl bs, it feels aggressively... idk, harmful? Negative? The comparison to Griffith and Charlotte makes a lot of sense to me, the only difference is that Griffith knows his relationship is a sham.
Like @mastermistressofdesire said, a chapter later they’re getting weird and jealous and love-quadrangle-y with Griffith and Charlotte thrown into the mix, and then a short while after that Casca’s telling him to leave and Guts is trying to reaffirm his loyalty and love for Griffith, and then during the Eclipse they’re entirely separated in body and thought until it’s time for Casca to become solely a pawn of Guts and Griffith/Femto’s intense enmity.
At their most positive they never feel like more than friends trying something out - even Guts is like, yeah you can come with me and maybe it’ll suck and you’ll throw off my groove but w/e we’ll see.
And at their most negative Guts assaults her to feel a connection to Griffith.
Also to address the actual like, compulsory heterosexuality vibe from an in-universe perspective, god like, they are so gay. Casca’s crush on Griffith feels extremely like a lesbian with a “crush” on a gay dude, ie someone safe to focus on who will never return her feelings (and no you don’t have to know the dude is gay for this to be a thing lol, citation: me and quite a bit of anecdata of gay women who’ve nursed crushes on dudes who also later came out). And excuse my messiness wrt personal identification but as someone who started out as ambivalent wrt having sex with men and is now firmly Not Into It, Casca having bad sex with Guts and going ‘yeah this is fine i guess i could do this more’ because she feels like a relationship with him validates her as a person is also #relatable.
And obviously Guts is gay but has related trauma. The first time he slept with Casca he was freaked out until he registered the fact that she was a woman, which seems like a pretty relevant prelude to their “relationship” such as it is.
you said it more eloquently tho here:
I think the idea that they didn’t have another way to imagine their intense feelings at that moment outside of a romantic relationship tells you how deeply they don’t really understand themselves at that moment and how much I think a part of them longs for “normalcy.”
like tl;dr ia with yours and mmod’s convo in the comments lol, allow me to join in on the gay projection.
