There are Thoughts that I don't have the language to vocalize about how Guts and Griffith have very clear animal imagery. But I feel like said imagery is also often used to highlight moments when they're losing their humanity. It's not just 'Guts is loyal, and that's why he's associated with dogs!' It's 'whenever Guts is losing himself to battle and dark emotions, the helmet of his Berserker armor is hiding his face'.
And like. That's not the only thing. There's also stuff like, the entire time Griffith is at his lowest, between his imprisonment and the Eclipse, his face is never shown. Then he becomes Femto and his mask kind of, becomes part of his face. And then I saw a post about how when Guts thinks about Griffith, there are times when he remembers Griffith's face, and other situations where he only visualizes the mask with nothing beneath it. Only when Griffith is 'reborn as a human' again do we start seeing his face again, and it's largely been with no mask to cover it.
I remember you've done a lot of analysis about Berserk analyzing the positives and negatives of 'humanity'. Humanity is not portrayed as an inherently good thing, it's tied up with a lot of negativity and messiness. But shedding your humanity is kind of. Cowardly? Or not cowardly but. It's not better? It's something the Godhand do because their negative emotions are so overpowering that they freeze their emotions rather than deal with it. And even reborn as a human, Griffith claims his heart is still frozen (even if it's implied he's not being entirely truthful or accurate.)
But? Just? Humanity themes. And animal symbolism. And animal symbolism being also strongly associated with Griffith and Guts' flaws. Griffith is a falcon because of his soaring ambition, but his ambition created troublesome situations. Guts is a dog but this is first introduced with parallels between him and the dog that followed Gambino around, and later the Beast of Darkness takes the form of a dog.
And! I feel like there is a thing! There is more stuff to analyze here! But I cannot summarize it in a pithy thesis. And also have not read/studied Berserk enough times to. Crystallize. It. I think it's maybe cool though.
Okay there's a lot to unpack here, so bear with me. Also... I'm never going to use Falcon, I'm sorry, I just can't, lmao.
First! Berserk absolutely goes all in on animal themes, particularly for Guts and Griffith but some of the side characters get these references as well, e.g. Charlotte is a duck, Isidro is a monkey, and Casca I think was recently referred to as a red raven. In most cases it seems to primarily just be a comment on the character's personality (remains to be seen with Casca). But in Guts and Griffith's case I think it's often used to demarcate the place where their full self is vs. their... primal pieces? For lack of a better term.
What I mean is, Griffith himself is a complex human being full of virtues and flaws and loves and hates and self-doubts and confidence and fear, etc. His ambition, his ruthlessness, his general loftiness are parts of him, but only parts. The Hawk, even when he's still human, is more of an embodiment of his high vision, his ambitions and his ruthlessness - he sees everything from above, he aims for the sky, and he is a bird of prey.
When he becomes Femto part of what's happening is that the parts of him that soft and messy and human become buried (or removed, or frozen) and what's left is The Hawk - in both its most malevolent and most aspirational forms. When he's at his absolute worst, his face is obscured by shadow and all you see is the Hawk as represented by his helmet (or "helmet" in Femto's case).
The thing about his low point (post torture-pre eclipse) that's interesting to me is that, yes his face is largely obscured, but the parts you do see are the most expressive parts - his eyes, his mouth - and what's obscuring his face is no longer the helmet that represents the Hawk, but a mockery of that helmet. If you want to really read into it, you could say that his being literally locked into a cruel imitation of his iconic helmet represents where his head is at and, unfortunately, his ultimate fate. Because while he is trying (with some success tbh) to adjust to his new situation, he's still unable to fully release the image of what he was (as shown by his wanting to be dressed in his old armor, and his repeated attempts to step back into that role by grabbing a sword, or by comforting/coming on to Casca depending on how you read that scene).
And ultimately he never does let it go - instead, he just gets rid of all the things that aren't that image,
The Dog imagery with Guts is very similar although obviously it's been more explicit during his human periods and hasn't gone as far/eaten him. Guts is like a feral animal in some ways but also like a domesticated dog in other ways - he has unconditional love and loyalty to those who give him the affection and attention he craves. I'll also point out that mistreated dogs are also infamously loyal to the abusers, I'm looking at you Gambino. Even with Griffith he's unable to let go of the love and loyalty, it just changes form.
So, like Griffith, Guts himself is a complicated person, but there's also the Dog in him - currently manifested as the Beast of Darkness. More than any other part of Guts, it's the Beast that urges him to forget all the other things that he cares about and throw himself wholly into the obsessive pursuit of Griffith - a demonstration of the same love and loyalty he always had in its most extreme/twisted form. And like Griffith, the implied threat is that if his spirit breaks, the beast inside him will eat him alive, devour everything that isn't Itself, and leave him inhuman. Honestly the Beast's thing about Griffith isn't much different than say, post-Eclipse Griffith's focus on his vision and ambition - they're both pumped up to extremes, the biggest difference is that Guts is still fighting it and Griffith is long gone (unless something changes).
And, of course, as you pointed out, when Guts is at his most feral, his face just disappears into his animal-motif helmet which, you know. Griffith echoes.
Which brings me to the thing about whether giving up one's humanity is portrayed as a bad thing. I think...
Okay, I'm sure 90% of people will disagree with me, but my main impression is that giving up one's humanity is portrayed as neither a good or bad, right or wrong decision but rather a very human decision.
Because it happens when a person has reached the point of no return - the abyss of true despair from which there is no return. It's the part in a survival story where people kill and eat the weak to survive. Not to be gross about it, but when you put a person into a situation where their only choice is to do something that would, in most circumstances, be absolutely reprehensible... they will usually choose to do the thing. And while a lot of people deny it, studies suggest that most of them are wrong, because most of them would.
Even so, when the survivors of a shipwreck come back into human civilization but they're the survivors because they ate their cabinboy, what does society think of those people?
It's not that dissimilar from the way people react to Sacrifices honestly - there is a recognition that the choice was understandable, but also a repulsion that the choice was made.
I chose those circumstances specifically because it really happened - in 1884, Edwin Stephens and Tom Dudley, who had survived a shipwreck, killed and ate their cabinboy to survive... and they did survive. But while the courts recognized the necessity, the attitude was basically, regardless of that you should've just died because some things are unforgivable regardless of the circumstances.
Anyway that's a bit of a ramble to get around to this: the sacrifice of one's own humanity in that moment is a result of that humanity, and the way they're viewed thereafter is analogous to the way actual people who do extreme things in extreme circumstances tend to be viewed. The fact that they often don't actually lose all of their humanity sort of bears this out: going all the way back to the Slug Count, Puck calls him out on being, rather than free of his humanity, just incredibly human - which he proves by being unable to kill Theresia. I'll never forget the Egg of the Perfect world and how he sorted through all the disposed corpses and laid them out one at a time or the way Rosine tried to save her best friend from her painful life. Even the way Ganishka is still driven by his bone-deep terror even when he's one of the most powerful beings in the world. They are, as Daiba says, hated and hating, but in the end they still act to protect humanity and the world they inhabit.
Godhand are a little different - just based on what we know about Griffith and Void's motivations it seems as though their stories are far more extreme in every way - their suffering is more prolonged and profound, their sacrifices are bigger and more destructive, their impact is incalculable. But like apostles, they try to escape their humanity, but they still carry its scars.
Hopefully that was coherent.
It's funny because, to me at least, Griffith's choice comes after such an extreme battery of suffering that I frankly find it more understandable than someone sacrificing their wife because she's an orgy-having heretic.
