#theme: critique

[bthump]

despite being a fan of berserk, what are your criticisms (major/minor) regarding the series?

Thanks for the ask! Sorry this took a while to answer.

My majorest criticism is Casca's character and the misogyny of how she's written (as well as how a lot of the rape in Berserk is depicted in general.) I've got a lot of posts on that subject, so I'll link a few in this post.

Some other criticisms I have of the story are: some inconsistencies with Guts' character throughout the story, Farnese's characterization 180, and Miura's art shift around the Fantasia arc.

I also have a lot of trepedation around the latest story developments: Griffith literally transforming into Moonlight Boy lol, the fact that it's looking less and less likely that Guts is going to embrace the Beast of Darkness, Casca getting damseled and losing her mind AGAIN, etc. But those are all difficult to thoroughly and thoughtfully critique without knowing where these plot points are going. We'll see how it all shakes out eventually, I guess.

I'll add that I have a tag on my blog for criticism if you're interested in more of my less positive thoughts on the story.

[sazzyartist]

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[bthump]

AND casca isn't the only female character to be lobotomized by the narrative. farnese's entire character arc... she went from being a fanatic Catholic who got off on watching gore, murder, and extreme torture to just... ??? like even if we believe there was a character arc, it definitely didn't justify the personality 180. i miss the fucked up farnese.

Yeah, like I'm a little more forgiving with Farnese because at least both versions of her are characters who like, do things and have some good moments, but lmao the "development" really just straight up wasn't there at all. There wasn't an arc as far as I could tell, there was like a single montage in one chapter and then her personality changed.

Like I could understand Miura dropping the sadomasochist stuff to an extent since after the Conviction arc the story in general got a lot less lurid and fanservicey, but man at least give us some inner conflict, some struggle with adopting a brand new morality system, something.

Or alternately the fact that she abruptly switches from extreme catholic sadomasochism to remaking herself as a witch to be useful to Guts could be a personality flaw in and of itself. The building blocks are there, with her backstory of becoming what frightens her, and the Conviction Arc's theme of worshipping other people who are "torches" in the darkness and that being like, not great lol. But nothing is ever done with that, her character shift is always treated as 100% positive as far as I recall.

[sazzyartist]

Everyone Wants To Be a Ho, No One Wants To Be a Whore

Above all else, to be a sex worker is to gamble with, and often lose, the ability to become someone, and something, else after leaving the i

[sazzyartist]

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Black music is rooted in that one thing: a singular shared pulse.

[bthump]

My biggest fear after miuras death now is that Mori won't catch up on the things that Miura hid in his work, so much world building, griffguts, metaphors etc and it pains my heart to accept that berserk will most likely never get the ending it deserves. I see others keep saying that Miura and Mori were good friends and that Mori knows the ending but until then he has to figure out himself on how to get the story there. Id like to hear your thoughts about the future of Berserk

Yeah I mean no matter how much they talked about Berserk and how much Mori remembers, it's impossible for the future of Berserk to be a 1:1 copy of what Miura would've done. I mean if nothing else, Miura often changed and added stuff as he wrote, something I believe Mori has acknowledged (based at least on a rundown I found on Skullknight.net of statements he's made regarding his work on Berserk.)

I think Mori is going to do the best job he can, and I do believe that he knows a lot of what Miura had been planning - not just the ending, but the lead up to it. And from the sounds of it, I think Miura was getting close enough to the ending that he probably had a decent idea of what was going to happen, what he was building towards. But again like, Mori has also acknowledged that his memory isn't perfect, that he didn't perfectly understand everything Miura was going for, etc.

So yeah I think it would be wrong to expect the rest of Berserk to be exactly what Miura intended in every detail. I'm sure there are plenty of subtle details, character nuances, thematic aspects like metaphor and symbolism, etc, that Miura would've added that are going to be lost. And I definitely get being disappointed about that.

But idk, I feel like I've made my peace with it. We're never going to get Miura's Berserk(TM) but we're going to get to see how it was going to end in terms of plot, and I don't mind this method of finishing it because it's still fun to get a new chapter occasionally and read and wonder about it and speculate.

Plus in all honesty Miura wasn't perfect himself. I was disappointed with aspects of the story and its apparent direction long before Miura passed away, so if I'm disappointed in the continuation it's not necessarily because it's not True to Miura's Vision, yk? I was already bracing myself to feel let down by Miura's version years ago. I think there's a strong tendency in fans (not necessarily you, just in general, I've seen this in dudebro spaces too) to project their hopes for the story onto Miura, assuming that he would've written it exactly how they want, so any deviation from their expectations is a flaw of the new team, but that's not really fair, because we can never know what Miura was going to write next.

Plus like, from my understanding, Mori and Miura been close friends all their lives and very regularly talked about their creative work with each other in detail. So while Mori has acknowledged that he and the studio can't perfectly recreate Miura's version of Berserk, I do think that to an extent we also have to accept that if Mori misses some of the subtleties of the story that we pick up on, then maybe it's partly because they're not something Miura consciously intended, or they aren't important enough for him to mention while discussing Berserk.

Idk. I guess my take is that the plot is almost certainly going to be pretty close to what Miura had planned before his death, and I'm curious to see what that is, even if we lose the details and nuances he would've added, or the changes he might've come up with as he worked on it, or the benefits of his subconscious, etc. So far it hasn't blown me away by being amazing lol, but there's been enough to hold my interest and keep me intrigued about the future of the story.

And I mean, there are even still parallels and metaphors and stuff. It's not a totally surface level retelling of what Miura told Mori at least. Plus they've killed chestnut Puck lmao, which is probably the only improvement so far, but I'll take it.

Anyway yeah, it makes sense to be disappointed that we're never going to see exactly how Miura would've finished Berserk, and I'm sure we'll always be left wondering what would be different and what wouldn't. But we just have to live with that, and either quit reading or enjoy what we can.

Thanks for the ask!

[sazzyartist]

Be jealous. Make demands. Want more.

Here's to a passionate nonmonogamy where things aren't always fair and people are needy.

Essential read for me lately. Fantastic, fun, thought-provoking as always

[bthump]

Something to consider is that Miura initially did write Guts as a power fantasy and quickly became dissatisfied with that angle of him. He wanted to highlight the harsher points of Guts personality as flaws and at something shifted the story focus to where it felt more and more like it was leading towards a healed ending. I think the disconnect though of the different intentions at the beginning of the story (where the plot wasn't very fleshed out) and where we are now may contribute why Guts is so hard to pin down. What he represents has changed and has been changing for a while. But he's so well defined in the GA because that was the backstory. Griffith is a character who hasn't changed much in what he represents because he's always had the same goal in mind. How he can achieve it is what changed.

Do you have a source for that? Like, did Miura say this in an interview somewhere? I know he didn't have a strong idea of where the story would go while he was writing the first few chapters, and a lot changed during the writing process throughout, but just based on the story and how it's framed, I think that Guts has been subverting the basic dudebro power fantasy thing arguably since chapter 1 (and definitely since chapter 7 when the climax of the first arc features Guts only as a helpless audience to his nemesis). Plus imo he was never depicted as more blatantly flawed then he was in the Black Swordsman arc.

One of my biggest disappointments with Berserk is actually that I feel like Guts has lost most of the flaws that made him interesting as we progressed. Though right now it does look like we might be diving back into some of that, with his breakdown over his sword, so we'll see where we're headed.

I would say maybe anti-hero fits better than power fantasy here - he was originally more overtly flawed, and his trajectory through the Millenium Falcon arc shows him growing from someone who is not particularly heroic at all to someone trying to help his friends and stuff.

Either way though I do agree that it's quite plausible that Miura's intentions with Guts shifted as he wrote the story and it snowballed, and that Griffith has had a very firm, clear character and story which makes him very consistent and well-written. It also helps that as a human he's only in one arc lol, and just about everything in that arc was very well written imo.