hey so i had a question. what was up with guts fucking that demon at the start of the manga. i was thinking about it and it just kinda didn’t make much sense to me?? like why the hell would he do that??? am i missing something?
doylist answer: starts the manga off with a bang (lol), gets the dude demographic looking for sex and edginess interested immediately, introduces Guts in a very shallow archetypal way so Miura can add a lot of complexity to his character and tear down that initial archetype, and Miura hadn't settled on all of Guts' characterization so he probably didn't think of it as the second time Guts has ever had sex in his life while writing it lmao.
watsonian answer: I don't think it's necessarily ooc though. Yeah Guts isn't actually the kind of character who goes around banging hot ladies who happen to be monsters sometimes, but he IS the kind of character who would self-destructively do literally anything to get close enough to a monster to kill it.
Like I actually could see him going along with a monster's seduction attempt up until he blows her head off mid-sex, the same way he let a monster eat him and then tore it up from the inside, or let Count Slug break half his bones until he was able to get close enough to his daughter to take her hostage, etc. It fits his modus operandi.
Also thematically I think it fits what I consider to be a major theme of the story - Guts being driven to fight monsters because of his rape trauma, and the act of fighting those monsters essentially being a way to replay it over and over with Guts successfully fighting back (mostly) every time, at the cost of more psychological and physical harm to himself. The sex just makes it feel extra on the nose.
(Detail worth noting: Guts shoving his cannon arm into her mouth, kinda like how he killed Donovan with a sword through the mouth.)
I don't think Miura was necessarily thinking that deeply about it when he first wrote it (though it's possible if he had Guts' childhood history in mind from the start, or even just the general concept of violence and freudian symbolism as a motif) but either way I think it works.
