Pretty fun, 7.5/10

←Previous Post Episode Four -- The Hand of God Or: Featuring A Homoerotic Water Fight Just In Time For Pride Month Content Warning: This episode features an extended flashback of Guts’ backstory, largely centered around his relationship with his adopted father, Gambino. Gambino was physically and emotionally abusive to Guts, culminating in a scene where Gambino breaks into Guts’ tent and tries to kill him. Also in this episode, the King of Midland calls an enemy army “black devils” which in context is a reference to their dark armor, but also, given that the leader of this band of knights has darker skin (among other Tudorian dark-skinned characters), it feels derogatory enough to warrant a mention here. We talked about the general sound design last time, with only an offhand mention of Berserk’s Opening and Ending songs, so let’s talk about those while we’re still on the topic: They’re bad, thanks for reading. Okay, okay. When I made mention of Penpals’ “Tell Me Why” and Silverfins’ “Waiting So Long,” it was in reference to a sort of “90s-ness” that Berserk 1997 carried with it, a defense of hiring Susumu Hirusawa for the dark fantasy anime. In the week since then, I’ve found myself reckoning with the idea that fantasy in the popular consciousness did not have such grand reference points. The Ralph Bakshi-directed Lord of the Rings animated movie nearly had a rock opera, for example (“nearly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, the rock opera was in John Boorman’s United Artists script before Bakshi got a hold of the project and replaced the script with one written by Peter S. Beagle (yes that one), which is a story for another blag but the point stands). This also ignores that the Lord of the Rings is an American production of a British book directed by a Kiwi in his native country of New Zealand and that Fellowship of the Ring would not be in theaters for another four years. There were a lot of reasons to not even see any dissonance with an artificial soundscape in 1997, even if I do maintain it means something to the story that Berserk sounds like it does. At the same time, the reason that I’m inclined to factor in a little bit of nineties cheese into the decision is, well, the opening and ending songs are peak nineties cheese. Tell Me Why sounds like it was recorded in a garage (I mean this with as much appreciation for garage rock as can translate onto a web page), with such nonsensical lyrics as “Put your glasses on, nothing will be wrong. There’s no blame, there’s no fame. It’s up to you.” Meanwhile, Waiting So Long is, by some nebulous definition of the genre, a shoegaze song with a chorus that is just the line “I’m waiting so long” repeated four times. Both are full of non-fluent English, which means I get to note that the online Berserk fanbase near-universally refers to the “glasses” lyric as “grasses,” and I hope you can hear the derision in my words as I type that. But okay, let’s put some analysis glasses on and try and figure out something that aligns these songs with the rest of the text. An interpretation I’ve seen elsewhere is that these songs are somehow in-character to someone in Berserk, and I don’t hate that Idea. I have already come up against the question of “why are you following Griffith” in my own analysis, and so there’s a lot that can be done with that. It’s a question we’re still answering in the series proper, though, so we’ll be following this pin later. More distressing are the final lines in the OP, “It’s too late. It’s too late.” Although we are already vaguely aware of the tragedy coming around the corner, this repetition serves as a constant reminder, especially when we get to the darker parts of The Golden Age Arc. There’s some animation that reinforces this as well: a white flower consumed by flames. “Waiting So Long” as an in-character piece is also interesting to analyze at this point in the series because it is a song about death and loss and an inability to move on. We have seen Guts begin the healing process from his own traumas, but again, we know how this ends up. This one is emphasized by its visuals. The credits play next to a montage or slideshow of the named characters, evoking an in-memoriam. That’s a smaller touch, I think. It could just be as a reminder of who these characters even are, as the story focus narrows to its core three, but the two together certainly feel meaningful, even if the majority of the depicted characters don’t even die. I guess that’s spoilers, sorry. Feel free to guess which ones! This episode is a lot prettier than the past three. Maybe it is because I was watching this episode late at night, maybe it was because of the soft morning light spread across the first half, maybe it was just because Griffith is naked in it, but I felt there was a notable animation quality bump going on here. There’s nothing that would break a budget going on, just all these little touches that take a little extra time to draw. During Guts and Griffith’s gay water fight, for example, they didn’t have to include the frames of both figures from behind the water that’s about to splash onto them, but they did, and the show is better for it. The meat of the episode is again split into two areas of focus -- Guts gets his backstory even more fleshed out and the two scenes with Griffith warning us of his fated destiny in the form of his behelit and how his ambition to have his own kingdom plays into that. We’ll start with the former. When Griffith made the assessment that Guts was fighting to find a reason to live, it was a guess based on how Guts carried himself in battle. Here, we find out that that guess was accurate. Guts was found under the corpse of a hanged woman, and all sources indicate that he was indeed born under this cursed sign. He was found adopted by Cis (or Sisu depending on the translation, but I prefer Cis because it demonstrates that Berserk is very gay), and when she died soon after, Guts was raised by her husband, the mercenary Gambino. Not only has Guts been fighting for a reason to live, he has been doing this all his life. In the beginning, Guts is fighting simply for his father’s approval -- I mentioned in the content warnings how this relationship is abusive. The pivotal moment comes, though, when, after running away from the camp, Guts finds himself injured and surrounded by a pack of wolves. Even after accepting that he is likely to die here, Guts fights onward. At the beginning of the episode, Judeau notes that Guts might have found his reason in Griffith, just like everyone else who follows him. It has not been officially established yet, but given what we have heard from nobility talking about him, and the fact that he’s leading a mercenary band at all, we can infer that Griffith is of common birth. Perhaps the best piece of evidence from this episode, though, is how he talks about nobility. Griffith wants a kingdom for himself; the big selling point for fighting for him is the reward for meeting that goal. But he also talks in this episode about how even a king must on some level meet the expectations of his subjects. A person is still a product of the system they are born into. He makes the point also that you can’t choose to be born a king even if you want to, it’s just the guiding hand of fate. A natural question then arises: What is Griffith’s fate? We the audience already know from Guts’ hallucination during the Black Swordsman episode (and even more if you read the manga). That can lead into a postmodern take on storytelling where a character finds their fate laid out on the page and is really interesting, but in the moment within the story, Griffith is fighting to find that out. He has set his ambitions high and counter to his birth because that, he believes, will demonstrate what Fate with a capital F has in store for him. He is exploring the boundaries of what it means to be Griffith. In a way, this also circles back to the comment at the opening of each episode by Void, wondering if even this personal rebellion is preordained. For now, though, we have established another parallel between Guts and Griffith, both fighting to find out what the world has in store for them. Guts has, even at this point in the story, already rejected what Fate has in store for him. His utter refusal to die is his defining character trait. Griffith, meanwhile, has a fate more nebulous. It seems he has been dealt the role of a mercenary leader, but then again, he’s had his behelit since he was a child, which has its own dreadful fate attached. We close the episode with exposition about the actual war all these mercenaries are trying to make a living on. The Band of the Hawk has allied itself with the Kingdom of Midland in their hundred-year war against the Tudor Empire. We have already heard rumblings of what Griffith’s success on the battlefield might mean for them politically, but this is the first time Midland’s king has caught sight of their activity. Three years have passed since the start of the arc. Guts is one of Griffith’s most trusted companions. We have yet to see what that means, though, outside of offhand remarks, but there are another twenty-ish episodes ahead of us for that. -r Next Time: People gaze upon others for different reasons -- to protect one’s own happiness, to fulfill one’s own dream, and to simply survive. Is there ever a time where one can live his own dream without inflicting a wound on someone else’s heart? ←Previous Post