←Previous Post Episode Two -- The Band of the Hawk Or: Introducing the Love Interests. Yes, I Said Interests, Plural Content Warning: After the midcard break is a surreal dream sequence where a young boy relives a sexual assault. Just after that, a woman is ordered against her will to lie naked with a man to share body heat. Above the break, I’m going to describe a scene involving encouraging someone to commit suicide. It’s a bit early to be going too deep into the manga when I want to be focusing on the arc laid out before us here, but given we just finished all of what the show is going to give us of the Black Swordsman arc, I thought this would be a good place to talk about this arc in the manga and what you might have missed. For example, Puck! Puck is an elf, of the androgynous, faerie-looking sort, who Guts saves in the tavern instead of that village girl and he continues to follow Guts around as he goes on his one-man campaign against the Apostles. While Guts outwardly rejects Puck’s company, elf pixie dust is a potent cure-all in this universe, so Puck’s presence becomes outright necessary if Guts is to continue moving. Puck is important because his nature contrasts against the rest of the world thus far. Kindness is possible in this world, even if Guts doesn’t want to admit it. It’s Puck who states the thesis of the series instead of Guts, leaving Guts’ belief in the indomitable will of the human spirit to survive mostly to subtext. But what subtext it is! The only other major battle in the Black Swordsman arc is against an apostle only referred to as The Count. Unlike the Snake Baron, where Guts simply walks into town and calls him out of his fortress (or the first apostle fight that’s not canon don’t at me on this), the fight to get to The Count involves asking an important question: What even is an apostle? The big reveal is that an apostle is a human who has made a demonic bargain for power and seeming immortality, but you must sacrifice whatever you most hold dear to do so, dooming the sacrificed to an eternity in Berserk’s version of hell. Behelits act as conduits for this sacrifice, and they only call the necessary powers when you are at your lowest point, so perhaps apostles could be seen as this: In the choice to either die or give up everything that made life worth living, apostles have chosen the latter. When you put it that way, all apostles are, in some twisted way, sympathetic creatures. Nobody wants to die, after all, and one can only imagine the point that many apostles were driven to before taking the bargain. But this is dulled by how terrible the sacrifice is, and the fact that most of them are, to put it lightly, terrible people. The Snake Baron eats children. The Count cares for his daughter and is depicted as truly caring for his wife (again, you can’t sacrifice someone you don’t truly love), but he’s a knight templar for his religion and has used his powers since becoming an apostle to inflict a reign of terror, executing anyone who even dares look at him funny. Remember, Guts got a vision of demonic figures in the anime’s first episode, and he called one of them Griffith. This is our first inkling of what is doomed to happen by the end of the show. But back to Guts and human life for a moment, because this is something I think gives a better introduction to Guts and asks a better “How did it come to this?” than anything that came before. The Count’s daughter Theresia finds out about her father’s demonic nature and is already disillusioned, but The Count’s dying declaration of love for her leaves her truly broken, wholly uncertain if there is anything worth living on for without him. Guts steps in and acts like the sort of edgelord that we have seen for three volumes of manga now, insulting her and going so far as to encourage her to kill herself if she really doesn’t see anything worth living for. Theresia doesn’t kill herself, though. Instead, she proclaims her new purpose in life is to get revenge, to kill Guts in any way she can. Guts says he is glad to hear it, turns his back, and walks away. Puck, horrified by all this, flies after Guts and tries to confront him to his face but he stops when we see Guts finally breaking down himself. In the final panels of the Black Swordsman arc, Guts starts to cry. Remember what Guts said in the anime. Humanity will always find a reason to live. It will make it up if it has to. But that doesn’t mean it will never hurt. This is the episode that introduces Griffith properly into the story, and there are three quotes of his that I want to highlight throughout this episode, each so packed with meaning that we’re going to be spending the next twenty-some episodes unpacking all of them. Here they are in the order that they appear. “Do as you will” These are Griffith’s first words in the manga as he allows Corkus and the members of the Band of the Hawk under his command to attempt to rob Guts of some bounty money. It is a very simple statement that asks an implicit question: What do you even want to do? These days, if you’re a little pretentious, it calls to mind a specific quote by Robert Caro: “When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, you see what the guy always wanted to do.” In this instance, Corkus only has power over his men and is portrayed as ambitious to a fault. He says he wanted to challenge the same warrior Guts had and use that to attain his glory. Much of The Golden Age arc is a power struggle, and it’s what that power means and what the principal characters are using to get it or hold onto it that are the driving thrusts of the arc. Then again this paragraph dances around the issue of Griffith being the one to say it. Griffith as a character has been debated over and over since the nineties, and some of the weight of this line is technically spoilers even to people who have read every published volume of Berserk, so I just want to point it out and put a pin in it for later. “I believe you don’t have a purpose in life and put your life on the line as a way to try and find it.” Much of this is covered in the preamble to this post (side note, I think I really like talking about Berserk), but let’s also get into specifics. Guts is a loner mercenary, traveling from battle to battle. His backstory, covered more in the manga but depicted in a dream sequence here, is that he was unwillingly taken in by a mercenary named Gambino who trained him from birth to earn his keep the only way one can in a mercenary camp: by fighting. After years of such abuse, Guts kills Gambino in self-defense and flees the camp. He fights in battles like he has a death wish, but a key character trait of Guts’ is his absolute refusal to die. Even when he has nothing worth living for, it is better than the alternative. This is why Guts is called “The Struggler.” Griffith brings up Guts’ fight at the beginning of the episode with Basuzo, a man who, legend tells, fought off thirty men at once and fights bears on the regular. Guts was very lucky to not die in that fight. Then again, maybe it was fate. “No matter what, I will get what I want.” We ask again, what is it exactly that Griffith wants? In this specific instance, he wants Guts, though it’s not shown exactly what that’s supposed to mean. In the manga, Guts implies that Griffith might be the sort of person who wants to exploit him sexually (and in the Dark Horse translation, uses a homophobic slur I’m not going to repeat here), and there are certainly homoerotic undertones to Guts and Griffith’s relationship -- we haven’t even gotten to the water fight -- so maybe that is part of it, but that’s only one facet of what Griffith wants. It could be that Griffith wants what he currently has -- an adoring mass of people willing to fight and die for him as the Band of the Hawk. But that’s only one facet as well. I’m beating around the bush. We saw Griffith last episode in Guts’ vision. We know how this is going to end. This line here is one of those “when you meet the character who is going to betray you” lines. It’s also important to mention Casca’s introduction here. Although it’s difficult to get into Casca’s whole deal without a few more episodes under our belt, we can get a few inklings here, largely of her absolute loyalty to Griffith. She is the one who follows Guts and Griffith to witness their first duel and calls out out of concern for Griffith’s safety. Of all the members of the Band of the Hawk, her story is the one we’re going to spend the most time on, which is good because you can probably guess what happens to everyone by the time The Black Swordsman arc rolls around. Next time: The story has begun. While they are entwined with strings spun by fate, the boy cries out, and the girl is stirred by emotion -- “It’s you who I want.” He does it to survive… That is why the boy wields his sword. Where will destiny take him? ←Previous Post

I kind of wanna start posting as many songs as I can with the same title. I have a title in mind; it would last a long while.