An Introduction to Berserk: Kentaro Miura’s Masterpiece That Shaped Dark Fantasy Across Media

4. Narration, Themes and Characters

[Note: The following section contains major spoilers.]

Part I: Through Guts, Berserk Speaks

The story’s narration blends past and present events, which makes each character’s motive and goal much clearer. We get to know Guts as a soulless murderer who kills groups of men all by himself. In the beginning, we see Guts finding and hunting down apostles who live among men and exploit them.

Then we enter the fan-favorite Golden Age Arc, which acts as an origin story for the Black Swordsman Arc. In the Golden Age, which is considered the best arc in Berserk according to many fans, we see Guts being born and follow him through his brutal childhood traumas and his encounter with the Band of the Hawk, where he finds his love and his best friend.

The more we get to know Guts, the more we understand his motivations in the Black Swordsman Arc. The narration shows us the broken and vulnerable side of the stoic Guts, which captures our hearts. Guts is the symbol of humanity itself, as we see him refusing death by literally any means he can. He is surviving in a world where humans are brutally murdered; famine, disease, and corruption are the very air people breathe; and astral demonic apostles exploit men, women, and children and abuse them. Though we realize that Guts is not just a badass fighter with cool gadgets throughout his journeys from the Golden Age Arc up to the the Black Swordsman Arc, this is not the end of his character evolution.

From the Conviction Arc until the current Fantasia Arc, Guts meets new friends along his journey and once again begins to deeply care about each member of his new group. Instead of pursuing vengeance, he decides to reconcile with his lover by finding a cure for her. Whether we see Guts fighting apostles who are trying to hunt him down, sacrificing himself for his friends without a second thought, or even in chains, captured and broken, Guts will always be a symbol of freedom. His mind is sharper than his body, refusing any compromise toward any form of tyranny.

Part II: The Bride

Casca, Guts’s lover, is a passionate commander of The Band of the Hawk. Like Guts, Casca had a very hard childhood, being sold and abused by men. She was saved by Griffith, the leader of The Band of the Hawk, and joined the band as the only female soldier. Casca loves Griffith and believes that he was the only person who cared about her and saved her from her miserable life. She is a fierce warrior, commanding her soldiers compassionately. She was saved by Guts during one of the Hawks’ most challenging battles while she was facing physical difficulties due to her body. They start spending time together after that and eventually fall in love before everything changes. After the Eclipse, Casca is so severely abused and traumatized that she loses the ability to speak or fight, acting like a scared child all the time. She cannot recognize Guts anymore, forcing him to do anything to cure her.

In the story, Casca is the symbol of innocence. Even when she was a warrior and a commander, she was too innocent to deal with all the corruption that clouded her life. All she wanted was to be part of a loving family who lived in peace and protected each other. By knowing her more, we just want to see her happy and safe. After the Eclipse, her innocence is even more apparent as she can no longer protect herself. She was the person who stood by Griffith no matter what, but she was sacrificed simply because his dreams were more important than her love and loyalty. Casca is the only thing that keeps Guts’s mind sane. She is his lantern, his only light, his goal, and his life. Casca is the reason why Guts is not an evil man.

Part III: The False Angel

The main antagonist of the story is Guts’s best friend, Griffith. He is a prominent warrior and leader of a mercenary group who brings Guts into The Band of the Hawk. When he brings Guts to the band, he tells him that he owns him from then on. He cares deeply about Guts, and we see their relationship as comrades and brothers continue to grow. He even puts himself in danger just to save Guts.

To elevate the bond to another level, Guts takes Griffith’s words to heart and sets a goal for himself: to become his brother’s equal, as Guts learns that Griffith considers a person with their own dream a “true friend.” As Guts moves on from the Band, leaving everyone, especially Griffith, in shock, Griffith makes the worst decision: sleeping with the daughter of a mad king who desires his own child, Princess Charlotte. After taking the princess’s virginity, Griffith is captured, brutally tortured, and abused, leaving him in a crippled, weak state that becomes the bane of The Band of the Hawk.

Like Guts, Griffith has also been through extreme abuse in his life, from prostitution to support his people to becoming a near-corpse under severe torture. However, Griffith never gave up on his dream. He wasn’t a struggler like Guts; he was more than that. He only cared about his dream, sacrificing the very things he once held precious.

Having nothing left but his dream, Griffith makes the ultimate sacrifice through an astral object called the Behelit, leading to the Eclipse, a ritual for the Godhand and their apostles to feed on Griffith’s subordinates, including his two most important people, Guts and Casca. Griffith leaves his humanity behind and becomes a Godhand named Femto. He defiles Casca in front of Guts’s eyes, torturing both of them and corrupting their unborn child, taking Guts’s left hand and one eye, destroying him mentally and physically. The lovers, branded by the curse, may have survived the nightmare feast of the Eclipse, only to live the rest of their lives in constant fear, pain, and suffering.

Even after Femto returns to Earth once again as Griffith, the savior of mankind, the incidents of the Eclipse remind readers that Griffith is only an illusion and that his beautiful Falconia has been built upon the brutal tragedies of his previous life.

As much as Guts is human, Griffith, on the other hand, is the symbol of a god. He is the most ambitious character in the story. He wishes to be king, and, fairly, before the Eclipse, he would have made a great king. Griffith is not a tyrant, at least when he was a man, but he also believes that he has no equals, since the only person who follows an idea instead of a man is himself. He shows us that no matter how desperate the situation may be, a person who is fighting for a dream will reach his destination. Even though Griffith is the pure presence of selfishness, in the end he is trying to cure the damned world with his dream, though in truth it is merely the illusion of a savior.

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