What the Fuck is Going on with Berserk?

Content warning: Full spoilers for Berserk, includes images from Berserk which includes anime boobs, as well as disturbing things happening to women.

When I was in AP Lit, I had the misfortune of being in a class taught by an incredible snobby individual. You might be thinking to yourself: "well, duh, he teaches AP Lit." But I assure you, this gentleman was even more snobby than your garden variety AP Lit educator. He would openly use the term low-class when referring to works that he did not like, and claimed that French culture was better than American culture which is a very odd thing to say in any context. He was not French.

However one thing that he said with which I do agree, is that if you are going to live in a specific culture, there is probably a set of works that you should be familiar with.

Now, this unfortunate individual lived in a very different world than myself. He lived in a world where extremely white people competed for who could have the largest stick up their ass without stimulating their prostate. Thankfully, I don't live in that world.

In the universe in which I dwell, amongst the people I hang out with as associate with professionally, most people are at least somewhat familiar with Berserk. Now to be clear, I don't actually think that this should be the case. But it kind of is. As such, I started reading it when I was 16 until I got to the horse demon part, and decided if I continued to read this, I would be extremely traumatized and thus should wait until my late 20s to read the rest. More fool me, I was traumatized a lot by other things! Waiting until I turned 26 to finish Berserk was probably a pretty good idea though.

I do want to start by saying that I genuinely like Berserk. It's fun to read, and I am a fan of the main antagonist, Griffith, since we both share the same flaw of being overly obsessed with obtaining power. Hopefully I'm not as bad as him.

I own a Crimson Behelit necklace, which often puts me in a bind. Sometimes when I am wearing it, men will compliment it. They are thus presumably making the assumption that complimenting it will cause me to feel positive emotions, such as happiness due to being near a fellow Berserk fan! They are wrong, however. My main reaction rather than a substantial degree of fear at being in proximity to a man who likes Berserk.

You may be thinking that it is a tad hypocritical to wear a Crimson Behelit necklace myself and yet have negative thoughts towards other Berserk fans. And you would be right—that is what this rant/review is about!

My Conflicted Feelings about Berserk

I have to write something about Berserk because my feelings are so complicated. I both love and hate this manga passionately. On the one hand the art is beautiful and the magic system is incredible. The protagonist would be a side character in any other series, but it would be the side character that you would want to follow because they perpetually get too little screen time. The antagonist is one of my favorite characters in any media ever. The magic system is deeply evocative and manages to be both terrifying and otherworldly, but make some logical sense at the same time. It clearly draws from Norse mythology as well as the Kabbalah, but is original enough to not seem deriviative or cliched. Below is am image of what Schierke, a magic user, sees when she looks inside of Gut's mind so you can get a sense of how well the art compliments the worldbuilding.

On the other hand, the main female lead is raped onscreen which causes her to revert to a childlike state which she remains in for most of the rest of the manga (to be fair, quite a bit has yet to be released). She is then mindbroken by said antagonist again and is no longer sentient. I understand its seinin manga, and as such is basically manga created by men, for men, but I don't think that asking for the female lead to be, idk, sentient is asking a lot?

Extremely compressed synopsis

This is not intended to be a thorough review, but more to give you a sense of what the book is about in general.

This story follows a man named Guts (or 'Gattsu' if you are going by the more literally transliterated Japaneese). He is known as the 'Black Swordsman' on account of the gargantuine sword that he uses, which is supposed to be too heavy for most people to carry around. He was birthed while his mother was being hanged and was adopted by a band of mercinaries who saw him on the ground under his hanged mother and decided that he could be given to a woman whose baby had died. His adoptive mother died of a disease and his adoptive father, Gambino, taught him how to fight but was otherwise a terrible person. At one point, a fellow mercinary named Donovan pays Gambino to have sex with Guts when Guts is around 10. Gambino later tries to kill Guts, at which point Guts kills Gambino and Guts is kicked out of the mercenary group.

This trauma results in Guts being very much in the gray morality protagonist camp. He is good in the sense that he is less evil than genuine monsters, but is kind of an ass.

He is superhumanly muscular, and this one particular image of him keeps getting posted in unseemly corners of the internet which I occasionally frequent in order to get porn (sue me). I think it is beacuse many people think they are like Guts, i.e. are tough and resiliant but sometimes an asshole, when in fact they are only the asshole part and not the tough and resiliant part.

Guts is branded. This means that he has a mark on his flesh which indicates that he has been sacrificed to the demons, and as such he should be dead. Demons are constantly pursuing him and trying to kill him because he belongs to them, he continues to fight them off. He lives on the 'insterstice' between this world, and the world of demons.

There are many antagonists in the series, the main one being Griffth, the leader of the band of the Hawk which Guts joins soon after killing his adoptive father. Griffith is the person who gave Guts the brand.

Griffith wants a kingdom. It is made very clear throughout the book that Griffith is destined from birth to rule the world despite being born some sort of peaseant (the circumstances of his birth are unclear but he wasn't born noble).

This is indicated in many ways. For one thing, he looks like this:

He is literally an angelic twink. One could argue that all twinks are angelic by definition, and I won't push back on that, but he was drawn that way for a reason. Griffith has the divine mandate in a literal sense. He is literally able to bring ghosts back from the dead to speak with their families (although whether these are real ghosts or illusions is unclear). He is the unquestioned ruler of Falconia, which is essentailly a kingdom in which magic is returned but all the demonic creatures are kept restrained.

Griffith is an 'Apostle'. An Apostle is a being who, via a combination of density and their own desires, is chosen by God to be essentially a demonic entity. You can choose your form, and are extremely magically and physically powerful. The five most powerful Apostles are called the 'God Hand'.

They are presumably a 'hand' because there are five of them, once Griffith joins.

Now, the observant reader may begin to wonder why the pre-Griffith God Hand consists of three horrifically ugly male-esque looking demons and one demon with their tits FULLY OUT.

This is important later. Hang tight for a bit.

During the eclipse, Griffith speaks with God.

He is injured beyond hope of healing due to over a year of torture when the eclipse begins. This God is able to give him any form he wants, he asks for wings.

Griffith has to choose somebody to sacrifice to the demons in exchange for admission to the God Hand, and he chooses Guts on account of him being the only person who caused him to for a short period of time, forget his dream. The demons were supposed to kill him there and then, but he escapes and is constantly pursued by them. Griffith then rapes Casca, a high ranking member of his mercenary group and Gut's love intrest. The treatment and discription of Casca is like... 99% of my issue with Berserk.

Casca

Berserk is seinen, which is manga which is targeted towards men in their early teens and 20s. I am friends with a lot of men between the ages of 18 and 35. Some of them are a little fucked up, except Martin, who is pure and innocent. I love you Martin.

But to say that this book is the way it is due to its target demographic makes some extremely unflattering assumptions about men in general. A lot of the arguments that I have heard about why Berserk includes the fucked up SA parts basically distill down to the idea that the messaging is really deep and profound, but if you only include the deep and profound messaging, not many people will ready it. They have to add in the sexal assault parts in order to make it appealing, so that people read the important part.

This is sort of like putting horrific sexual abuse cheese upon the vegetables of meaningful art. I really really dislike this argument because it implies that in order to coerce younger men into reading artistic work, you need to include stuff like this:

What the actual fuck.

This is just porn. This is monster rape porn. There is quite a bit throughout the rest of the manga, but I feel no need to add additional screenshots because unlike Berserk, I know how to chill after I've made my point rather than continuing to add page after page of horrific fanservice.

The woman in the above image is Casca, Gut's main love intrest. Throughout the book, Casca is:

Almost raped by a noble as a 12 year old until Griffith cuts of the nobles ear.
In "The Battle for Doldrey" (Golden Age Arc) the Chuder General and her are fighting eachother one on one and he says that he will allow her to live as his captive, with very obvious sexual connotations (Guts laughs at this and says she would be a terrible captive and 'bite it off'). She ends up killing the Chuder General. This is the only time that Casca succesfully defends herself against a man who is threatening her.
In "Forest of Tragedy" (Golden Age Arc) she is raped by Wyald (the monster in the image shown above) until Guts cuts off its huge spiky dong.
In "Afterglow of the Right Eye" (Golden Age Arc) she is raped by Griffth while he ascends to goodhood causing her to revert to a childlike state where she can only speak in... vowels basically? She can't communicate.
In "Den of Evil" (Conviction Arc) which is a chapter for which she is non-sentient, she is raped by giant goat Apostle with a snake dick until Guts cuts the goat in half.
Almost raped by a pilgrim while brain dead until Guts prevents it.
Raped by Guts when he is possessed by the Berserker armour and she is brain dead.

This is not making the story interesting, this is just gross at this point. My primary issue with this it is that for a certain type of man, Casca is basically the 'ideal woman'.

Casca starts out a soldier, but is not built like a soldier. Sure she wears armour, but her physical body, which we see a LOT of, doesn't really have the amount of muscle or fat that one would expect on a fighter. I am somewhat willing to overlook that, because its not as though Guts or Griffith have body types which are ever seen in the real world. It's manga, it's more or less part of the artstyle at this point.

It is later revealed that she joined the Band of the Hawk primarily because she saw Griffith as a godlike figure after he cut off the ear of a nobleman trying to rape her. This means that she didn't neccecarily become a warrior for its own sake or of her own volition, but rather out of loyalty to Griffith. But even still, that is kind of Griffith's character. He makes people follow him and view him as godlike. He is godlike. You could argue that Guts has similar motivations as well when it comes to serving Griffith. The whole point of the Band of the Hawk is that Griffith has an incredible ability to get people to follow him to the end of the Earth, so the fact that Casca doesn't really have any volition when it comes to being part of the Band of the Hawk isn't that problematic because nobody does, really.

In the Battle for Doldrey, Casca is seen to be a good fighter when she cuts open the face of an enemy general in one of the most badass combat scenes in the manga. This is cool, but this is also the only time she is seen killing anybody, which is odd given the fact that she is a soldier.

After Griffith is kidnapped, she is put in charge of the band of the Hawk on account of being the natural leader after Griffith and Guts. She is indeed a really good fighter as Guts says she is.

I would make the argument however, that given the context of the rest of the story, I think the reason that she is made to be a soldier is to make her more appling as a woman. Casca is masculine enough to not be into 'boring woman stuff', instead she has the same hobby as the protagonist! She is tough enough to conveniently beat up bad guys, but she is still weak enough that she keeps needing Guts to protect her from being kidnaped as used as a sex toy which happens multiple times in battles.

And then she fucking becomes brain dead after getting raped by Griffith.

Yes, I know, Guts is devastated. He tries very hard to get her sentience restored by the Elves. He says at one point that she isn't even the person he loved but rather a wound left by Griffith. But he's clearly not too upset to, idk, not rape her when he is posessed by the Berserker armour? My point being that having the main female lead unable to do anything other than walk around and stare blankly at things for half the series is certainly a choice.

Casca mentions early on in the book that it is not her fault she was born a woman. This is definitely not her having a gender crisis. This is her agknowledging that her being a woman is inherently a flaw. She is emblematic of a disturbing male fantasy: a woman who veiws men as superior, doesn't come want any of the annoying feminine baggage, is basically a man who is less good at masculine tasks than men and is also very fuckable, and for a long period of time in the book she is unable to anything but walk around and act like a child until her facilities are restored.

It is worth noting that among the people who protect Casca in her non-sentient state, many are women. For a period of time she is taken care of by a group of sex workers, who make a point out of not letting anybody have sex with Casca as she is not sentient. One mentions that the reason she is doing this is specifically because she is a woman as well. The implication here, that only a woman would be willing to ensure that a non-sentient individual is used for sex work, is certainly a take. That being said, you could probably contrast this with what happened to Guts as a kid.

There are many others, mostly women and Guts, who ensure that Casca is safe in her non-sentient state. Farnese, an ex-cultist, goes so far as to express happiness that she is finally getting to weild a blade 'for the sake of protecting somebody else' which makes her feel like a good person in comparison to the cultist she used to be. Schierke, Farnese, and the Flower Storm Monarch are all women and they are responsible for healing Casca's non-sentience while in Elfheim.

Schierke

Schierke (I think that is a Japanese take on Scandanavian names) is a very powerful magic user, and is one of the very few women in the series who is actually able to do damage to the demons and other monsterous beings that constantly come after every human in the book. Her mentor, Flora, is extremely cool and her magic appears to be kabbalistically inspired.

If you are curious, the 3 letters in the top parts of the star spell 'bag', the two in the middle spell 'ach' the bottom 3 spell 'zzch' so I doubt that the person illustrating spoke Hebrew.

Schirke uses Flora's influence and inspiration to summon a flood which kills some trolls. This is pretty fucking awesome.

This incredible feat causes Guts to tell her she did a good job, which is extremely rare for him to do.

While this scene is fucking awesome and Schierke is incredible, I don't think it at all absolves Berserk for a few reasons.

Firstly, making women witches is a pretty old fantasy trope, which likely stems from the conception that women are inherently very confusing, and thus magical. It is obviously incredibly strange and irrational to not want to have sex with objectively incredible men who they should naturally want to have sex with, so of course the only explanation is that women are impossible to understand. Hence, magic.

Secondly, Schierke is one of the only characters without the 'anime body type' as I am fond of calling it. For example, her mentor, Flora, at one point appears like this:

This is the old wise witch lady. I am unclear how she de-aged herself. And it's not only the women who appear in this manner. You could argue that Guts is more a power fantasy than fanservice, but Griffith is definitely supposed to be attractive. There is quite a bit of Guts/Griffith Yaoi on the internet (not that I've ever seen it of course).

Monsters are drawn horrifically ugly, heroes are drawn irritatingly attractive, Schierke is just kinda drawn like a normal human. She is one of the only members of the main cast to be drawn that way. I feel that at least part of that is becasue she is too powerful to be played as a character that readers want to fuck.

Casca is completely unable to protect herself, communicate, or think. As such, she is drawn very sexually and frequenty partially naked because that is an attractive thing to be. Schierke is a powerful magic user, so there isn't a super high chance of readers sexualizing her, so why bother?

Slan

The female member of the God Hand, Slan, is certainly sentient and is one of the more interesting members of the God Hand. Griffith is obviously Griffith, and Void (the tall guy with exposed brain) is suggested to be older than other members of the God Hand. He discuses Causality often, suggesting that he is wiser and more knowledgable than the others. But Conrad (something was lost in translation with that name) and Ubik do not seem to have any distinguishing features other than being powerful Apostles.

Slan is interesting. She is her own distinct character and comes up a few times when other members of the God Hand are absent. She also appears to have some power over the realm of Quiploth, a realm of the Astral Plane filled with ogres and trolls. The trolls, of course, are seen to be having sex with women which results in the women in question exploding with a fully grown troll bursting out of their intestines. This seems to be how they reproduce?

Anyways, Quiploth is CREEPY and the art is incredible.

Slan appears in Quiploth by forming herself out of the intenstines of dead trolls. She then attacks Guts until he is rescued by the Skeleton Knight, who is the only inhuman being who keeps defending Guts and co.

Do you FUCKING MIND????

And this is the only powerful female antagnoist.... sigh...

Humanity

It is hard to say what Berserk is 'about' since it is such a long and complex manga, and it isn't even over! I could fill several posts with Flora's friendship with a terrifying Skeleton Knight who she claims has a 'bashful smile'. However one theme that is consistant is the idea being human, and overcoming that which is inhuman with humanity.

The title of the manga, Berserk, comes from the Berserker armor that Guts gets.

This armor allows Guts to be beyond human and trancend his human limitations. The sacrifice is that it makes him inhuman. That is, presumably, why he rapes Casca while wearing it. Whether it fully eliminates his humanity remains to be seen.

To become an apostle is to abandon humanity in exchage for power. When Griffith rapes Casca, one of the apostles comments that it is so deeply evil and so human as well, to be that evil. Guts is able to fight the apostles, but it may be that it is only because of his armor that he can do this.

Women don't really get to be human. The vast majority of the problem with the manga is Casca but like...

Being used as a demon incubator to fill a minor plot point which shows how powerful this one kingdom is becoming is about as objectifying as it gets.

What sucks is that it works

I'd like to say that Berserk would have been just as well received without the messed of SA aspects added on. But I don't think I can really definitively make that claim. Berserk is one of the most influential dark fantasy manga out there and has inspired a many characters in other creative works.

It may be true that it would have been just as well received if the woman who gets the most screen time were sentient throughout most of the book. But that also may not be true. It may be that a lot of people claim they like it for profound, artistic reasons but in fact they really just like seeing a lot of terrible things happen to people with anime tits.

I kinda wish I didn't live in this world. But, here I am.