I’m not a great fan of anime and manga, but recently I took the time to read the famous Berserk, and I was surprised with just how well developed where the main characters and their motivations and dynamics.
I love tragedy and have been reading the Greeks, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and many scholars on the subject of the tragic for a long time.
That being said, although I know that the main focus of Berserk is not poetic language (which one usually finds in the tragic tradition), I can’t help but admit that Griffith is as great a tragic character as any I have ever encountered in the great dramas of the world. Shakespeare’s language is far more complex and beautifully poetic than that of Miura, but I don’t think there’s any character in Shakespeare that is as complex and contradictory as Griffith. Sure, he lacks the sublimity of Shakespeare’s great poetic monologues, but his mind is actually so complex that one simply can’t explain exactly why he did what he did and why he wanted what he wanted.
Guts is also a great character, but his conflicts and fears and motivations, his will power and resilience, all of that, although very well done, is not as complex as the struggles and mysteries of Griffith (at least while he is still human).
Anyway, just need to say that anyone who wants to improve one’s skill as a fiction writer will do well to look for sources of inspiration and learning-material in all sorts of mediums, and great manga sure is one of those mediums.
The plot of Berserk’s Golden Age Arc is a great example of tragedy. I was sincerely impressed.
yeah it's pretty good, glad you liked it fren
Not literature. Go back.
How hadn't you read Berserk before?
Not everyone is into edgy japanese comics when they’re born
I knew it was very long and have been postponing for a long time. Eventually watched the 1997 anime and decided to go for the whole thing. It was worth it.
I also read the entirety of Vagabond and it too deeply impressed me.
read Vinland Saga too
This but stop when you finish the prologue
>muh pacifist viking
Literally the gayest thing ever thought of.
filtered, everything after is where it gets good
vagabond is not nearly as good tbh and I say that as a vagabond fan... it unfortunately falls way too much into pseudo-deep philosophical dialogue which fails to hold pathos when it seems juvenile compared to any real philosophy. this really becomes apparent once Musashi starts turning peaceful..
Griffith is dull in my opinion. Everything he does is boilerplate destiny + road to good intentions. He's about as deep as Thanos from the marvel movies, but Thanos at least gets a few clever lines while Griffith unfortunately gets none.
>bloated series written by a coomer Nip where the MC gets raped by a Black person and the main antagonist lets himself get raped for money
>being compared to Greek Tragedy
I hate you moronic TikTok bandwagoning zoomers so goddamn much.
I don't know, the Greeks enjoyed their fair share of pederasty as well
>it's only okay if the greeks or netflix does it
I hate zoomers
I had a very similar experience reading Berserk, anon. I will say though, the quality (in terms of storytelling, not art) drops off pretty significantly after the Golden Age Arc
I agree. Although, until the Conviction Tower Arc, it was very good.
Miura should have find a solution and ended the manga in 300 episodes maximum, but I think he trapped himself in a corner. Nowadays it's even worse. It's just a shadow of the original work. I still read only because I want to know how the story will end.
I thought Lost Children and Conviction were still quite good. After that though it starts to go off the rails.
First is drug addicted incestious mary sue.
Second is the everyday man enduring a cruel inescapable fate.
Second is a literal cuck that took the BBC.
>griffith did nothing wrong
>guts got cucked
>casca enjoyed every second of it
what an awful chatgpt post
Whoever wrote this shit should have stopped at the Golden Age arc. Killing everyone off and ending it right then and there would have been 1000% better than the garbage it devolved into.
What do you think of the artistic merits, pathos, and dramatic aesthetics of the highly detailed troll rape panels?
You sound like a boring person
If you enjoyed Berserk you might want to take it up to the next level in literature and try some Brandon Sanderson
I really wasted time reading 200 chapters of this guy trying to find Casca only for her to get captured again once he finds her. Overrated slop with poor comedy and shit characters.
nobody did anything. its a predeterministic universe where souls are just carried along for the ride by the material universe playing snooker with molecules. souls can't make decisions, only bodies can. souls merely suffer the torment caused by the consequences of those actions that they were unable to influence from within their gilded meat cages, and which they are then punished for eternally
Don´t read this if you don´t want to get spoiler.
http://skullknight.net/idea/
[Spoiler]Humanity is responsible for its own suffering
If this came about after the author's death then it's worthless. He lost sight of his story and became obsessed with pedo anime and idolm@ster. He barely progressed the plot for a decade because he just didn't give a shit.
Nah, pretty sure that's ripped from a chapter that the author retconned because he didn't like how much it gave away and defined about the nature of fate in Berserk. The chapter was from around when Griffith was imprisoned, I think (the page says Episode 83, so you can sort that out). It was well before the later shit, and that was part of why it was thrown out (too much too soon).
In order to understand Berserk themes and narrative.
It´s a Friedrich Nietzschean Tragedy
I enjoyed this guy’s analysis of Griffith’s character:
https://bthump.tumblr.com/post/171634331901/the-brightest-thing-a-griffith-analysis
I am going to read this and others,so i am curious if you have free time to give your take on this video which i watched some time ago.
Correct me if wrong,but are we even sure that he is a the monster that people make him up?if you read this posts on tbharchive 2008 by the way long time ago,it completely changes everything.
https://desuarchive.org/a/thread/10634177/#q10634417
It´s funny if you read without warning at first you think he is just ia mustache twirling crazy cartoon evil character type then you read this link and other things and then you realize that nothing is what you thought.
I think Griffith is too underdeveloped in his youth and motivations, I think the superior character Miura was aiming for, tolkien got right in Feanor. It's funny because the latter is less popular even among LOTR fans despite the fact that his motivations are very well understood. Griffith just doesn't seem to have any choice in what he choses to do even when someone as comparably powerless as guts seems to.
The Problem with Griffith is one that i see common in villains like him is that they really don´t do thing that are good in its own or view themselves as heroes in their own story.
The Villain that can be a police officer or a military who do harsh things and feel conflicted or show emotions and can be your average joe that you see in the street,is a villain that is almost as genius and relatable.
That´s why 99% of Berserk readers or first average are always going to sympathize with Guts.
Griffith is just too distant and lacking in simple emotions,and most important they never change their character.(The concept of Griffith Feeling genuine remorse and betraying the apostles and wanting forgiveness,would be an admirable literary tool.)
Berserk i have hope and not going to give an veredict,until the manga is ended by the people who are running the manga after Author death.
>Feanor
Yeah,If Miura read this character and understood him he would be everything that i said.
berserk sucks ass, friend. even dark souls already surpassed it.