Berserk highlights this era’s fascination with darkness. It’s timeless narrative began 1989 and is ongoing today, first as a comic and then later through many adaptations on screen from a tv show to movies and video games. But why?
The protagonist Guts is introduced as an incredibly vile character who demonstrates an immense apathy at best and cruelty at worst towards his fellow man, yet the audience is enthralled by him, this scarred, one eyed and one armed man wielding a monstrous sword and who has had a cannon installed in his false arm. Great sounds like a protagonist but his character doesn’t. Yet early on we discover his goal is to kill an angel named Griffith, and instantly we are given a flashback – whilst not a happy young man, he is whole – both eyes and arms, a mercenary for hire who works alone.
This flashback ends in the most heartbreaking way, we see a character so impossibly damaged that he goes past the concept of an anti hero and is for intents and purposes a justified villain (at the beginning of the story) and the lesser of two evils. But why is this so successful? What creates such a fanatical audience that even 30 years after first being published, companies will spend a fortune just to remake the same period of the story? 2016 was the first time a company passed the point of ‘the eclipse’ on screen.
I think it has to do with the topics, not only is it an incredibly violent and dark story, it talks about deep and meaningful issues such as nature of mankind on a species wide and individual level. Guts is man willing to relinquish his humanity for revenge when we first meet him, yet as the story progresses and obstacles occur he is forced to priorities more immediate things – the safety of his former lover (the now retarded Casca) and the travel to a new haven for her with a new group of allies that he originally agrees to protect Casca from him.
But my belief is that the real fascination comes with Guts perseverance. He has nothing else but his goal for large portions of the story, without it he has nothing and something about that connects with it’s mainly male audience on a fundamental level. As well as this there is the description and depiction of ‘beast of darkness’ Guts’s unrestrained Instinctual Desires as described by Freud. I mentioned earlier that Guts was willing to reliquish his humanity for revenge but as the story progresses and he has to protect Casca and his growing number of dependents he has to deal with the dilemma of using the Armour of the Berserk. A suit of armour that stops him from feeling pain and will even pin broken bones into place and force dislocated joints into place – by piercing the owners flesh with shard of the armour, all whilst unleashing the wearer’s most violent nature, it’s helmet literally reworking itself into the shape of the rottweiler that embodies Guts’s I.D. (Shown at the top of this blog).
As Guts’s exposure to the armour increases so too does the way his I.D. is shown, it becomes more ragged and demonic. Growing larger and quite literally thrashing against the chains of Guts’s Psyche.
As this continues so does the way it is represented in the story to other characters, because thanks to the armour, the darkness in Guts’s nature is there to be seen by everyone. Whilst they might not understand it, their friend and our protagonist is literally being hunted by his own dark nature. In the picture below in the midst of an invasion Guts fights for control of the armour with his friends only a few feet behind and for the first time they see a physical representation of Guts darkness, as it quite literally stalks him seeking to gain control as he is distracted.
It’s this fatalism of ever present danger from an internal enemy that may be equal to or worse than Griffith that I believe has created this cult following and such an undying love for dark fantasy. Guts willingly falls into his doom for all the right reasons and it makes the audience love him. He is almost doomed to make the wrong decisions believing them to be right, and every time the audience knows he’s wrong but even to them it seems right.
It’s this heartbreaking truth that makes this story so addictive. That and the eclipse. For fans of dark fantasy and dark sci-fi even those that haven’t read this story know of the eclipse. If you don’t know about the eclipse and you like fantasy and sci-fi, please read/watch Berserk for the eclipse and you will get the faster crash course as a writer of the process of throwing a brick filled with grenades at your cast.
Matt sHERIDAN'S rESEARCH AND eNQUIRY 