//Blatant spoilers because most of my Berserk talking points are either weirdly specific, or come up literally 150 chapters in, and context is required//

Okay, I see a sacred cow, and I have to fire up the barbecue once more. There was a time when I could say I loved Berserk, and would unquestioningly give it a 10/10, but now is not that time. Maybe I grew up, or something, idk. God, I'm so disappointed upon reading it again now, I barely know where to begin. Berserk is difficult to talk about, due to its complexity and length, but I'll do my best.

Berserk's Golden Age arc has been done to death in reviews, and it's amazing. We all know it. No need to say more. The homoerotic subtext between Guts and Griffith is *chef's kiss*. And we all know how it comes crashing down, due to miscommunications that are brilliantly baked into pretty much every character's fatal flaws during that arc. If I had to fault it on anything, I'd say Casca's scene during the eclipse was handled poorly in the manga, but more on that later.

For the minute, I'm here to talk about the absolute slog that is everything that comes after. The problems I see in Berserk are deep and structural, and have to do with Guts as a character. He's almost purely reactionary, because up to a point, he has no personal investment in the plot at hand beyond 'Casca in danger, me smash', or 'GRIFFFFIIIIIITH'. His interactions with others are limited. The man barely speaks, barely thinks about anything beyond the humanoid sack of potatoes that is Casca, or the man he hasn't talked to for years and hasn't made any moves towards doing so. He doesn't interact with either of his primary motivations past a certain point. His only other interactions basically amount to 'Hey Guts, don't do the stupid thing and overuse spoopy armor', and then Guts saying 'I won't.' before promptly using spoopy armor in the next boring shonen fight scene. Tell me how that is good writing, please. I hate to say it, but that's really freaking boring over the course of over a hundred chapters. Those chapters often go something like:
Alas, dickwolves have appeared and are menacing AREA OF THE WEEKville! Watch as Guts and company near-effortlessly mow down an array of dickwolves, but not before they menace poor, mentally ill Casca and tear off all her clothes with their dickpaws! Repeat. In the distance, Griffith accomplishes something of significance to the setting, like repelling an entire continent's worth of demonic Kushans, using a quarter of the pagecount.

It's as if Miura didn't know what he wanted to do with Guts and company after Casca's mind was fixed, so he dragged out their half of the story to an almost absurd degree, and I'd chalk up a good three quarters of the dragging to the incessant battle scenes.

But PushMe, I hear you cry! Battle scenes are awesome! Er, not when they lack stakes, emotional investment, and eat up an absurd amount of page count for their trouble. They don't have any technical elements that might make a shonen fight interesting, and the seemingly only allowed failure state is 'Guts dies/Girl is raped'. It's never a case of 'we need to run the fuck away', leading to a desperate fighting retreat using actual tactics, because then we wouldn't get ten more awesome panels of the dragonslayer effortlessly bisecting dickwolves. Any fight tension is displaced solely onto whether the armor will eat Guts' soul or not. Quiet moments that might be genuinely poignant(and were, in the Golden Age) are interrupted every other chapter by these near-pointless fights, as if the mangaka believes his audience will lose interest if the manga goes ten pages without seeing Guts screaming and covered in blood. He is, in some ways, like a parody of action movie tropes, his introspective, needy side subsumed into scowls and really cringeworthy one-liners. He harpoons any sense of atmosphere a scene may have, either by the dad jokes he utters when he opens his mouth, or by everyone suddenly pausing to admire his sword/technique/sweet ass. Whoever happens to be nearby will form an impromptu peanut gallery to remark at length on the oft-mentioned 'heap of raw iron', with Isidro at the helm, which gets repetitive fast and usually eats up a page or so per fight scene for its trouble. It doesn't make the fight seem any more impressive for its effortlessness, either. We know Guts = Stronk, and considering how slow Berserk is to update, wasting precious pages to reiterate this or have him engage in fights that don't further anyone's character is a general waste of everyone's time.

I feel that he needs actual emotional investment in the plot at large, something more than his revenge quest vs his companions. That was compelling back in Lost Children, at his lowest point, where whether or not he accepted Puck, or let Jill in, felt like it meant something deep and personal to his character arc. It was pretty obvious that if something didn't change, if he didn't let them in, he'd die forgotten in a ditch as a bitter shell of himself - a 'Gambino was right' ending, so to speak. By the time of the Fantasia arc, that theme is feeling pretty worn out. He exists only to protect his friends, which is a very well-worn path for shonen protagonists to travel (see also: Bleach, Naruto). And we all know by now how boring shonen protagonists who fall into this trap are. It's characterisation that began with him leaving the Hawks, and sticks around for an uncomfortably long time without significant development. He's too busy swinging his sword around like an angry Beyblade to notice. And to me, that's just not compelling, in the long term, as it lacks the brevity and poignancy we got with his internal struggles during Lost Children.

For the record, this was a problem as early as the latter half of Conviction, where Guts is trying to save Casca from dickmen/fire. His investment here is his guilt over leaving her alone for two years. That's interesting. Guts fighting with the beast of darkness over whether to abandon her was interesting. How does it play into the events of Conviction? It basically doesn't. Instead, we have Guts effortlessly killing stuff, Guts killing Mozgus and co. with some effort, and the themes don't really add up at all. Guts motivations in the scattered plot of Conviction do not matter one iota, and my investment in his fights literally hinges on me caring deeply, intimately for potato girl's safety. It's like... meaningless noise, past a certain point. There's no great ideological or personal conflict, and Guts doesn't have any meaningful internal conflict to make me care about his great and epic, ten page struggle with 'Masked Torturer #3, now with a side of wings'. It's the same storytelling mistakes, over and over again. Ultimately, Luca the fearless prostitute shines as the most interesting character in the whole arc, because her conflict with Nina is ideological and neatly self-contained, with both having clear viewpoints and a depth of character often lacking in members of the RPG party to this day. Luca doesn't need a slab of iron to save someone from a mob, and she doesn't need 200 chapters to give someone she disagrees with a stern talking to. Strong contender for best written female character in Berserk, in my opinion.

Speaking of women... something I never see brought up in discussions of Berserk is the way Casca's rape is portrayed in the manga. It's just... not horrifying, at least not to me. It reads, literally, like porn. The angles and focus of the panels are exploitative of Casca's body, with little focus on her face or the emotions that lead to her becoming a potato. If you disagree, please, compare the way Casca is portrayed to Guts' rape by Donovan, or the way Ganishka is portrayed as he stands menacingly over Charlotte's bed, or even the 1997 anime's version of the scene. Miura knew how to portray rape in a scary, realistic way, from the perspective of the victim. He just decided Casca was too hot not to draw like a pornstar for twenty odd pages. Really, it never quite ends, as Casca is drawn naked in poses clearly meant to be alluring with worrying regularity, when she's a goddamn rape victim, so traumatised she's lost the ability to speak. Her trauma also fluctuates in intensity. At one moment she can kill three armored bandits while butt naked, and in another she can barely run on flat ground without tripping over her own feet, so that she can drown the scene in Damsel In Distress tropes. Miura's inconsistency in his writing of these characters makes it hard for me to take the plot involving curing her of her brief porn career at all seriously. Or any other of the many times Casca (specifically) is threatened with rape. Combined with my above problem with Guts' later characterization, it severely undermines my ability to enjoy either of them as characters, because 'woman in danger, man save, you care' stopped being a compelling plot point by itself some five decades before I was born.

Griffith, for all the hatred he gets from fans for his role in Casca's disastrous career as a pornstar, is a breath of fresh air in comparison. He's about the same now as he was on rebirth, which isn't great, but Griffith has goals and he accomplishes them quickly, without fifty chapters of screwing around, which is more than can be said of anyone (bar maybe Farnese) in Guts' party. He tried to talk to Guts about what happened, and Guts wasn't in the mood, so now he's off doing his own thing and loving life. Griffith has uninterrupted quiet moments. Griffith's ultimate goals are nebulous, but he's efficient, and achieves small things towards that ultimate goal without taking up pages upon pages to messily bisect dickwolves we don't care about. Griffith is proactive, where Guts is almost purely reactive. Griffith vs Ganishka is, to me, a more satisfying section of the manga than anything Guts achieves in the same arc, and is over in roughly a quarter of the page count. The entire world changes as a result. Guts gets on a boat. Eventually. After acquiring spoopy armour, to make him fight good, for... reasons. To summarize, in my opinion, Guts is the least interesting character that the manga could focus on at the point where the plot has found itself, with seemingly little ability or interest in interacting with the setting, and yet so much time is spent focusing on him that it feels bloated and glacially paced. The result is... not exactly fun for me to read any more, now that I'm not wowed by him killing lots of stuff with no effort or personal investment.

God, I'm tired. The point of this rambling, sleep-deprived tirade is that Berserk had an amazing opening, then spirals down into a deep, deep pit of mediocrity, from which it has yet to emerge. The story almost feels stretched to the breaking point, perhaps a mirror for the burnt out author, with no resolution in sight. What happens on page is frequently surface-level, seemingly for the purpose of not advancing the plot while appearing to be doing something, anything, to convince its diehard audience that the manga is not dead. Guts gets stronger, Griffith builds his kingdom, Skull Knight is cryptic, and as a long time reader, it feels as if the wheels are spinning fruitlessly. The Golden Age was tightly written, plotted, and the tension was palpable that something horrible was about to happen. That was a long time ago, and I have to be honest with myself that Berserk likely isn't ever going to return to that level of quality.

I just want these two guys, who haven't talked to one another since the Hill of Swords, to finally talk out their problems that began with Guts leaving, and finally bury this zombie of a franchise. And maybe kiss. Just... end it already, Miura. We all know you want to. Only the dead can know peace from this Elfhell.