Berserk

Let's get straight to the bone with the negatives as the positives have already been done to death. I don't like at all how mangaka Kentaro Miura handles female characters which is only a complain to some if you make it one. However, there's much more to that. There are major problems with Casca. She — like most female characters of Berserk — has been heavily sexualized (for reference, Wyald chapters, post-Eclipse Casca under waterfall) and sexually assaulted and then chucked aside. What should have propelled development of her character makes her a human cabbage. And I do mean the Eclipse. A Band of Hawking Readers go: "One can't imagine what Casca must have gone through and anyone with such trauma will be rendered insane" et cetera. Well, neither can you or Miura. And yet, he chose to put Casca through the Eclipse and was not willing to follow through with her character. It may be so that Eclipse was written during pre-internet era and Miura was out of ways to research the nuances regarding such topics. Yet again — I stress — he chose to depict the act. If all he came up with was sidelining Casca's character agency for almost entirety of the remaining narrative scaling twentysomething volumes, it's not very good writing, is it? Especially when the central concerns revolve around her. You call it bold and visceral and transgressive. I say thoughtless and obtuse and a missed opportunity. Even Schierke wasn't spared in the fetish department and she's thirteen. Tell me we can't use modern lenses for something authored thirty years ago. Except we can. Except dated artistic decisions are to be acknowledged in all kinds of art for us to appreciate the rest of it.

Adding on, violence seems to go hand-in-hand with such assaults on many fronts. Wyald was thoroughly unnecessary, especially after the Bakiraka chase. We had been already introduced to an apostle, and him coming right before the Eclipse as a clunky foreboding lessens the impact. We get it. Apostles are evil, rapey, and hideous. The point was made in prologue. What's that, you say? It was to show Guts is now more powerful and can hold his own against an apostle? Well, no shit, he's been splitting logs coming down a waterfall's mouth so I think we would have been okay following that. Let's leave the trolls out of it too. We get it, dammit. Violence desensitized me to the extent that it was no longer shocking and I didn't care for the hack-and-slash, apostle-of-the-week cool factor. To help sum up the paragraph, Japanese composer Susume Hirasawa is willing, quoted by Miura in Tezuka Osamu Prize (2002): "I think Guts' sword represents a penis and the monsters destroyed by it represent women's genitalia." Poetry, my man. Big-dick poetry.

I find myself indifferent following the ensemble of RPG-like cast gathering around Guts while he wanders in search for Griffith — a trope as old as the Journey to the West. Need not talk about tonal inconsistencies because it is partly the fault of manga's length. Berserk could use a fat trim which I doubt will hurt manga's credibility. It's so repetitively heavy, the entire thing, an almost Sisyphean undertaking — stitching cults, causality, existentialism, divine caprice, dynamic morality, and like. So heavy you get tired reading it, no wonder it struggles to carry itself, for hammered-in complexity doesn't equate to quality. If the meatier themes need the ceaseless bluntness, the structuring and handling needs to be subtle and sure. I don't see it beyond Golden Age arc. Miura even admits to writing the manga as it progresses, and also regrets overdoing the sexual assaults of the manga looking back, a case of inexperience. At least knowing this, it's understandable how things came together to be as they are.

Berserk isn't bad, by any means. It's just so damn uneven, carried by momentary sparks in later two-third of the manga. We know there is an obvious raging passion here. It's a lifetime work hence the collective and eclectic fantasy esthetic — a world populated with spirits, centaurs, elves, dragon, demons, trolls, witches, fauns, goblins, golems, ogres, unicorns, you name it. Miura's guiding vision, however bloated and overstuffed, is there. It takes time but emerges. Birth of Fantasia is one of the most beautiful unfolding in animanga medium. The art style morphs the mythopoeic sections with awe and you want the panels framed and tucked away. At the same time, there are more volumes on the other end of the spectrum as well where the art seems to be window-dressing, drudgery, indulgence. Not a unifying element.

All in all, a mess, maybe at times a beautiful one. This isn't to say only polished and structured works are worth it because we know manga, by very nature of the industry, is a spontaneous medium, living and dying by its ad-libbed frenzy. I'm actually a hardcore believer in Steve Erickson's "I don't find perfection especially interesting. Art is not all about refinement and formal accomplishment. It is about passion and imagination and courage and these things that I didn't understand when I was kid being taught the rules. I realized that . . . art could be . . . what I wanted to make it if I could pull it off.” So while I see what people value in Berserk and where the strugglers come from, it isn't pulled off well.

It remains what it is. Manga community doesn't openly talk about the issues enough. Berserk's praised to heavens and back here. It is being read by underage people and I hope to put out there what's absolutely not cool. Think through your favorites. That's enough from me.

(Edited afterwords, copied from a reply elsewhere: People got confused when I mentioned the rape and sexualization in the same sentence. I don't have problems with use of rape in a work. I have problems with Casca's character being ultimately denied any impacting action further in the story just after the assault in Eclipse. Users here think I have problems with rape but really actually I have problems with how the aftermath is handled. We have seen Guts dealing with his trauma but we hardly see Casca have the same arc for so, so long. It's like Miura was out of ideas what to do with her.

I don't care for censorship of triggering topics. Write/draw whatever and take responsibility. It's a free world. When Casca gets portrayed in a sexualized light and tossed aside with little agency, just after what she went through in Eclipse, I can't really take it seriously anymore.

Conclusion, no, I don't think rape = sexualization. However, sexualization is a problem. Especially not fan of the loli shit.)

Another edit, tired now, very much hoping the last one to come. Berserk is a fantasy, y'all. It's not an accurate account of Mediaeval Ages, and it has no intention of being one. Pure artistic expression. I don't see it putting rape in any meaningful context other than just for the sake of being edgy. Add to that the above edit's text, you know where I stand.