Slightly Biased Manga

Told you there’s be more Berserk this weekend.  I’d read the rest of the volumes I have back to back in a marathon again, but I find them easier to write about when taken individually so I can keep the story segments straight.

Hm.  So it turns out that the leader of the Holy See knights can experience pleasure in pain.  Let’s hope she never gets her hands on the Lament Configuration a behelit so she can summon the Cenobites.  It’s not like a character with an affinity for BDSM necessarily means that Kentaro Miura saw Hellraiser before writing the plot to this series, but its just one more similarity.  And the parallels in other areas ARE too much for me to believe there is no connection.

Aside from that, the part with that woman was really great.  Of course, the night creatures came after Guts while he was being held prisoner, and he had to take the leader as a hostage to make a clean escape.  The creatures… get them anyway, and possess the woman.  She… she does things.  Mostly to Guts’ sword.

The focus shifts back out into the entire country after that, where it’s revealed that there’s a horrible plague killing off a lot of the villiages, and things go back to the kingdom that the Band of the Hawks fought for when Griffith was a good guy, before the King went insane.  There’s a… dream most of the survivors are having about a golden hawk saving them.  It coincides with something else in the story, and it makes me wonder how Griffith will play a part in the story, if at all.

Guts has a dream as well, one that causes him to go back to check on Casca.  He’s forced to remember what happened to her after a demon possesses a horse that nearly rapes the leader of the Holy See knights.  He has to come to terms with a few things when he goes back to see her and the people who were keeping her safe, then he has to prevent something he saw in his dreams.  It looks like this will unfold over the next two or three volumes at least.

Also, the leader of the Holy See Knights swears up and down she’s going to destroy Guts since he saw her humiliated (through no fault of his own).  They’re sticking around, and joining them is an Inquisitor who is good at finding heretics.  Really, it seems like his forte might be torture, which is good news for us.  His face is drawn in such a way that it looks like a mask until he gets really angry, then it looks like a hamburger or something.  It’s remarkable.  He’s got people that torture for him, but in what looks like a taste of things to come, we see some people broken on the wheel (a subject I just read a book about, funny enough, and could not picture despite my best efforts - it’s the type of thing you have to see because it doesn’t quite make sense described in words), and at one point, one person gets hit so hard their eyeballs come out of their sockets.

Promising stuff.