Slightly Biased Manga

This will be the last volume for awhile. Something tells me I’ll probably get the rest of what’s available in English the next sale I see and marathon it again, but for right now, I need to stop.

This is more of the “Lost Children” chapter from last volume, and things carry over into the next volume from here. The arc is so named since the faeries we saw at the very end of the volume are revealed right away to be children transformed by magic into insect-elves. The fight that the large elf-insect starts at the end of the last volume is abruptly cut short in the first chapter, and as the townspeople come back out of their houses, they see only Guts and a gigantic pile of burning children’s corpses since they transform back when they die. It’s pretty horrifying, and it gives Guts pause when Puck tells him about it, and makes him sick later on. I kind of like that these situations come up after the flashback.

The head insect-elf is created, not surprisingly, by making a deal with the Cenobites, and Guts has no problem with killing anything which offered up people as a sacrifice to give themselves power. Guts parts ways with the little girl who had been helping him in the village, and she is invited by the head elf-insect to live with them, away from adults and punishing them. The little girl has no problem with this until she realizes that the little ones cannibalize each other, which is also horrifying. Guts is waylaid on his way into the valley with a bloody battle with some forest guardians under the command of the insect-elves, and I have to say I am definitely enjoying the return of his metal arm with fire cannon. At one point, he blows a gigantic insect-man up, his head flies off with his eyeballs on fire, then the body parts turn from insect back into man. While I still don’t believe anything could compare with the sacrifice, random insane acts of violence definitely continue to surprise me.

The one thing I didn’t like was the implication that Guts is some sort of Christ figure. The army of the Holy See appears again, and the woman who heads it mentions that they follow basically wild tales of monster sightings, not really expecting to find anything, but all the tales have a “black swordsman” in common. She suggests several explanations for this swordsman, but the last one (complete with a large illustration of her posing in front of a stained glass window) was that Guts was “important to their religion.”

I’ve got this volume and volume 15, then I think I have to stop until I find the volumes on sale again.  I’m just broke and moving right now.

This volume opens with one of the most ridiculous chapters ever.  I thought that things would get relatively sane save for the constant demon slaying after the whole sacrifice thing, but Casca does one more bizarre and improbable thing for the road.

As much as I would love to dismiss what happened outright, part of me is also intrigued.  The dead king implied that it was Guts’s demon, which makes me wonder more about his role in all this.  On the other hand, I think I would be much better off blocking that entire chapter out of my mind.

After some training and Guts getting hooked up with the equipment we saw in the first volume, things snap back to the present.  Well, first there’s some sort of religious/prophecy angle, and some Holy Knights appear to let you know that it was foretold that events surrounding the “red lake” they found were foretold.  The fact that the leftovers from the massacre are called a “red lake” made me smile, but this scene was very short.

The next storyline starts off with Guts rescuing a little girl and taking her back to her village, where she is promptly beaten by her father and the entire village turns on Guts for having Puck, and elf, in his possession.  The aversion to elves is due to the fact that elf-like creatures apparently swarm all the towns in the area, destroying everything, eating people, and carrying off children.  When Puck vouches for the fact that elves don’t eat people, a swarm flies overhead the mark Guts has starts to bleed, so we know they’re monsters.  Guts then goes about dispatching the monsters, and the volume ends on a cliffhanger.  One of the more compelling images in the series is a gigantic panel where Guts has a bunch of little man-shaped smears all over his sword after swinging it through clouds of the elf-monsters, causing them to stick to the surface like bugs on a windshield.  I’m not sure just yet how I feel about this story arc, other than the fact that this village is a sad and depressing place, so I don’t really want to pass judgment until I read more.  What I’ve seen so far is pretty good though.  It’s hard to go wrong since I enjoy the demon slaying, and there’s quite a bit of it in this volume.

The design on the elf-monsters is quite good.  They look a lot like Puck with some insect-like features, and when they get mean, the get even more bug-like.  They’re vicious little things.  The queen elf-monster looks like the same creature we saw when the injured Band of the Hawks members were devoured several volumes ago.

There’s also a short story in the back which was apparently the pilot for the series.  It was hard to read because the Guts in that story is a really exaggerated, cartoony version of current Guts.  He rescues a little girl that looks just like Griffin, which made me laugh.  Puck is also a lot more cartoony, and I also laughed when he struck the perfect pose when the little girl called him cute.

This ENTIRE VOLUME was just grotesque, deformed monsters the likes of which I’ve never seen eating people in the messiest way possible.  There were a couple chapters at the end after things had settled, but the bulk of this volume was just… a beautiful, horrible, bloody, gory massacre.  When the Cenobites said everyone would be sacrificed, they weren’t kidding.  Monsters appear out of nowhere and begin consuming everyone immediately.  I mentioned last time that the Kings appearing was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a manga.  I think it may be second only to this massacre.

Most of the people who survive the first wave of slaughter can’t or won’t believe what they are seeing.  I liked that reaction a lot.  On one hand, I want to say that it’s more realistic that they didn’t take this horrible situation in stride and just start hacking away at the monsters.  Monsters don’t really exist in their world after all, and the one Guts fought was the only one most of them had seen… so it seemed logical that the sight of so many at once suddenly devouring their friends would give them reason to pause instead of fight.  On the other hand, there was nothing whatsoever that was “real” about what was going on, so it seems poor to quibble over details like that.  Even so, it was the right thing for the situation.

I’m glad that Judeau didn’t die a random, senseless death.  Judeau wasn’t even horribly brutalized by monsters before he died, he just… expired doing a brave thing, and he sort of put the fight back in Casca and forced her to deal with the situation.

The only one who had a chance against the monsters was Guts, who was armed only with the hilt of a broken sword.  He did what he could, which was a hell of a lot.  He went absolutely crazy when he saw the slaughter start (he’s still up on the platform with Griffith while everyone else is down below), and as he swims through the pools of blood on the ground, he does a fair amount of brutalizing himself.  It was just… I can’t adequately describe how absolutely horrifying and perfect this volume was.

Guts doesn’t actually fall until Griffith finishes “incubating” and comes down to face him personally.  It takes several monsters to restrain Guts, and that’s when he loses his arm and eye.  Griffith does horrible things to Casca, and he makes the monsters hold Guts down so he has to watch.

The very end of the volume has someone saving both Guts and Casca.  Griffith holds off on blowing the two of them apart as they flee the Cenobite dimension.  Given the horrible brutalizing he had just given Casca, I’m willing to bet his hesitation mostly concerned the welfare of Guts.   The last couple chapters just deal with explaining that Casca… isn’t quite the same, and sort of set things up for how we know them in the present, which is that Guts is constantly pursued by monsters that want to devour him.

I think the flashback may have one more volume left in it, because… well, because Casca is still alive.  I feel like I have to reserve judgment on her until she either dies or comes to her senses, because how she is now is just sort of disturbing and wrong in the same way Griffith’s condition was when they rescued him after the torture.  I’ll still hate her if she somehow comes through unharmed and unchanged, but that seems unlikely.  I can’t begin to imagine the myriad of bizarre things that may or may not happen to her before the flashback ends, and maybe something will happen that’ll make me like her in the end.  Who knows.  I wouldn’t have thought that there could be a scene which could so thoroughly top every single one of the fight scenes in the series so far either, but I was totally wrong about that too.

The volume starts off with lots of pity for Griffith.  It was really depressing, and I am kind of glad that it didn’t go on for too long like that, because… well, because the characters just don’t seem like they’re meant for that sort of thing.  Griffith does what he can to run away after overhearing a conversation where Casca basically admits she’d need take care of him for the rest of his life since he’s been basically crippled.  There is kind of an amusing/vaguely frightening daydream that follows this which has Griffith and Casca leading a normal home life… and once again, those two just aren’t meant for those sorts of things.   What they are meant for happens next.

I knew they’d find the Egg of the King again, and I knew the Cenobites/”Four Kings” would be summoned, but how they actually show up is one of the absolute coolest things I’ve ever seen in a manga, ever.  The landscape turns into sad-looking faces and the four take form by rising up gigantic.  One drops from the sky, one is formed when her single enormous face rises up out of the ground, many faces form one of them… you know, different things like that.  I think there’s a whole chapter dedicated to having these four appear when the Egg of the King starts weeping blood.

I can’t stress enough that the ground is made of faces.  This makes everything a LOT freakier.  At one point, the Cenobites raise Griffith up on a platform in the shape of a hand made out of faces.  Guts falls off the edge of the platform, and Griffith tries to save him by putting his arm out, but it starts to come apart at the elbow… which is one of the most disgusting things I think I’ve ever seen.  Guts stops his fall by gouging his broken sword into the side of the platform… into the eye of one of the faces.  Then he climbs up the sheer face precipice with his broken sword, repeatedly gouging the faces on the way up.

A lot of what goes on in this volume deals with the Cenobites explaining the situation to Griffith and him making a decision.  Basically, he can become the lead Cenobite and realize his dream of being king, but he’ll have to sacrifice every single member of the Band of the Hawks.  And really, isn’t that what he’s been doing all along?  Guts realizes that this is probably what Griffith meant when he asked if he was being cruel awhile ago.  Griffith makes his decision, noting just beforehand that Guts is the only person he’s ever met that made him forget his dream.  While certainly interesting now (”You’re the only one…” has been an incomplete thought for the past two or three volumes), I wonder if it will also be important later.

Everyone is branded with that symbol we saw on Guts in the first two volumes.  Judeau gets it on his hand, Casca gets it on her breast, Guts on the back of his neck.  Then the slaughter begins, and it is fantastic.

I wasn’t sure what to think when the scene went back outside the Cenobite dimension and we saw… Puck.  Why Puck appeared is sort of a mystery with a thin excuse (it was helping the one member of the Band of the Hawks that escaped the branding and slaughter), and maybe it will be explained later, but it just seemed like a good excuse to show Puck in a situation where Puck wouldn’t be able to see or recognize Guts.

I absolutely had to have more Berserk after I read 9-10, so I went out and bought 11-13, the only consecutive volumes I could lay my hands on at the comic shop.  I’m really hoping that forward momentum will slow down after 13 so that I can at least wait and order more when I’m not flat broke.  If I’m not satisfied, I’m probably have to drive to the suburbs this weekend to get more, and I really don’t want to do that.  Berserk may just make me, though.

As expected, Guts fights the Wolfman.  He turns out to be a monster akin to the Nosferatu, perhaps the same type of monster.  Maybe not, though.  He does a trick like the Lord from the second story where a huge monster somehow spontaneously generates from his midsection so his tiny torso and head is mounted on top of a gigantic body, complete with huge staring eyes.  I liked the fight, which took up a good chunk of the volume.  The way Guts finally wins is pretty amazing and suitably violent, but Guts takes quite a beating to get there.  These beatings seem pretty insignificant when compared with the abuse he was taking in the present, though.

Griffith is doted upon a little bit and thrown around, and apparently is unable to play his role when asked.  He doesn’t have much to say about the fight, or what happened to him, or even about how he feels when he is directly engaged in combat.  I don’t think he has much to say at all anymore, which is a shame.  I really would like to know what he thinks about Guts.  He seemed to… I don’t know, enjoy the fight between Guts and the monster.  He was declared officially invalid at one point, which is definitely disappointing.

I don’t know if I can take much more of this Casca business.  It was particularly bad last volume, but I hate how flirty and mother-y she is now.  I feel like this kind of ruins her.  Since she wasn’t shown in the present, I can only assume she dies, which should be quite sad even if I don’t like her.  It will probably destroy Guts and send him into a berserker rage against whatever monster does it.  Hmm.  Maybe that monster will be Griffith, taking away the one thing Guts has that’s important.  That would be interesting.

The one thing I’ve liked so far is that, ever since the flashback started, the fantasy elements have been almost completely cut out.  In the present, Guts is fighting horrible mutated monsters and is being followed around by a faerie, but these things don’t exist in the past.  So far, the only hints that these things even exist in the world have been the Nosferatu and the dust that Judeau gave to Guts to heal his wounds.  Well, and the egg that Griffith wears.  And then suddenly, because things are starting to fall apart, we have all sorts of hints.  Last volume it was the prophecy Guts listened to, and then in this volume, we once again see monsters, fantasy creatures, and all sorts of other things.  I suppose since an immortal monster was the only enemy that Guts has been unable to defeat so far, it’s appropriate here since now you know shit is really hitting the fan.

This volume is mostly concerned with the rescue of Griffith.  The Princess helps, and as everyone (Pippin and Judeau included with Guts and Casca, along with the Princess and a maid) descends into the basement of the tower where Griffith is being held, the Princess tells a history of her kingdom.  Apparently the tower is the oldest part, and the hole was there before the kingdom was.  It was a relic from the kingdom that had been there before, which had been totally wiped off the map.  That king’s ruler?  None other than the one who had warned Guts before he had his reunion.

Like I said, I have no imagination.  What that little man did to Griffith was totally unexpected.  They didn’t show his face, which I thought was a nice touch.  He seems to still have hair, but even Guts is repulsed by whatever they did to his face.  The little man took pretty much everything from Griffith that made him important, though.  One wonders how that will work itself out.  It seems Griffith is perhaps not mad at Guts about what happened, though.

Of course the small party runs into trouble as they escape.  Specifically, assassins are sent after them.  I liked that Judeau proved himself more useful than everyone other than Guts, basically.  I actually like him quite a bit, he’s talented (but not overly talented) and he’s not all doom-and-gloom like every other character in the series is.

Anything else?  Well, it looks like the King, for whatever reason, has an unending supply of monsters on hand to send after the Hawks.  Next up is the Wolfman, apparently.

I bought up through volume 10 of this series on sale, and I was so… caught up in the end of this volume that I read 10 right after.  I may not be clear on some of the details, but the dividing event between the volumes is so clear that there is only Berserk before this and Berserk after, so I’m pretty sure I’ve got things straight.

First and foremost, I loved what I saw of Griffith in this volume.  I was pretty happy to see that he was so shocked and bent out of shape about Guts, because I was not expecting such a violent reaction out of him.  I mean, I remembered that Griffith “owned” Guts, but I thought Griffith was sort of above caring for people unless it directly affected his plans.  And maybe Guts leaving did, but I think Guts made the right call, because he would have just been a warrior unable to fight in a time of peace if he’d stuck around.

I was sort of sad to see Griffith’s self-destructive behavior, though.  Old Griffith would never have been that reckless, and he is indeed paying for it.  We haven’t seen any sex in a long time (not since volume 3), and there’s something both beautiful and repulsive about it in this series.  I suppose that proves beyond a doubt that Griffith is in fact a man, something the degenitaled nude from earlier in the series hadn’t completely convinced me of.

When I saw the torture start, I thought that they would just scar Griffith’s body and gouge his eyes out.  Seriously.  I have no imagination whatsoever, apparently.

A year passes, and after fighting in a tournament, Guts finally hears rumors about the fallen Band of the Hawk and goes to them just as they’re about to mount a rescue for Griffith.  Not before he gets a prophecy, though.  Actually, the prophecy happens at the beginning of the volume, and the Hawks part happens at the very end.

Also, something else happened at the end.  It was shocking, unexpected, and dammit, it just wasn’t in the cards.  Things had sort of been heading in that direction ever since the 100-man melee, but I just didn’t want to believe anything would happen.  They HATED each other.  Apparently not enough, though, and the volume ended on something so beautiful and grotesque that I just had to pick up 10 immediately and read it, even though I hate doing that before I write about stuff here.

In case you had any doubt as to whether or not Griffith is a total psychopath, this volume will clear all that up. To be fair, he only acts out because there are people in the kingdom’s court who are trying to kill him. But he manages to secretly thwart their attacks, kill all of them in a most “accidental” way, and then kill everyone who knows what he’s done. He doesn’t do this himself, though. He uses other people so his hands won’t get dirty. Griffith does kill one person on the battlefield, and it occurred to me that he’s not often shown slaughtering people in the same way Guts and Casca are, but he’s somehow more terrifying, even with his girly face.

Guts acts on his decision to leave, which bummed me out. He says he needs a goal so that he can return to Griffith and not be someone Griffith can look down on. He leaves without one, which doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. There’s actually a few really nice scenes where various Band of the Hawk generals try to convince him to stay. I like Judeau, who is sort of a lighthearted background character, and he winds up having a nice conversation with Guts about being happy with one’s lot in life. Guts really should be happy, since he’s about to be made a lord and given whatever he wants… but alas, he goes to chase some intangible goal.

I was hoping Griffith would stop him. Part of me feared that Griffith would understand what Guts wanted and just let him go amiably. When the duel commenced, I believed that Guts would be kept against his will since there was no way he could win against Griffith. I was pretty mad, and so was Griffith. Maybe Griffith doesn’t forgive.

There’s a huge battle at the beginning of the volume. I was happy to see Guts get what he deserves as far as near-constant combat goes, his sword finally breaks against something it should. A mystery Nosferatu tosses him an even bigger sword from on top of a cliff to finish what he was doing though, which was either a cop-out or badass, I couldn’t decide.

At one point, Griffith puts a question of morals to Guts, who backs off because he says someone who has killed 100 men shouldn’t make a moral judgment. At this point, I can’t count how many people have been cleaved in half by Guts, and while he has defeated 100 at once single-handedly, there’s also the matter of the guys he slices in half and decapitates in the battles. Hm. Maybe I should go back and take a body count.

I don’t know how I feel about this business with Casca.  It seems to be over for now, which makes me feel relieved.  I really can’t picture her and Guts together.

One thing I forgot to mention last time was that Griffith’s speech at the beginning of the volume was not only about someone who he considered a friend being equal, but also how everyone has to have a goal or dream to aspire to in life.  Guts didn’t say anything throughout the course of the speech, and I was a little unsure about his reaction.  I figured the main part of the speech was about what Guts saw as his dream, and I wasn’t sure if Guts considered fighting his hardest or being strongest his goal, or was deeply unsettled by Griffith’s speech since he lacked purpose in life.

It turned out to be that he lacked purpose, which made me feel better since this means “being the strongest” is not going to be a goal.  After saving Casca, she talks a bit more about how attached she is to Griffith, and I was surprised to see that there was no romance whatsoever.  She says she realized her purpose in life was to be Griffith’s sword so that she could help clear the way for his dream of… world domination, or being king or supreme ruler or whatever the lofty goal he was striving for is.

Guts talks.  And talks.  And talks.  There’s probably a page somewhere in here which is equal to all his dialogue in all the previous volumes combined.  What does he even talk about?  Well, he tries to explain himself to Casca a little bit since she always criticizes him for being reckless, he talks about Griffith, and later, he talks about what he plans to do in the immediate future.

The decision he comes to is  not one I’m happy with.  I’m a little worried, actually, because I thought only death (or undeath, or pacts of evil, whatever) would drive Griffith and Guts apart.

And even though there’s lots of talking and bonding between Guts and Casca, there’s also plenty of violence.  In one of the coolest battles so far, Guts slays 100 soldiers who come to collect the bounty on his head.  As you can imagine, heads explode, eyeballs fly, body parts are cleaved apart, and Guts explains that his secret is that his sword is dull and that if you don’t die when he hits you with it, you’ll wish you had.  There’s also another huge battle at the end of the volume, but its resolution isn’t going to come until volume 8.

Let’s see… Griffith is sort of working himself more and more into the King’s good graces.  Also, the good graces of the princess, which is sort of what I imagined he had in mind when he described his ambitions.  He’s got a ways to go for that, though, because there are plenty of people who hate him just because his blood is apparently not blue enough.

Griffith actually has Guts murder someone in the dead of night, which is interesting because prior to this most of the fighting has been pretty straightforward and out in the open (well, I suppose the weird sewer worms with the lord’s face on them in the early volumes are sort of an exception, but that was magic).  The person plays dirty and certainly has it coming, but things go bad and Guts winds up doing something really horrible.  So horrible, in fact, that even Guts feels a little bad.  When he tries to talk to Griffith about what happens, he hears part of a speech that seems to apply to everyone present (Griffith, Guts, the Princess, and Casca).  The gist of it was that Griffith considers a friend someone who is equal to him, and I couldn’t figure out if Guts was disturbed by this, gratified by it, or considered it something to strive for.  I’m not sure that the specific effect is all that important just yet, though.

What else… there’s some weirdness in the last few chapters where Guts winds up saving Casca and the two are separated from the main group.  I was a little insulted that Casca fell in battle because she was menstruating, but I suppose it gave the story reason to show how it was that she joined the Band of the Hawks and some of her other problems with being a woman among men.  Thankfully this single event doesn’t seem to have magically healed the rift between Casca and Guts, but it at least got Casca’s feelings for Griffith out in the open.  Well, a little.  I suspect that’s where the flashback is going, anyway.