Taskmaster The Podcast - Berserk

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

What do Bernini, Nietzsche, and Hellraiser have in common? They are all influences on the darkest fantasy we have ever (or may ever) cover: Berserk. This story of power, fate, and astronomical violence provided us with possibly our most intellectual conversation to date.  Listen to us talk with special guest Brendan of @tsarpowerpod about the man too angry to die. Content warning: quite a bit of intense sexual violence.https://tsarpowerpod.weebly.com/patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodDarius: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes of hiding in our genre of fiction. As always, I'm Darius and with me is my co-host Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Howdy. And with us today to continue Dark Fantasy Month is definitely some dark fantasy.

We have a special guest, Brendan, who's here to talk to us about berserk how's it going brendan pretty good pretty good uh my recording studio has been oddly hot for a while so i'm going to be taking off and putting on my sweatshirt for this whole episode oh so we get a strip tease while we do this beautiful yeah why not why not dinner and a show maybe it'll show. Maybe our intro music this time, we can put on some like... Make it sexier. Yeah, strip club music. So what do you do, Brendan? What are you up to? Well, podcasters might know me from two things.

One, I am one half of the Sarpower podcast where we rank all of the Russian rulers from Rurik to Putin. And Putin is not going to come probably for a very long time because there's many centuries in between Rurik and Putin. A lot of Nikolais and stuff. Yeah, so don't expect up-to-date commentary on the

Russian invasion of Ukraine or some shit. We can probably get commentary on the time they conquered Kiev in 1170 or something. Well, that's a whole complicated thing, but I feel like if I were to explain that, that would defeat the purpose of listening to the podcast. Yeah, go listen to that podcast.

Yeah, I'm not going to take away from our download numbers, especially since we really need that Patreon money to pay off my car loans. Anyway, my buddy Roberto on that end also runs the History of Succarvelo Georgia podcast, which I don't appear on as often, but I do edit the scripts. So I also contribute behind the scenes to that. I also contribute behind the scenes to that. Roberta, who we had on as a guest for our two-part series on The Wheel of Time.

Oh, that's right. I forgot it was The Wheel of Time and not The Witcher. Yeah, it was The Wheel of Time. The Witcher was Trevor from History of Podcasts. Right, History of Podcasts. Friend of the show. Yeah, besides that um i'm a writer and a journalist um i've been published in real clear politics and on pen live and uh that's about it because uh journalism is something that i do want to do more frequently now

uh but did realistically young journalists need to know that it's going to take a while uh but yeah that's where you can find me you can also follow me on twitter at foster underscore writing regardless of what i'm doing over there if i'm like putting out a harsh noise album or whatever the fuck it'll be on there i'll say you're making kethel really happy but as learning exciting things right now as as always we have brought on a guest who knows a lot more about more stuff than we do which i mean for compared to me that's a pretty low bar to cross but you know yeah oh i forgot about the himbo meme oh well look look look i'm surprised you read this whether look it's mostly pictures. Yeah.

You look at the pretty pictures. I looked at the, I looked at the pictures and inferred the dialogue. I inferred the context from the pictures. So actually, you know, I, you know, I got a chat bot to read the dialogue to me. I'm imagining a robot voice. It's like, no, like the, like the Japanese voice to text thing on Google Translate. It's like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. It's like skipping.

We just get rage noises. Griffisu. All right. One last thing before we get started. I want to give everyone a very explicit content warning. The biggest content warning probably ever. Yeah yeah the biggest one we've definitely had yeah this will be the biggest we ever have to do likely likely um so this is uh berserk it is as it fits perfectly in dark fantasy month is in very dark and includes some very, uh, dark topics that some people may find upsetting.

There are going to be references to, well, obviously lots of blood and gore, um, sexual violence, generally sexual violence against women, against children, mentions of incest,

um, and a whole lot of other really fucked up stuff. Yeah. So if any of that is particularly bothersome to you, I would recommend maybe not even listening to this episode, to be honest, it's going to be large parts where it's unavoidable. Yeah.

It's completely unavoidable. It's pretty much integral to the story. So if you're good, I always, I recommend berserk to anyone with the caveat of there is a gratuitous amount of sexual violence and by gratuitous i mean it serves no purpose other than to shock the viewer in my opinion is my major criticism of mura yeah um and we will get into that specifically a little bit later in the episode i think i kind of want to save that for closer to the back half we're going

to talk about sort of the uses of different kinds of violence and what purpose they serve within the narrative. Yes. But I wanted to get that content warning out of the way for anyone. So we, you can know for sure. Now that being said, berserk, what is, if you want to give us Brendan, a quick rundown, who made berserk and what's it's you know what's the founding mythos of Berserk okay so I think in 1989 it was like the early 90s late 80s there was a fellow from Japan his name was Kentaro Miura and he has worked on a lot of manga, but his most well-known and most beloved is this one, Berserk.

Kentaro Miura unfortunately passed away in 2021, I believe. So last year for people who are listening to this in 2022, which is this year, of a heart attack, I believe. If I had this up. The point is he tragically passed away pretty young he was in his 50s and most tragically before he could even finish his magnum opus of berserk it's currently being continued now by his assistants um i think i'll save my my uh my pros and cons on that my opinions on that for later in the discussion i'm sure no matter what i say on it it'll piss people off um i mean we could say pretty much anything about this and it'll yeah uh but there's really not much to tell i want to save the founding sort of some details about how it was created to explain why certain things happen in the story of the manga. But all you need to know right now is Berserk was created, drawn, written with help from assistance by kentaro miura

oh see i double checked he was 54 years old so very young very very sad very unfortunate acute aortic dissection yes so berserk is the story of a guy with a sword and the man is too angry to die yeah and that is like i know there's like a meme about like local man like too angry to die that is that that's guts our main character's name is guts and that is basically his entire like deal until you learn his backstory and stuff is that he's just a guy who's too angry to ever die and he's really really good at killing people with a sword that's ludicrously big yeah classic buster sword yeah he's got a cloud strife buster sword well and he can like chop a horse in half yes the thing about guts is guts's sword is that

if you whether it's cloud strife from final fantasy or whatever that dude's name is from bleach if it's an edgy if it's an edgy emo boy with lots of lots of issues and a gigantic ridiculous unbelievable sword it was stolen from berserk berserk's influence on manga cannot be understated even beyond manga it's like dark souls for example the dark Souls is entirely a berserk ass game yeah it's berserk the game that's the whole reason that my roommate and I even started talking about it

he read it because he's a huge fan of Dark Souls I'm also a big fan but like yeah that's sort of like aesthetic is immediately noticeable you just walk into certain spaces any from soft game and you're like huh i think someone's been reading berserk also plenty of times in fights in berserk guts explicitly has to use the dark soul strategy of

being like if i get hit one time i'll die so i have to dive roll from every attack if i just dodge every attack i will be safe the secret to not dying is not getting not being not getting hit and like and if you do get hit being so mad that it does nothing to you it's which is okay it's slightly misleading because many times guts deliberately gets himself hit just to gain an advantage. He has no regard for his own safety or life, but he somehow always lives. He very much kind of wants to die, but just won't. Yes. So he's just like, yeah, you can hit me, so what?

Very Freudian. The death drive as i i said in our talk before the episode but i as i was reading this just started in my mind referring to guts as dark goku because he's kind of dumb as shit a lot of the time yeah his whole thing is that he's only happy when he's fighting because it's the only time he doesn't have to think or do anything else is when he's fighting and as he fights the more powerful his enemy is the angrier he gets and the more powerful he gets so like it's very much that shonen protagonist type deal but my cultural touchstone is goku he's also very much got that like i'll let him hit me let's see what happens the um the this is the shonen protagonist back when it's still almost kind of it's not new in 1988 1989 but it's not absolutely destroyed over yeah um it's like at the time what do you have you have

you know you have dragon ball you have jojo you have like fist of the north star so it's like i don't know there's something kind of charming about it yeah he did take a lot from fist of the north star um well everybody that which i've had people recommend that to me as well. I only know it from the memes. Yes. I mean, all I know about it is post-apocalyptic punches people a lot. And then they explode. Yeah.

Yeah, so that's our main character is Guts. He's the big sword boy who's very angry kind of dumb he's also the important thing you need to know about him is he's a jerk yeah like when you meet him we sort of are introduced to him in the prologue you introduced him i won't call like in media res he's just like yeah an adult character i mean adult generally here this is he's probably at this point, like, yeah, he's like 19 or 20 or something like that. And he's just out wandering around and fighting enemies that are secretly

ghosts or demons. And yeah, he's just mean. He's mean to everyone kind of on purpose all the time. And that's it. That's his, that's just his deal. Yeah.

I should note like that you might think that this is an incredibly dumb manga and it is don't get me wrong it's also halfway an incredibly smart manga but when you're introduced to guts it'll be in something called the black swordsman arc where it's just sort of a lot of dark fantasy and horror tropes thrown together so big angry badass tough badass tough guy who's fighting a guy who's also a giant snake or a giant slut or something who eats babies yeah he just eats people eats people yeah eats people yeah eats people they both both of them eat people the snake guy and the slug guy there's a lot of people eating mostly the demons eat people yes the demons

do eat people yeah and each other but that's besides the point uh we'll get to that later and when i think the point okay sorry let's see the point you're making is that yeah on the one hand you're like this seems pretty dumb this is absurd dumb right yeah it's a big angry guy it's darius's kind of manga exactly it's like me if i sucked more than i normally do but like on the other hand like you pointed out once you actually get into like outside the prologue into the the first arc the golden age arc, you suddenly realize there's this entire second tier of commentary going on that like they, even though they obviously work together to me, they sort of are floating separately. There's like guts doing his guts things and guts on his own,

occasionally just interacts with this higher narrative that's going on within the story. But I think that also makes sense for guts's character who doesn't want to be involved in the higher narrative of anything yeah the guts so the guts is not a smart guy but one thing that miura makes sure to do is say that guts is most in his general attitude is right about everything i think that's where miro is getting that simply by being himself he proves miro's points um i guess you could say he he doesn't have to do it intellectually he simply does it because that's who he is

which i deeply respect on some level well yeah he doesn't think about it he just does it yeah honestly just being in the world because this is by my account at least as far as what i've read the bleakest setting i have potentially ever encountered um yeah uh yeah i would say so and that i think kind of lends itself to the respect you almost have to have for somebody like guts to survive as long as he has um even only into his 20s being essentially a mercenary since he was like six yes so and what i what i was saying earlier is when you get to the black swordsman arc which is the prologue where he's just doing he's just thrown together a bunch of dark fantasy stuff and horror mira didn't realize that he was going to continue after this he openly said yeah i was just doing stuff that i thought was cool but uh he later decided okay i'm going

to continue this he wrote a backstory for guts and he had all the stuff justifying it and he put a lot more thought into it overall uh the themes of it that is he always put a ton of effort into the art which is part of why it's so famous for its uh hiatuses yeah and like as someone who does who has not read very much manga at all it was reading like reading berserk i could immediately find things where i'm like oh i have seen this everywhere before like not in not that i've seen this this this trope or this art style specifically from Berserk, but I have seen it copied or replicated in multitudes of other places since then.

You know what I mean? It's like reading something where you're finding like, oh, this is where that trope came from. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Kintaro Miura came up with that. It's a recurring theme

with the uh writing of berserk and it's also it's weird that it's kind of weird that this is coming up on a literature podcast because yeah it's manga it's comics the art is equally really good um and that's that's due to the fact that mira spent painstaking amount of time on every panel um if you just look at some of these panels you can only just imagine how long it took for him to draw that with a pen. Some of those battle scenes where you've got like hundreds of people, hundreds of like people on on horseback. The detail is immaculate, despite being a broad shot. Yeah. Like, honestly, one of the first shot, like the last shot of the pre of the prologue golden like golden

age stuff and the first shot of the actual first chapter like is this massive split screen battle scene where it's where it's on two pages and it's insane it's it's insanely good art yeah um this is 1989 like what is it yeah i i read somewhere that that that was partly due to the influence of uh woodcuts on his art except he wasn't cutting wood to get the woodcut texture he was drawing it with a pen he wasn't using a paintbrush or anything he was it was a pen jesus christ yeah god well i mean i think one do we have to introduce like one more person before we start talking about the themes that i think the one person we have to introduce is the most evil femboy in existence yeah griffith yeah griffith is like the head of the mercenary company that guts ends up being a

part of the majority of the golden age arc and then obviously we don't really worry too much about spoilers here because we're doing a review podcast you expect the story to be spoiled we have to to talk about the themes you know griffith then goes on to be like the main sort of antagonist of a lot of the rest of the, of the, of the manga. And Griffith is the most like charismatic person anyone has ever met. And also sociopathic, I guess, in terms of like everybody is only useful so far as they advanced his agenda of gaining power. That's kind of his deal, which we're going to talk about a lot,

but he is also, again, just the most fem boy swordsman you've ever seen in your life. You're actually not sure of Griffith's gender for a while, which is like intentional. And, uh, I mean,

in, uh, the bed of the Hawk is also the most like, it's just full of fem boys. So in the, in the early is also the most like just full of femboys In the early Golden Age stuff they do show him naked for a couple of seconds There are penises in drawn in Berserk but notably he's not

drawn with one for some reason You know he's just drawn with like a Ken doll smooth nether region Yeah basically as is Puck which is a flying which although is called an elf he's a fairy yeah puck's called puck is a weird little naked fairy that flies around with guts for a while who just reminds me of the little fairy from zelda yeah it exists to be uh that's probably inspiration directly for navi maybe who knows kind of equally as annoying uh

yeah kind of but puck's whole existence is to be the like me the counterpoint to guts a lot of people okay a lot of people despise puck a lot of people despise isidro which is a character that shows up later i like isidro because i kind of relate to him more than i do with guts puck is just annoying i don't relate to naked fairies sorry some people might that's not me i mean you know what's the uh what's the first sort of like main theme you you want to talk about now that you've sort of laid the groundwork for what's going on here yeah uh the first thing i wanted to talk about i guess was a lot of it is going to be about the duality between guts and griffith um and a lot of things like their approach to free will or meaning or war or what what i i'm pretty sure what like biblical characters kentarmere is

referencing or there's a lot of that yeah there's a ton of there's a ton of um christian imagery i mean that kind of leans into the original like dark fantasy dark fantasy stuff off and horror especially if he's getting like you we talked about a little bit before but um when you had mentioned hellraiser it's like using in some instances religious imagery in horror is that's like a staple yeah um i could here's a thing i i want to i've said this before i want to avoid cert talking about certain interpretations because they've been done to death i think one of the major ones is nicha i want to avoid nicha as much as i can and you can talk about it but the other one is the metaphysics of berserk um especially in its treatment of religion and demons and angels and what have you,

especially regarding to mysticism and transcendence, and that's its relationship to violence, sacrifice, and sex. I want to avoid all that because I think I thought, okay, this is a political podcast, so I'm going to talk about the politics because there's a ton of it in the Golden Age arc. It's literally just all court yeah intrigue uh entire arc is just it's it might as well be game it's game of thrones yeah it is game of thrones which if george rr martin drew from that i wouldn't be surprised like i and not anymore well i mean we talked we talked a little

bit about how much you know this like berserk has influenced dark souls you can complete that circle by talking about the fact that elden ring had george rr martin as true the dudes that helped write its lore true yeah exactly so like that that sort of inspiration does kind of come full circle and we know that he's at least aware of like the the milieu of this sort of thing so i wouldn't be surprised if he's read berserk yeah i honestly would not be yeah even though i do think his direction for elden ring was what if there was a big tree what's up i hate to break it to you but that was also taken from berserk sorry big tree yeah big ass tree there's a major plot point in the uh millennium falcon and fantasia arcs i think they're called there's just a big tree hell yeah how it gets there is a whole whole thing

lots of issues lots of chapters covered just how this tree got here and the role it plays in griffith's master plan i guess well that's a spoiler for you well you said you weren't going to read the rest of it yeah i probably will not for other reasons so you can tell me that that's i will but i'm baseline always interested even if i get spoiled yeah aren't you like anti don't care about spoilers or whatever or is that i i'm not a big like unless it's like oh my goodness this is a like a twist what a twist like if someone gives that away it's kind of a huge twist so no i won't we'll avoid it then yeah people who know what i'm talking about in the comments are pounding on

their desks right now look i think we often say things that make people hit their heads on their desks. Yeah. That's, you know. I do it for a living. I'm a journalist. Yeah. So first, we're mostly going to be talking about the first major arc, which is called the Golden Age arc. And then probably some about the second one, which is the Conviction. Yeah.

Conviction arc. Mostly the Golden Age one. And this is where we see the most like, this is Game of Thrones power politicking, right? Yeah. So Griffith is a commoner. He is not noble born. He is a walking rejection of the argument for genetic superiority that is inherent to the hierarchy of the medieval world. There's noble blood and there's not noble blood.

And there's somewhere in between. I'm sure some medievalist would love to discuss this with me or correct me on Twitter or something. Maybe they can point me to a blog post. I don't know. But Griffith is a commoner. And this is where I argue he understands the one thing about politics, which is that it is not about blood. It is not about what it is about court entry. But the number one thing it's about is being better at killing people than anyone else

or getting other people to kill people for you which he is yes this is the major this is the major distinction between griffith and guts griffith manipulates people sometimes he feels bad about it there's a particular scene where he's cradling the body of a 10 year old boy who for some some reason, he recruited into his mercenary band and asks Casca, Do you think I'm cruel? Which is one of the few times that Griffith expresses some kind of regret for his actions. Just about the only time. um their assumption something that um you had said um a while before about in that way griffith almost kind of being a liberal enlightenment figure yeah i would i would argue that he is

um i think there's in terms of like laying out i don't know the philosophical timeline of this to me griffith especially towards the end is a mix of a lot of things he's a messianic figure because like jesus he was a commoner he was not well jesus was said to be born of the line of david but that's not really where he started griffith started you can see in flashbacks he started as just a normal commoner uh just the prettiest commoner you've ever seen exceptionally beautiful uh and androgynous uh you know he's like i don't know he's like he's like david bowie kind of yeah he's kind of got it's a ziggy stardust over here leader of the band of the hawk yeah which uh not to think of it both in the sense of androgyny and in the sense of committing sexual abuse unfortunately there we go true uh they're more alike than you think yeah more like than you think um

yeah to me asra miller ass yeah as yeah he is asra miller basically yeah psychotic they them that's basically his whole character that is that is great yeah so i think he is a figure of the liberal enlightenment because although he was a messianic figure he's like napoleon he's just a guy who is so charismatic everybody wants him to be in charge and that's his superpower uh although you would argue i know napoleon kind of goes against the ideals and enlightenment arguably but it came out of it well yeah but i would also argue that griffith does that too yeah in a in a in griffith's um instance it's like whereas the genetic superiority is what's important to what he what he overthrows more or less yeah what he's trying to overthrow is almost this idealized

idea of a meritocracy where it's like where he's working his way to the top it's an intellectual superiority as opposed to a genetic one um and marshall's most importantly marshall superiority i would argue above all everything well yeah um well at the end that's that's a that's a grand statement in and of itself because like you could see it as being oh he's just smarter and blah blah blah and he's working harder but what's he working harder at? What is he using his intellect for? And it's specifically the amassing of violent political power.

Yes. He's not an ideologue. I called him a figure of the liberal enlightenment, but he's not an ideologue. He's only doing this for personal gain. That's the only motivation really anybody in this manga has. Really all he wants is a monopoly

on violence. Well, if we want to be perfectly honest. Literally the entire world is what he's after. This becomes clearer later in the story. Aside from philosophers like most of the leaders of situations that led to, in quotation marks,

liberal enlightenment, overcoming monarchies. He doesn't overcome. He becomes a dictator. He becomes a bonaparte. Well, yeah, becoming part of the monarchy.

There are military figures, but it's that idea of not wanting to supplant the hierarchy itself, but instead become part of it, despite being outside of it from the beginning. Yeah. You don't want to destroy the structure of power. You simply want to be on top of it. He's not interested in any of that. He's interested in understanding how politics works, then using that knowledge to manipulate it

for his own personal gain. He's the ultimate capitalist. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's like initially it's like he is the archetype of the liberal billionaire. Yeah.

I mean, early on he does quite literally sell his body for money. Yes, he does do that. It was for money, but it was also it yeah it was money that the band of the hawk needed um i guess i do we have to explain kind of what the band of the hawk is i feel like people they're a mercenary company yeah so uh guts back going back to guts

guts is a mercenary uh he's fought for his whole life one day when he's like 15 he encounters griffith and griffith says if i can beat you in a duel you belong to me lo and behold griffith does it and guts is so taken with this beautiful beautiful but psychotic they them that he was like you know what i could get used to this because he also you know the shit like comradeship and all that corny shit which he like the power of friendship which he like reluctantly allows himself to have a little bit of well they almost have to force him into it like pippin has to pick him up and bring him downstairs and give him a drink yeah there's a scene where a character called pippin who's a giant picks him up and

forces him to put his body by the campfire and then shoves an ale in his hand and you will have comradeship god damn it yeah and by the way he has a weird funny splash splash scene with griffith in the next yeah yeah they have like this you know the scene in the movies where like the it's like uh some movie it's like i don't know a family like an adam sandler comedy i'm pretty sure adam sandler literally had him seen like this in one of his movies where like they go to uh like a car wash and like the these hot cheerleaders rub their tits all over the windshield that's that's what this is like it's like the scene where the um bluto in animal house looks in on the sorority girls having a pillow fight that's what this water fight is between him and

griffith naked absurdly gay yeah absurdly gay and i mean there's like a there's something to be said here about i don't know this is probably this is beyond my scope uh but we even mentioned this kind of in the black company in our previous episode this must come up in dark fantasy a lot but like an almost psychosexual like control of people yeah yeah like um like griffith, like he has to know that people find him attractive. He does it on purpose. He does it on purpose. He acknowledges it. Yeah.

I mean, that's pretty explicit with someone like Casca. But even he, almost in the way that he talks to Guts, and the way that he breaks when Guts leaves. It's homoerotic. it's homoerotic it's like yeah it's like this dude is not only psychosexually like manipulating other people but has a psychosexual attachment to guts i read that as an insult to griffith's narcissism griffith is only happy when he can control other people and because guts is And because Guts is one of the few people that wants to stand outside society. Sigma male grinds it. Because Guts is a Sigma male who wants to go start his own company instead of staying and working for his bitch ass boss Griffith. You know, goes off into the woods, gets into crypto. Yeah, well, part of

Guts leaving is also like, he feels like he can't ever be Griffith's equal. It's because he wants to be Griffith's friend because Griffith openly said, I only consider my equal

my friend. And he cannot be Griffith's equal so long as he's serving under Griffith. I mean, Griffith says he kind of lays out what his equal is. And he's like, someone has to have ambitions as lofty as my own. And Guts is like, I don't have any. He's like, I want to leave to figure out what that is. Eventually. Yeah.

having he's like yeah i i want to leave eventually um yeah um i mean it takes uh you know a little bit of mass death for that to happen but yeah um what does this story before we go too far i do want to say though that like despite the like weird overtones of like homoeroticism guts is also like really weirded out by that and like it's like what are you like literally says what are you some kind of homo yeah for because when griffith says i own you and i want you guts is like oh what do you mean yeah are you gay and griffith's like what if i am listen he's a shonen bad boy he's not allowed to be gay i'm a shown in bad boy in japan in the 1990s in fairness to me he played that as guts being dumb well yeah he did but it was it was pretty funny because then again griffith plays it off like just like what if i am what are you gonna do about it i'd

beat you in a sword fight i own you which you can question again which again this is some like top gun level homoeroticism with like the two dudes having a sword fight for dominance like i'm sorry what kind of sword fight exactly exactly that's the point we'll never tell you have to read to find out i know how big guts we know how big guts his sword is so yeah i mean that's kind of the first thing it's just a metaphor with the yeah with the gigantic sword it's like what does that gigantic sword really stand for hamiura that's like probably the most obvious thing that stands out yeah i mean there's obviously again with the with the themes of this manga it's impossible to not read uh sexual theming into sex is everywhere like ginormous phallic swords and not just to titillate the viewer it's pretty essential in my opinion to the themes of the story yeah it is it

does actually remind me of the the quote from the you know the dish this show you can't talk about anymore which is um everything about everything is about sex, except sex, sex is about power. And I do think that kind of applies in Berserk. What's his name? That's from the fucking Kevin Spacey Netflix

show. Well, yeah, but that's not... He's not the one who said it. I remember it from House of Cards. He doesn't originate that. Yeah, it was Oscar Wilde, I think. Was it? Sure. That just shows you my cultural touchstones.

Oh, it fucking was Oscar Wilde. Damn. Okay, that makes it cooler. Thanks. Oscar Wilde was cool. Yeah, I was about to say. So we don't have to worry about referencing rap. We can reference Oscar Wilde. Yeah, so for going to say, so we don't have to worry about referencing Shratt. We can reference Oscar Wilde. Yeah, so for better and worse, sex and the undercurrents of it are throughout this story. But I think the first one you're talking about here is sort of the idea of Griffith as this liberal enlightenment figure who understands the system and works the system to his advantage uh to gain power within it as much as

possible yeah and his counterpoint is guts and guts his whole deal is simply i don't want to be a part of any system for any reason and is only with the band of the hawk because he's enchanted by griffith there's a lot of reasons part of it's part of it is because griffith griffith is his major reason but he's ultimately willing he's there for his friends and he talks multiple times about huh maybe this isn't so bad i could stick around here for a while i have something to fight for uh that decides he's had enough anyway he decides willing he's willing to hurt uh casca who loves him uh to make his own way well he's willing to hurt casca and griffith what's what's ironic about the whole thing is it's griffith's

understanding of how people work the one person you couldn't manipulate yeah well i think they do kind of point out that guts is doing what griffith would do if they were like switched places sort of yeah well that's a griffith is constantly pissing off nobles because he's a commoner who was elevated to a viscount simply by being so good at killing and guts did the same thing to them and he can't stand it yeah he can't yeah he can't stand it he's like he's so used to dealing with all these people in such a way that he sees himself as being above them that when someone actually does almost try to prove themselves his equal, even though he said that a friend could only be an equal, it's simply not possible. I'm making sure that Guts is his superior in sword fighting anyway. he beats it yeah he beats him he does for the listeners at home this

is basically a really pivotal moment where uh guts tries to leave griffith says no i own you you can't leave and challenges him to a duel and which worked the first time worked the first time this time guts did the one thing which griffith almost never does which is change griffith got better at sword fighting to the point that he could beat griffith by cutting clean through his saber and still being skilled enough to not kill him. He basically puts the sword to his neck and kind of forces him to his knees. And it's like, all right,

I did it. See ya. And then at this point, this is the turning point of the story, because then Griffith goes from being like the most calculated, professional, unflappable, unflappable person that the world has ever known earlier to still had the the frame of

mind to get guts to go take care of the problem even though he was shot yeah so he goes he goes from this and as soon as he encounters his like first real setback which is losing guts he snaps and immediately throws all of his hard work out the window like instantly he does this by uh sleeping with princess charlotte that's her name yeah uh who is shown to be jealously guarded by her father to the point of incestuous incest uh sure and uh some maid sees it and runs and griffith is imprisoned and he's tortured for a year and he's also castrated exciting yeah he's tortured in pretty much every way like and that's like oh small detail the little torturer in his left hand he has a speculum that speculum winning griffiths is bussy oh my god no not the fanboy bussy no yeah we'll fade that bussy well i won't the bussy the bussy but so like

this whole the whole golden age arc and up to like this this this break in the end of it is like you pointed out this this distinction between sort of the man who disrespect who disrespects caste and class society entirely entirely by rising entirely and rises through it to be at the top of it which is griffith and the man who completely disrespects class society by simply not wanting to ever be in it or constrained by it, who's guts. And you see this multiple times where like Griffith will be schmoozing and talking to counselors or whoever. And Griffith will just be like, get the fuck out. Or sorry, guts will be like, just get the fuck out of my way. I'm gonna go talk to the guy.

I don't give a shit who you are. And this it's like the dichotomy between the two are sort of lessons about deal how you deal with the power structures that are constraining you are you going to work inside of them to be at the top of them or are you going to break them by ignoring them and then at the end by walking away from them and if somebody tries to do something about it you cut them in half yeah yeah either one of them either way you have to amass an enormous amount of violent power there is no way to either rise through or cut through the structure of society this is an extremely anti-pacifist story yeah without amassing the

world's biggest body count and the greatest skill with a sword. And cause you're also explicitly led to look down on, I think anyway, people that maintain their power position through like skull dodgery, you know what I mean? Through like backstabbing and poison. Griffith does anyway. Griffith does anyway,

but like you're explicitly made to look worse upon someone like the counselors who do like, you know, court politicking, who do like, you know, backstabbings and all the little like court intrigue. Whereas it is you're much more supposed to see like the benefit of just being really good at murder. Yeah. And the one time that Griffith asks guts to do something to help him connive, which is, um, assassinate, um, add on.

Yeah. And I don't, I forget. I forget if it's, he's Adonis or his son is Adonis. I think it's Adonis. Okay. Adonis is Adonis.

It's like Adon and Adonis or the, the, the, yeah. Right. Right. And the one time he does that, which he resorts to child murder, is the son okay adonis is it's a don it's like adon and adonis or the the yeah right right and the one time he does that which he resorts to child murder which he doesn't really have a problem with later on because the children were monsters but regardless uh he definitely does murder like a 13 yeah oh he was younger than 13 it was like 10 yeah in in the moment yeah this is very much like a panic by the way a nephew yeah um it was a very panicked moment but the point i think the point is though that like guts is horrified that one

time he has to do some conniving one of the times he has to do some conniving for griffith yeah the time he has to do like backstabby stuff he doesn't really like it he doesn't it's not his style yeah he again everything i'll be walking into the front door and cut them in half like everything you learn about guts the entire golden age arc is that because he's so conflicted about multiple things in his past and everything else that's going on the only time he's only comfortable if you just put him on a battlefield facing down to 5 000 guys guys and just be like, I don't know, kill him or something. Yeah, that's the role he plays for Griffith.

He constantly butts heads with Casca, who is Griffith's lieutenant second in command, because she's constantly going after Guts for being reckless, which he is. But Griffith understands that Guts is just so good at killing that it's not really reckless yeah it's like griffith has has planned for that the fact that that guts will do silly shit and it's also that griffith doesn't care if his underlings die casca does yeah casca is the only one that cares if people die yeah which which of course is punished in a lot of ways throughout the rest of this story the only the only like morally almost unambiguously good people are mostly just the handful of good people in the band of the hawk all the other femboys in the band yeah the other femboys in the band stuff i want a little i want a moment of silence for my boy judo

the other fanboys in the band. I want a little, I want a moment of silence for my boy judo. Ah, yes, we can. All right. That's enough. Yeah.

There we go. But like, yeah, the, the only people in the story who you are sort of met to, like, I think can just feel unambiguously bad for are like, you know,

casket judo. Pippin. Like, sure, they're mercenaries, but like every time you see them, except Corcus, he can... Yeah, Corcus can go jump off a cliff. But like, these are the only people who are shown to be,

I would say, like, good. Like, Guts is our protagonist, but he's not a good guy. But like, Casca and these other people are and for this they are punished yeah i would like to point out um the thing with judo is that judo is a good character but i think in mira's eyes he's an example of how he's he's contrary to the niching ethics that Mira is laying out. Sure.

Because by his own admission, Judo has no ambitions. He's satisfied with where he is. I think he says at one point, I was never good at very much, but I always thought I was pretty good at throwing knives. That's his specialty weapon. He throws knives and dual wield swords. Yeah, that's his thing. His kind of thing is he says that like he realizes he's happy just being around other people who are more successful and

powerful than he is yeah he's a very go with the flow kind of guy and he does it like by his own admitted to his own detriment there's a point where he is dying and he's trying to rescue casca and he's sacrificing himself for her and he says he looks at her like with all big doe eyes and he says uh i prided myself on being such a smooth talker but even now i can't even like admit to my to her and then cuts out. Obviously he loved her, but he is willing to tell guts. Hey man, I know you're leaving, but why don't you get Costco to go with you? Like,

I'm sorry. He's also like, everybody knows everybody can see it, man. He's the only one, honestly, that like talks to guts, like a genuine,

honest person. Yeah. And it's like, I actually kind of get what you're what motivates you and here's something that i think will help you and help ever help most people if you bother to do it and so of course he's promptly ignored he was promptly ignored and killed off in a horrible way uh yes like the world itself is it's it's set up in a way that it's like being nice just sets you at a major disadvantage. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, that's not too far off from like the real world, but. I mean, but I think, I think that's, that's a theme talking to other people we've referenced earlier. That's one of the major themes of Game of Thrones is that being a good person automatically puts you as a disadvantage to everybody else around you because having moral convictions it hampers your ability to do what's necessary in a game where where power is the only thing that matters and yeah i think a lot of people take that well it is in uh morally nihilistic statement.

And I can tell you, I would argue he was a massive moral nihilist, as is Guts, because he scoffs at weaklings, essentially, is the word he uses. He scoffs at Puck for doing the right thing, and he doesn't intervene in the execution of somebody because he just simply considers him to be a weakling it's not and to him he doesn't it's the way of the world it's sort of the social darwinist thing although it's more complicated than that with guts's character and with nicha's philosophy which uh social dominance griffith is more of a social darwinist than oh yeah yeah for sure what was i saying it's ultimately i won't i i i i won't use words like good and evil except in specific circumstances when discussing berserk because i don't think that's what kintaro miura was about no for sure um i will say though i will probably use those sometimes in this discussion but i was also talking i was just talking on twitter with someone today about the

idea of like this was more about the idea of like separating the art from the artist and like what the art what the artist intended and what you take from it and there's i think the for me personally the way to analyze a work is you can analyze it on the level of what you think the the creator intended it to be but you're also completely free to divorce it from that. If you so wish and to take your own lessons from it, you just have to be aware that that's what you're doing. And that's sort of, this is all something I've been thinking about since we did our episode

about the Moorcock essay, Starship Stormtroopers about how many like sci-fi authors are just inherently reactionary and that like that's true but you can all you i well i think more cocks a little wrong is you can in fact interpret work a different way you just have to be conscious that that's what you're doing interpret it how you like because then humanities professors will be out of a job if you don't yeah so like we can definitely say that you know where you're coming from in these discussions is that the the author here definitively well i also agree with mira but

yeah like wouldn't say someone is good or or or evil where like me reading it interpreting it myself i would i would definitively label a character like griffith as an evil person yeah and to clarify that's not what the work would intend to clarify mira is i think a moral nihilist but he is still lays out in ethics there's a distinction between ethics and morality that he's making here um yeah absolutely people smarter than me have said that so i agree well again he's taking it all from nicha yeah just taking it all from nicha yeah um which i said has been done to death so i want to avoid it it's it would it would be obvious to anybody who seeks out like interpretations of um berserk on youtube if you just google what does what is yeah you will get bombarded with that you also get a lot of you'll you'll get bombarded with people who have

a juvenile interpretation of nicha but the cck philosophy like most people that talk about the video essay um by cck philosophy ikea yonas chica about berserk is a good formerly known as cuck philosophy but he actually knows what he's talking about because he i'm pretty sure he has a degree in it i mean we've also been nietzsche defenders on this podcast before and the fact that he's often misinterpreted by people doing bad faith readings of his work and the fact that bad people interpreted his work badly and that's not something that's his fault. Yeah. Berserk is tragedy, art, morality,

affirmation by Jonas Chica, CCK philosophy. Yeah. Was that when we talked about, Oh, when we talked about Nietzsche, that's probably the bonus episode. That's probably about everything everywhere all at once.

Yeah. That is. Yeah. We talked about it a lot there. I mean, I guess the quote Nietzsche regarded, bring out about the politics in the words of Zarathustra, the state is the coldest of all cold monsters.

That's like the whole point. That's almost the point of this arc. Pretty much the point, yeah. The entire point of the Golden Age arc? Yeah. It's cold-blooded. For Guts, it's passionate. For Griffith, it's cold-blooded, which I guess is another way they're distinguished.

Yeah. For Griffith, it's cold-blooded, which I guess is another way they're distinguished. Yeah. I mean, the two of them are almost polar opposites with the only exception being the pursuit of power. But it's just entirely for different purposes, through different methods, for different reasons. One is passionate. One is calculating. One is outside the structure. What is passionate? One is calculating. One is, you know, outside the structure. One is inside the structure, but like all of their methodologies and thought processes

are different. They just have somewhat similar goals, which is a good way to set up a foil character is you guys want the, they want the same thing, but they have entirely different methodologies of going about achieving that goal. But they have entirely different methodologies of going about achieving that goal. Yeah. And while we're on that topic, the different ways that they encounter power or really anything that restrains their freedom also applies to fate, destiny, and free will. Oh, yeah. We should talk about that because here's actually weirdly – we haven't actually talked about free will too much on the podcast yet.

I mean, we've had instances where we've encountered how different series approach fate. And that's going to be like important for us later because we were, I mean, we were planning on eventually doing an episode just about that. Yeah, we will eventually do an episode entirely about the concept of fate versus free will and how it's handled across multiple worlds well this would probably be a major landmark for that because it's the one that's another like major thing people notice it literally opens with um i think i i can't quote it right now i'd have to like find it the narrator whoever is speaking asserts that there is no free will. Which opens with the Golden Age with this.

So it's a hand holding a behelet, which actually in Japanese is behelet. It's a made up word, but it was translated as behelet because the translators thought the inclusion of lit sounded like lethos, the Greek word for stone. And it is a stone, technically. It's like a living egg stone interesting that's yeah it's literally just a puzzle box from hellraiser honestly it really is centibites yeah that's literally where he took it from um it's that um hellraiser and yeah hellraiser is also like important for an important landmark for understanding what he's

trying to say about transcendence and metaphysics and so on um uh in this world is the destiny of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law is it like the hand of god hovering above at least it is true that man has no control even even over his own will. So in the prologue, just the unnamed narrator, it's just Mira speaking. He's asserting that free will does not exist, regardless if there is a transcendental entity terminating it. At least within the first couple of arcs here, the only other entities above human that we encounter are all evil. They're not evil. They're just beyond human humanity very uh yeah very eldritch lovecraftian in a way they're and this is yeah this is one thing where kintara mir i think asserts a distinction well it did the non-existence of good and evil in favor of humanity and inhumanity oh gosh we're

kind of skipping ahead um well i guess we're we're in the free will thing okay so i wanted to say about free will is it directly says free will does not exist and this character called the skull knight who is a supernatural character who's the enemy of the god hand and of the apostles who are followers of the god hand although they're not actually ordered to do anything but they are it's complicated is explicitly puzzled by grift by guts living in spite of the fact that he was fated to die yeah with the mark um yeah it's not marked of sacrifice yes the god hand which is the most powerful group says we have no choice this is the laws of causality griffith decides agrees and says he doesn't have a choice so he does the horrible thing that we'll

talk about um even though it's horrible and even though he could argue he's merely self-interested but he also seems to simultaneously believe that he was fated to do it and he didn't have a choice guts openly scoffs at all of this he laughs at skull knight when he says fate what are you talking about i don't know what that means same which he doesn't i don't know what that means same which he doesn't intellectualize it he simply by being who he is fate bends to his will this is like the anti-witcher where like in the case of guts he's like i scoff at fate and then fate bends yeah before him whereas whereas gerald is like i don't agree with fate and then fate happens to him regardless um yeah this is what this is what we mean about how rich the discussion of free will is in the realm of fantasy especially um like it's rife with that and and this is a great example like this is such a unique example too. Did you know, if you are angry enough and good enough at killing the universal fate will

literally bend around you. Yeah. And I say that, but Miura is ambiguous about whether or not fate is actually real. Sure. It's just that the other character, the characters within the story believe that that's what's happening. That like guts is literally defying fate by continuing to exist.

Yeah. Which for some reason I always remember because the specific type of nerd I am, which is a quote from the game we reference constantly, which is Knights of the Old Republic to the Sith Lords, where the exile is referred to as one but one of the jedi masters is talking about the exile and says you know the future is a shifting thing and the exile cuts like a knife through it in that like there's there is fate and powers at work but if you are strong enough that in that instance you can is literally untethered literally became untethered from

fate by being you know either too strong or too powerful or something like that and i see a slight echo of that anyway with with guts whether you whether you know me or a book actually says that fate is real or not within the frame narrative the characters believe in a way guts makes the god hand pure conceit like it it makes it his essential like fuck this fate that means nothing to me spits directly in their face because these incredibly powerful unknowable beyond human entities act as though they are strictly beholden to it and guts is essentially just proving them wrong and it's like it's almost makes it's i feel like it's almost intentionally making the god hand look conceited like they're just making not even necessarily making things up but that they are they have essentially thought of

themselves as beholden to something that might not even exist um showing them as fallible yeah in the metaphysics of berserk they are not gods they are literally the hand of god and there is a god whether or not it's canonical that mayer explained what his idea of God is in the universe is debated, but I'm going to assume that he's just going to stick with it. There's a scene where Griffith encounters something called the idea of evil who identifies itself to him as God. Identifies itself to him. As God. And the idea of evil says. I did not create the world.

Humans created me. Because they felt they needed. Some kind of meaning in the world. To explain evil. So they came up with the idea of evil. And now it's like a psychic topo or something. But that's extremely. That's just straight ripping ripping from Nietzsche.

Yes, it is. Again, I know we don't really want to focus on it, but it's impossible to avoid it. It is, yeah. Just because of how entrenched it is. That we decided we needed that. Yeah, it's the... The egregore. Which is the distinction between griffith and guts because

guts doesn't need that he's just so angry that he makes it well yeah this is why guts is an uber mention the way that nicha actually meant it he makes his own way he's not defined by the values of others of the herd to use his terminology god God, it's like a Goku-Fujita thing, except the roles are reversed. Yeah, you're Griffith-Fujita, who's just like, no, we have to have politics and power and do all these things. And Goku's just like, what if I just punched really good?

I don't need your machinations. Yeah, and like I said- This is just way more self-aware. Bring you back to politics. And like, again, with Nietzsche, I mean, Nietzscheans like Michel Foucault realize this. Fuck all this genetic hierarchy, meritocracy. It's about power.

It's about who can kill. Well, I think that that right there, like where it's where, where Griffith does that to like, you know, the human kingdoms or whatever, as we just said, guts then does that to the power system that Griffith has become part of as the God hand. Because again,

if it's about who has power, the Griffith guts still isn't dead. And like Ketho said, that inherent power of him existing and continuing to exist puts to lie the the the systems of you know i'll call it you know power authority or whatever that the god hand is relying upon for their authority yeah it essentially just makes a fool of it yeah metaphysics itself guts scoffs at honestly it's so yeah i it's it's such bad respect because it's like it's one i don't know it's just the way that the world is set up you can see why no one else feels that way

like of course it's like the the the setting that they're in is so unbearably brutal it's like of course people would turn to something to find meaning in this like objective hellscape yeah um and gut still somehow finds a way to say i don't need it well i mean if i could swing a sword that big i don't think i would need it either to be honest with you oh and it it is i think explained in the i might be wrong about this but there is a part where skull knight um comes up to guts and he's like so you're still alive huh uh and he's still figuring out how that's even possible um metaphysically guts is crossing a line between human and non-human because for one he's not entirely subject to free will to fate

subject to free will to fate his skull knight concludes that there are some okay there are at least some things guts can simply choose to do it's partly because guts is branded so for in so um guts has a scar on his neck called the Mark of Sacrifice. Because that's on his neck, demons are constantly coming after him, which is part of why he's getting so good at killing. He's constantly doing it. Yeah. Somehow he's not dead from sleep deprivation alone. He has his Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours of demon killing. There's more than that, by gods. And because he is in...

He's branded. He's in a state called the Interstice, which means he's both in between... He's between the material world and the spiritual world, which they have a name for, which is explained by a witch character named shirke which i forget what she called it um there's like so there's three tiers to the metaphysics there's the world of idea which is the most basic one then the material world which is the world of

idea precedes and then above that is uh the uh spiritual world astral world that's it astral world um and that is the realm of spirit and mind but not idea for some reason i don't know why i'm having weird flashbacks to like my intro politics courses we're talking about the you know the world like of plato's like yeah the idea this is the world of ideal forms this is the world of the god this is where people are like that sort of thing yeah um the world of ideas like concepts yeah yeah which i don't know how i i'm i think bureau would have explained that more why the like shirke is wrong in having such a platonic view of the world it's based on hermeticism uh mostly so yeah i think that's where it comes from that's

how magic works in the world view of magic users in the world berserk which comes way later like after after the conviction arc yeah absolutely but anyway guts is in both the astral world and the material world and in neither he's between he's at the border he rides he rides the line between them that is one of that is skull knight's metaphysical explanation for how he is able to have free will and defy defy the god hands fact that they but if he is there he got there through pure force of will yes skull knight also rescued him from being sacrificed so he did don't let it be said that guts never had help he rescued guts and casca yeah yeah guts and casca which i guess i will have to start like explaining the story with uh with that because it's skated around it i love cool yeah well yeah

well i was gonna to save that more stuff after we got past sort of like the main politics and that sort of thing. We could get into the stickier stuff. So I don't know. I guess, can we do that now? Or I think we're done with politics. I think so.

I think I was just going to point out that like this idea of sort of being strong and powerful and like writing sort of the line between the real world and the realm of spirit or whatever you want to call it you know you see this in other like stories you know what i mean like lots of lots of protagonists in stories that have spiritual worlds or other worlds their whole deal is the fact that they're sort of oneists in stories that have spiritual worlds or other worlds their whole deal is the fact that they're sort of one foot in one and one foot in the other the avatar yeah i mean the avatars like that even in like a more base way our bonus episode this month we're doing about the movie blade oh my god yes that where our bonus episode is about blade. That's his deal. He's like,

you know, half in the vampire world, half in the human world. Right. That's his deal. Yeah. Um, if you look at someone like the witcher,

he's half in the world of like humans in that he deals with their politics and all that sort of thing. And half in the world of lone outsider that deals with monsters. Right. Well, half in the world of monsters, like half. Yeah.

He's like, he's half monster and half of monsters like half yeah he's like he's half monster and half human essentially half monster so this idea that like you're not it's expressed a little differently in all these stories but it's that idea that like these protagonists are able to do the things they do because they inhabit both worlds and i would be remiss if I didn't mention something I've talked about with people who are into more sort of spiritualism and that sort of thing.

Then a lot of pre-modern societies, that was the role that someone like a shaman played in your tribe was somebody who existed here in the physical world, but transcended into a different one. And they were the, that tribe's connection with that spiritual world. And those people were special for that reason. And it's not just a very old concept.

It's not just pre-modern. I mean, I'm sure I'll get Catholics who are theologically disagreeing with it, but essentially a priest is fundamentally an emissary to the divine. Yeah. And I mean, that is, I guess, even more specifically the pope right yes yes oh yeah yeah and i mean yeah someone can get mad in the comments all they want or whatever but that's just true yeah especially yeah the pope is literally supposed to be like the connection of god on earth yeah yeah yeah but you piss off the tradcast when you point that out look ironically yeah no i mean i'll piss them off for other reasons for plenty of reasons Yeah, but you piss off the Tradcast when you point that out. Look. Ironically.

Yeah, no, I mean, I'll piss them off for plenty of reasons. That's safe. I'm not worried about pissing them off. Yeah. God, oh no, we're going to get the Red Scare girls on us. Yeah, fascism fundamentally requires self-contradiction. So no matter what you say, you will piss them off. Yeah.

Yes. But I just, I want to talk about that a little bit. Yeah that yeah guts his whole thing is this riding the line between two worlds and that is a a fairly reoccurring trope among all sorts of stories that i can you know i can think of off the top of my head from ones where it's just stuff you see and stuff you don't see and like that an actual other spiritual uh in i mentioned it before our mythical lost episode uh children inhabit that space over the fact that they're more in contact with dust like in the golden compass the fact that children can see dust and are more affected by dust and their demons that's because they they are more closely inhabiting both worlds that of of you know the enchanting power and that of where humans live

and once you become old you lose the ability to do both things. So it's just fun that that's like a very, very common recurring thing. Yeah. If you want any philosophy book recs, the two ones that I think deal with this, that theme the best is Noel Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror. That's spelled N-O-E--l and i think one of those letters have noelle carol or parrot is it paradox to the heart yeah philosophy of horror or paradoxes of the heart yeah the e has an um the two dots above it um yeah um yeah yeah um the other one is mark fisher's the weird and the eerie um somewhat somewhat vibes

with um noel carol's theories on this um but that idea of betweenness is most certainly central to noel carol's interpretation of horror movie monsters uh not not fitting neatly into any kind of category which i would also additionally argue fits with um lovecraft's notion that the source of all horror is the unknown yes yeah definitely it's just that to lovecraft the unknown was his neighbors yeah to him the unknown was jews despite his wife being a Jew. Oh, yeah, that's right. As Moorcock said, we don't have her opinion. So we can't really know if that changes his mind or not.

So, yeah, let's transition now. And also the Irish, I should note. Yeah, wow. Let's transition to the other thing we've danced around so far that we had to put a content warning in here for, which is the other major theme of Berserk is violence, but specifically sexual violence. Also ritualized violence.

Yeah, ritualized violence. And it is a big deal in this story. And I would say that my main criticism, or not criticism of the story, it's just, again, it's a personal thing that bothers me, is that within Berserk, there's violence of all kinds. There's violence of basically every stripe you can imagine. To quote the only Greek philosopher, Nietzsche liked, war is the father of all and the king of all. Yes. That's Heracles.

Oh, you're right. That is. God, you're making me remember the one class I took on the foundations of political theory. Good Lord. But what I don't like, what bothered me about it, is that of all these forms of violence, they all serve various purposes aside from sexual violence,

which as far as I can tell, and you sort of mentioned this, exist only within this, within the story, mostly as a way to add sticker shock to the story. as a way to add sticker shock to the story it doesn't necessarily like fit with the the themes and the narrative of the story aside from a way to make you go oh my god that's horrible yeah um the one of the most horrible instances of sexual violence that occurs before the eclipse which is the event we're leading up to uh there's a monster who's an apostle called uh wild who's like a monkey man like so after griffith uh snaps sleeps with princess charlotte then gets locked up and tortured for that they go the old band of the

hawk goes on a rescue mission to break him out uh in the course of running from the what are called the black dog knights which is like they send all kinds of like weird assassins after them who are like have the coolest character designs and then are killed off immediately they never show up again yeah can i just i want to throw one side note in here that i'm guessing is something that becomes an anime like an anime or manga trope is that like every band of people you come across are called like the purple rhino mega knights yeah and then you're like we're the band of the magnificent whale and then like they all have names like that and they all have like names for their special attacks and they'll just get killed by guts.

Yeah. I think. Even at the time that was played that for a joke. Also a recurring gag. Oh yeah. Yeah. Armstrong. That's his name.

Yeah. Yeah. Where he's. Yeah. Yeah. It's been passed. Stone for generations. Word for word.

That is taken from one, like a couple of characters, I think. Yeah. I just, I had to sidetrack word for word. That is taken from one, like a couple of characters, I think. Yeah. I just, I had to sidetrack just for that. Clearly just a trope thing of like every other, like the band of the Hawk kind of seems like, all right, there could be a mercenary company called that,

but then they get like increasingly more esoteric and weird. The further on you go in the story, it's like the band of the whale. And you're like, all right. Then it's like the purple dragon nights. And then it's like, I'm going to, I'm'm gonna emphasize that this is all still post jojo well yes i mean yeah but no it's it's just and that's that's a long-running manga like manga and anime trope not just to be have names like that but to like have a name for their

special attacks move again again for for like a normie weeb like me my first thought is the fucking ginyu force freezes ginyu force you show up and have like a coordinated dance for their little intro there's something so unbearably it's hard to say the word charming in regards to berserk because it's berserk um it has some funny moments it's one of its light-hearted silliness well that's that's the thing about about i think a lot of things that have to do not just with berserk but some of the properties that have gotten a lot of ideas from berserk it's like there's an element and this is something that i always harp on all the time. Oh, it's Big Hat Logan.

Yes, it's to my personal tastes is what makes stories like Berserk, in my opinion, some of the best just ever. Because what you do is you have this incredibly serious everything. serious everything but you also have moments of humor that point out in a way the absurdity of everything you're looking at um and it's like you see it in berserk plenty of times with people showing up and calling themselves the purple whatever and they're like oh here's my special attack seven thousand dot and you're like this is just dopey as shit but then it's all set within a setting that takes itself very seriously but at least addresses the fact that it is insane yes all these all these purple rhino knights that their special wall cleaving attacks then getting killed by guts in a single swing is very much like indiana jones killing the sword yeah yeah yeah but then if great joke you see that's

yeah it's a good top 10 jokes yeah hi watchmojo.com this is the top 10 jokes it's like that's that's the sort of thing that like again that i notice in a in a game like dark souls with big hat logan um or or like the fact that you can have a ginormous finger in elden ring that flicks people and you're like this it's like everything else about this is so austere and it's like the third best weapon in the game yeah it's just it's just like it's like how can you somehow perfectly balance the absurd and the absolutely austere at the same time? Sorry, that was a digression I just had to make.

That was a great digression, actually. But anyway, to summarize. Again, if people just don't realize how much I enjoyed this, I'm going to keep reading it. That's the selling point of anything for me yeah so anyway to take it back guts casca pippin and judo are fleeing um with griffith's decrepit useless body he's still alive he's just like it's there's a point yeah barely um like he had his tendons cut so he can't even stand he can't even hold a sword. He has no tongue. Yeah, he has no tongue. He can't even speak. He, yeah, so they're running. And they get chased by, like, the mercenaries, the thugs for hire. They're like, your majesty, you can't seriously think about deploying them.

These are the Black Dog dog knights led by wild who is an apostle anyway they like the guts in the gang get helped out by like some nice charming farmer family with like cute kids uh and then the black dog knights come along the throw the little kid in a fire rape everyone kill everyone that is not female then cut up their bodies and then stick them on the end of their spears this is simply gratuitous i would argue yeah yeah because again the only purpose of it is for shock yes i was about to say you could just add them right up and then be like bad things are going to happen and then cut and then later see even if you went as far as seeing the bodies on the spike

like it's like that's not more gratuitous than any other violence we've seen in this yes up to this point um like one of the first things you see in the first chapter prologue ever is like a baby um in the same scenario so it's like it wouldn't have been any more gratuitous to do that but he had to go the whole nine yards yeah and i yeah this is i guess sort of a distinction about agency everybody guts kills for the most part is not helpless yeah he kills a 10 year old and he's horrified about it then you know it's bad the violence that is looked down on in berserk is the one that's done by the powerful against the completely powerless the these victims of the black dog nights have absolutely no agency whatsoever

they're side characters they're killed off and in that, it is an insult to the real life violence of rape to treat it so cavalierly. I think it can be done well. If you know the movie, The Nightingale, that's an excellent movie that deals with sexual violence. And one of the major things is it does not completely rob the victim of that sexual violence of her agency. The whole movie is about her agency actually you know honestly we might need to look into more just as like a palate cleanser eventually yeah finding an appropriately written story because i think sexual assault is just something that fantasy a lot of times especially honestly it's probably because so much of it's written by and for but yes that you just end up with this let me let me get in on my my little horse now then about uh mirrors uh how women are depicted in Berserk. I've warned you about this.

The spoiler is not good. They are either portrayed as being like powerless little like maidens that can do absolutely nothing and then

just get killed by being near the action. by being near the action by near being near the story happening. Like in the prologue, he like gets, gets a ride with like the preacher and his daughter or granddaughter or whatever on the wagon. And she just gets killed and then turned and kills the grandpa or whatever.

So women in this story are either like just this powerless little waifs that can do nothing like the count's daughter or whatever or uh princess charlotte the one counterpoint to that is casca who does have agency and who is a renowned fighter uh in her own right but then half the time we see her, she's being debilitated or downplayed or eventually sexually assaulted. Yeah. As a purely objectifying thing. Almost happens twice before it finally happens for Rue. Yeah, he like almost happened.

Yeah. When she's 11, it almost happens. And Griffith saves her. Yeah. Kind of. when she's 11 it almost happens and and griffith saves her yeah kind of cut well she gives her the means to save herself which is sort of like the way it's the way one of the ways griffith understands power is that he manipulates people but he distributes the means of violence to people everyone by giving them training and weapons then in the in the in the fight where you know guts ends up fighting the hundred like, she's almost sexually assaulted a couple of times. Oh, yeah.

And threatened with it constantly. And then eventually in the story, it happens twice at least. Once from Griffith slash Mento. Femto. Femto. And then once later on in the next arc by guts. Yes. And it,

to me, it is a very poor choice to have your one female character with agency. Who's like us, who has agency in the one thing that matters which is the capacity to kill is then gets like depowered in such a way that she becomes purely like a sexual object and after griffith assaults her she said she's literally infantilized she loses her memory and becomes like a reborn child and to me that's like an insulting way to handle like the one woman who had power so far in the story. Yeah, she yeah, she's well, some powerful women show up later. Yeah, I can only speak to how far I've gotten, obviously.

um yeah i can i can only speak to how far i've gotten obviously yeah they're all witches but uh shirke is treated weirdly sexually in her own way by mira but honestly that's just isn't shirke also like 12 yes she is yeah isu isu joe gropes her it is like it's sort of like the thing where like you know when the trope about like the male protagonist falling on the breasts of the female character yes sort of does that yeah sort of like that

yeah and again just with like treating female characters even Casco when she's like in, in combat, leading all these troops, there's one big important fight where she almost dies. It's right before the fight with a hundred men. Like she almost dies and is unable to fight off this night. She should be able to be because she's on her period.

And it's like a major plot point. The fact that she's on her period and essentially like immobilizes her she's like oh i can't possibly fight in this condition it's half joke too yeah it is really funny period joke i think i think again like just from my own understanding and consumption of especially 1980s and early 90s manga like this might be some of the more egregious examples but but this was a across the board occurrence yeah pretty much in all of it's weird to think that dragon ball z was the least a dragon ball might have been the least bad about it that like that fucking master roshi was one of the least bad characters but um yeah but it's like it obviously it's not excusable but it's also it was unfortunately also pretty commonplace at the time and of course with how extreme

berserk was even relative to the other things coming out at the time even that was extremified um yeah i just it just for a story that otherwise has a lot of like powerful and important things to say the fact that it also has this sort of like also here on the shelf with it is like hot women on their periods are silly they They can't do anything. Also, this one woman that you care about who's had agency, we are going to remove that agency through sexual violence. And then that's it. And every other woman you encounter is basically a child. The one woman we meet who isn't a child and who has agency is the queen, and Griffith murders her.

There's also that one member of the God Hand who's definitely feminine. Yeah. Who, by the way, is known as the Horror Princess of the Uterine Sea. That is one of her titles. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. Real, what's the term? Madonna horror complex?

Yeah. But I mean, you know, long time listeners to the podcast will know that this sort of specific trope is what turned me off of finishing the Witcher series because of what they do to Ciri. Yeah. I didn't read it, but I listened to that episode. What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah. yeah i didn't read it but i listened to that episode what the fuck yeah yeah i would argue i would argue like despite all of what muera does in this where it's just gratuitous and unnecessary and like objectifying and infantilizing i would argue that the way that siri is

could be worse well i mean siri is in her case this is cartoonish yeah siri siri's is literally more realistic because she's like is about to be assaulted is saved and then the person who saves her assaults her and then they start a relationship and then even when that person is killed and everyone is like hey that person like assaulted and groomed you she's like no i don't see it that way because that's what happens to victims of like grooming and assault it's just too close and then the rest and then the rest of the story is everybody trying to get siri to fuck including her own dad which another trope that carried that is in a handshake meme between The Witcher and Berserk is dads really weird about the virginity and childbearing capacity of their daughters. That's – I mean that's true of how women's sexual and capacity – sexuality and capacity reproduce was controlled in medieval times and now.

Yeah, I'd best, talk about like, you know, after Griffith sleeps with Princess Charlotte, the king loses his fucking mind and basically says outright that like literally the only thing he still had was his daughter's

virginity. That sends a shudder through my spine. That is like, that's not even like a subtext. Well, that being said. That's not even subtext. That's text. That there being said,

however, is not presented as a good thing. No. No, it's not. But this is my point, though, is even though it's not presented as being good, he's presented as being bad for feeling this way it's not the only time this sort of attitude is presented and mira does go out of his way to

not make that many of the other female characters power relationships that much different and like so that that was the thing to me that i found off putting personally yeah was the the that this sort of infantilizing and powerlessness of women and then the direct depowering through assault of the one powerful woman you encounter yeah so to explain this because i think we have to talk about that how this works in the story um which is why yeah like the warning is this is pivotal to the story it is impossible to understand what's happening without this so if you don't want to see any of that don't read Berserk if it doesn't bother you

read Berserk because it's great otherwise anyway so after they run Griffith re-encounters something that he's had for something with a long time which is the Red Beharrit I think it's like the Beharrit of Kings it's called this is just the

puzzle box from hellraiser it summons these entities that we've been talking about which are called the god hand which are the leader void and his various other members which are uh slan who is the female who's the girl uh that's basically her role who is the female, who's the girl. That's basically her role. Who is basically naked. Yeah, she's basically naked. Yeah, sexuality is integral to her character, which I think this says a lot of profound things about sexuality,

but I won't get into that right now. Yeah, so there's Void, Slan, Ubik, and Conrad. Either Ubik or Conrad is just butterball from hellraiser void also sort of resembles um uh chatterer uh none of them resemble pinhead in any way which is weird that's probably intentional yeah to draw people away from the immediate comparison slan kind of looks like medusa she has snake hair or tentacle hair actually yeah um which god the manga and tentacles don't get me started and there's there's some besides hellraiser there's a lot of references to hr giger who designed the alien for the alien franchise also says a lot of things about sexuality and rape for yeah so satire is a artistic uh landmark for the design of the god hand and some apostles the god hand are literally the hand of god there's five of them griffith is

incarnated as one of the god hand in order to become a member of the god hand or an apostle which is like a step below god hand not as powerful but they're like humans that kind of look monstrous in their human form but they can transform into monsters um these are all of guts's enemies in order to become an apostle or god hand you have to have a behedit and that can only be fated to come into your hands and you have to desire to sacrifice something that is truly important to you what's important to griffith you guessed it the entirety of who just rescued him the entirety of the band of the hawk they're all marked with something called the brand of sacrifice they're all marked with something called the brand of sacrifice and that gives the apostles permission i guess and also the uh they sort of choose to but they're like

um they quote um the book of the law by alistair Crowley. Do it thou wilt should be the whole of the law. That is the only command that the God hand gives to the apostles. But they also are given permission by them to sacrifice, which means they kill everyone horribly and eat them and tear them apart. And Mira delights in drawing the every character you love being killed horribly they're just gratuitous if you're thinking about like the order at which stuff is released in in the pre in the the prologue stuff you do meet griffith yes in the form of which is in the form of yeah and it's like he's doing this in a way to kind of make you hate him yes um it's like this is the this is the moment where you realize why guts went from being someone who liked griffith to being someone who tried to kill him the next time you saw him this is

guts this whole thing now his whole thing is now is murdering griffith initially then it becomes about protecting casca yeah so the the where we tie this together probably with the horrible things that happened is specifically what happens to griffith aside from everyone else in the band of the hawk being torn apart and tortured and eaten is the the final bit the the sort of cherry on the top here is specifically what happens to Guts and Casca at this like reckoning when Griffith becomes part of the hand of God. And this is why sexual violence is gratuitous.

Because the sole reason, okay, so Griffith takes the form of Femto and then holds Griffith down, Guts down and makes him watch Griffith rape Casca in front of him. Because it's the one thing that Guts actually cares about. Guts actually cares about.

He doesn't do this. The fact that he does it to Casca is entirely incidental, which is partly why it's gratuitous. It's just to hurt guts. That is the sole reason he does it. Yeah, and that's what breaks Casca, essentially turns her into an amnesiac.

Breaks her mind, yeah, which trauma doesn't work that way. Well, it kind of does, but whatever. It's a manga, who cares? This is where it's at. It's like the sexual violence is that it's the most gratuitous. Yes, because Casca was this character. Again, we talked about this huge, badass, important character, important love interest simply becomes one of many, one of many tools on the torture rack that Griffith has in store for guts. Yeah.

has in store for guts yeah also i feel like there's probably something to be made about the fact that earlier on when they're talking about their relationships uh casca says that all she really wants to do is be the the sheath to griffin's griffith's sword oh wow subtle imagery yeah real subtle there um but yeah then at this point that uh guts and casca are rescued by the was it the skeleton knight skull knight skull knight yeah are rescued by skull knight yeah aren't sacrificed so i didn't miss the casca not actually get branded for sacrifice yes she was branded above her left breast because of course that's right but and she constantly tears her shirt off so you can see her breasts and then you can see the mark of sacrifice. Oh yeah.

You do have, you do have to see her titties a lot. Like you just, it's necessary. But that is interesting to me though. Cause like guts avoids dying to the brand because he's very, very angry. I don't,

I guess maybe I missed it, but how specifically is Casca avoiding not dying to the brand of sacrifice? So yeah, part of it is guts. He will fight off every, I missed it. But how specifically is Casca avoiding not dying to the brand of sacrifice? So, yeah, part of it is guts. He will fight off every, um, dark entity,

which all dark entities or spirits are attracted to the brands, not just apostles. They're below. That is like ghosts that live in a hanging tree, stuff like that. Yeah. The skeletons that pop up out of the ground, pop out of the ground.

Um, because you know it's dark fantasy like whatever first off they survive solely thanks to skull knight he rescues them then they are taken to the lair of uh this cool old blacksmith guy yeah who also says a lot about meaning in life because he said he they're like rickert who's a like a 10 year old kid asked in the band of the hawk asked him about meaning i think and he says the old guy says well uh when i was old enough to hold a hammer uh one was put in my hand and now i'm 60 and i have not stopped holding this hammer. That's his deal in life. Casca is kept safe by going inside a cave that where elves used to live and their magic protects her. Also, at some point, Shirke does some magic to negate the power of the brand.

So things can happen without constant fights. Gotcha. Well, that needs to happen for the story to progress. That's one of his power ups. Yeah, that needs to happen for the story to progress. That's one of his power-ups, yeah. That needs to happen for the story to progress. Also, why else introduce a magic user? Unless they're going to do magic. I figure what he's going to say after this.

Do you want to say anything before we move on to the conviction arc? Nothing? Man, if only that eclipse hadn't happened, Griffith just would have killed himself and we'd be done. Yeah. Ah, but it was fated for him to be there during the eclipse dang nabbit anyway so yeah let's let's finish off this arc here through the conviction arc let's yeah what's what's going down so this is my other favorite arc to get to it you have to skip over

the lost children arc i think it has a lot to say the lost children arc but we're going to skip over it because people don't like it and there's more to say about the tower of conviction so um this is where mira shits on religion the most specifically the catholic church and its role in medieval society medieval european society religious characters who are variously shat on or reform or what have you also more examples of women being treated horribly because they introduced a character farnese who famously nearly gets raped by a demon horse yes yeah like literally a horse yes that is a demon a horse yeah the evil spirits and demons possess animals and like people and they make them into zombies or like demon dogs or whatever,

which is mixed for great horror art. I love mirrors mirrors art here, but again, he can't help himself. He can't help himself for making a demonic rape horse. Uh, Oh, uh,

guts is missing an eye in an arm at this point. And he has, he gets an upgrade where he gets a cannon in his arm, which is like, hell yeah, man. Yeah. Which is like. Hell yeah man. Yeah. Which you know. Anyone who's played.

Final Fantasy 7. You have now combined. Barret. And Cloud Strife. Into a single character. I mean he uses the cannon. In the. In the prologue.

Yeah. Yeah no. I'm just saying that. This reminds me of Barret. Who has a gun for an arm. Yeah. Oh yeah. But.

Anyway. So to briefly summarize this. It. Oprett who has a gun for an arm yeah oh yeah but anyway so to briefly summarize this it opens with a character named father mosgus who is a bishop i guess oh he's a inquisitor he hunts heretics which are also real here they're not like a category of person that was simply invented by the church to persecute jews they actually do exist and have like have like weird orgies and stuff yeah um actually pretty much do worship satan literally um although it's sort of presented as simply actually no they're a baby gets chopped up and eaten and put in a stew and that one i forgot i was gonna say it's like presented as like i was gonna say it's presented as an equally valid option for religious people to take but then they chop up a baby and kill it so all really the miro's thing is all religion is bad then yeah so he's a heretic hunter he's going

to something called the tower of conviction which is a torture chamber for extracting confessions out of heretics um a lot of people hate him because he kills people for no reason horribly and he's very self-righteous about it which is just the cherry on top of being annoying you will talk about how much mirish like very unsettling shits on religion here yeah it's not again this is one of the times where he's not doing subtext he's simply doing text there's a lot of refugees this is one of the times where he's not doing subtext. He's simply doing text. There's a lot of refugees in this one spot who are simultaneously being persecuted and helped by the church, which is, I guess, an interesting point. Also, they worship a bird that's been nailed to a cross instead of Jesus.

I should mention that. I think it's a dove, which, yeah, whatever. It's a very, I mean, again, art, the art is great. The art is great. That's all I'll again art the art is great yeah it is great that's all i'll say the art is great yeah the reason they're there is because griffith has a master plan well he's now he's femto he has to be reincarnated in another similar ritual a pseudo ritual because something called pseudo apostles also show up here if it couldn't get more complicated. All the dark evil entities kill everybody in the camp to sacrifice them, so Femto can be reincarnated back into a physical body out of an astral body, because in the astral world, he can't actually do anything to the physical world,

and his ambitions are far beyond the astral, back in the material. Seems kind of lame to me, you're already an all-powerful god but not really powerful and yeah he's incarnated from femto into griffith again specifically a incarnation of him called the white falcon or the white hawk who is a prophesized messianic figure this is all basically the book of revelation also yeah that's the antichrist yeah that's the thing of it i skipped some things into it but uh i talked enough that the middle parts will get to guts is going to the Tower of Conviction because Casca ended up there somehow. This is one. Yeah, she gets taken there because the person who's watching out for her doesn't do a good job.

She gets captured. Something like that. Yeah, something like that. I think we're going to hear it. Yeah. The one cool thing I like this is it centers sex workers as heroic, except for Nina. I kind of have a crush on Nina, but I won't get to that.

So the leader of these sex workers is Luca. And Luca is taking care of Casca because they're just like, oh, this is a person who can't handle or take care of

herself so we'll do that and uh also everywhere um casca goes she's followed by evil that kills people because she has a brand yeah um and luca is what i will call an egalitarian um she sort of makes her way through generosity and non-contention she avoids conflict and she takes care of everyone in the camp by buying soup for them with like the jewels and shit that she gets from working as a sex worker so interesting um portrayal of women there where specifically sex workers are portrayed as heroic which is a which is again that's good at least i mean i won't say it's good or bad it's me i probably didn't think like too progressively about sex workers i think what he's doing there is simply inverting it i don't i don't think he's the kind of guy to say like oh you can't just have sex that's out of marriage but like um i think he's simply in

i mean really doing a very christian thing which is um portraying like sex workers is like being people you should uh i don't know be nice to yeah i mean jesus famously was pretty cool or like pretty cool with helping out sex workers yep yep sex workers uh don't say that about mary magdalene because it's sort of like a medieval legend tradition not actually in the bible oh yeah well i don't remember that specifically yeah which is you know we one thing we've realized uh throughout the time doing this podcast is that like we actually should probably be way more familiar with specifically Catholic beliefs across

time because, holy hell, so many of the books we read deal a whole lot with Catholics. They're either by or about Catholics. They're by Catholics or about Catholics. Basically all of them. Yeah. You need a degree in theology to understand uh freaking canicle for lebowitz too but that's kind of yeah you've got

like well you've got the major ones everyone knows, like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, but then like Cataclysm for Leibovitz, or even, again, like I talked about before, The Golden Compass. All of these stories are either written by Catholics or written about Catholics in one way or another. Which is another cool thing, because Miura is also like, let's throw in some Hermeticism in there. Let's throw in a slightly different religious tradition in there yeah a little little sort of a slightly different like religious tradition a little bit yeah make it a little more exciting yeah

all encompassing yeah so like what is our with this this can this conviction arc what is what do you think is sort of the major sort of like political angle that miura is taking in this arc or is it not nearly as direct as you can see in like the golden age arc um well first off the it's not so much about how politics the lifeblood of politics is lifeblood to that specifically when it is out of people it's obviously it's like hits you over the head with the religion bad thing um but of course it's like you know more complicated than that it's also why is religion bad specific so it has the thing about it providing a justification for pure sadism in the form of the inquisition's torture of people and i think it gets in it gets more into pseudo-sexual thing especially with farnese

farnese is i think um the major thing here she is a sadist so farnese is sort of like this trust fund baby that is inserted into a paramilitary church organization to hunt down... Holy Iron Chain Knights. Holy Iron Chain Knights. So, the Holy Iron Chain Knights have been in the background this whole time following Guts because they're convinced he's responsible for a massive amount of human slaughter because when you kill monsters they turn back into people that they were it's like werewolf werewolf rules and they're like oh the infamous black swordsman is killing all these people we have to apprehend him so they're following him That's how they end up here. And that's the role Farnese plays where she's sort of converted out of her previous worldview and into a new one, which focuses on guts is so cool. I think there's something on.

I think this guy's on to something. I'm going to follow him. Yeah, because it's sort of explained as like starting off as a sort of inquisitor who enjoys like burning people at the stake yeah and she gets sexual gratification out of it specifically and sort of it it even the light of other people burning is a light in the darkness for her yes but like literally just watching guts do guts things which is like fighting demons she's like oh maybe i've been wrong this whole time guts is pretty cool my new religion is that guts is cool yeah and this this does get this does get into nitro specifically in his genealogy of morals where he criticizes uh

criticizes christianity as being a sort of self-flagellation literally a sort of sadomasochism um which de los talks this about this more in coldness and cruelty which is specifically about sexual sadomasochism the nietzsche's thing in the geology of morals was about christianity i should have had my copy here damn it whatever i'll yeah so the thing is so far nice is this trust fund baby from a noble family who because she is a virgin is put in charge of the holy iron chain knights even though she has no martial abilities whatsoever her main thing is is she likes burning heretics and she does it a lot and she does it out of her sadomasochistic tendencies she flagellates herself topless and also i think masturbates while she's doing it in some part sure why not man why not

well yeah i think i think she straight up did no i'm not saying you're wrong i'm saying and that's more towards me or or i'm just like yeah sure man why not oh okay and i would argue that she sort of she desires a sort of self-dissolution or self-destruction uh within sex and like evangelion explores this a lot too when you have sex with somebody you're metaphorically becoming one with them and this is tied to mysticism because the fundamental precept of mysticism across islam or buddhism or catholicism is a sort of ecstatic self-dissolution um which again shows up in evangelion constantly i'm not smart enough for us to ever cover evangelion it would be a bonus episode anyways it's technically not literature it wasn't yeah so the the way i can best explain this is there was

a uh catholic writer and saint and ecstatic mystic named saint teresa of avila from spain and she would basically pray for long periods of time then have visions where she felt she was becoming one with the divine and this also had an erotic dimension because she described it as ecstatic and this becomes explicit in the sculpture by the italian sculptor um bernini where she describes one of her famous visions where an angel is stabbing her with an arrow a fire with the love of god the erotic dimension is explicit in her face she's making an orgasm face. Bernini deliberately did this. That's the best way I can explain it.

And that's Farnese's deal. To him, to her, religion and mysticism and sex are all about destroying herself so she can have some sort of ecstatic unity with the divine. have some sort of ecstatic unity with the divine um which albert camus argues is the sort of one thing that humans are always striving towards and i'm not making this up this mostly comes from uh george batai's book eroticism which i haven't actually read i just read summaries of so yeah that's farnese's deal and i think that's one thing that Mira is trying to say about those three things, which is the individual, the individual sex and mysticism and religion in general. sword the guy with a big sword is cool yeah suddenly we're into like you know the esoteric communion with the divine through the you know through the pain of pain of flesh and you're like that is exactly what it is yeah it is literally exactly what it is it's very much like looking at a thing and then like following the string up and you're like oh oh this is this is understanding

that marira it was apparently incredibly well-read. Well, yeah, I think that's the one thing you really do have to take away from this, is that Miura had a vast trove of knowledge and influence to pull from and didn't shy away from making all of it a part of the narrative. No, not at all. It's a philosophically dense dense series just probably why it took so damn long for him to draw it

who knew that pictures could make you think so hard see I was prepared yeah see I this is okay occasionally we seem to flip flop a little bit on the show between like which one of us is going into a series blind like having no idea of what's going on in it and this was this one was

my turn and boy well again one of the last times we did this was was the witcher yeah how does this keep happening to me everything we blindside you with is like tailor-made tailor-made to make me upsetty i think the other thing that's relevant to themes is the pagan cult that's in here the great goat yeah the great goat who just started out as a guy in a costume but because of becoming a pseudo-apostle became an actual great goat. Again, once again. According to Isidro, the horny goat. Lol.

Yeah. Who's this guy? Oh, this is just the great goat. Oh, okay. Yeah. Which, some interesting thing, he did sort of base it off of accounts of the Black Mass, where you did kiss Satan's penis, which was also a snake. That's actually a thing. God, I'm learning so much

tonight. Yeah. This is extremely enlightening. Yeah, talking a lot about witches and peepees. What else could you want to talk about? It's berserk. that's all mira has on his mind well i mean it had to get weirder after yeah i had to get weirder after we killed off most of the femboys so that's true yeah got off most of the femboys and the one that's left is extremely

morally ambiguous um if not just morally repulsive yeah morally repulsive as is at least yeah at least morally repulsive at least but guts is too just for different reasons in this pagan cult as well as with the church there's just a lot of sheep going around as there are just explicitly referred to in the text so this thing with the pagan cult does nina is part of this pagan cult and they basically just have orgies in a cave. There's many references to the Malleus Maleficarum and superstitions about what witches do during the Black Mass, which is specifically eating babies.

There's like a cauldron in the middle. There's a lot of babies in there that they made a soup out of. That's pulled straight from the Malleus Maleficarum, which was the Hammer of Witches, cauldron in the middle there's a lot of babies in there that they made a soup out of that's that's pulled straight from the malice maleficarum which was the hammer which is the manual for witch hunting yeah and they worship um a satan analog a baphomet analog really which uh i didn't know this apparently the word baphomet is a bastardized form of, I think, Muhammad, which the Knights Templar was accused of worshipping. But somehow it got mangled.

Muhammad became Baphomet and a prophet of another religion became a satanic evil figure, which go figure. That's medieval Christianity. I was about to say that that seems to track with the track record here i also that reminds me though i did see something recently that something similar that the name beelzebub which originally came from like ancient jews was actually probably started off as a different a god of a different yes like cult in the ancient middle age which is be be as a bull. Yeah.

And they basically just changed it to be like the God of something to being like the God of like Beatles or something. I was like, yeah, they basically called them the Lord of the flies. It's like an ancient Israelite dunk on a different cult. That was a lot around at the time. There's a story in the,

but I don't think. It was because they're like, hold on. It was sort of like the ancient Israelites being like, Oh, he's a story in the but i don't think it's because they're like hold on it was sort of like the ancient israelites being like oh he's he's the god of swords more like the god of dicks and then that just became beelzebub like yeah they just like they just dabbed on him like thanks ancient israel wonderful yeah there's another character um i think baal is a a uh so baal appears as a dragon i think a dragon deity in the old testament where it's like found out that his priests were like you know faking the dragon eating the food that they left in the temple as a sacrifice and then they killed all those yeah um i i forget if it's the same as beelzebub

but i'm pretty sure that was daniel i think it's the story of daniel uh oh it's associated with the canaanite ball but all but all literally just means lord by the way lord or like that's like so many yeah like regional deities where it's like in their own dialect it just means god or lord or king yeah and uh a beelzebub was a philistine god and it should be noted that the israelites uh were also canaanites at one point like there's archaeological evidence that uh it's suggested i remember reading one thing that one theory is that uh yahweh is a forge god that started in the canaanite um pantheon i was about to say like historically i thought it started as polytheistic and then they only just became more prominent the israelites were polytheistic

yeah initially like many cultures i mean a lot of religions that were that too otherwise you wouldn't need to have all this shit about i am the only god otherwise it wouldn't be necessary yeah there was a different there's like a different word for i don't remember it's not monotheistic there's like this is a for it. I don't remember. It's not monotheistic. There's like this, it's a slightly different word that means that you only worship one God, but you acknowledge the existence of other ones. And that's what the ancient Israelites were like.

They acknowledge that other people worshiped other gods. It's just that they thought theirs was the best. Yeah. It was, there's like a specific word for it. But again, all of this is all things you basically have to either, you have like a pet to understand all of the things that miura is talking about within this within this like story all of

these things we've been referencing are things that if you have a passing knowledge of like actually show you how much he was including in the story about a guy with a big sword yeah and also like i would raise catholic they don't teach you all this i i found out this other stuff on my own oh no no no yeah no the theology class in sunday school is not sociology of early christianity archaeology or history yeah so these cultists like farnese they're like what do you call it like the followers of the the christianity analog in that they're still all sheep that ultimately desire to not be individuals which is again mirror saying that's bad being like guts is good because no matter what, he is still an individual and he asserts it.

There's a scene where this guy, Jerome, who's in love with Nina, is having sex with her in the orgy. And he's also took like this potion and he starts hallucinating that his hand is going through her and they're literally becoming one. He's losing his individuality he's the point of all what mira is saying is in what he's getting ultimately from nicha's uh genealogy of morals it's about wanting to not be an individual which is the same as death which is why camus rejected it yeah mira saying these are two sides of the same coin there was another thing i wanted to talk about um and then i'll have one more thing to sort of conclude that um multiple times so whenever farnese encounters guts she explicitly says and sometimes she's always encountering something mind-bending it's whenever you know whenever a lovecraft protagonist encounters

the god and their mind is totally blown that always happens whenever she's around guts and it's the thing that lets her change her mind but that's another interesting thing is um i think actually it's it's when she encounters demons and spirits and so on and so forth. She's never encountered that in her actual religious practice. And then this guy comes along and all these spirits are surrounding him and she sees literal living proof that she's wrong. Her religion is wrong. Angels and good things are nowhere to be seen, but there's a fuck ton of goblins and trolls and evil spirits and demons and demon dogs and possessed race horses. Yeah.

And she realizes, no, the divine is not merciful or kind. The divine is terrifying and destroying because like the God hand, it is so beyond humanity that we're like ants and that's the thing i think mira says about the divine i think if he believed the divine existed maybe he did maybe he didn't i don't know yeah it's that sort of like being so far above and beyond that we are yeah like well well there's a there's a thing to be said, I think, about when an entity is so far beyond another that it can take actions that from its perspective seem like, oh, in the long run, this is a good thing. And not really understand the harm they cause. You know, like someone could say, be trying to do the nice thing and pick up an ant and put them somewhere outside or something but they could end up putting them in such a completely incorrect spot for that ant to survive that ant just dies or like you could do

kind of the reverse because it's our lack of understanding of the earth that led the climate change even though we're simply trying to benefit well profit actually not benefit humanity just profit yeah it's just this idea of in a weird sense the um the idea of evil and the god hand sees itself as necessary and i don't want to say helpful but the idea of evil thinking of self of of it existing because it because of man's like meaning like giving meaning to things it's like you could see that as it being like oh i help this is helpful this is helpful to mankind even though what it does is just fucking kill people constantly yeah but the force this they're doing

what they perceive themselves as needing to do what they exist to do you know it makes me think it makes me think of the reapers from mass effect yeah they're not interested in good and evil they're certainly not interested in what's good for humanity yeah no it's just they're more interested in doing what they believe they're supposed to be doing. Yeah. Whatever that means. Also, whatever they want to do, because the apostles satiate themselves by cannibalism and also sexual violence. Yeah. However you satiate yourself, they do that. And also they turn it up to 11 and make it horrible.

Yeah. Horrible is a word. for that i mean that's like you eat drink and fuck well they eat people drink blood and rape that's their thing the the word the vices but 10 000 times worse which is kind of christian of miura to do but whatever i keep having to say the very the very underhanded lols but yeah i mean sometimes like there's it's yeah it's fine it's kind of like dante's inferno where all of the sins are simply having too much or too little love of some things like lust is too much love sloth is too little love the um the apostles embody all of those too much sins yeah especially it's like the uh my experience with the most rabid of american evangelicals is that like fun is just not allowed yeah like anything that's like anything that's

that's good is just too much it's like it feels good too much it's too much you're not supposed to feel good they turned out to be right about harry potter though look again broken clock my conclusion at the end of the tower of conviction arc is one thing that maybe I don't get what Miura is saying. But Luka this whole time is complaining about what a coward she is. I think Miura is sort of saying something a little more complicated than a bad misinterpretation of Nietzsche would be, which is that it's all about strength and power and what have you. Nietzsche didn't mean physical strength or political power or what have you. What he meant was rising above it all and doing, going your own way. Farnese retreated from her fear of the dark into religion

and realized that it's actually just about courage. And Nina could have gone with guts and continued to rely on strong people to save her like she has done her entire life with Luca. But she instead found herself another person that she perceives as weak, which is Jerome. And their solution became for two weak people to prop each other up. Is the two weak people propping each other? Cause I, I didn't get to read out this far, but like, um,

the, the two weak people propping each other up. Is that portrayed as a good thing? Yeah, it is. It's portrayed as a good thing. Well, again,

you're at a good and evil. It's Lucas. Oh yeah. Portrayed as a positive thing. Yeah. Positive thing. It's a Lucas solution to well, yeah. Portrayed as a positive thing. Yeah, a positive thing. It's a Lucas solution to whatever problem she's been having with a lack of courage. So in that instance, I mean, could that be an argument for mutualism?

Yeah, it could. Just the idea of, you know, ape together strong. Yeah. As much as Nietzsche shits on the herd um he was kind of wrong about that well yeah I mean fundamentally humans are still social creatures social creatures yeah it's like you can try and be a pure individual all you want but you you don't become an individual without being other with other people yeah and guts can't function without the support that he gets later especially in the story from his comrades.

Yeah. Not just the band of the Hawk, but also the supporting cast, Isidro and Shirke and Farnese and the other people. Yeah. I think that could be sort of a good point to end on is that despite the fact that we've spent this entire story in this conversation, a lot of it talking about guts being this sort of like, you know,

will to power. It's a Sigma male, like self-made outside the hierarchy. will to power sigma it's a sigma male like self-made outside the hierarchy will to power sigma ubermensch ubermensch despite all of this actually reading this story like even in the intro thing puck helps him yes he does puck has magic fairy dust that heals him every time. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Every time. No, you're fine. Every time he gets injured. So despite all of this other things we've talked about, when you actually zoom out and look at it, he's really not alone and never really, and isn't a lot of the time and doesn't get where he's going entirely by himself. And so this idea that you can be this alone Superman is actually sort of contradicted by all of the other characters around guts existing,

even characters that harm him are still ones that help build him into the person he is. And so this idea that he's just alone out there doing it all by himself, I think is fundamentally just kind of not true. Yeah. In the entirety of the way that Anishian would portray it. Yet, Mira strikes this philosophical balance between shitting on people who want to simply stop being individuals and the people. He acknowledges that, yes, it's beautiful and romantic that Guts is doing all this.

But if it weren't for puck he'd be dead but why not for casca he'd be totally insane if it weren't for shirke and the provision of the berserker armor he would be unable to overcome any obstacles plus the berserker armor would kill him or drive him insane or both there There's a third thing. And ultimately he's saved by skull night. Yeah. Like he's alive because skull night saved him. So even amongst this, like,

you know, self-willed the power, there's still a real, there's still, you have to rely on people around you. Yeah. And ultimately the thing is, but guts constantly struggles to let people in. It's being okay. So the thing is guts was guts constantly struggles to let people in it's being okay so the thing is guts

was raped as a child by donovan big content warning there it's kind of a famous scene it happened he struggles with intimacy which is why when he was intimate with casca it was so like monumental um but even with friendship he can't stand being touched because he's traumatized he only has social interactions with people his only contact with human beings is that he's at the handle of a sword and the pointy end is pointed at other people or what remains of them uh a half of a cloven person and he i touched that man with my giant sword it's like superman all-powerful he just struggles to do the right thing guts ultimately he will never die in battle mirror would never allow that to happen he's too badass

but the problem is he without other people he, he might go insane. Yeah. He's going to lose himself entirely. Well, if anyone wants to find out what happens, there are now like 300 some chapters of berserk, I think. More being released. The art sucks. Yeah. There's a, they are continuing past Miura's death. Obviously some of us have, you know, strong opinions about the art not being as good as it was. I personally obviously don't have an opinion. I haven't read that far. some of us have you know strong opinions about the art not being as good as it was i i personally

obviously don't have an opinion i haven't read that you haven't seen it but and i'm not as i would i'll be honest i'm not as discerning of a you know of a manga fan as other people might be because i am a normie when it comes to this sort of uh of of like the realm of nerddom i am my particulars come in very other specific ways. Well, thank you for coming on, Brendan. I had a good time. Thank you. Again, this was,

and I mean this in the most positive way possible. This is like the most intellectual episode we've had in quite a while. We've actually covered the most breadth of like various philosophical and political ideas, I think that we've had to in a while. And I really appreciate that. I had to in in a while i really appreciate that i want to emphasize that none of this is my original idea it's all taken from

other i mean is there such a thing who came up with this shit uh yeah yeah uh yeah read it was really read okay read nicha read batai read noel carroll read mark fisher yeah read those things or you can do what i do and just listen to people who have read them that's my plan that's what i do um listen to those things just or listen or listen to those things um they're a wonderful text to speech uh one last time i consumed all the book should i ever consumed the anarchist library um one last time brendan do you want to say the names of the the other podcasts that you participate in so people can find you if they want to yeah i'm one half of

czar power where for once i don't know what i'm talking about uh i just react to whatever roberto ports whatever horrible shit somebody did that week that's spelled t-S-A-R, as in the Russian rulers. We're ranking the Russian rulers from Rurik to Putin. And our other show is the history of Sukhartevelo, Georgia, covering the history of the country of Georgia, not the state, from prehistory to present day. I will include the links to all of those things in the notes of the episode. Thanks to all of those things in the notes of the episode. Next, next episode,

we will be back with our, I guess, relatively lighthearted finish to anything is relatively lighthearted in comparison, relatively lighthearted finish to dark fantasy month. We're going to be doing Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Hocus Pocus 2. No, it's going to be Coraline by Neil Gaiman.

I never read. That's a mistake. I need to fix that. Yeah, I I need to fix that yeah I haven't I've seen the movie I've seen the movie the stop action one but now I'm going to read it that's going to be next and we have a bonus episode out by the end of the month covering Blade I have seen that

I just want to talk about Blade yeah that's going to be funny that's going to be a good one so sign up to the Patreon for that one and as a final note is also as we've said before next month like this was Dark Fantasy month next month is Cyberpunk month

we're going to be doing more manga again next month because we're going to talk about like Ghost in the Shell or Akira we're going to do No Man's I the shell or akira uh we're going to do no answer i think we have to do we have to do akira now because you got to see with berserk some of the best drawn manga oh yeah ever and then you're gonna get to see the best some of the best film animation yeah so akira is probably going to be the bonus episode for cyberpunk month

it's probably gonna be akira uh so if you like that also watch tetsuo the iron man which is a japanese body horror film that directly inspired akira and yeah body horror is the thing yeah also i haven't watched it but geno cyber is another anime body horror because i've heard that there's so many of them well that's going to be next month we're doing cyber cyberpunk month and if these go well we're going to do them every year like you know October

will be spooky month and November will be cyberpunk month bring me on for Junji Ito if you're going to do that I'm sure we will at some point actually the anime for Uzumaki will be probably out by then oh shit yeah there we go there we go the soundtrack by colin stetson the same guy did we'll just do we'll just do next year we'll just do spooky anime uh manga yeah why not and we'll

talk about ito and we'll talk about satoshi k cone and we'll talk hell yeah that's it yes i got you guys gonna make me into a different kind of nerd god damn yeah well thank you everyone for listening thank you so much uh we'll see you next episode thank you all for listening one more thing yeah i don't know what that means but but I trust you to have said something. It's Russian for power breeds parasites. That's my catchphrase on Tsar Power. I love it. Fantastic.

That is amazing. Yeah. Everyone, remember that as you go to sleep tonight. I was right. I said what he said, and it was true. It was true. Thank you all for listening. Goodbye.

Bye. Bye- Bye. Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. be fucking real man come on