In the Flesh: Berserk (1997)

Don’t come near me, thinks the wounded and broken Griffith (Kevin T. Collins) as Guts (Marc Diraison) races after him. If you come close to me, if you so much as touch my shoulder, we’ll never… The thought trails off as apocalypse engulfs the world around them, Griffith’s dream of ascension to godhood claiming the lives of his followers and boon companions in a Boschian orgy of violence. What path is so unthinkable to Griffith that the destruction of everything he holds dear is preferable to so much as voicing it? It’s not hard to guess. From the moment the elfin, silver-haired commander of the Band of the Hawk holds a bested Guts at swordpoint and declares “You’re mine”, the show’s subtext is as plain as day. The two men love each other, revolve around one another, come together and fly apart again and again like the magnetic miniature lord and lady offered as a childish courtship gift to Griffith by the Princess Charlotte. Later, Griffith will destroy his own ambitions of kingship by forcing himself on Charlotte after Guts defeats him in a duel and leaves his command to pursue his own destiny.

It isn’t the last time Griffith assaults a woman to prove Guts means nothing to him, that Guts belongs to him. In the bowels of Hell, beneath the eyes of the God Hand and among the butchered remain of their comrades in arms, the revivified Griffith, christened “Femto”, rapes Casca (Carrie Keranen), who spent a decade or more of her life harboring unrequited feelings for him before finally falling in love with Guts. Seeing the two of them together after his rescue from the castle dungeon triggers the final collapse which leads to his embrace of the Eclipse, but when he takes his vengeance Casca, as always, in spite of the show’s care and the care taken in Kentaro Miura’s original manga to portray her as a full and complex human, is only an instrument between them. He rapes her because to rape Guts is unthinkable to him, a path even his demented mind can’t walk, or even contemplate. Yet it’s Guts’ eyes he holds as he violates Casca, Guts who occupies his final human thoughts, Guts alone who ever drew his focus from the singular and monstrous destiny he has coveted since childhood.

Griffith’s sole textual homosexual assignation and its aftermath lend additional weight to the nature of his feelings for his lieutenant. In his younger days Griffith performs sexual favors for the pedophilic and ephebophilic governor Gennon in exchange for funding to expand and equip the Band of the Hawk. Gennon harbors projected feelings for Griffith when they meet again years later, and even thinks Griffith might spare him for the sake of their past relations. It’s the sole point in the series at which Griffith verbally expresses upset or disgust. He rebukes Gennon for making such “vile claims” before murdering him in cold blood. The line between these two nexuses of homosexual feeling charts a devastating course for Griffith and his fellow adventurers, tarnishing and rendering impossible his love for Guts before he ever meets the man. Berserk suffers from many issues, from the occasional thinness of its Medieval setting to the quality constraints imposed on its animation by budgetary and scheduling concerns, but the sophistication of its handling of queer desire and rage, in making a man who would rather destroy the world than admit he longs for the kisses and caresses of his true love not just believable but inevitable cements it to this day as a classic of dark fantasy.