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Berserk At a glance, it's not a strange world. Peasants farm, priests pray, kingdoms and empires rise and fall by the sword. People are people. They are happy and they are miserable. The world is vast and daunting, but nothing is unknown--nothing waits in the darkness. Nothing is more powerful, more loving, or more sinister than mankind. At a glance. But if you look in the right places; if you follow the rumors and the prophecies; and if you pay a little more attention to your nightmares and listen carefully in the night, you might find something else. Call it God, call it Fate--it doesn't matter. It's a puppeteer pulling the strings of the world, and its monstrous children are very hungry... --- Kentarou Miura's Berserk is a dark fantasy manga set in a mythic imitation of feudal or medieval Europe. It details the life of Guts--a tragic antihero, an absurd Sisyphean hero, and a Nietzschean ubermensch beyond good and evil. And yes, he's a huge half-crazed butcher of monsters. He struggles to exact revenge and find freedom in a world ruled by a malignant God, and his path is littered with corpses. Thematically, Berserk pits humanistic free will against nihilistic predestination. The denizens of the setting personify bleak, cruel inevitability. Guts fights to overcome and destroy them--to realize the happy dream of freedom and justice in a world without either. But in the very beginning, he only fights because he is cursed with the Brand, a strange wound that marks him as a sacrifice to spirits and demons. It draws them to him, and he relishes the opportunity that brings, for he is the Black Swordsman, an infamous wanderer and monster-hunter. Swinging his gigantic sword with an iron fist, he brutally slays both the living and the dead on a bloodthirsty quest to find and destroy the powerful God Hand and their demonic Apostles. His only company is a good-natured, tenacious elf named Puck. (Think trickster-faerie. Puck is not a classic fantasy elf.) Guts accidentally saved Puck's life, and in turn, Puck has taken a well-meaning interest in Guts's health. But as Puck soon discovers, there is more to Guts than simple blood lust. There is a past and a betrayal--and a story to be told. But it's a story you should read for yourselves. It occupies volumes 4 through 13. Have fun.  What you're getting into... Berserk is for mature audiences only. It contains extreme violence, strong sexual content, and detailed gore. More specifically, thousands of people die, there is rape and sexual depravity, and the author happily draws intestines pouring out of a bisected corpse. But have no fear, the manga is about more than sex and death. It's a story of war, political intrigue, ambiguous morality, insanity, dark revenge, great dreams, tragic love, and a terrible pantheon of evil spirits. It's one of the few mangas in which the main character earns, stroke by bloody stroke, the strength and endurance that makes him a monster amongst men and an equal amongst monsters. If you see Guts's seven foot sword and think, "No man can swing that," reading this manga will change your mind. There are no easy victories in Berserk. There are no painless conquests. Everything is earned through strength, willpower, and a little cunning; and it's earned inch by inch. You will not be disappointed by the growth or power of these characters. And speaking of characters, you can expect the best here. Berserk's writing deftly dances between pulpy action and literary character development. The primary actors are well-rounded complex characters with deep motivations and even deeper relationships. They are supported by a wide cast of similarly excellent secondary characters, giving Berserk a dynamic plot structure and a vast number of interesting and meaningful character conflicts. The story is set in a highly detailed mythos, a wide fictional geography, and a mysterious but important world history. Everything feels rich, alive, and authentic--even the monsters. But the real treat is in the art. Berserk is beautiful. Page for page, the artist aims for a level of quality that outshines many of his contemporaries. What next? I've avoided talking about or showing too much of the actual story because I think you should read it. So what's next is finding a copy to read! Preferably, you should support the English distributor, Dark Horse Comics. Dark Horse Comics has published the first seventeen volumes of the series (as of June 2007) and releases a new volume every two months. Unlike many manga translators and distributors, Dark Horse aims to keep the original art completely intact, because Berserk's Japanese sound effects are sometimes woven into the art. For this reason, only text is translated on the page, and starting in volume 12, sound effects are translated with notes in the margins. There are no meaningful differences between the Japanese and American releases, and you don't have to find a scanlation group to read a well-translated, complete copy. For this reason, I highly recommend that you purchase volumes of Berserk whenever they are released, and only download the manga chapters when they are not yet available for sale in America. I'm looking for more information... If you want to read more, then read these links. But be warned, spoilers abound, and you really shouldn't spoil this story. I've also included links to two scanlation groups. If you sample the manga and enjoy it, please purchase it. The ADTRWwiki for Berserk: http://adtrwiki.com/index.php?title=Berserk The Wikipedia for Berserk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserk_%28manga%29 Band of the Hawks scanlations: http://www.thehawks.org/ Evil Genius scanlations: http://www.evil-genius.us/ SkullKnight encyclopedia and community: http://www.skullknight.net/ The last thread about Berserk (closed and archived): http://archives.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1129522 Some notes about the Berserk anime. There is a Berserk anime. It follows the first thirteen volumes of the manga in 25 episodes before ending abruptly. I recommend reading the manga first and watching the anime second--if you watch it at all. It omits vital characters and plot points, making it impossible for the anime to coherently continue after a certain chapter in the story. Furthermore, those characters and plot points were part of the foreshadowing, and without them, the ending of the anime becomes a bizarre, almost ridiculous surprise. The anime isn't a stinker, but it doesn't measure up to the original manga. There isn't much else to say. Zoolooman fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Jun 28, 2007 03:57
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abbad0n posted:Looks like the new thread was right on time: Chapter 286 That was awesome. I'm so glad we're finally on the boat. Guts and crew are more pleasant and interesting than mean ol' Griffith. >:|
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Jun 28, 2007 07:43
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Guerilla Medic posted:And yes, Guts is certainly crossing from cool-scarred to holy-poo poo-Nameless-One-scarred. That's why he wears his armor and his bandages so often. Constant fighting is breaking him. He is slowly falling apart. :[
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Jun 28, 2007 19:24
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Scoobi posted:In regards to Casca: I took what the skull guy and company have said to mean that when Casca comes out of her idiot state she might go back to Griffith. Or not want to continue on with Guts quest for revenge. I'm hoping she sticks with Guts but who knows what hosed up direction it could be taken. I heartily disagree with your first bit of speculation. If she were ready to switch to the evil side, why did her mind break? Why did she regress to a childlike state? The events of the Eclipse were traumatic. She was held high and raped by the man she idolized in front of the man she loved. Her child was aborted and tainted with evil. Everything she held dear was annihilated, betrayed. Caska has good reasons to loathe and fear Guts. He abandoned her and abused her, even while protecting her. She also has painful, sick reasons to protect the new Griffith. He is in the body of her son, and she swore to protect his dream. But if she is going to ally with Griffith, it won't be a simple change of alliances. It will be a painful drama with no happiness in it; it will be--mark my words--a place to be rescued from: rescued by a man with the strength of will to lead her out of the demon-infested light.
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Jul 15, 2007 13:26
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Don Cojones posted:Was Farnese jealous of what Guts was about to say? Maybe. You saw how hot and bothered she became when she whipped him. But she might've wanted to avoid knowing more about Caska.
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Jul 15, 2007 21:23
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maxxheadcheese posted:I think the eye is gone forever, but hopefully he'll get his real arm back. I think its why we saw what we saw this chapter. He won't get any of it back. They were iconic losses. He gave up his arm to save Caska. He lost his eye when she was raped. It is the missing eye that always sees the Eclipse. It is the missing arm that demonstrates his incredible will. They are gone forever.
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Jul 16, 2007 05:59
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In the world of Berserk, a broken body can be restored, but you pay with your humanity and everything you loved. See Griffith for the details. I don't think Guts would be willing to pay that cost.
Zoolooman fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Jul 16, 2007 |
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Jul 16, 2007 19:49
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I think Miura is being slow because he's plotting the post-Elfheim arc, and he's a perfectionist. He'll be unsatisfied until he is absolutely certain that the story will be the best it can be.
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Jul 28, 2007 22:15
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Comments about chapter 288: I'm glad to see the girls working out how they feel about Guts. This is a good productive use of the story's downtime. :] Schierke seems to have reached a comfort zone with her childish crush, Farnese has expressed frustration with Caska's condition, and Caska has--for a brief moment--responded with near-intelligence. I think this indicates that Caska won't join Griffith or anything crazy like that. In her own dim way, she seemed to understand what Farnese meant. Maybe she caught on that Guts is struggling on her behalf, and I think she'll remember that when her mind returns. Maybe she won't be loyal, but she won't be a traitor either. What do you think?
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Aug 4, 2007 09:14
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SpazmasterX posted:Well, his sword is magic in it's own way. Yeah, but it's not the nice kind of standard, elemental magic, nor is it even the magic of the Godhand. It's the taint of terror and death.
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Aug 8, 2007 00:49
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Tupperwarez posted:I just noticed that Guts has hit the tiger with such fury that not only has it been split in half, its eye has popped out of its socket. It's so hilariously over the top. 'Gallows humor' is a term that really applies to Berserk. He hit it hard enough to split its tongue in two.
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Aug 10, 2007 10:40
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abbad0n posted:EG delivers: Yay. Adding to the OP. :]
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Sep 16, 2007 04:31
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I'm going to take a different perspective on this. I'd speculate that none of the current friends will die.
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Oct 14, 2007 08:50
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The next chapter raw will come on the 22nd.
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Nov 18, 2007 06:54
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Gvaz posted:I really don't know how Miura is able to release chapters "whenever he feels like it". Doesn't he want to finish it and move on? Last I heard he was projecting the series to be 50 volumes, and if he keeps going the rate he's going we'll all be 15 years older by that time. Fifty to sixty volumes, yeah, but nobody is absolutely sure of that number. Sources for this kinda thing are rare. He is allowed to write them slowly because he isn't merely making them whenever he feels like it. He's making them as fast as he can mostly by himself.
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Dec 21, 2007 21:18
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Gvaz posted:But I thought he had a small like 5 man team going at one point? And the source was the interview on the DVD. He does. Studio Gaga works with him on some chapters, doesn't on others. Also, awesome, an interview. Which DVD?
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Dec 21, 2007 21:30
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OG17 posted:I'd rather see how Guts's party reacts once Griffith's in sight and he's ready to tear through everything that gets in the way. I'm really thinking things'll finally end with him having a chance to sacrifice them all for a fair shot, sort of mirroring the Hawks, and I won't be surprised if he takes it. I would be very surprised. What makes Guts righteous is his humanity. He wouldn't trade it for cheap demonic power. He will earn power on his own.
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Mar 24, 2008 22:38
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cooldude2.0 posted:I'd say spite. The demon thinks "ahaha I've lured this stupid man and now he shall die" but actually the reverse is true "regret your folly monster for i am all that is man" Bingo. This monster draws in her victims with lust and sex. You can see her hunt one of the Band of the Hawk during the eclipse. Guts is "lured" into the trap, and then he kills her for revenge.
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Apr 4, 2008 19:50
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I agree. Griffith is far beyond redemption. There should be no forgiveness. Griffith made a blood sacrifice out of loyal soldiers and raped the woman who'd trusted him and cared for his broken body. Out of jealousy, he tried the break one man whom he couldn't control. gently caress Griffith.
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Oct 13, 2008 15:04
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TooManyUzukis posted:I never really thought of him as a protagonist either, but he certainly does develop a lot after Guts "breaks" him by leaving/beating him. He is kinda of untouchable now, which is disappointing. I kind of look forward to the Griffith sections of chapters, if only because I hold out a vain hope that he'll finally stop being just a pretty picture with the words "Bad Guy" hung over his head and start being a CHARACTER again. I think he looks like an antichrist archetype and is still an interesting character.
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Oct 14, 2008 16:51
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temple posted:But aren't we all? We're fated to die eventually, not to be currently dead. Guts was a pawn of Fate. He played an intimate role. Then he was branded, marked as a sacrifice, and Fate was done with him. As far as Fate is concerned, he is already dead. But the curse of the brand is also a hidden blessing. If Fate considers you dead, it no longer has the power to ensure your death. Guts can struggle on.
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Jun 20, 2009 09:16
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Don't mistake plot conveniences for the influence of Fate. Guts stands outside Fate to some degree. The question is whether he is merely a "jumping fish," like the Skull Knight, capable of escaping causality only for a moment, or something more powerful that can defeat causality altogether.
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Jun 20, 2009 09:58
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Berserk is explicit, but it's not fetishistic. The intention is not sexual arousal.
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Aug 14, 2009 09:42
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YouTuber posted:Stuff Guts is a branded sacrifice. Griffith ascended on his blood. The world moves as if he is dead. That he hasn't died places him outside Fate. That the world manages to stay on course despite their interference shows how difficult it can be for one man to fight destiny.
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Jan 9, 2010 02:52
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YouTuber posted:That's the thing though. The world's course is still decided in a major fashion by Guts and crew. The Skull Knight is another person who is dead and should be outside of Fate yet Femto was literally waiting for him to attack with the Sword of Resonance so he could bend the strike. I would suggest that the world is good at getting back on track. Also, the Skull Knight is not outside Fate. Whatever happened to him, he gave up his humanity and became something more powerful, but he paid the price in freedom.
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Jan 10, 2010 02:37
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How often does Berserk release these days? I made this thread five years ago, and I've been trying to save up chapters since four years ago.
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Apr 4, 2013 00:20
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dis astranagant posted:It's sporadic as all hell. You'll have maybe 40 chapters to read but they tend to get released in clumps where 2-4 of them come out almost weekly then nothing comes out for months on end. There's been a new tank more or less annually, though we're currently about 18 months from the last one, 9 or 10 chapters each. How far is this story from ending? 
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Apr 4, 2013 00:30
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