(Note- This was meant as a reply to a forum on the subject of Griffith and morality but I liked it because yeah I am smart I write things so um yeah. Have some is-this-even-meta.)

I don’t think terms like “good” or “bad” have any real objective meaning, or at least, if they do then shit’s still a lot more than that. It’s not like “Oh [person x] did a bad thing, therefore they are TEH EVULZ”. And I think that applies like…double with Berserk, since the entire series goes out of it’s way (on more than a few occasions) to deconstruct the idea of black and white moral absolutes* (also the fact that Guts and Griffith literally are black and white was not intentional here and kind of contradicts my point a little let’s move on).

[* = Guts used a little kid as demon bait you can’t fucking justify that shit.]

And I mean, does it even make sense to judge Griffith (as he is now) by our standards? Between the whole “quite literally on a higher plane of existence” deal and the “ends justify the means” thing he’s got going on a bit (plus all that humanity’s unconscious desires crap I’m too lazy to go into and someone else has probably already said and probably better than I would have)… yeah. I’m thinking that ‘normal’ concepts of morality don’t quite fit here at all. He is neither good nor bad. He simply is.

And he definitely seems to be something (someone) that people want/need, for whatever end. He’s playing the part he’s ‘supposed’ to. And in that regard, you could argue that he is unambiguously “good”, if good is defined as “serves the collective interests of humanity”. (Huzzah, utilitarian ethics!)

Of course, from the protagonists’ perspective, he is the biggest douchebag to ever douchebag. So I suppose, again, it depends on how you see it, and how you define “good” or “evil”.

This crap is fuckin’ complicated, man.

And backing up a bit (because I’ll admit that human!Griffith makes about 1000% more sense to me than neo!Griffith ever will and also because I’m pretty sure that the default reaction to a lot of Griffith discussions is “BUT ECLIPSE”): he did a shitty thing. But I’m pretty sure that most people would do the same thing (more-or-less) including me so. I can’t blame him. Which makes it hard to hate him for it, I think.

Man, someone else has probably said all of this already. u_u