The original post:
Golden age Griffith is not the exact same character as Femto, and was definatley not ‘always evil’ or a ‘sociopath’.
Okay, so, sociopathy is pretty much defined as the inability to care about other human beings on an emotional level.
This quite clearly does not apply to Griffith, because if he hadn’t cared about the band of the hawk he wouldn’t have been able to sacrifice them. That’s just….not how this works.
And even leaving the eclipse out of it (can you ever really leave the eclipse out of it? idk…), basically the entire reason that everything went (literally) to hell is that Griffith was, y’know, angry and hurt by Guts leaving the hawks, and did a very stupid thing because of that.
Griff would not have reacted the way he did if he didn’t care about Guts.
I…honestly think that golden age Griffith was basically a pretty decent person? A little arrogant, a little possessive, maybe slightly too ambitious…but basically an okay dude. I do not believe this about later Griffith/Femto in the least.
So what changed? To be blunt about it, Griffith’s life pretty much turned to shit in a big way. Torture is literally designed to break people. And so it did.
Now, let’s just…think about post-torture, pre-eclipse Griffith. He’s traumatized; half-insane; horribly, cripplingly injured; about to be abandoned by Guts for a second time; discovers that Casca’s only staying with him out of pity, and the dream he’s pretty much literally devoted his life to up until this point lies shattered around him.
That’s not a good place to be, and that’s a hell of an understatement.
I seriously think that pretty much anyone would make the same choice Griffith did in that situation, and if I may be ever-so-slightly meta about it, that’s why it works. Because Griffith isn’t some vaguely-defined monster, he’s entirely too human, with all the flaws and damage and shitty decisions that entails. Berserk doesn’t really do moral absolutes. That’s kinda the entire point.It’s a lot more complicated (and a lot more tragic) than the 2d villain people seem to think he is.
And while what Griffith does as Femto was completely and utterly beyond unforgivable, I think you’ve kinda got to look at the reasons why; how fucked-up he was at that point. Griffith is, ultimately, what his experiences have made him.
None of this is an excuse for his actions, of course- but it’s an explanation. And a friendly reminder that he wasn’t always like this.
Followup posts by tumblr user ALovelyBurn:
I’m not even sure I’d say Griffith, pre-eclipse, was too ambitious. Certainly he had seemingly unrealistically high goals, but what was unrealistic for most people was not in fact unrealistic for Griffith - he was well on his way to achieving them until Guts left and he snapped. And while people sure do like to claim he just did it because wow powerhungry and overly ambitious (and I don’t disagree that ambition was part of his motivation) there’s a lot of evidence that he did it for much more complicated reasons than that, too. Like… his hatred of class-based social hierarchy, his yearning to reshape the world and to discover how far his gifts could take him, not to mention the guilt of having so many deaths on his back and feeling like the only way to repay the fallen Hawks for their sacrifice was to, as he said, keep winning. To fulfill the dream they died to help him realize.
And:
Because the series goes out of its way, repeatedly, to reject the concept of moral absolutes.
Just starting with the creation of the Godhand and the Apostles to begin with - someone who is truly heartless would be actually incapable of becoming one of them. So EVERY SINGLE APOSTLE, each one of the Godhand, every last one of them, is the twisted remnant of someone who once had someone they loved so deeply that to give them up was to give up a part of themselves. And then suffered so badly that losing their most precious person was preferable to continuing on. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, of the four sacrifice origins we’ve seen, three of them were on the verge of dying, and of the three, two were suicidal.
And even then, twisted though they may be, there’s still something inside them that remains of their old selves - the Slug Count couldnt sacrifice his daughter, and Femto couldn’t kill Guts and thus let Skull Knight run off with him.
I’m gonna avoid tangenting at this point, but yeah, moral absolutes and Berserk are not things that get along. I always thought that was one of the series’ most prominent themes, honestly. Even Neo!Griffith represents both the darkness and the light, though it’s unclear in what sense at this point.
