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Manga Talk / So I Binge-Read All of Berserk...
« on: January 07, 2024, 11:11:55 AM »In November I decided, somewhat on a whim, to finally read one of the most classic manga series that I had never picked up before: Berserk by Kentaro Miura. Over the course of a few weeks I read all 375 available chapters, thinking that the series had been completed, only to find out that it is still being released and I caught up just as a new story arc got started. Berserk is widely regarded as one of the absolute best seinen manga, drawing in heaps of praise, and seething ire when the anime adaptation was f*cked up, and after reading it all I… really don’t get what all the fuss is about…
Berserk is about a very muscly man called Guts, who really hates demons and monsters, and particularly hates a specific demon man called Griffith, and so he goes around chopping them all to pulp with an enormous sword (and occasionally shoots them in the eyes with crossbow bolts and throwing knives). No matter how much damage he takes, his hate and anger fuels him to get up and keep fighting until his enemies are defeated.
The story begins with him going from town to town searching for demons to kill who will bring him closer to Griffith, like crossing names off of a cartel hierarchy. We get introduced to a comedy relief character in the form of Puck the little elf with healing powers, and Guts will occasionally save someone from demons but then act all tough guy tsundere in an “it’s not like I was doing it to save you or anything” kind of way and making some comment about how weak people won’t survive or should stay out of the way.
The next section of the story takes us back in time and is a hundred or so chapters telling the story of how Guts got to where he was as we read just prior. It is a story of a damaged boy finding a leader to trust and his place to grow, only to have things spiral downward and out of control as the group are within touching distance of their goals, and then to have everything ripped away from him in a horrendous fashion.
I want to pause the summary here to discuss a little. These two sections are what cause people to label Berserk as grim-dark - a label that indicates either that bad things happen to good people, or that there are no truly good people. By these definitions I would say that Berserk is barely grim-dark. It is definitely seinen, with all the blood and gore, death, nudity, the plethora of phallic demons and far too long, detailed and pornographic sex/r*pe scenes (it is not an easy read when commuting on the public trains, let me tell you…). But it really is quite surface level with many of the darker themes. I don’t know if I’ve read other grim-dark mangas that have done it better, but unfortunately, for me, in the context of all literature it doesn’t hold a candle to anything written by Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, Pierce Brown, Michael John Grist, Luke Scull, etc. To be honest, despite the dark aesthetics, Berserk kind of starts to read like a shounen manga because these themes aren’t really approached in a more mature or deep way. There is a lot of your standard manga narration with overuse of obscure and random metaphors that sound poetic but obfuscates the point of the plot and exacerbates the issues of thematics. On the other hand, I had a really hard time sympathising with character motivations as they pertained to serving Griffith, because I rarely saw properly written the same charisma in him that the other characters themselves claimed to be seeing - so I was constantly feeling as though the story was telling rather than showing me this - and so all the events that transpired really didn’t hit me like they should have outside of a fleeting sense of shock and awe.
Credit where credit is due, a lot of the characters in the group are likeable, and I particularly enjoyed the character of Casca during most of the second section of the story. The artwork is also pretty good, with absolutely standout spreads of either super detailed settings or striking vistas, very visceral motion, or just Guts looking cool. I will also say that, for the most part, the darkness of this part of the story tows the line and generally manages to stay on the right side of being too edgy or overly cringe-inducing.
Next we transfer into an arc of the story which felt akin to watching a DnD campaign - whereby the party are trying to get to the land of the elves to help heal Casca. I’m not going to lie, I actually enjoyed it for what it was and I enjoyed the majority of new characters that were introduced to the group. But this was a vast departure in tone from the previous sections, such that it was a little jarring. Again, if it weren’t for the gore, nudity, and sex, this was even more like just reading a shounen manga. We also move from a fairly low fantasy vibe with fairly supernatural magic, to a more high fantasy high magic feel, and although I liked the magic system, I’m not sure that I liked it in the context of Berserk. In the meantime, in the background, Griffith has returned with a whole warring nations sub-plot that I could not help but distrust the entire time.
Sadly Miura passed away in 2021, but the series was continued in 2022 by his friends and colleagues. It is here that I want to bring up the mystery boy who keeps on appearing, helping, and disappearing in this latter section of the story. I dislike what they did with him. If this was the plan all along, then I think the subversion of expectations really doesn’t feel great here - like a ham-fisted broken promise. Otherwise I speculate that they decided on this reveal to steer the plot in for a landing for Berserk as a series. In either case, what feels worse is that the direction that they have now steered the plot in, by using him as a mechanism, is essentially a repeat of basically the same plot that has already kind of been repeated twice already over the last two story arcs
Spoiler
and just when Casca was returning to a semblance of capability. It kind of sapped most of my motivation to continue reading in the future.
So I have mixed feelings about Berserk. It was a decent enough read for sure, and I definitely had more things that I liked about it that I haven’t mentioned in this post. But it also did not blow me away as I expected by the general praise around this series, and this mis-match is to the point that I am actually questioning my enjoyment of manga story-telling generally a little bit, especially in comparison to novels. For me, the shounen-esque elements were like a ball and chain weighing the storytelling down because of the confused tone and slightly ballooning sub-plots, robbing momentum and profundity from what could have been a much more effective and concise story.
I have tried to keep this spoiler free, but I know this is probably a controversial take on Berserk so let me know your thoughts about the series, and if you think I’m approaching it from the wrong angle etc.