It would be an understatement to say that Kentaro Miura's work on BERSERK is a foundational part of why I've written over a quarter of a million words in analysis of
Final Fantasy VII up through
Remake over the last year in the project I keep mentioning whenever I poke my head in to drop some words in on the forums rather than into this thesis of mine. I don't know if there's any manga that I've spent the sort of time living alongside in someone's perspective reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading to look at the nuances of how he portrays particular details, where he pulls those visual metaphors from, and also the influences he had on the industry and that it had on reinforcing those themes into the absolute masterpiece of the manga that he spent his life creating.
One of my favourite interviews of his is one I found the other day where he talks about planning the story up through about Volume 5 from things he'd come up with throughout college, but that after that, it was largely shaped by his detachment and isolation from the world, and how he acquired news and information from tv while being deeply separated from it all. It's hard to overstate hearing that was like hearing someone describing the perspective that I've been living in over the last year and a half after relocating to a foreign country following the death of my friend who I'd spent nearly every work day of the last 4 years with, and then finding myself under a set of circumstances that left me cut out from the people who were meant to be my support network, and left trying to recoup in the loss and death and disconnection within the midst of a global pandemic where recreating social bonds and contact with other people isn't an option. To add to that: I'm already someone who experienced abuses at a young age and my younger sibling was born with a deformation in his kidney that caused him pain any time he ate until he was old enough for them to perform surgery, which meant that I grew up with a literal Berserker my entire life, so I know exactly what sort of things shape someone to literally go blind and disassociate into a self-protective rage against their own will. So... there has been a lot in his work that's been foundational to how I've managed to cope with all of the loss, trauma, death, abuse, detachment, and isolation of the last 3 years and use it to reexamine the perspectives of all of the things that I've cared about and delve deeper into the messages that they convey in the framework than I'd ever imagined doing, let alone fathomed possible.
Most of Thursday was me in tears sporadically throughout the day, as I had been writing until 7am, and upon forcing myself to finally stop and go to bed, saw that the news had been shared two hours earlier. I still can't talk about it verbally without crying.
I was quite relieved that one of his assistants did mention yesterday that while there are a lot of notes in his manga of Miura's struggling from 1993-2011, that he'd started to take more careful care over both his physical and mental health over the last 15 years, and he'd been regularly exercising and staying in good health. That's also one of those things that's difficult to overstate that that sort of strain it takes a toll that lasts, and we never really know how long we've got.
There is at least the comfort in that while there's a very real possibility that we'll never know the end of BERSERK what he established with his manga is something that is so deeply influential and interconnected into the modern mythology of our storytelling that I don't think that the core of what his work represented will ever fade away.
Which is simultaneously what makes it just that much harder to fathom that he's gone before he completed the work that he envisioned.
X 
The animation usually, quite frankly, sucks, but sometimes it's not bad and the music and story made up for it mostly. 
. I was under the impression that
