You're kind of looking past what I was saying. I know Berserk was more than a fantasy manga, but I was trying to illustrate that Miura himself probably didn't think of his work as the grandiose thing we do, and I feel like approaching a continuation as such would miss what Berserk really was. it's not just an epic story, it's also a very grounded, introspective thing tht isn't afraid to have fun with itself. The last chapter of Berserk ever published prominently features Jar Jar Binks. Berserk is as much an action senien as it is a shojo manga and a crude comedy manga, that's what I'm saying. The fact it was able to so smoothly shift and evolve is what made it great; Berserk never stayed in one place too long, and it never repeated itself. There weren't villains of the week like in Dragon Ball (comparison stolen from the SK.net thread,) that's what makes it a very difficult thing to follow up on without being Miura himself.
This is all the exact reason that I brought up Osamu Tezuka's
Phoenix, because Tezuka was literally the godfather of manga. Manga comics were considered a completely frivolous artform when he ditched medical school to start writing them. The genre of manga comics and the way that they integrate mythology, historical references, and lighthearted non-sequitur humor is ALL stuff that he established and utilized when defining what manga became. It's not something that in any way indicates that
BERSERK is any less serious because it includes those things, they're literally just a natural part of the art form at its core roots. That's why
BERSERK ISN'T something where looking at its genre is helpful in understanding what makes it truly great.
The other reason that I brought this up is because
Phoenix is another manga that was considered its author's life's work – and it was left unfinished because he died before he was able to complete it – and it was left unfinished.
I guess it's a difference in philosophy. You think that if it isn't Miura's Berserk, then it's not worth it. I think it can be something. Not Miura's incredible work, but it can be something that has merit in its own right. I know for Mako at least that that's tantamount to fan fiction, that it doesn't matter, especially if there wasn't a plan in place already, but I'm not so sure that matters. It'd be a work birthed from the grief and determination of a team without its leader, and I still think that's something worth seeing personally, if they want to do it. It doesn't have to be Miura, the fact that it isn't would be the point, in a way. That's why I proposed a change in title and a reset in volume number, it wouldn't be Miura's Berserk, it'd be Studio Gaga's Berserk.
And, I mean, if you don't think that's worth seeing, that's fine. Nobody can replace Miura, and the fact it wouldn't be his ending would make the whole thing hollow for a lot of people. I could hardly blame the team themselves for not wanting to poke the bear, those are enormous shoes to fill. I just find it very interesting that they haven't flay-out said that it won't happen yet, since that's what's happened to other series.
tl;dr I think there's potentially merit in a work made specifically because Miura died, not because it will provide the ending he would have written, but because it would explore what even being a continuation of such a massive work would mean.
The point we're making is that for a work like this, the author
IS the story in so many ways. What is the point of "continuing" the story unless you know that you can preserve those things? That's why Mako makes the comparisons to fan fiction – because fan fiction is overly focused on the narrative and characters within the context of the story itself, and not about the overall assembly of elements that makes up those things in a particular way for a varying set of purposes.
As a point, let me get into some Berserk-centric things about the narrative construction.
Griffith & Casca are explicitly designed in ways that are meant to mirror Guts' relationship to his own adopted father & mother, because the sore of the psychological narrative about Guts is the primal panic and detachment that he experiences in not knowing how to identify a connection and value it because of the events and traumas that he experienced as a child.
Griffith's suffering in the tower of rebirth is caused because of the grief he is unable to cope with upon Guts' departure because Guts naïvely believes that he was just another stone in Griffith's path and everyone will be just fine without him. Guts reverses on his decision and comes running back to save him from the tower of Rebirth after it's already too late for Griffith to realize his dream. That means that not only did he ruin Griffith's dream, but he's also destroying the path he chose to abandon them and have his own way, so he's destroying his OWN dream as well to continually keep clutching at the broken pieces of what he left behind. When Casca tells Guts he has to keep his commitment to leaving and she can't come with him, Griffith attempts to leave and kill himself to let them be free and then Griffith has a vision of a normal life with Casca where they have kids and live in a tiny house together, and Guts is still out in the world somewhere. That reality never comes to pass because Guts ONCE AGAIN runs back to Griffith's rescue, and Griffith is attempting to scream at Guts to stay away but has no tongue to speak and stop him.
Judeau explicitly states that he's not sure if Griffith is an antagonist or not, and every single member of the Hawks joined willingly EXCEPT Guts. Griffith sacrificing the Band of the Hawk in the Eclipse is exactly in line with the types of necessary sacrifices where people HAVE to die to realize a dream like the one Griffith is after, and he's always attempted to find the path that involves the least amount of death – but unifying an entire country is bathed in blood & warfare. Everyone there except Guts signed up willingly ready to sacrifice their own lives for that cause, and that's exactly what they did to bring their leader back and realize that dream – with the exception of Casca and Guts, who survive and who Griffith explicitly does not kill despite having all of the possible power necessary to do so. (Also, as an interesting point – the entire Eclipse scene where Femto emerges is a direct mirror to
ALIEN when the Xenomorph kills Parker & Lambert, and is the only time in the film where the creature actually intentionally kills members of the crew rather than capture and regress them into eggs to perpetuate itself. Their suffering is directly meant to be a tool to psychologically manipulate Ripley into compliance, because he's meant to represent the embodiment of the absolute darkness and opposite of humanity as one of the God Hand).
However, that power exists because of that sacrifice that the others made. It's the reason why Griffith actively ensures that those around him don't retaliate against Rickert when he slaps Griffith in the face and leaves. He ALWAYS gave his men the choice to follow him or not – with the singular exception of Guts. He doesn't bear them any ill will, malice, or lingering thought, because that's not what they died for. He is instead, focused solely on attaining and creating the kingdom that he always dreamed of, because NOT doing that would be to make all of the deaths and sacrifices it took to achieve that utterly meaningless. It would make the absolute horrors that he experienced and the person he had to turn himself into utterly selfish and pointless. This is connected to why Casca is absolutely horrified whenever she's in Guts' presence, but when she is in Griffith's presence – she is completely calm and serene. That's amplified by when Griffith returns to the physical world after the Incarnation, he is now ALSO interconnected to Guts & Casca as the form through which their child is allowed to exist. This is why he instinctively protects Casca, even though he's able to stand among the graves of the Hawks without feeling any emotion about them any more, because he's come to terms with what happened as being the reality that he lives in now. It's why Guts is still insane with rage and pain, and when questioning Griffith, he simply replies that nothing has changed and that Guts more than anyone should understand the type of person he is, because everything Guts is doing is in an attempt to be Griffith's equal, and he's driven by the same underlying hatred for his father Gambino and protective instinct of his mother Shisu.
This is because the issue that it presents NOW (which is where the manga was at when Miura passed away) is that Guts is now faced with the fact that if he's willing to commit to his path for singular vengeance against Griffith – he's going to have to murder his & Casca's own son to achieve that. He has to be able to recognize that he's becoming a reflection of all of the types of pain and abuses that he went through by clinging to those things, while also refusing to ever accept the world as it is, but only remain singularly committed to the idea of the world as it COULD be... – which is literally the exact power that Griffith obtained to accomplish his goals ONLY as a direct result of Guts' choices. Which means that Guts would also be rendering all of the deaths of the Hawks meaningless if he killed Griffith and destroyed his kingdom, but he views it as the total opposite where he's the only one who's fighting in memory of the absolute horror that they went through and the destruction that was caused in their lives – which is once again, something that he actively committed to giving up when he abandoned them all to seek his own dream.
That's why Guts is paired with the Skull Knight and Griffith is paired with Nosferatu Zodd, as they're echoes of the individual that they no longer have in their lives. Skull Knight keeps pointing Guts towards a goal because Guts still doesn't know how to find the thing he really wants, while Griffith utilizes Zodd as a tool of destruction but also offers the Apostles a place where they can experience a sense of belonging that they lack everywhere else in the world. So, the issues in bringing up those conflicts are inextricably intertwined into Miura's view on the problems of the world and how they came about and what to do about them. It's more than just the narrative pieces of the story, but it's an exceptionally intricate look at countless historical events and how those all interconnected to those themes and ideas, and how he made use of those by creating a story where it's supposed to be a commentary about the actual world from his perfective of his own perspective on the issues of the world.
The point here is that
BERSERK is an exceptionally complex examination about life and how the perspective you take in the narrative from will inform your emotional attachment and understanding of the events in the story – but there's nothing that points to the protagonist being on the path of justice and righteousness – which is also the core message that's being portrayed constantly throughout
Phoenix. If you want an understanding of how deeply complex those elements are in terms of religious mythological narratives, CLAMP's debut manga
RG Veda is a retelling of themes from Hinduism with the Deva-Asura War that utilizes a shitton of the same visual iconography (both of which are also foundational in the designs that Nomura draws on when making the characters in
FF7, which is why I'm exceptionally tl;dr about it all).
When it comes just JUST how big of a deal
BERSERK is – There's a reason that in the first episode of
Evangelion in the very first battle against Sachiel, Unit-01 gets stabbed in its right eye and then gets its left arm cut off before going "Berserk" and Anno continually builds off of that visual iconography and mirroring it, which is why in
End of Evangelion, Asuka gets stabbed in the left eye and her right forearm gets split in half, but her Eva doesn't go berserk, and instead just gets ripped apart by the Mass Production Evas. He even emphasizes this more in
Rebuild where in Shinji's second battle, there's a subtle change to the scene where rather than both of Shinji's eyes being hidden by his hair like in the original, only his left eye is visible in
Rebuild in the moment before Shinji once again instantly attacks with feral instinct rather than following the training that he was given. It's impossible to overstate how important just... and indescribable number of meticulously intricate details in
BERSERK are that most people don't give a second thought to (which again, I've been uncovering while researching for a year in obscene amounts of detail because a countless number of them are a part of the lifeblood of
Final Fantasy VII).
Regardless of how humble Miura was about his work, the impact it had across the industry of anime, manga, & games is literally impossible to express, and it's INSANE to think about what carrying that weight looks like for those who are left to potentially be able to do so. That's why it's SUCH a complex question when you're talking about continuing
BERSERK and the complicated questions around what that actually means, because the story is ALL of those things, and it is consistent about that through line in the narrative at all times, because it's intrinsically interconnected to how the psychological mechanisms of the story are established and the lessons about the inheritance of those struggles.
If you're going to change the title and make SOMETHING, the question is – is that something still
BERSERK or is it something else entirely? There are a shitton of different
Evangelion stories, but are they ACTUALLY continuing the story or are they just writing fan fiction? There's a huge difference between the two, and when you're considering something that is a 30-year-long life work and a manga that is considered a unique masterpiece of art, and for an author who is no longer alive and that work represents his legacy – that is a choice that cannot be made lightly.
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