Berserk will forever remain in the heart from fans as one of the most great monuments of Japanese comics, and rightly so. The forever unfinished universe of Kentaro Miura started in 1989 is so complex and unique that it leaves a lot of room for the collective imagination… and flaws that fans are willing to overlook.
Berserk : an impossible first scene?
Few manga have won the respect and admiration of readers around the world like Berserk did it. At the center of this unconditional love is the show’s main character, Guts. A character as complex as it is profound. It’s this depth that keeps fans from simply accepting the manga’s opening pages as canon to them., as they swear with the behavior and character of Guts. The psychology of the character is divided into three very distinct acts, his childhood, his passage in the Band of the Falcon and after the Eclipse. Even if we know chronologically when the first scene of the manga takes place (after the Eclipse), in no way does she match Guts’ personality during any of these phases.
Indeed, in the first chapters of the manga, Guts emerges as a totally inimitable protagonist. The first chapter of Berserk start with Guts sleeping with a woman. However, in the throes of passion, the woman is transformed. Although she thinks she tricked Guts with her disgusting true form, he reverses the role without hesitation and fires a cannonball from his arm, destroying what until then appeared to the reader as the beginning of a plot. This opening serves above all to show that the world is full of demons and that Guts is someone who likes to kill them. However, throughout the story of the manga several elements are shown that prevent this scene from being canon. The main one being that Guts is basically a very sensitive person.whose coldness is a bulwark against human contact.
Guts is Haptophobic?
Indeed, as good manga readers, you know that Guts was sold by the one he considered his adoptive father and sexually abused during his childhoodexplained in the flashback beginning at the end of volume 3 of the manga, during the famous Golden Age. This violent trauma gave birth in him to a deep aversion to human contact.. Same cascaone of the strongest female characters in any manga, was initially unable to touch him, and ended up getting there with difficulty over the course of their relationship. This cold and detached personality that defines him in the first chapters is a rational defense mechanism, but which therefore no longer corresponds at all with the vision of Guts capable of sleeping with a demon, especially after the Eclipse. If, after this event, he is looking for the God Hands to take revenge on Griffith, he is haunted by the rape of Casca, the love of his life, who has lost his mind. Considering this love, it’s hard to imagine him having a sex life behind Casca’s back… Because of these contradictions, some fans prefer to consider that this first departure Berserk is actually non-nanonwhich is not a bad idea.
Dark things happen in Berserk, but never without them being connected to other things. However, since this is an introductory scene, it is difficult to link it, and this has never been done by Kentaro Miura. It is quite possible to remove it without changing the course of events. This is explained by the fact that Berserk had two departures. A first with volume 1, of course, where the author was not entirely sure of the direction to take his story, and a second start with volume 3, when it was finally resolved. So for many, Volume 3 counts as the true beginning of Guts’ adventures. Moreover, since the death of the author, the tributes to Kentaro Miura multiply in the world, in particular in the last game Elden Ring, where appear numerous references to Berserk.
