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Speaker 6: Remaining a live man.
Speaker 4: I like this man, you letting butterfly flapping his wing
big down another forest.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 3: It gonna cause a tree fold, letting five thousand miles away.
Speaker 5: Man, nobody see nobody.
Speaker 1: You don't need no man.
Speaker 5: We don't like you.
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Speaker 6: That's the point.
Speaker 3: Man, don't black it dag on the pan.
Speaker 6: Man All right, Felix, welcome to the show. How you
doing man?
Speaker 3: Doing good? Mister Verdon, how are you doing today?
Speaker 6: I'm doing really well. You and I have talked a
decent amount, but I guess this is the first time
we've ever done anything recorded together, even in my group
chat for a long time, and just a little bit
of background. This is gonna be different than normal episodes.
I'll probably do a couple of these. I've got some
other guests coming on, but instead of doing you know,
like something topical or like a contained one shot or
like a longer series of one guest, I want to
kind of expand you know, doing more media analysis. Right,
politics is really depressing and boring sometimes, and so I
want to talk about berzerk Uh. Those who aren't aware
this is a manga write Japanese comic book, I'm not
really the core demo for that. I think this is
the only one I've read all the way through, and
it's really interesting, really unique. So Felix, if you want,
I'll just kick it over to you for some kind
of you know, broad context.
Speaker 3: Okay, So I am more geared towards that demographic. I've
been introduced to all sorts of anime and manga. However,
I'm very stingy on which mangas i'll actually go out
and buy, because typically there'll be a release schedule where
you'll have like a fan translation up and ready to go.
But the one that I have committed to to getting
all of them is Berserk, and I actually went out
of my way to get all the real Big Boy
large print special Dark Horse ones, so I've got all
fourteen of them. Thirteen and fourteen are currently rapped because
I haven't had times when my kids have been born
to read Berserk. It is not a family friendly manga
by any stretch of the imagination. But for a little
bit of a breakdown on it, Berserk was speaking of
one second.
Speaker 6: No worries, So just a little bit of background. As
I've said, I am not the core demo for this,
and before I've mentioned other kind of pieces of pop
culture that I consider to sort of transcend the genre.
This is one example of this. So Berserk is technically
you know, dark fantasy, highly influential on things like you know,
Dark Souls. You'll also see a lot of references to
gene Wolf, but also to a lot of other pieces
of Western history and Western art. There's a huge influence
from Bosch and Escher. The art is genuinely fantastic. It's
very very good, and you know, as I said, sort
of like you know Watchmen for you know, Western comics
or graphic novels. I think, as we're supposed to call
them now, it is above and beyond that genre. It
is sort of something in its own right. As Felix
was about to say, it's very, very long running. It's
been published in I think the same magazine, Sense eighty nine.
The guy behind it sort of an a tour figure
unfortunately passed away. But thankfully before he passed he not
only had you know, a group of students, right, people
who trained under him, and then his best friend who
he sort of left the entire outline of the plot
for his untimely death. So it is still continuing on.
There's with anything sort of a split between people who say, oh,
you know, only you know the original creator's vision is
what matters, versus people who you know are enjoying the
new stuff. I will say, actually, I think the new
stuff is quite good. Got quite a lot of ground
to cover before we get there, uh.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and sixty chapters later.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So for those interested, I'll put a link down
in the description where you can read it all for
free digitally. In addition to having very good art, The
reason I think This is really interesting to me. And
this is you know, one of many themes we'll talk
about is that Berserk is sort of a tale of
a virtuous pagan right, a man who is damned. We'll
get into details of that later, and yet nonetheless fights
against impossible odds. As you mentioned, Felix, the content is
quite extreme. Literally, anything you can imagine is in there.
It is not glorified. In all cases. It is very
clearly bad and unpleasant. Also, the character main character Guts
is based off of an actual German mercenary kind of Also.
Speaker 3: There's kind of kind of place it's a very fortunate
quink ink where I think one of the interviews said
that Myra didn't know who it was, but it's it
lines up so well. You're like, how how could he
not like he lost his arm, and it's like whether
or not it's like maybe some some blood memory transferred
across people to be like, oh, this is exactly what
you could get out of this. It's it's uncanny.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And for that that is gots go Otz Vaughn.
I can't say that it's German, look it up, but
that was a you know, a fifteenth century German Mercenary,
who much like Guts in our novel, had a metal hand.
That's its own it because it's a great Wikipedia article
on that German Mercenary highly recommend it. So yeah, as
far as like the big big picture stuff, again, as
we said, very very grim. Every once in a while
Twitter and or Reddit gets really mad about it. Oh yes,
discourse right, step over it. It is dark fantasy. Additionally,
as we mentioned before, the art is very very good,
very influential, and you can look at it and not
only see how the art evolves over time, right, it
gets better, but would you imagine that for Mustard this
time it was just one guy. It's incredibly impressive. It's
recently sort of resurfaced in kind of zoomer pop culture, right,
People my age really like it. You see a lot
of it in like gym culture for fairly obvious reasons.
As you mentioned Felix in the outline, there have been
mixed results as far as adapting it. You know, there
have been some games. There was a nineties anime that
became very popular in like AMVs, so you've probably seen
some SoundCloud wrap set to a fight scene from that.
The animation is really good, but it's sort of truncated, right,
it doesn't tell the whole story, but I like it.
It's not as good I'll die on that hill as
the original material. There's some video games that I certainly
remember renting from Blockbuster and really have nothing other to say.
Some people like them. I don't have a lot of
experience there. And then there's a really weird looking three
D animated version that came out on Netflix in like
twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the twenty sixteen anime is a adaptation moving forward
from the Golden Age, and as we're talking about troubles
with adaptations, it picks up where the Lost Children arc
would have ended without showing anything in there. They kind
of glossed over the trail of destruction that would have
led and the rest of the cast that were introduced
to two Guts, and then it just follows conviction all
the way to about the key point at the end
there is that you finally get the armor, you finally
meet sure K, and you have this big distinction between it.
And it's a shame because some of the production notes
in that thing looked really good them. From what I
understand and remember is the idea was they wanted to
do three D overhand drawn, which would have given this
really otherworldly kind of look to it. And the hand
drawn stuff was gorgeous, it looked great. It's a fantastic
adaptation of what Mirror's work is. But the three D
was not it. It was one of those things where it's clunky,
it's awkward, it doesn't it just kind of failed in
a lot of people's eyes for like, what is it doing?
And that's not that's not even to mention some of
the sound design, because it was just kind of a
botched adaptation. It had very high hopes and just crumbled immediately.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So the reason that we're referring to different arcs
for those who aren't familiar, is these are kind of
long running plot lines, right. They're they're sort of a
you know, half dozen of them, and each one of
them spans, you know, in some cases, you know, years
and years of production, and they're broadly speaking, you know,
there is an overarching story, but each one is more
self contained. So if you're looking for a place to start,
we're going to be covering what's called the Black Swordsman arc,
which is pretty short, self contained and is an introduction, right,
it takes place in media race, you know, after the
characters already established. You can correct me on this, Felix,
but this was originally, at least in some part, the pilot, right, what.
Speaker 3: He picked effectively, So there was there is a material
called Berserk, the prototype that came before it. There's a
lot of things where effectively the design is very similar.
You can see what Miro was trying to get at.
The famous brand of sacrifice isn't on his neck, it's
on his chest, and it's huge, and he still had
He's most of the design elements are there. He's missing
in a hand, he has an eye patch, it's not
just a dead socket. And he's fighting a vampires to
go because his mom got killed. Pretty basic, you know,
shown in kind of material. Still very dark, gritty.
Speaker 6: So if you're looking for a place to start with
written material, the Black Swordsman arc is normally it's organized
in the first where you find it online, like the
first couple of volumes, relatively short, relatively uh. It is
still very good, but it is more more underdeveloped, right,
you're getting still it's an introduction, right. One of your
notes I thought was funny that it's quite accurate. Is
you know, Guts in this version is a pizza cutter, right,
all edges and no point that.
Speaker 3: He said, dude, it's so bad. In the first couple
chapters he's it's all it's all edge, and you can
see it that that was taken from the prototype pretty hard,
where you're like, I'm just gonna be this guy who's
might makes right and I hate everything and everything sucks,
but I'm so cool and it's so obnoxious, Like if
you took him for more modern audiences. Season one Aaron Yeager,
who is an insufferable just jackass. He's not the season
four hobo Aaron that everybody loves to meme that he's
this epictone will like the first couple chapters, you find
Guts in a rough, rough place. There's a lot of
carry out from the prototype, and given that this was
an eighty nine, this is kind of the vibe that
you're getting, like you're getting these aloof fist of the
North Star. You have all these kind of adjacent manga
around there where you're trying to have people that are detached.
They're not really I'm trying to think of the right
word for this, as because as we find out later.
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Speaker 3: Dot I E to borrow the meme term Guts is
very much as sensitive young man like he's He's one
of those people where the and in the no I
have the black Storesman basically builds up to what effectively
is like two panels, and it's right at the very end,
and we'll get to it later, but the first little bit,
you're like, man, this guy is a jackass. He's just
flaunting he's killing people left, right and center by all
metrics other than the first panel showing a monster like
he's a bad guy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think it's important to do. Like the
it's perhaps best to start if you're looking, if you're interested,
and I highly recommend it is either starting with the
anime if you're up for it. It's you know, it's
relatively quick paced, and it'll give you sort of an
executive summary of you know, what most people consider to
be the classic storyline, you know, introduction to our character,
all that, So that's a good place to start. But
also Black Swordsman, it is a prototype. It's sort of
a rougher version of a character you'll need to know
or you'll get to know later, but it's all there.
It's relatively short, and it will give you a taste
broadly speaking of what this universe is. You don't necessarily
get the same depth we get to later, but nonetheless
you sort of get brined so let's dig into it.
And as I've said, i'll have a link for where
you can read this. It was published serially and is
now available in volumes kind of multiple monthly issues put together.
And so this covers in most archives the first three
much much shorter than much much shorter than later arcs.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 6: You, right off the bat get exposed to shall we say,
somewhat graphic content. If you've seen the opening to Conan, right,
this will seem very familiar to you.
Speaker 3: Very very similar, like, yeah, it's the the first panel
is basically a filter. Is like if you can get
past the first one where the first panels guts bare
ass with a chick who turns into a monster, then
you're like, okay, what was that? I got to go further. Now,
what's what's happening? Because when you first look at that,
you're like, oh, is this gonna be a smart book?
I'm not interested. It immediately filters people with any sort
of we'll say dainty or sensibilities right away. Now that's
not true if you start with some of the anime stuff.
It starts off a little little cleaner until it really doesn't.
The Golden Age movies were very good about that where
it's regular violence until it's not. But the general thing
is like, oh, this guy is cool. Look at him.
He's hunting monsters, he's he'll do anything he wants to do.
He'll get butt naked with this monster, let her transform, fangs,
all of it, and then blast her in the face
with something I know without having panels up. That's you know,
more provocative than not. But the main point is we'd
already mentioned he has a cannon arm and you can
clearly see that his artificial hand has something, and you
get the notion of just wall and she burns away.
So it's very much out of the get go. You
already hit it hard if you can deal with that.
You were presented to a regular story at this point
of the Lone Wander entering a castle.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so this is where we meet our first kind
of carry through care. Uh.
Speaker 3: This is.
Speaker 6: To say obviously that the broad strokes of you know,
low or high fantasy, it doesn't really apply. It is
sort of a low fantasy world being dragged into sort
of apocalyptic scenario. Obviously we'll get to Yeah here.
Speaker 3: Sword and sorceries might be be a closer term for it,
because you could you can imagine most of it with Conan,
where you have lots of swords, you have lots of guts,
you have some sort of magic, but it's very hard
to get a hold of it's it's secreted to a
very few amount of people. You still have the weird
transformations like Tulsa Doom just sitting there turning into a snake,
very analogous to what's happening, but it's not it's not
high magic. You're not getting people playing carpets.
Speaker 6: And do not expect to have things broken down and
explain to you, which I actually kind of like, you know,
a lot of it is sort of think fast. You know,
things are developing and you'll be able to sort of
constitute like, okay, what are broadly speaking the rules. But
it opens with, you know, after that kind of initial
panel or an initial couple with a much more typical opening, right,
it's kind of your your prototypical fantasy tavern. You know,
we see Guts with his hood, you know, drawn over,
and you know a bunch of Ruffians, a bunch of
tots are kind of torturing this little fairy who is
a character who will be present the rest of it.
Puck the Elf. I assume the name makes more sense
in Japanese. It's a little bit odd, but you're gonna
have to roll with it effectively being tormented, so it
sets you up for what you expect to be. You know,
our hero, you know, stepping in, you know, unhanded him,
and well we kind of get that, but not at
all in the way you think it. Guts basically just shoots.
Speaker 3: And has murdering apart four people.
Speaker 6: In incredible detail.
Speaker 3: I might add one of a bolt through the guy's skull,
and you're like, oh, okay, he doesn't even say hi,
he doesn't say stop torturing him, he doesn't say unhand him.
It's not heroic, and you're mad. It's just intervention just right.
Speaker 6: The the violence is lovingly rendered, I think would be
a good way to put it. Obviously, guts this sort
of iconic for this giant sword, which you know sort
of became a trope in manga and anime generally speaking. Right, Uh,
obviously you see it in Final Fantasy with characters like Cloud,
who has basically the same sword.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: Obviously features in the Dark Souls games, as well as
any under other any number of different names. But he,
you know, cuts these men apart, and then basically walks
out the door. Uh this, you know, little faeryous little
elf is still tied up. He doesn't even bother to
do that. He just walks straight out the door. And
this is where we get some of that edge, some
of that snark, like he basically is just kind of
making fun of uh, you know, this little elf and
then uh, the mayor of this town throws him in jail. Right.
We we hear a little bit of of this this.
You know, he's tied up, you know, being tortured, are
about to be tortured in this prison and the mayor
comes in. It's like, oh my, did you have any
idea what you've done?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 6: Those were they were what do they call the villain
in this one again? I can't remember, Oh the snake.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the first main like Apostle of the Snake baron,
you have the guy show up. Mind you, we kind
of jumped over the part where Guts is bisecting these dudes.
It's not like they're not clean kills. Like the first thing,
first time he swings the sword, he just bisects somebody.
And then you get the bit there's a lot of
these uh favorite lines where you're like, oh, it's massive, thick, heavy,
far too rough and details like a raw heap of iron.
A lot of people like to hype it, but in general,
like this is very, very messy. It is not a
clean kill. He made a big showing and now isn't
he with the fuzz?
Speaker 6: So he gets, you know, dragged to prison. There's a
lot of torture in this, uh, both to and from Guts. Uh.
This is not a particularly pleasant or optimistic setting.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: You know, Guts, even when he is in his more
heroic moments, is not a good person. To put it mildly,
so anyway, he's being tortured. The local mayor is basically
saying like, oh my gosh, like what have you done?
You know, don't don't you understand? You know you you've
endangered our relationship with the baron and.
Speaker 3: Protection circuit vibes of this.
Speaker 6: Rut said is like yeah, exactly, like, oh, you've messed
up my relationship with you know, with the baron, and
Guts basically spits in his face and says, well, I
know what you're doing. You're a coward. You're giving him
women and children and as of yet we don't know why.
The mayor gets furious. He says, is you know, I'm
gonna have to go apologize, torture him, but don't kill him.
So Guts is, you know, tortured by this kind of
weird gimp looking dude. Uh that will continue. By the way,
there's uh both sexual over and undertones. Uh. Actually, now
that I say, there really are no undertones there.
Speaker 3: There's no there's a there's a couple that you're introduced
to because earlier he's like, don't touch me, which is
actually like a very like you know, key phrase for
a lot of different situations and traumas.
Speaker 6: Oh, believe me. We will get that in detail later.
Speaker 3: Uh. So the point is the.
Speaker 6: The action shifts, right, Guts is being tortured to Uh,
the mayor going to this snake Baron's sort of creepy castle.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 6: He walks in. There's guards at the gate, and this baron,
in human for the time being, is sitting on a
you're sitting on a throne, eating a feast. They talk
back and forth. We see this kind of ominous snake
headed armor behind him, seemingly the origin of the name,
and they have this conversation. He says you know, you
bring him to me basically the black Swordsman. You know,
this this figure of terror which is Guts, and you
know in this he basically says like, I'm you know,
he threatens to kill him. The Mayor's like, oh please,
you know, we'll give you double the tribute in both
gold and flesh, and the guy says, I don't care.
You know, I don't I don't want your tribute. I
want to see humanity perish in flames. Uh, and very
like in this very sort of iconic frame, he spits
a human ear at him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it's he mentions it off handle earlier Guts.
You think he's embellishingly, Oh he's a monster eats human flesh. Well,
now it's true. And so you can find that he's
not just debauchery where you you know, you'd think he's, oh,
they're having him deliver women for you know, harm, No,
he's eating them. Like this is very clearly he's engaging
in a lot of cannibalistic behavior. And the other thing
that's in there now is the snake Baron gives that
idea of like, oh, I don't care, I just want
him managed to burn pages earlier you get the idea
that Guts has very much a miight makes right outlook
on life, where if you're not strong enough to stop
yourself from being squished, as he's complaining to Puck, he goes,
if you touch me on to squish you and if
you can't deal with it, too bad. And with that
in mind, like the whole thing's like, oh, he's gonna
have this huge confrontation, and out of left field comes
what you think is a nightmare from Guts where he
gets this apparition of there's literally no other way to
put it, even if it's you know, foreshattering a monstrous,
demonic fetus just there and it's like, what is going on?
Where the hell did this come from? It wasn't foreshadowed.
It's just suddenly in the room with Guts as he's
laying on the floor, just bleeding out from all the torture,
and it's very clear that he's seen it before. You know,
he's like, oh, why are you still here? Get away
from me? Why are you again? Go away?
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Speaker 3: He's panicking, and then Puck shows up, and this might
be the one thing where it feels I kind of
want to say contrived a little bit, because it is
in this moment that we find out that Puck is
a hillbot. The elves, instead of being tinkerbill powder making
you fly, they can restore wounds and limit your fatigue
by no means is it fully capable, because it's not
something we're in other fiction to be like, oh, look
doesn't have all the scars anymore. No, they're still there.
Like Guts's body is not getting repaired one hundred percent.
He might be getting a ninety percent fixed off of
everyone of Puck's things, but if you take ninety percent,
you're losing a lot of stuff down the line, just
based off of rate of return, if you're always losing
ten percent of your top self at any point time.
So you're like, oh right, cool, this is a way
that we can survive the Shenanigans where it makes sense
he's an elf. Elves have a variety of different traditional interpretations,
either in being like gift exchange things in like Europe, tricksters, pixies,
what have you. But it offers you with the ability
to be like, okay, well, if he just gets his
assna to him all the time, how does he recover
from those? And he so right now, Puck feels kind
of a plot device where he ends up later like
he's relied on in the early chapters, but he's like
nowhere to be found in a couple other ones, cause
like the latest couple of chapters, Guts can't he can
barely see. His eyesight's going out out a whack. These
are not recoverable situations.
Speaker 6: Right, and he is sort of I think the term
is landerized in certain parts of this, where he just
becomes like the character. Uh there are i would say,
ebbs and flows to this character, and as you said,
in large portions he's just absent. We will well, it
is fairly sparse, just the two of them in this
initial art. We will meet many more characters who become
more relevant as you know, the narrative builds out. But
in this sort of you know, prototype version, this very
like trimmed down version. It's pretty much just them and
kind of you know, the monster of the week. It's
not quite that bad and in fact alive. But especially
for the first two, they're very much contained, right. You
can sort of read either one of them and get
pretty much at what you need to from them. Obviously.
The third and final part of this is actually quite interesting.
We get a lot of clarification and sort of teases
for what will come after this. But anyway, Guts is
healed and the snake baron is attacking this village earlier
you know. One of the things that Guts said to
the mayor is like, well, you know, don't you have
your own men, Like why can't you, you know, fight
this battle? And seemingly the snake Baron has come to
enact his revenge on this town. He's riding in with
his men, just killing all the guards and some civilians
as well. Again and someone who you again, I can't
say this enough. This is not for the faint of heart.
And there is a moment where you see like a
half of a child on one of these men's spears. Right,
you don't have to be a genius to figure out
what happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's the snake barons. He does his best
impression of we'll say pre slurpy day. I guess he
joined the fruits of his labor all uh impaler.
Speaker 6: Yes, uh so rides in, you know, Guts is now free.
He he you know, shoots you know, dozens of his
men and also shoots a number of crossbow bolts into
the snake baron. Right, they have this sort of you
know tussle back and forth, and then he sort of
knocks him into this building and all of a sudden,
this is where things just go to twelve, which is
you know, quite common that things ramp up really really
quickly in this and we see the snake Baron shed
his armor and become a sort of human man hybrid.
Speaker 3: Like heads his armor, he just starts to fill it out. Yeah,
he goes in bands really there and if so, here
might be a here might this might be a deep
cut for you. Did you ever watch the was it
the nineties Guiver movie?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 3: So? Guiver is another one of those anime slash manga
that's very known for body horror and just gross. But
a lot of the stuff where you could see this,
this is what his face is kind of what happens
to Mark Hamill in that movie. It's just gross. His
face becomes.
Speaker 6: The inside of the snake smell.
Speaker 3: The bottom palette of the of the snake monster. Now
it's like a monster. It's it's closer to This would
be perfect for like an Elden Ring or Dark Shorts
character where it's an anthem anthropomorphized snake monster. It's a
cobra with arms and legs and a long tail, but
his face is the bottom palette where the new tongue
comes out of.
Speaker 6: Oh, who's that? Boston Dark Souls three that carries an
invisible baby. Uh, this is gonna sound crazy to someone
who hasn't played that game. That's basically what this looks like.
Mirror's art style is incredibly influential in those games. You'll
hear me referencing and all the time. It's even better
if I remembered it. But they all have completely incomprehensible names, so.
Speaker 3: I don't remember, and it's been ripped from there almost
every time, like Dark Souls as we tanged into it.
The most recent one, Elder Ring Blade, is literally I
rip for rip from one of the scenes from later
in the chapters. The armor that Guts wears is very similar.
Speaker 6: Cyrus the Consumed King.
Speaker 3: That's who I was saw there is Yeah, so kind
of an annoying.
Speaker 6: Boss fight, if I'm gonna be honest.
Speaker 3: I've only done a run of like the single Dark
Souls like once me and my buddy went back on
Elder Ring So that's the one I'm more familiar with,
so I know some of the peaks and valleys, but
i'd have to go back and be like, what are
you doing? Twenty fifteen Felix digging out my knowledge on those.
Speaker 6: So uh point is and this is this sort of
iconic fight where we see things that will be echoed
throughout the rest of the series. Uh. This, this Apostle,
we learn, and we don't know what that term means,
although we will come to discover it later, is just
beating gush post, just knocking him into walls, you know,
just hammering him over and over and over again. His
Guts tries to wrestle this massive sword around, you know,
they're they're fighting back and forth. And then as sort
of uh you know foreshadowed in the initial just when
you think all is lost and gust is completely pulverized,
sort of flips his arm down and blasts him with
fire and takes out like, you know, three quarters or
I guess a quarter of his face and head just
blasted backwards.
Speaker 3: It's one of those reoccurring tropes in there where Guts
uses his mouth for something. It doesn't matter what it is,
whether it's gripping a sword, blade, string, what ever. Because
the Apostles have a couple of these things that you
start doing, like they love to gloat, they love to
hear themselves talk, and they are extremely proud, like there
is an underlying current with any apostle in there, Rosine notwithstanding,
but the rest of them are extremely proud of what
they're capable of in their apostle form, to where this
the situation of would be the right one. Underestimating comes
up a lot where they're like, Oh, he's just a dude.
I'm a fucking snake monster. I just crushed three ribs.
I flay his skin off his bones. Mind you, Puck
can't help you in the middle of a fight. So
Guts has to make it from zero to one hundred
in any fight because Puck can't show up. It takes
time for him to heal these things. It's not a
game in that regard. And so the snake Baron finally
gets bodied as a Jay was talking here, and you
finally get to see the sword do its work again
where I just boom. He takes the moment where he's
flabbergacid missing a quarter of his face to getting I
don't know cutting third, I guess he basically gets decapitated.
Speaker 6: And throughout this kind of gloating, you know, he said
over and over again, like you're just a mere mortal.
You know you're you're tough for a mortal kind of
implying for later that somehow these apostles are supernatural, not
a you know, huge leap after he turns into an
anthropmorphic snake monster with a you know, face tongue, which
I guess every tongue is a face tongue, but you
know what if you look it up, that.
Speaker 3: One's really a face tongue.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it is protruding through his face.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: And you know, his Guts is standing over him basically
like torturing him to death. He says, you know, he
basically proclaims the indomitable human spirit. You know, he says,
you know, I'm more about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he goes over like it doesn't matter if a broken, beaten, scarred, like,
we're gonna fight till the very very end. And there's
a level where these apostles once they once they they
have an instinct of like oh I'm dead, I'm gonna
die now, they give up. They just become like these
little worms and literal worms later, right, and there's not
a lot of leeway where they just give up and
fall over. Meanwhile, Guts earns his name later of the
moniker of the Struggler, where you can see it like
he hit underneath a bunch of corpses to get the
jump on the guy as he's getting his ass handed
to him. He has one last trick to finally do it,
and much later when we get to the end of
the arc, you get to see just how far he's
willing to do it. Little preludes all here in the
Snake Bear. It's just small, little snippets because you never
know when you first make it if anyone's gonna like it, right,
You can't commit to being like it's gonna be a
nine hundred chapter epic when you're first starting out as
a mango, So you kind of end up into a
bow and say, do people like it? This is a
nice stopping point. Can I expand further? Or is this
really gonna grab people's attention?
Speaker 6: And this is basically uh, you know, Puck does the
does the thing and name drops then or the manga
he says, this is berserk.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: So the next kind of mini one shot is more
character building. Right, we see guts assumably someone afterwards kind
of walking through the woods. You know Puck is is
following him. It seems like basically he's deliberately tried to
abandon Puck and Puck is trying to catch back up.
He and I'll go over this one more quickly because
there's sort of less to this one. Again. The art
is incredible, it's worth it's.
Speaker 3: Incredible, but it boils down to one statement that everybody
likes to hash over and over again. But it's world building, right.
Speaker 6: And so he encounters this, you know, old man and
his daughter in a cart. They basically say like, hey,
you know, can we give you a ride? He rebuffs them,
eventually says yes, they're talking. The old man asks him, oh,
you know, are you a mercenary? He says, you know?
More or less? He says, oh, you know, was it
his son or was it his nephew? I can't remember
someone in his family.
Speaker 3: Well, it's definitely just a relative.
Speaker 6: Uh. Well, he was a mercenary too, and he died
just as some you know, anonymous soldier on the battlefield.
And imagine, you know, how much better his life would
have been if you would have, you know, stayed home.
He could have enjoyed the simple pleasures of life and guts.
You know. Turns to him and says, well.
Speaker 10: Oh, Amy, my little one. I ask myself a million
questions every day, when will you give me your first smile?
How much sleep do you need? How can I help
you and your big brother to get along?
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Speaker 6: He died what he loved doing, Like isn't that better? Again?
Some kind of you know, foreshadowing of the character. And
then we see this sort of brand right which we've
seen on guts any number of times before. We've seen him,
you know, wipe blood into it. That seems kind of suspicious.
It's been remarked upon.
Speaker 3: You, Yeah, he was. He kind of licked the blood
off of it when he was having a snake bar
and show up to town. It's only been alluded to
right now, but this is definitely the uh, you know,
what is this? What does this do? It's not exactly
it doesn't actually ever give you that till the very
end of the arc, and even then it could be
debated like what exactly it does? But You're definitely wanted
to do a lot more on like oh, like he's
he's like physically cursed.
Speaker 6: Like this is bad, right, And that's one of the
things that he says is, you know, he sort of
jokingly says, oh, you know, I'm I'm pursued by evil spirits.
And the guy's like, okay, come on, you know you're
trying to be mysterious or whatever. And then, you know,
Guts kind of flirts with this girl a little bit,
nothing serious. It seems like she's interested.
Speaker 3: He's just younger. It's just one of those things where
you realize that it's nothing crazy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and then he falls asleep and he has this
sort of a very disturbing nightmare where he's running through
this maze being chased by a giant version of this
sort of demonic fetus monster we've seen earlier. You know,
he's running, he impales his foot, it's basically stuck there.
Speaker 3: Unarmed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, which is another recurring theme. There's there's a lot
of nudity in this.
Speaker 3: As well, Like it's it's supposed to be like Pizza
Cutter does still vulnerable. It's not yes, right, it's it's
it's character development in a way that's not spoken.
Speaker 6: Yes, and we see that, you know, this thing is
chasing after him, and he wakes up in the middle
of it and finds this like horrible little goblin monster thing,
and he you know, throws it off and smashes it
and says, oh, this is you know, this is an incubus, right,
it's a demon. I think the exact phrase is produced
by the combined blood and sexual fluids of men who
died violently, which is a lovely turn of phrase, but.
Speaker 3: Basically yeah, I mean even on his they don't. I
don't think they are here go because I have the
book open right in front of me, right just as
our fun reference think youby were born in the mixed
blood of sexual fluid to those who died with hatred
and malice, which means is somewhere around here there must
be some corpses of bandits or the like who died violently.
Speaker 6: Yes, And then, as per usual, all hell breaks, These
sort of you know, skeletal warriors are erupped out of
the ground and start attacking these three guys or the
party of three. Uh again, I don't know how many
times I can say this. The art is superlative here,
it's absolutely beautiful, Like there's this great double panel of
you know, guts basically swinging his sword around all of
these uh you know, all of these skeletal kind of
you know, soldiers. And for those who are interested in
this the armor in Berserk, some of it's obviously fantasy,
a lot of it is really good and historically derived.
You're an artist for the.
Speaker 3: Kind of that whole, Like I think a two hour
breakdown of a video where someone goes over like this
is the arc, this is that armor, this is where
it came from, and it is surprisingly in depth. I
don't I believe it started off as a blog post
that was linked to Reddit, which eventually I think got
a YouTube video on it which I can't remember off
the top of my head, but it is surprisingly thorough
on like, no, this is where this armor piece came from,
and you have that you know, lovingly, as I'll put it,
the Japanese artist love of detail, being able to put
in there where you're like, oh no, this is real,
This wasn't what's the joke? Like any sufficient Japanese hobbyists
will beat you at your own game.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And like I said, obviously there's a lot of
fantasy in this, but especially for background characters and goons.
Actually even in the earlier you know sort of I
guess we could say volume. We mentioned arms and armor,
very very high quality, and you know, they're they're fighting,
and seemingly there's this sort of endless tide and the
action breaks and we see, you know, back into this
wagon and we see that this girl has become possessed
and killed her father, and Gut you know, sees her
walking towards him and has this sort of flashback where
he sees her smiling, you know, as they were in
the in the wagon ago exactly, and he hesitates, and
just as he hesitates, she stabs him, like right in
the gut. You know, the spell is broken. He decapitates
this girl and then continues fighting seemingly all night, and
as you know, the sun breaks, the you know, the
spirits dissipate, the bones sort of you know, returned to
being inert. And I don't know if you have it
in front of you, but there's this sort of echoey
voice and obviously it's Britten texts, so you know there's
not a sort of like an audio version of it,
but basically saying like we'll follow you forever and again
through this whole thing, we've seen that brand started to bleed,
first with the Incubus and then again with these spectral soldiers,
sort of foreshadowing something that will you know, carry forward?
Is there anything I missed? And sort of summarizing and
speaking about.
Speaker 3: That Felix that's coms it up pretty close. The main
point is that the girl gets murdered right off the
bat with the skeletons, like as they are erupt she
gets impaled. And so you have this thing where there's
the spirits are capable of both animating a dead body
and actually trying to take over life flesh. It doesn't
matter like at that point you're just an instrument. If
you're weak enough, will as eventually it will show later
I believe it's. Yeah. Leader in the arc, Guts almost
gets possessed until he's able to shake him off. There's
a lot too there where you start to realize, Okay,
if they're saying that they can't chase him down, how
long has Guts been doing this? Like if he doesn't
get a single night's sleep for how long? How like
maybe I'd be a pizza cutter like you sit there
and go I'm cranky after the kids wake up at
four thirty. I'm not cranky enough to tell people to
go kill them else. But it's one of those things where, Okay,
if this is every night, you're now on a night
shift where you're constantly having to not die, you may
or may not ever get any sort of respite from it. Yeah,
it's really easy to see where he's getting this mite
makes right thing, like if you can't handle your own shit,
how am I supposed to handle it for you? I've
got too much going on. And so it's one of
those little tidbits where it doesn't really give a lot
in terms of character other than the idea of this
man is like just hounded. That'll be a pun later
in life. But he is hounded by all these spirits
all the time, and so it's much more about world building.
There's just fucking violence everywhere because they're just in a field,
just a clearing. It's barely a clearing in the forest.
Hundreds of corpses just there, Okay.
Speaker 6: And we also see this sort of tension in Guts
as a character between on one hand, this sort of
indomitable fighting spirit will he'll never give up no matter what.
He'll fight all night if he needs to. But also
he's incredibly nihilistic and fatalistic, right he says in this like, well,
you know, I guess he says it later, but it's
relevant here. He's like, once you're dead, you're dead. There's
nothing after that. It's just done.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 6: And he says, you know, like again speaking about this
guy's deceased relative, where he's like, well, what does it matter,
right if you die doing what you you lived, Like
that's that's all there is, and that is something that tension.
We will we will get background for later. Tune in later,
tune in next time. Uh, but we.
Speaker 3: Will get there. Doesn't really believe it because you saw
him hesitate, like it's just you get those small little hints.
You're like, Okay, he's not really like a pizza cutter.
There's something more that first chapter what's kind of a
bait and switch, Yes.
Speaker 6: And that exact moment of hesitation, right, we will we
will see later again. I know it's annoying to constantly
being referencing what happens in other arcs, but this one
it's important to mention sort of occurds chronologically after the Yes,
this is the most famous arc. This is again, as
we've said, just sort of in the middle of this narrative.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna take a quick tangent here with this where
there are there are arguments to be made that people
say you should just start with the Golden Age versus
used to start with the Black Swordsman, because if you
start chronologically when Guts is literally born, you just you
go through everything that he has seen up to that point.
The problem with that is, just like say the Usual Suspects,
if you start at the very beginning, you lose the magic,
and part of it is finding out the mystery once
once you really, once you go through the Golden Age,
everything makes sense. It has the defining event of the
entire series all wrapped up in a very bloody, gruesome bow,
missing eyelids and leather hell razor outfits and everything. But
it's it's not the same. So if you're if you're
completely naive to how the story developed, and if you
watch that, there's also these gigantic character problems that arise
literally with the first panel because you're like, oh, sensitive,
sensitive young man, Guts wouldn't do such a thing like that,
doesn't make any sense at all, whereas and so with
publication history, you're like, oh, okay, I can see where
they're starting to come up with these ideas, how do
I flesh them out? It's more of a organic kind
of war storytelling, I.
Speaker 6: Guess, yeah, And I think that that's a That's why
I believe this is the place to start, both because
it's it's contained, you understand relatively quickly if this is
something you're gonna like or not without wasting a lot
of time, and also for the exactly that reason, even
if narratively it takes place later, it makes less sense
because the characters simply do not act the same way,
you know, as they would if this were like a
literal progression. But the next section, which the majority of
this arc, is really fascinating.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we get introduced to the neat of a
lot of stuff.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and that's good format as far as a podcast, right,
get to the most interesting thing forty seven minutes into
a recording. But basically this is where we one learn
a lot more about this universe and also really see
the first interesting character and not to say Guts becomes interesting,
but we get a really complicated character in this one,
which is a lot of fun, so somewhat similar to
the first part. We they're continuing on their journey, walking
into a new town and they walk in on.
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contil slash Christmas an execution.
Speaker 6: We see this sort of tent up to the side.
There's this burly knight standing next to the executioner called
Zon Dark.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 6: My best theory for this is that this is this
whole anime is or manga is full of names that
sounds like Western names to Japanese people. So it's sort
of like syllables that might be in the English language
put into a blender. The point is this the big
beefy knight, you know, the big hammer standing out front,
and this woman is being accused of heresy. Obviously this
there's a priest there. This is heavily you know, pulling from.
Speaker 3: The inquisition, has found a heretic. We've got to put
him to death right now.
Speaker 6: And this woman, you know, despite protesting her innocence, is decapitated.
Guts is in the front row, and you know, as
as you know, her brother or son, I can't remember
who some you know young boy is basically screaming, uh,
picks up her head and throws it into this tent.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: There's sort of a brief interaction with this on dark guy,
and we see this kind of like hulking figure, uh,
just almost no neck, kind of pretty fat. It's disgusting. Yeah,
like really pug shaped character.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 6: So point is this character, the count, you know, has
a brief interaction with his his henchman, and basically this
guy is on dark, gets into a fight with Guts,
you know, Guts you know, punches him, kind of roughs
him up, and then they just bolt. They're being chased
by these guards. You know that he gets cornered, does
what he normally does, you know, slashes a ton of
these guards, really messes up. Like basically the.
Speaker 3: Whole double spread of two people add in the same
swing getting bisected and it's never pop down, right, it's
always a half. So there's four pairs of two pairs
of legs missing their tops.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you you get to see all of it.
It is an anatomy, course, I'll put it that way.
Speaker 12: Uh.
Speaker 6: And so you know this the the tide is starting
to turn though, you know, more and more people are pulling, pulling,
pouring into this sort of dead end. You know, Guts
and and Pucker are surrounded and then all of a sudden,
this little great pomps out and this creepy little man
basically throws a bunch of smoke bombs out. It says, hey,
you follow me, So they run into the sewer, they escape,
and this creepy little guy Fergus.
Speaker 3: Well, so look we're gonna let's back up half a
second here. So the creepy little man Vargas is a
big deal in there, but let's uh, let's take a
half step back here, because it's gonna double back in
here where the brand is used as the call out
to the count, so clearly someone knows what he doing
or what he is. This zon dark guy actually confronts
Guts head on, right, He's not just part of the
crowd anymore. And this is where you start to realize
that the sword. The sword doesn't get its name I
think until Godo names it and the lost children are
I think, like right before conviction. But the sword is
eventually given the name the Dragon Slayer because it's a
sword big enough to slay a dragon and it will
not break, regardless of what kind of hammer is actually given.
There's lots of chips it won't break. But Guts one
on one bodies is on dark and oh, let's one
last out of tangent for clarity with this, Guts is
mostly believable when he does these things, because by most estimates,
he's like six foot seven two and seventy pounds of
pure muscle. This guy you talked about the gym culture before,
he's fucking yoked like there is nobody else. Like of
other manga you might want to get into. His closest
competitor would be a boky character where they're just ripped.
They're very athletic, they're very strong to silliness levels. But
the fun part with this manga is that sword has weight.
When you're chopping people in half. It is not a
it's not a enoughing personal kid slap of a katana.
It's like, no, this horse now got bisected. This guys
now bisected. It's stuck into the wall. There's a heaviness
to the violence that's not like a Power Rangers episode.
And so as he's going through beating the hell out
of his dawn Dark, you can feel it. His face
is all fucked up. This immensely proud warrior guy gets
bodied by a nobody who's already maimed. You can see
that he has a fake arm and no eye. I
should be able to win this fight gets bodied. Everyone's like, well,
we all have swords, let's go kick as start losing,
only to be bailed out by Vargas snooping in because,
as you can tell when the brand was bleeding, something's
gonna happen. We don't know what. We just know it's
gonna be menacing. You're fighting fifty guards plus the champion
plus the count. Like, bro, this is a death wish.
So Vargas saves him. He sneaks in, shoots all the
things because you guys gotta get you guys got to
follow me right now. And Vargas, other than being a
very creepy and he's not creepy in terms of his personality,
he's very monomoniacal in his viewpoint. He is what's that
movie with Cher the guy in the face, You know
I'm talking about where I'm blanking. He is horrifically disfigured.
Argus is completely dejected and kind of disgusting, Like half
of his face is normal, the other half is flayed.
He's having a very difficult time like walking. He has
a cane. Vargas is totally bored, but he then will
info dump guts on what's happening with the count. Ah,
you're here, muted, buddy, mister Burden, mister Burden, you're muted.
Speaker 6: That joke would have been way funnier if I were
actually uh, if I were actually audible again good yeah,
and no joke is funnier than when you repeat it.
I was going to say, I was looking desperately through
Shared's filmography trying to figure out what you were referencing to,
but on fortunately, you're talking to a zoomer who has
seen two movies, and so that cultural context went over
my head. Although I did work for a guy who
the car collection I worked for who made his money
providing cards to movie studios and famous actors, and he
said Share quote was a disgusting whore. So take what
you will from that.
Speaker 3: You know what that's actually going to play into this
arc real fast percent is so it works so perfectly.
Speaker 6: So we he is talking to Guts and he basically says,
like you have to seek revenge for me, that this
man was a monster. He used to be harsh but fair,
but all of a sudden seven years ago something changed.
Speaker 3: Yeh.
Speaker 6: We learn that this this count was basically fighting heresy,
you know, this sort of vile cult, and according to Vargas,
the cult you know, nuck in and killed his wife
and that's when he changed. He became you know monstrous,
you know, torturing people. We learned from Vargas, who was
his physician, that all of a sudden, you know, he
was just abducting people and you know, doing horrible things
to them, eating them.
Speaker 3: And then one day, very vivid detail as giving out
information where Vargas is. One of his legs is consumed.
So that's where the King comes in. Vargas is very
much I know, you're a Zumras. Isn't gonna work very well.
But Sean Wiland of Internet fame will know this. He
looks like John Hurt from Snow Piercer. He's just missing
limbs and skin all all over the place.
Speaker 6: That's one of the two movies.
Speaker 3: I'll take it. I'll take it's one of the It's
it's very it's yeah, it's it's very disgusting. As the
Count personally partakes in all this torture.
Speaker 6: We find out that Vargas, uh, you know, he tried
to flee with his his wife and his son. I
believe at least one child, and.
Speaker 3: I think it's the sons, but it never gives like
how many, and the.
Speaker 6: Count catches them, you know, horrifically tortures them and then
murders his family in front of him, uh Vargas. Somewhat later,
you know, after being tortured, he you know, consumes a
drug that will let him, in sort of a Romeo
and Juliet fashion, you know, fake his death and then
he's able to you know, sort of smuggle himself out,
uh and guts. Basically just says like, yeah, I don't care. Uh,
that's pretty gay. I'm gonna kill him anyway, but not
because you told me to. Right after being saved by.
Speaker 3: This guy, I was gonna do it anyway. Whatever, Dad, Yeah.
Speaker 6: Some some kind of performative edge. But we're also introduced
to a major plot point that is not particularly expanded
upon in this one. But this this sort of red
egg shaped object covered in faces as eyes and teeth.
Speaker 3: Yes, a lot of people will see the memes of
the behalo it arranging its face and eyes in the
right order, screaming and bleeding out of its eyes. I
don't believe, oddly enough, for the little bit of autism,
I don't believe this one is actually ever given a color.
The only one that is given a particular color is
the egg of the King, which we find out in
the Golden Age, which is called the crimson behalo it.
This one's typically colored like grayish blue. They can be
whatever color it is. The main point on this is
like Berserk is all black and white. There's no color
to it. So this is one of those ones where
there's it is a darker color. It is given. It
shows this you can use whatever imagination. I have a
fondness of one of the art picks later where some
of them are blue. So like you have a lot
of license on what colors they are. Outside of you
know somebody in particulars you're muted against her.
Speaker 6: Wow, incredible professional podcaster, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 3: It's the first time bad luck with me.
Speaker 6: And that's all right, one hundred percent. And you know what, Felix,
despite the fact that I ask you medical questions, I
trust you that to that level, I will not be
inviting you back on because you made me forget how
to use software.
Speaker 3: That that's okay. It happens.
Speaker 6: So in the meantime, right, we learned that this bailet
was in some way connected to the count he owned it.
The physician stole it when he left. We don't know
how that matters. Allegedly, arrived part of this caravan, right,
it was something that these traveling merchants were carrying.
Speaker 13: For the twelve days of Christmas. Your spar had for
me twelve Christmas eleven cakes of baking, ten salmon smoking,
nine Christmas crackers.
Speaker 7: Eight lovely Jesus even, six stucking fiddlers.
Speaker 13: Five misses for Christmas, case, three Brussels rouse, two turkey
legs under Christmas mate, super easy.
Speaker 4: Spine, you're super easy supermarkets.
Speaker 6: So while this is happening, are the Count is talking
to his head goon. It's on dark right, he's he's
horribly injured, you know, he's he's laying in.
Speaker 3: Bed, he's not holding the l very well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's raging. Right, he kills one of the physicians
attending him. But the Count comes in and basically sorry,
everyone leaves, and uh, basically there's no way to he
he vomits out a demon slug.
Speaker 3: You're gonna have to pull the image, like, there's no
way of describing this.
Speaker 6: What volume is this? I'm this is it is?
Speaker 3: Hey, I can give you off mine. It's page two
thirty six. If you just put in this account, damon,
that'll be it.
Speaker 6: I will actually I'll edit this part out so it
looked like I had it the whole time, perfect. I'm
reading it online, so you're good.
Speaker 3: It's it's right after, but we'll say, like, you know,
as you pull it up, we'll let you do it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Earlier, whas Vargas is giving a a description of how
the Count looks, you start to realize why people start
calling him the slug Count, because he looks like a slug.
He grows antanna, his arms morphed into I don't remember
what they're what they're thing is it's not necessarily a
pseudopodum my old well, the teachers are gonna kill me,
but it's you can see.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, so let me pull the u uh
uh and there's more mentioned we will uh get to. So, yes,
all right, you see this kind of horror account, right,
and his horrifically injured uh you know, henchman here, and
then all of a sudden we see, right, this sort
of horrific monster, you know, vomiting out.
Speaker 3: Of the Count's mouth, and it there's the panel. Yeah,
if you go on like.
Speaker 6: It's it's it's somewhat grim and he says, you know,
my demon take it inside of you and then we
sort of move on from there.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: At the same time, we kind of go back to
the conversation.
Speaker 3: This is happening at the same time, so it's very
it's cutting back and forth. I'm going to be like,
this is happening at the exact same time, but the timeline.
Speaker 6: He mentions, uh, which we will get to later. The
God hand right by the way, Felix, do you need
to go?
Speaker 3: I got a little bit more. I can give you
about fifteen more minutes.
Speaker 6: Cool, cool, just drop out and I'll finish the summary
and talking about a little bit if you want to
just leave whenever you need to. We see the God
hand right, Guts mentioned them, these five shadowy figures. So anyway,
comes back to the conversation and all you know, they're
going back and forth and out of nowhere, Guts Brand
starts bleeding again, and then really just out of nowhere,
this sort of demon corrupted Henchman just emerges through the
wall and just starts fighting with Guts again. However, and
you know what, I'm just going to pull it up
in the other window, and you see he has been.
Speaker 3: He is grifically loader and more crazy. The thing that
came to mind. When I first saw this was actually
if anybody has ever played resid Evil, for when you
disarm or you know, decapitate, one of the the Spanish
goods where extra loombs start coming out, or again you
might not know this one one of the better fun
animes out there, or manga parasite where they start more
morphing and chain morphing. I'm gonna get that's not the
right word. I'm looking for him. They I don't know
how to put it. It's it's like a it's a
very mutable effect that comes out and you start to
realize that this is not zon dark anymore. This is
this is something entirely else. He crushes through the wall
right there with his axe. He wasn't that strong before,
and he's big, burly and just has kill on the brain.
Speaker 6: Right and this body horror will will continue, right, so
they sort of have this fight. Obviously, he seems you know, bigger,
he's got sharp teeth now and glowing eyes. But you know,
Guts is able to cut his arm off, and as
you mentioned, right very much, Resident Evil four, he cuts
the arm off, you know, disarms him both literally and figuratively,
and then all of a sudden right that the sort
of evil goo starts pulsating out of this and he
grows a massive new arm, right, all kind of with
dozens of different you know appendages, and just starts wrecking
the whole place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like a Kira all over like you
can just see ted you see.
Speaker 6: And again, I don't know, I'm gonna say this. The
art is so good in this, right, these these doubles
age that people think of, like.
Speaker 3: The ones that they have in their mind. Is there's
one panel from the Lost Children arc that comes to mind,
there's one from this one, but a lot of them
come from Late Conviction and Millennium Falcon Like those are
the ones where most people are like, oh yeah, this
is this is the jam. Yeah it.
Speaker 6: It continues to get more and more detailed. So you know,
the two of the two of these fight. It's a
you know, very good will illustrated fight scene, and we
continue to see both this sort of you know, dominant
human spirit of guts. Right, he's doing much better than
any man normally, should you know, he's swinging. There's this
this panel where basically the powers of this sort of
corrupted goon are growing, Right, He's getting faster and stronger
and more and more durable, until eventually they have to run.
Uh Guts even you know, partially decapitates him. It doesn't
do anything, and so the three of them bolt. They
basically make a run for it. Uh here's another and
this is what I mean, where like the body horror
just keeps going. So after he has the top of
his head uh you know, slid off basically, Uh, that
sort of slug monster pops out right of of the socket.
Speaker 3: And even to the point where it calls out Vargas.
He's like, oh hey, buddy, I haven't seen you forever. Yeah,
a lot of fun and it's christ like okay. So
now not only is he stronger, faster, it's effectively remote controlled.
Von Dark is now a drone for theies.
Speaker 6: This is the the bailet we mentioned, this sort of
egg shape with different human mouths and and eyes. So
point is the the party is is forced to escape,
right they they partially collapse, uh this sort of hide out,
and they run out through the grate and as they
they sort of enter this this sort of sewer right
Guts takes the bailt from Vargas you know, leaves and
as you know, Vargas is sort of going.
Speaker 3: Back into his to go to the sewers.
Speaker 6: We see a tenet pop out of the water and
there he is again, just kind of glowing eyes, three
of them right, two on the slug and one on
his you know, partially decapitated or partially smashed skull. You're
glowing out of the sewer. So now right, Guts and
and Puck are you know, running away right there out
and you know, they have this this conversation when they
realize that there's another execution planned, and these townspeople are saying, oh,
you know, this is one of the friends of the
guy who disrupted the other one. Obviously they've got Vargas,
this is planned, and Puck is constantly saying like, oh,
you've got to save him. Guts is like, no, yeah,
there's no way I can't. It's a suicide mission. And uh,
you know, he's having these visions of Vargas saying, avenge me,
and he you know, he sort of pounds the wall
like now, I won't do it. So we cut back
to the same scaffolding from earlier outside the capitol, where
these two again kind of there's a lot of one
of the weird recurring things is bizarre, gimpy looking executioners
really got nothing there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just it's just there, like it's they have
the hood. They're definitely trying to go for a particular
aesthetic with it, because later on in the conviction art
you get a whole crew of these guys. They're not
called executioners or inquisitors. Yeah, it gets much weirder, but
same sort of vibe. And before this, this is where
you start to see. This is probably this section right
here after Vargas gets captured, set in for execution. It's
all within like basically a day. They're not really a
long time between these situations, and Puck is like, hey,
you need to go intervene. Guts is jokingly like coping
and seething about this. He's like, I'm just gonna go
watch him die, you know, if he if he would,
if he didn't want to die, he should have gotten caught.
If you're so worried about it, why don't you go
save him. He's putting it on Puck to go be
brave and tiny. It's just all it's all showboating, right,
Like he's sitting there. You can tell that it bothers
him that Vargas a put out his neck for him,
saved him from the gigantic thing the behalo. We're gonna
get into those ones later. That's more of a Golden
age situation, talk about about like the happenstance of those
things even showing up in the first place, or where
they go. But the main point is like it's just
Guts is just doing his best to return back to
pizza cutter. And one of the things the framing elements
they do for the first couple, really that's really only
this harc I can think of is that the elves
are very sensitive to emotions, and so Puck is just
like writhing in pain because Guts is nothing but a
pizza cutter. Right, That's where he got the term of like,
oh he's feeling berserk, okay, and he's now having a
situation where maybe Guts is just an asshole, Like why
am I peeling around with this guy? Like if he's
really this much of a dick, why am I around
this guy?
Speaker 6: And so what happens is that Fargus is executed. Right
the count is looking over him and says, you know what,
it's made clear that this is a deliberate trap or
a provocation to try to get Guts to show up,
and he says, you know what, you're lucky, I'm giving
you a quick death, and as Guts looks over, Vargas
is killed, right, executed, head chopped off. So Guts and
Pucks split up, right, we see, you know, Pucks are
flying around, Guts walking through the woods, and he comes
upon basically the corpse disposal. Right, there's two of these goons,
you know, throwing these corpses just in a pit. They
throw Vargas in with his head, you know, basically say like, oh,
this guy looks really ugly, and then Guts comes up
and kills him. Now, the interesting thing is is that
this is sort of a moment where we see, you know,
got to sort of crack a little bit, right. He's
not only visibly bothered by it, but we see these
sort of spectral figures rising from this corpse pit, basically
you know, calling for revenge, and it seems as if
it almost works right there, they're almost possessed. We also
see a return of this sort of demonic fetus, but
when he sees it again, it has Vargas's face yep,
and he's you know, just incredibly distraught by this. We
also see teased the Count's daughter. She will become relevant later,
but this sort of possession, right, all of these figures
are rising up from the pit. You know, they're saying
we want revenge. They're wrapping their arms around in this
very evocative panel, and it's really well drawn, right, obviously
it is black and white.
Speaker 3: It definitely comes back of like, you know, what is
it your brother's blood calls from the ground for vengeance
or for justice? You get really and we want to
possess you to go handle this. Vargas begged you. But
if you're not gonna do it, we're gonna possess.
Speaker 6: You to go do it, right, And you also see
just some really well done art where Guts is obviously
black on gray with white highlights, but these spirits are
are white ink on a gray background. So they're very
strikingly different against him. Just an artistic note, right, and
Guts shakes them off, right, He basically says no and
sort of cast these spirits out.
Speaker 3: Oddly enough, they're not trying to kill them, like, it's right.
It's a departure from before we're like, oh, okay, there's
other sorts of spirits. Now not everything is the same world,
Like he's only going to be, you know, attracting these
Poulter guys that want to kill everything. These ones have purpose,
they have a desire with it, and he.
Speaker 6: Right when he cast them out, he says, no, like,
this isn't a supernatural fight.
Speaker 3: It's me.
Speaker 6: I'm a human, I'm flesh and blood, and I'm gonna
go kill the count. I'll do it myself. So the
next chapter, right, Uh guts his back in the city.
He's sort of going to kill the count. The Count
has captured Puck. You know, Puck is obviously distraught by
the whole situation, and he gets carried into a room
where the Count's daughter is a Puck is in a cage.
He the count is basically giving them to his daughter
as a gift. There's this very uncomfortable scene where the
Count touches her and she freaks out, like like recoils instantly. Ah,
there is more than an implication there of what is
going on.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's one of those things where it's it's
almost like a bait with this one, like this might
be the one where it's not the it's not the
actual imp actual true implication is not till the Golden
Age Dark, where that is very explicit. This one is
more of a she is extremely sheltered. She hasn't left
the room in seven years, and she knows something's wrong
with Dad. It's not necessarily like he's abusive exactly. It's
much more of like you have that moment of like
a coraline situation that's not him. Dad is not Dad.
Something else is there. He is something entirely different, and
so she's very panicky around him. But it's not knowing
what the Count and what we learned about him later,
it's I would say, it's extremely unlikely that he actually
engaged in any sort of like sexual abuse with his daughter.
That can't be said for other characters. But the Count
is much more of He's he's a complicated dude, and
he actually like the Count for being a small hard
in this Now the couple of key things that will
come back to make some major potential later down the
line because of his decisions and his choices. But his
big one is like he loves his kid. He doesn't
want her to be influenced by anything. The story of
his wife being you know, killed by heretics is what
she knows. So he like as he's going around executing
heretics and basically protecting doing his job as a count. Right,
he's doing much better than the snake Baron did. Where
he's keeping up appearances by trying to investigate people that
may have wrongdoing. He's still sneaking in some torture and
shit on the side, but it's not wanton disaster. He's
able to keep it together for the last seven years
to be like, yeah, he's a monster, he's tougher, he's cranky,
but he's not burning the whole time. He's much more composed.
I guess it would be a better way to put
it right.
Speaker 6: And so you know, Puck and Teresa, are you talking together?
We'll come back to that. But you know, as the
Count leaves, he basically says, you know, everyone leave, and
we get this sort of premonition right that he realizes
Guts is here, he knows that he's entered into the city,
and he takes his bare hands and just crushes the
wall next to him, right, sort of hinting that there's
something more to him. So Guts is walking up this
stairs and we see that the monster has returned, right,
this sort of goon's on dark. He's been fighting. It's
still alive. And I'll show some of the art here
because it's really really cool, uh, that they have this
sort of fight on the stairs, right, the final conflict,
and he is mutated, yeah, even more body horror, right,
his his face is distended. He is multiple different eyes
popping out for every direction.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 6: Again, very resident evil. And so the two of them
have this this battle where eventually, you know, guts Is
is victorious. Uh, but I don't want to. I want
to move through this for the sake of time. But
the art is very very.
Speaker 3: It's great, it's very gruesome. It gets to the point
again Gus gets his ass handed to him multiple times.
He's bleeding out because every single thing on here is
sharp and there and he can keep regenerating. Except the
fun little thing is he gloats once again, what is
it unless you cut off my head right thanks to
the tip, asshole, and just immediately and just chop off.
Speaker 6: Let's mention again, it's not a clean thing, right, He
sort of skims the top off.
Speaker 3: And threw his cheeks. It's not yeah, I mean, granted,
is not really bone at that point, but the same
point as he gloats, he then pays.
Speaker 6: The little slug monster is still on the tip of
his sword, you know, taunting him, and Guts just smashes
it against the wall, just completely juices it. So kind
of continuing forward, Guts has been severely injured, right, He's
saying like, I can't give up, even though I've lost
all this blood. And we cut back to Teresa. That
counts yeaheah, no worries. I'll keep going. And so the
two of them are going back and forth. Basically she's saying,
you know, Ibs trapped here, and she describes the situation
with her mother, so we see, you know, the rise
of this cult. The demon is basically just bafha met right,
It is that exact drawing. And they say, and again
very exacting detail, that they stole in and sacrificed her mother.
And that's when he changed. Come back to that later.
Guts is continuing his rampage, right, he cutting down you know,
these sort of men, and he arrives in this scene,
or arrives in this ballroom right with this priest character,
who's more of a character than we've mentioned per se.
We haven't mentioned him because he's sort of an ancillary goon.
But the men attack Guts again in just great detail.
And for those wondering what I'm talking about with these
double spreads, let me pull up. This is not like
a particularly renowned one. It's just the one in front
of me, right, But you can see these double spreads
are just incredibly detailed, right, the historical arms and armor
and guts just I mean, there's most of that guy.
It's a bit grim. So continuing through this fight, right,
he's just mulching these guys. They send in another kind
of big bad goon, and Guts, you know, handily dispatches
him by sort of separating his arms and shoulders from
the rest of him. Ye, I'm moving through this quickly,
not because it's not interesting, but because you know, a
lot of this is sort of action.
Speaker 3: The later yes, because we've seen Guts just murder people
like he can do that. It's like he's very good
at it.
Speaker 6: And so we cut back to Teresa and Puck and
she's let him out of the cage. She basically says, like,
you know, I always wondered what it was like to
fly because I've been stuck in this room for so long,
and then she lets him go, and you know, right
before he goes, he basically says like, oh, I'll come
back for you, you know, and she cries and basically,
you know, we see some semblance of hope because all
she wants to do is go outside. You're cutting back.
Guts has just made his way through, you know, these
men and is in this this sort of great hole.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, you get past the fog wall, and suddenly
you have the count. He's at the end of the hallway,
staring menacingly.
Speaker 6: Right. And for those wondering, all of the detail given
to arms and armor is also given to architecture. It is,
of course, you know, like anything in fantasy, sort of.
Speaker 3: Exaggerated across every pillar.
Speaker 6: It's it's all hand done. It's it's masterfully illustrated. Uh So,
the two of them sort of start their battle, you know,
back and forth, right, and then we see again this
sort of monstrous body horror right, like, it is very
clear that you know, this man is no longer human.
You know, they're sort of trading initial blows.
Speaker 3: He's got a small of his true form through zoon dark,
but his true form is gargantuan. It is huge and
it is disgusting. He has a very human mouth where
the slugs I don't I guess what was it radula
would be.
Speaker 6: His face is up the top by the eyestalks, and
the artist does a very good job of slowly revealing this. Right,
you start to realize how big he is, always in shadow, right,
and again we see these kind of like monstrous tentacles
and teeth, and then until finally you see, right, a
horrific body horror right of this man form revealed oddly
reminiscent right of what we saw with the snake baron earlier.
So the two of them have have this fight, which
is quite good, but we're going to kind of skip
through it because we see a lot of the same things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's over and over again, but the main point
is that during that time period, Teresa is like, I
should right now leave my room, while the guards are
yelling and while things are crashing, I should leave my
room right right.
Speaker 6: Now and right and Guts is sort of playing this
cat and mouse game, hiding behind all of the pillars
that we showed you earlier. Uh, and so you know
he he's sort of using this in sort of a
hit and run tactic to try and uh, to try
and sort of equalize between him and this massive monster.
Again you see the the loving detail to you, both
the violence and kind of the body horror. And you
know he's taunting him as he sort of you know,
cuts him apart, guts is still just getting battered, and
as he's sort of knocked down right over top of him,
gloating you know again we we see, you know, as
he's sort of crouching over him, his daughter runs in
the room, you know.
Speaker 3: Seeing immediately sees his face and immediately knows that that's
her dad. Like there where it's like, oh my god,
that's what you are, right and this the count his
face is actually really funny where you look at it.
It's just the immediate shame of like, oh my god,
she's the jig is up. She sees what I really
am now now like what do I do? What do
I do with this? Like you were never It's I
don't know, I don't know what other medium has a
situation where the contrast of the form to the face matches,
because there'll be a song like oh I can't believe
you're a drug dealer, walt or something something stupid like that,
where it's just regular people. His immediate thing is in
slug form being thirty feet tall, is like, what do
I do? Yeah, it's the next panel down right at
the top, like uh now what like fuck, what do
I do? What do I do?
Speaker 6: Right? And he recoils in horror. His daughter does as well.
He's he's trying to run to embrace her, and she
somewhat understandably, just is having a meltdown.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he has. Right from that moment forward, he's crashing.
Speaker 6: Out, yes, and again we see just the absolute horror
of this figure. And then out of nowhere, right, we
see Guts use that opportunity right to to throw knives
at him, right to get back into the fight, you know,
using his sort of attachment for his daughter. And we
see again, right, he's been smashed, he's bloodied, he's he's broken,
but he's still fighting nonetheless, you know, barely standing. He
literally you can see him, he can't even lift up
his sword really, and yet this right, and so the
the count continues his just rage right now that he's
been exposed to his daughter. Guts is just in this one,
he's just getting kicked, right, just getting smashed over and
over and over again and.
Speaker 3: Again right to where yep, he can take an advantage
by he's not above taking prisoners or taking hostages.
Speaker 6: Right, and he grabs Teresa, holds him in front of
him basically to halt you know, this assault, and again
he uses that opportunity, and here we see it and
again another great panel to use the space sickly flamethrower
filt to his arm to blast this monster. Right, and
so what's different in this one? Right, we see the
same thing. You know, his face has been smashed, Gus's
hand has been broken in the attack, and another recurring motif. Right,
he's so desperate he'll use his one good hand and
an arm right to keep up fight.
Speaker 3: Having a good hand, he's using it, is right, He's
using his fake arm is his prosthesis plus his mouth
to get the job done.
Speaker 6: And much like we saw earlier, he's able to decapitate right,
the ugly slug head off of him.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 6: Again in sort of exacting detail.
Speaker 3: So this is suddenly where the the arc starts to
starts to hit a fever pace. You're you're going with
a slug man, You're doing all these things Guts now
does what he's does. There's a snake barren and everybody
else where. He starts torturing the guy. After this, you
have this weird pacing. He's now just stabbing and just
overly over again, you're gloating about not being able to die.
I'm now gonna just carve you up constantly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and his daughter is horrified by the way, and
again he says again like I'll show you the limit
of a human being. Uh, you know, just this kind
of horrific scene. This this girl is is understandably just screaming,
but nonetheless like he's showing very clearly he is exposing
this guy's shame. Uh to his daughter. Again, Guts is
not a great guy. But something happens all of a
sudden right the bailet, here's this apostle say I don't
want to die, and it's bathed.
Speaker 3: In bloods panicking, and then suddenly like just not too
not a panel over, you're sent to m she's esher's staircase. Well,
all of it's like annoyingly hard to model. Uh, you know,
was a non Lucidian, non non Uclibean geometry or whatever
the word is.
Speaker 6: Yes, and this is where nuts. Everyone's transported.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, to take a step back from this, and
it shows you in a later panel that there's a
there's a storm over the castle. At this point, I
believe it's this. I believe it's this arc where it
shows like there's a storm cloud. Yeah. The next the
next one where it ends over the big one is
is that he then gives up the game. It's like, hey,
the great ones are coming. They have all sorts of names,
the God Hand, the Angels of Desire, whatever names you want.
They actually had to give out their names later. They're
called Void, Fempto, Ubiic, Conrad, and Slam. There's some deep
lore on whichever names you have him, but half of
them are novels or you know, callbacks, different things. Everybody
who's known Berserk is very is extra usually very familiar
with Fempto. And this is where suddenly the art goes
from dark fantasy to the mechanics behind. Yeah, becomes hell Raiser,
and suddenly you get the deep lore on what goes on.
Speaker 6: This is a reference. These are the five figures, these
sort of you know art trends in most you know
mc escher painting. Yes, So it goes to the next
chapter right, and I want to say I'm going to
be able to show you less for this because it
gets into things that I cannot show on YouTube.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's one of those things where I think
we can kind of in all honestly, I think I
and my personal thing is I would it heavily leads
into a personal then deata with Femto. That's the that's
the entryway into the Golden Age arc, but it doesn't
really play into necessarily the messaging of the Black Swordsman arc.
It's more world building. It's all sorts of things, and
it's one of those things that you can wrap back
up on where it's like, oh, you have all these things.
You see how Guts is now having a complete traumatic breakdown.
You thought it was bad before he finds the will
to stand up. He tries to swing at Femto. It
doesn't work, but everybody's panicking. It's it is a very
chaotic scene going on suddenly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so we see you know that that Guts as
of yet, for reasons we don't know why, has history
with these guys. He doesn't like them, and even in
his diminished state, right after fighting this battle against the Count,
who is in half bisected head form just laying on
the ground with guts splayed everywhere, not guts, the character
guts like what's inside you. They're going back and forth,
basically making a deal. He said, this character, I don't
want to die. He is, you know, seemingly activated. This
this object is transported to another dimension, and he says,
grant me a wish. Take that man's life, and one
of them Slan basically says, that's not what you want.
Your desire for something was so great that it tore
reality apart. But you don't actually hate him.
Speaker 3: He's just a yeah, you don't want to die.
Speaker 6: And there's this sort of seeming moment where one of
these characters will meet. Later, says the Black Swordsman, he's
not even worth noticing, which again basically triggers Guts to
to take a swing at him. Doesn't work. Obviously, Again
we see these sort of bizarre, you know, demonic figures.
Speaker 3: But he basically you can't be stopped. He gets a swing,
he gets the adominal human spirit allows him to at
least approach and attempt to do what he's been doing
to everybody else, to fempto. And it's kind of surprising
because even the other members of the god End are like,
oh oh, he managed to go up the stairs. He
managed to do it, He managed to get the swing.
Where As you learn in the Golden Age, these guys
are very I don't know how to put it. The
world of Berserk is about ninety nine percent deterministic, and
that last percentage fraction of a percentage is essentially this
man's will and the rest of like that's where you
can get into it real deep on. You know how,
Guts as an inspiring character because he just doesn't ever
give up under any circumstance, pain, penalty, or hardship. And
it shows here like in plain game like even if
they're like essentially god hands, where the slug man goes
the great ones are coming. Okay, he's saying that big
slug man who just bodied Guts okay, screwed up because
he gloated or you know, let it, let his daughter
get in the way. Really, if you want a view
it that way. But he obviously revers who these people are.
He revers these entities and by them being able to
basically pitch Guts away like these are these are on
a different level. This is now you're to borrow from
Elden Ring. These are the promised concert re Dawns of
the World where socks so fight. The fight blows, so.
Speaker 6: His gut sort of runs up to take a swing.
He's just repulsed back, flies across the room, hits one
of these staircases and is unconscious, and the sort of
severed head of the count is saying like, oh, thank you,
you did what I wanted accidentally. And you know one
of them, the guy with the hell raiser base peeled.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's either Conrad or Kubic. Think Ubik's the one
with the glasses.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the giant brain.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: But he basically says, like, all right, enough of this,
it's time for the dramatically named invocation of do basically
says you need a sacrifice. He's like, oh, well, when
you take cuts his sacrifice and they're like, no, that's
not good enough. That's a guy you hate. That doesn't count.
And he points to Teresa and he says, that's what
we'll take. That's what you actually love. That's what's a
worthy sacrifice.
Speaker 3: And then Tubiic goes ahead, or Conrad at that point goes,
let us let's take a trip down memory lane. Because
you know how this works.
Speaker 6: You know what you've done this?
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, Suddenly what I revealed it isn't told. He
conjures the actual image. All right, you have his mom
you have to count His wife was. Yeah, she did
get killed by heretics because she was being a hoe
bag with the Heretics. A matter of fact, she might
given given her position in there. She is probably like
the head priestess of it, right, right.
Speaker 6: And what we found out is that he was, you know,
incredibly devoted to his family, fighting this this long campaign
against the heretics, and when he returned home early, he
found his wife it as part of in this I
cannot show you. I'm sorry, no, no.
Speaker 3: This is this is definitely not you too friendly. But
he finds exactly imagine the cave scene from the second
Matrix movie with no clothes on this.
Speaker 6: It's an origin right with this kind of like giant
god to it or to a demon, right to Baphomet.
And we found out that not as you know, his
daughter was told that she killed by the cult. She
was this arse priestess and he lost it. He killed
her himself, right, he he killed them all.
Speaker 3: No, you got to back up here half a second. So, okay,
killed everybody but her. He can kill every single heretic
in the room, no questions asked. He gets to his
wife and realizes, I can't do this. She gives him
a look of like I know that. You know that
you can't do it. You can't actually follow through because
of who I am and this. He has this huge breakdown.
He's like, I can't do this from that caravan. You're
giving that bailot or behalo it or however you're gonna
say it. His desire at that point is he wants
her dad, but can't bring himself to actually do it himself.
He is now requesting that his will be done without
him actually engaging with it. And the baylet activates. You
get a picture of the god hand who shows up
again and void. His big brain shows you, hey, you
just gotta do a single phrase. You just gotta say
I sacrifice, no big deal. At that point, you get
the pitch of the brand. He conjures the image of
it in his hand. You go, oh shit, Okay, so
suddenly guts is now supposed to be somebody's sacrifice. Okay,
You're now getting a lot of a lot of Shenanigans
where the devils of the world are basically giving this
to them. And let's see here, this is what the
count says. He says, it makes no difference. Whatever you
are saved me from my suffering. If you do it,
I'll give you anything. And then he goes, yeah, sure,
give me your wife. Cool. He then erupts into slugma,
eats every single bar, every single person corpse that he
had in there, and tears his wife lim from limb.
Mind you, this is a conjured image of that. Now
Teresa gets to watch her dad.
Speaker 6: Do all of this to that place, and he says, right,
you did it so that you could transcend your humanity.
Speaker 3: As now in you know, white fragile human heart.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this this sort of We must have different translations,
by the way, and so un using whichever one I
found on the internet, so that probably translation.
Speaker 3: It's it's two back to back. It's like, you offer
this woman to sacrifice the life you couldn't take by
your own hand, the life of the person you love
the most and hated the most. You gave it to
us so that you can bury your fragile human heart,
so that you could transcend your very humanity. So yeah,
you're gonna have different translations with it. Like I said,
I mine's the dark Horse, special large prenditions and translations
I'm using.
Speaker 6: And as he he says this, right, we see a
full focus on this kind of horrific you know, mutated abomination,
right half a face, and he gestures towards Teresa, the
brand of sacrifice sort of floating in flame in front
of her, and basically say like, we'll do it. We'll
give you anything you want, and all you have to
do is give us your daughter. But what's interesting about this,
and this is darkly different from the first time you
know that this horrible monster he doesn't do it. He
basically says like, no, I can't.
Speaker 3: He can't bring himself to do it.
Speaker 6: I can't bring himself to do it. And they say like, well,
you'll be you know, dragged to hell. You'll be completely
you know, damned forever, sort of dissolved into nothing. And
there's this great image of hell, which again is right,
this swirling.
Speaker 3: The common idea of it would be if you've ever
seen the Disney Hercules, there's that pit of sole at
the bottom swirling down. It evokes that same kind of
imagery where honestly, I think that's where they got the
idea is from this panel being in nineteen ninety two
when everyone this was made, where it's a swirling vortex
of all these souls, you can start to make out
individual people in it, to the point that the Count
has he can't do it. He can't. He still has
some little tiny bit in him that says, I can't.
I can't get rid of this. She's she's the gem
of my world. I can't get rid of this. This
is also why I don't believe that he actually abused her,
because there's that line where if you're just a toy
or something, you're not gonna you're not gonna damn yourself
to hell for this if you know you're committing those atrocities.
Speaker 6: And then the right, this sort of tendril of human
souls right reach out, ready.
Speaker 3: To go, and our boy from before is numero uno.
Speaker 6: He is there to collect his due, yeah, which again
is the sort of grim right that even Vargas rights
is in hell.
Speaker 3: So like cool, he's now there and they grab the
Count and in his right, which is interesting. Basically, as
any apostle dies, they start to revert back to whatever
they were. You don't get to see that because the
other ones guts like bisected, exploded and dissolved, and so
you don't actually notice this. But as the Count is
now turning, that little slug piece not the rest of
his body, but it's slowly burning away and he gets
dragged all the way to hell. He reaches out. His
little girl sees it. She's very understandably knows that her
dad could have did it. And then everything gets way
more over zealous because they go, ohhit, there's another person
with a brand here. We're gonna go after him, and
they start trying to drag Guts down, and that's where
again the cannon arm gets a lot of a lot
of use in this first arc, probably more than it
does anywhere else where. He tries the same trick against
Fempto as being held up by all these souls. He's
gonna shoot him with the cannon and it does nothing.
It basically explodes right before him and he can't believe
his fucking eyes. Sorry to Curt So that's just at
the very end, I held it together, Felix.
Speaker 6: I like that. You assume that that was the phrase
was going to get this episode in trouble, and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I didn't. I did very good to
try to not get the other ones. There's a phrase
that's in the notes. I'm pretty sure you read that.
You probably giggled at the impact. Yeah, that's so as Guts.
He's in disbelief. He cannot believe that he's tried every
trick in the book. He's had this small window. You
get a call out that he names Fento Griffith. Inside
there there's a small sliver where it touches the Golden Age.
We're ignore that that's not part of this right now,
we're gonna skip that. Okay, storm is over. Everybody is dying.
The corpse of the Count is there. Half his body
is gone, his bottom half is gobbled up. The top
of his head still missing, his soul gone. He's now
withering and dying right there, the dragon slayers there. Guts
is just fucking can't handle it anymore. He's having a breakdown.
Teresa is also having a complete and utter psychotic break
right This girl who's probably only like twelve, maybe fourteen,
it's oh d I'm young, young where she just saw
all this happen in a single night after being cooped
up in a room for seven years, has no way
to process this. And this is where we finally get
the pizza cutter back. He does his best impression of
Russ Cole and says, go ahead, you should kill yourself.
But after she goes on in my room like what
am I supposed to do with my life? It's all over?
And so he goes, you should just kill yourself. He
gives her a knife and he's like, meanwhile, Puck is
being the straight man with this, going, what the fuck
is wrong with you? Like, after everything that's been gone through, Like,
what can you do with this? And he's like, yeah,
you can just be all over. All of your worries
will be over if you just kill yourself. Here's the knife.
He goes, it's your life, do what you want with it.
Speaker 6: So confident, she thinks, what's interesting, and this is why
we'll get more of this. But I think this is
a really interesting dichotomy. And she's thinking about it right,
she's kind of bringing the knife down to her wrist.
The floor starts to give way, she starts to slip over.
Speaker 3: This is a big moment here in the arc, here
where the floor gives way.
Speaker 6: And guts sticks out his sword, like almost instinctively, and
she grabs on to the edge right there, there's blood
running down. Let go, right, even in that situation of pain,
right she's literally cutting her fingers to the bone, she
won't let go. She still wants to live. She's still
not only does she want to live, but guts wants
to save her right despite all the edge, despite all
the just kill yourself, it doesn't matter deep down.
Speaker 3: Out there because he's broken, like not not a panel
before this, Like he's he's using the dragon Slayer as
a crush. You can barely walk hands broken, Puck and
being a heel bought has not he has not received
any attention yet, Like you still have to have the
timeframe for this. To Mirror's credit, within a fight, there
is no downtime. You're not gonna sit there and be like, oh,
we're gonna do a dragon ball Z thing where you
have denda heal somebody. I go, okay, go back and
five freeze it again. Okay, We're gonna do this again
for three more time until you guys figure out this.
This is a tired trope, doesn't happen. Mirror is very
much like you're stuck, buddy, here you go. There's other
things later down the line that you know we'll cover
on and there's some particular moments where that doesn't always apply.
But at this moment, Teresa has the will to fight
through all the pain to not die. Her hands are
totally mangled. Mind you, the dragon Slayer is about four
inches thick, six and a half beat long, and has
been through chips beating. This is not a clean cut.
This is like trying to grab a rusty knife, right.
It isn't like you're it's not fun in any way
such a word. But she makes it. She guts, pulls
her over, and she's like, oh my god, I can't
believe that. It's like and then immediately goes the coping
of this is all your fault. Fuck you guy, this
is all your fault. I can't believe you did this.
Ever since you came to town everything was bad. So
guts being guts. It's like whatever, dude, He's like, I
saved your life. He gets his cloak. He's just ready
to leave town. She then promises that she'll find him
and kill him, and all right turns kind of the
animate trope reverse of like, oh, I'm gonna swear revenge
on you. He's like, yeah, that's not a big deal.
I'll be I'll be ready when you want to try, right,
go ahead. And then the panel that basically rounds out
the Pizza cutter is finally there at the very end
of the Guardians of Desire, right before the the Golden
Age starts, is you get the panel of guts crying
the sad guts meme. Everybody's basically seen it, to the
point that Puck is astounded. He can't believe that he's
seeing this guy who let Vargas die, he kicked him
out multiple times, barely, let this girl live, murder, murdered
scores of people. Now is crying question Mark, So like, okay,
you realize that there's a lot more to this guy
than there ever could be before, where he's not really
like a pizza gutter. Now as you read through the story,
like you could sit there and go, well, which part
is he crying about? Is he crying about the the
God Hand encounter? Is he crying about Teresa? It might
be the fact that he has a bajillion emotions all
at once. He's a sensitive young man, like I said,
because the other part is what would be your best
guess of how old Guts is at this point, if
if you had to take a stab in the dark, I.
Speaker 6: Think I know this isn't he like seventeen or nineteen?
He's like very young in this.
Speaker 3: Ish Yeah, so like at this point in it depends
on which age you start him off at that you
can calculate it. So some people will say he's like
closer to sixteen in the Garden Golden Age. There's something
that will say he's like thirteen fourteen that takes place.
There's a three year jump, move him to nineteen twenty.
He's about twenty one to twenty four right now. Ish,
he's not very old. And yeah he's been bad or
this badly. He's crying. He's a young dude. He doesn't
know what to make of this thing. The Blacks arc
I think can be summed up by just that final
encounter very well, because you find out big things for
the show is not everyone's irredeemable. This lug Count came
out of it just fine. Yeah, he committed some vast atrocities.
He's still going to go, you know, pay his dues.
But he didn't cross every boundary. There was a boundary
left for him that he couldn't leave away, as our
good friend arn like to say, you know, those are
the things you can't leave behind. He could not leave
behind his daughter, and that was his line. You find
out that somewhere inside Guts is a very troubled, angry,
sensitive young man who's coping over something. The next eighty
chapters you find out exactly what he's coping about. You
find out that Puck is essentially our perspective character for
the first arc and the Lost Children arc, where he
basically follows around gives you the he's the he's the
cameraman for most of those two arcs, trying to figure
out where he is. It's short. Yeah, we covered it
in about two hours. Obviously not to like exaggerating detail,
but enough of a play by play that if someone
wants to, you can read this in an hour. It's
not particularly long if you have that translation. But it's
a very good introduction to the world. There's some things
to be expanded on later, but it's great. The main
thing about this is you see this guy who's he's
had it rough and he's still somehow able to make
it through. And the fun part is he's not the
shown in character like through the power of friendship, bro,
and just you know, not giving up. We're gonna make
it together and you're not gonna make He means it,
and he has the scars to show it. It's not
all daffodils and rainbows. It's a lot of sexual violence,
a lot of very gruesome ends for lots of people.
And just the struggler is a perfect name for it.
Like this guy goes through the whole thing, struggling through
for how many it's been two years now since the
main end of the Golden Age arc is there, So
he's been doing this for at least two years or so,
as you find out later, and he still hasn't given up.
And he's contrasted with as you kind of get the
vibe later we can go into it further that his
his end eventually would have been a Vargas. He's too crippled,
he can't do anything. He still has a desire for
revenge that he can't fulfill, and he's practically and he'll
end up begging people to do it for him. And
so like it's kind of a he's a goofy foil
against Vargas strictly for that where if the if the
current of fate as the intro to one of the
animes will like highlight, is, you know, is the destiny
of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law? Is
it like the hand of God hovering above? At least
it is true that man is no control even over
his own will. If his story went differently and went
more towards Vargas over this crippling events, maybe he didn't
meet Puck, maybe Nigga healed something along the way, he
would just be a Vargus. He would just be a cranky, maimed,
pathetic person. But he's not.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And in big picture, as far as themes, obviously,
you know that idea of being sacrificed as part of
someone else's rise to greatness will appear later. And then
also that idea of being in a deterministic world where
like a great deal has been struck, where you are
to be sacrificed. Ultimately you will be damned, will be
dragged to hell no matter what. But nonetheless, right even
in that hopeless situation as we saw, you know with Teresa, right,
even in that despair, that human desire to keep going
no matter what, no matter the pain, or you know
how awful the situation is, that desire to transcend is
still above it, and that desire to overcome. And you know,
that's why I really think Guts is the is this
sort of archetypal pagan hero right. There is no hope
in this world per se. There is no time where
everything will be made right. It is when you're done.
You know, you're dragged hell and you just dissolve into nothingness, right,
you enter the sea of souls, But nonetheless right, even
in the fate of that avase of that right, guts persists.
So you know, as we've said, there are more episodes coming.
It's just an intro, but read this. I've linked an
e copy. It's well worth your time. The art is great.
We weren't able to show you very much of it,
but there's a lot to get from it. You know,
there's a reason so many of our guys like it.
I say this as someone who is not a consumer
of this type of media. I think it stands above it.
So again, Felix, man, I'm gonna have to go. I
need to eat dinner.
Speaker 3: It was great talking, but it's a great book. I
would say now I would I would recommend moving forward, whoever,
whatever choice individually have on there. For Clarity's sake, I
would say, and I as a fan of the series,
just ignore chapter eighty three. It doesn't exist. Mirra himself
wanted to pull it, and he did. For a lot
of the adaptations. It's usually included on the fan stuff online.
It is not included in my dark Horse ones as
far as I can remember. The prototype is in someone
of those, but chapter eighty three is not there. It's
one of those ones that gives away the game too
much and ask too many questions. So just don't. It's
fun to talk about in terms of content surrounding it,
but you can think you can kind of think of
it as an as an apocryphal text. It's useful, but
it sometimes sometimes it will spoil different things. But yeah,
Brazurik is one of those series that you should read
if you have the stomach for it. He's a great
inspiration for getting yoked and being able to Yeah, you know,
if you can't, if you can't find inspiration with regular people,
then uh, you know, being able to try and swing
a four hundred pound steal sword or be the be
the way to do it.
Speaker 6: Fair enough, again. Like I said, check it out. We'll
be back for more. Felix will be back later. I'm
gonna I think I'm gonna do a rotating cast of
different people to come on.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: I think that however much we talked about is probably
too much. I'll have to find a way to break
it down a little more. But this is my passion.
Speaker 3: We're gonna have to go through like mini arcs or something,
or go by chapter counts. It's it's a lot to
try and squeeze an arc and you're certainly not gonna
do Golden Age or any on a single day.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, So anyway, you'll see Felix more. I'll be
dropping his socials. As far as my stuff, jabur and show, Apple,
Spotify YouTube. I know I don't normally talk about stuff
like this, but my long, like two and a half
hour review of the three Body Problem with luthempar was
well received, so I figured, you know what, let's do
more of that and look, an hour of fifty seven
minutes is pretty good. But check out our sponsor Axios
Remote Fitness Coaching if you too want to be jacked
and sensitive, or you can throw me a few bucks,
get the episodes early in ed Free Felix, I appreciate
it everyone at home.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me answer
Speaker 12: A