Thread 281695441

I have heard it called one of the best manga series out there and one of the most overrated series out there.
So, is Berserk overrated?

>>281695441 (OP)
All the underrating and overrating makes it perfectly rated.

>>281695441 (OP)
Golden Age, Lost Children and, to some extent, Black Swordsman arc are legit good. The rape horse arc, Tower of God and Rape Trolls are ok. After that, all the way to the boat, the manga gets very generic and lost a lot of the energy it had. Post boat is zombie Berserk, in more ways than one.

>>281695441 (OP)
Nah it's amazing

>>281695441 (OP)
Berserk started in 1989 and it was definitely one of the darkest (story wise) fantasy series in manga at the time.

Berserk, unfortunately, falls into the same kind of camp as LotR and D&D in regards to fantasy. It was the progenitor of TONS of stuff that is seen as common place in the genre to the point if you read it with fresh eyes today with zero prior knowledge it comes off as bog-standard shit you've seen a million times but with extra rape and violence. The artwork remained constantly evolving as Miura always improved, however, this was the reason Berserk never got finished and it's slow release with its themes being copied so much really wears down its overall impact to new readers. If Miura just kept his original style and knocked out the series regularly? Berserk would probably have finished its entire story in the mid-nineties. It didn't finish though and a team dedicated to finishing it aren't really moving it along much faster that Miura was when he actually worked on the thing alone.

Sorry, off topic. Berserk isn't overrated, it's just been copied and referenced in so much stuff that it sure as hell won't feel unique to a brand new reader and will feel formulaic as hell despite it being the origin point for a lot of those formulas.

>>281695441 (OP)
>>281695605
I don't understand why nobody ever talks about how the Tower arc is a 1 to 1 retelling of Devilman (with the time travel chapters removed, but those were added in later editions by Nagai and weren't those who Miura read in his youth)

Daily ironic Berserk hate thread

>>281695441 (OP)
Yes, but I liked Schierke

>>281695698
>Berserk, unfortunately, falls into the same kind of camp as LotR and D&D in regards to fantasy. It was the progenitor of TONS of stuff that is seen as common place in the genre to the point if you read it with fresh eyes today with zero prior knowledge it comes off as bog-standard shit you've seen a million times but with extra rape and violence.
Tolkien doesn't fall in this camp if you read him.
There's this other thread right now >>281689998 where people are discussing Tolkien's elves and those are basically alien creatures compared to how elves are presented in modern fantasy; also Tolkien's worldbuilding is so autistic and full of weird shit that it's very not standard.
Tell me a fantasy where the Earth is created as a flat plane and then God gets angry and flexes so hard it becomes a sphere

>>281695801
>Tell me a fantasy where the Earth is created as a flat plane and then God gets angry and flexes so hard it becomes a sphere
This sounds awesome. Does this happen in a Tolkien work? Maybe I should start reading it then.

>>281695801
And if you read Berserk it's clear how incredibly far apart it stands from the kind of mindless fantasy slop that superficially aped it afterwards. It doesn't change the fact that it'll lose the impact it would have had if you experienced it when it was not only expertly executed but 100% novel.

>>281695801
Most of that shit comes from the Silmarillion and 95%+ of fantasy readers did not touch that book even if the read LotR and The Hobbit. Yeah, his expanded world building and lore is pretty fucking bananas even by modern standards, however, looking at his most read and referenced works is where you get common fantasy themes.

>>281695698
> It was the progenitor of TONS of stuff that is seen as common place in the genre to the point if you read it with fresh eyes today with zero prior knowledge it comes off as bog-standard shit you've seen a million times but with extra rape and violence.
Really? I've seen a fair number of things that either referenced or took superficial stuff from Berserk, but I've never read anything that made me go "hey, this reminds me a lot of Berserk"!
If you have some examples, I'd love to try them out.

>>281695441 (OP)
It would be remembered as the GOAT if Miura didn't drag it on for decades and actually finished the story

Why do posers hate the boat arc so much? Of course, reading it as it released must've been cancer, but most of the faggots complaining just read it all at once, and it's not that bad. The point I see being parroted the most is "Where's le heckin' rape and darkness and edge", these opinions give off underage b& vibes.

>>281696183
NTA but blade of the phantom master is one that really felt like a direct rip.

>>281696266
It wasn't just that releases were slow during it, but that they got progressively slower at a parabolic rate, making it feel like it would take infinitely long to complete. If you read it all at once now it's honestly quite a brisk little arc.

>>281695901
It's in the Silmarillion, the backstory to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
To explain what I mean
>The Universe is created by a bunch of divine being singing together under God's comand, in the beginning the Earth is a flat plane
>they limit their powerlevel by taking lesser physical bodies and incarnate in the world and make the land they inhabit Paradise on Earth
>some thousand years of divine autism and the Dark Lord, one of the divine beings with a lot of ambition, wages war against everything and loses, gets thrown in jail for some time
>to give you an example of the shit the Dark Lord did, the first Sun and Moon were two giant lamps made by the divine beings, and he took them out of the sky and crashed them upon the world, burning half of Earth
>Meanwhile elves and humans are born and do their stuff in Middle Earth (East of Valinor, the place where the gods live, separated by an ocean)
>The Dark Lord is freed 'cause jail time is over
>As soon he's free he starts shitting everything up
>ruins Earth forever doing too much stuff to list, makes a fortress in Middle-Earth
>after thousand of years of autism those divine beings, elves and a group of humans defeat the Dark Lord, who is thrown into prison (he's in deep space now in a space-time dark hole being surveiled by a elf with an Infinity Stone in his forehead in a flying ship)
>the divine beings, as a thank you to the humans who helped them, gift them an island in the middle of the ocean and make them twice as big as a normal human and their lifespan is thriple
>DO NOT SAIL WEST TOWARDS PARADISE ON EARTH
>humans do just that
>God gets fucking pissed, destroys the island and takes the Earth itself and bends it, so that it's a sphere and the path towards Paradise is now unreachable to humans (Paradise Land exists but the ship has to follow a straight line and the curvature of the Earth now bends the route, only elves can go there by boat)

>>281696266
It's a neat arc that gives some great development to the cast (especially Farnese as she gets better at being a witch under Schierke's teachings). It's just that it lasted for seven fucking years, and it came after the end of the Millennium Falcon arc, where Griffith and the Godhand literally rewrote the fundamental laws of the world to make his everlasting kingdom in Falconia. So the boat journey just feels like a giant nothingburger in comparison because it set such a high bar.

>>281696442
And then there was the ultimate cliffhanger before Miura's death.

>>281696468
That's in a different arc though (Elfheim).

>>281695441 (OP)
Yes, the whole thing is le heckerino shock value and edge. Now, once this is understood, there aren't that many manga doing `le heckerino edgee` for the coolbros (to the same degree of Berserk) and in that sense it's unique. There are people who want to read the rapest most gratuitous material available and then proceed to get outraged when gratuitous cheap things happen on the next arc and post "how did X do so wrong?? it's so gratuitous and cheap! I wasn't prepared for all this edge bros..." and it fulfills that niche. I'd say it's a solid 6-to-6.5/10.

>>281696079
>common fantasy themes
Then why in LotR Gimli is a poet so able with his language and so smart with his insight that made Legolas question how could it's even possible and surprised Galadriel herself, and every time a dwarf appears in fantasy they're retarded unga bunga?

>>281696682
Dwarves in fantasy literature are rarely depicted as retarded beings. Hell, most depictions have them as highly buercratic, tradition focused, xenophobic, gold obsessed, craftsmen types. The weirder one is them being drunks frequently.

Who hated their protagonist more: Miura or Horikoshi?

>>281695441 (OP)
>>281695748

>>281696919
>highly buercratic, tradition focused, xenophobic, gold obsessed, craftsmen types
And none of those traits are commonly used in Tolkien to depict dwarves, except for tradition focused and being good craftsmen, even tho in Tolkien the best blacksmiths and craftsmen are elves.

>>281695441 (OP)
Miura's artwork will always be among the best in all of manga

>>281695481
fpbp

>>281695441 (OP)
back then it was some real good shit. Black swordsman, Golden Age and Conviction arcs were truly great, hell one could argue that millennium falcon until Guts got that damned armour was pretty great as well. it has great art to the point that no adaptation will do it justice. what makes it overrated though isn't people saying that it is great but the people who haven't even read it claiming that it's greatest manga (conversation like that is retarded itself anyway) and claiming that story is extremely unique. nothing after Golden Age can be considered unique at this point.

>>281698989
>Golden Age
>unique
It's a retelling of stuff that Miura read in his youth.
Year 24 shoujo, Guin Saga, Go Nagai, Rose of Versailles
There's almost nothing in Golden Age that's original

It's overrated now that a legion of faggots read it. We should have gatekept it harder when we had the chance.

Behold! The Mad Swordsman..

Vagabond is better

>>281696266
It has been an eternity since I read Berserk, but I despised that section. It was already becoming unbearable with the cohort of retarded allies he was amassing, but that period was the last straw. The stupid fairy was a stain on the entire manga, but was bearable. Once he had fucking two of the shits and that insufferable Dragon Ball character that wandered into the wrong book, it was finished.

>>281695605
Nothing exists after 97 for me. Don't care about the manga either.

My first experience reading Berserk was by bulk buying all the dark horse volumes in a black friday sale (1-38 at the time) but unbeknownst to me they were on backorder and got delivered in 5 separate shipments over the course of three months and volume 1 was in the last box. Was worth the wait though.

>>281695441 (OP)
It had great art and a strong start with writing, but Miura obviously didn't have a good ending in mind. That's the case with most manga.

>>281702334
What makes you say that? There are a lot of directions it could go to end well.

>>281703289
The God Hand is too strong, and Guts is progressively worn down after the eclipse. The best reasonable ending I could see would be Griffith's physical body being killed by Guts, the rest of the God Hand (maybe including Femto) walk away unscathed to try again in 200 years, Casca's mark disappears and she mostly recovers, and Guts probably dies at the end of his struggle. I haven't followed the manga at all since Miura's death.

>>281703522
>The God Hand is too strong
I mean, yeah. They aren't really something that can be killed. Femto can because he has a legit physical form made by the rape aborted fetus from Casca. You aren't killing the others that are anthropormic personifications of concepts as best I can tell.

Best I can figure is the first four members were probably the elemental spirits with Void rounding them out. Void is the fifth element in Japanese lore being the absence of the other elements, the space between them, and his abilities seem to spatial manipulation so that tracks.
Slan is lust, Conrad is pestilence/decay, Ubik is desire/manipulation, Femto would be conquest/domination.

Femto/Griffith is clearly a focal point for shit to bleed over into the physical world and offing that bastard would probably close a good chunk of their ability to access reality. Or maybe not.

The entire point of the series might be about the futility of struggle to prevent change. In which case, everyone dies, Griffith wins, the age of magic starts a new with him as the new ruler of the world, and Guts and Co are just the point of view of street level characters as that change happens.

>>281695605
>Post boat is zombie Berserk, in more ways than one.
Casca getting her memories back was a great few chapters.

>>281703522
I think Griffith wants to destroy the Idea of Evil

>>281695698
>it's just been copied and referenced in so much stuff that it sure as hell won't feel unique to a brand new reader and will feel formulaic as hell despite it being the origin point for a lot of those formulas.
I don't know a single other anime or manga that has done something as close to The Eclipse.

>>281701034
You almost had it.

>>281702334
>>281703522
>>281704714
>>281706518
When Miura was asked about a hint to the ending, the only thing he said was, "Void"

I think just how in Golden Age the King betrays Griffith, Void will also betray him, or maybe Griffith seeks to overthrow Void and Void catches on.
I think Guts will activate the behelit, and Void will offer a chance for Guts to sacrifice Griffith since Guts does have some nostalgia for Griffith, even if he doesn't want to admit it.
Guts will refuse since his son is still part of Griffith.
What happens after that, I'm not sure, maybe Void tries to kill Guts and Griffith saves him and they 2v4 the God Hand and it ends with Guts and Griffith both on death's door and Griffith lets the Moonlight Boy take over while he remains a spirit in him.

Maybe they just make a permanent full moon and Griffith is forever trapped.

Maybe the Moonlight Boy becomes the Idea of Good or the Idea of Hope and frees everyone from the vortex
>Sort of like how Griffith is the antichrist, the Moonlight Boy is Christ.

>>281695698
i read many cuck ntr hentai manga before berserk so yeah berserk didnt have much impact on me

>>281706986
Is Guts or Casca the cuck?

>>281707044
the reader

>>281695441 (OP)
Yeah. It's got great parts but only a decent average. People say it's the greatest thing ever because it was one of the first gory """adult""" manga with a fan scan and TL for anglos, and later Miura's art developed to the point it was seriously impressive.

What's truly pathetic are the people that watched the grasses on anime and latched onto the manga's prestige third hand, but hey.

>>281706786
>Maybe Void tries to kill Guts and Griffith
Void is very much the kind of "being" that would say "Meh, guess that plan didn't work out" and just move on to something else. He clearly doesn't give a shit about anything on a personal level because "That's causality" and "We aren't gods" means he just kind of acknowledges shit happens and doesn't get upset over it at all.

>>281706518
The Idea of Evil would probably be cool with that. I got the distinct impression it didn't really like what it was doing but was just fulfilling it's role.

Now for an aside, I find it really fucking bizarre how people get upset over the rape in the series. They claim "it's gratuitous, serves no purpose, and is unnecessary shock value". Yeah, that IS the purpose. These guys are monsters, they do monstrous things. Nobody is giving a shit about the dead kid ripped in half and on a spike being eaten. People get upset Wyld raped a woman, but don't really get anywhere near as made that he has the same woman's limbless corpse impaled on a stick like some kind of fucked up banner. It's weird how cannibalism, torture, murder, dismemberment, and extreme acts of cruelty to men, women, and children are viewed as less evil than rape.

>>281706603
The giant rabbit things from Blood C were pretty over the top. The real impact for the Eclipse was you just spent 11 fucking volumes of hanging out with these poor fuckers to see them go out in a really fucked up way.

>>281708031
Their logic is because SA happens more often IRL than someone getting ripped apart or skinned alive, that it's triggering to someone who experienced it to read it, and so they claim it's unnecessary.

>>281695441 (OP)
No. It simply slowed down the release of new chapters to the extreme, which frustrated many fans.

>>281695441 (OP)
Too many pages spent on staring at a moth's pussy if you ask me.

>>281708607
This was posted by a candle.

>>281708031
>Void is very much the kind of "being" that would say "Meh, guess that plan didn't work out" and just move on to something else. He clearly doesn't give a shit about anything on a personal level because "That's causality" and "We aren't gods" means he just kind of acknowledges shit happens and doesn't get upset over it at all.
Void deflected Skull Knight's attack, so at the very least he will act in self defense. If Griffith tries to kill him then I can see Void attacking on that, since I don't think Void wants to go into the vortex and suffer for all eternity.