Kentaro Miura’s Berserk is one of the best dark fantasy manga/anime of all time. The pain and hurt depicted in the franchise are enough to make adults cry. Another extremely strong emotion portrayed in the series is anger. Guts has gone through too many tragic circumstances, and he is filled with anger to the brim. Yet, unlike other angry people, we can never hate the unfortunate protagonist.
Berserk also provided Guts with a fitting enemy. The sudden betrayal and disclosure of Griffith’s character were enough to make even hardcore enthusiasts balk. The cruel actions of Griffith are sure to boil your blood. In an interview, Miura finally revealed what inspired him to create the despicable villain.
Kentaro Miura’s Shocking Inspiration for Griffith
Kentaro Miura was struggling to form a perfect villain for Berserk as a bunch of things overlapped in his mind. It was only around the third volume of the manga that an idea began forming. The main theme was to show Guts’ anger, so he needed to create a perfect object or character who would anger Guts.
Thus, Miura asked himself what makes people angered beyond reason. The conclusion was the murderer of one’s parents. However, the mangaka wanted to portray something that he felt more intensely about.
I was someone who friendship mattered a lot to, so the idea of making the target of Guts’s anger a friend, or at least a man of the same general age, naturally came to mind.
To Miura, friendship mattered so much that even the idea of a friend’s betrayal caused havoc in his mind. In real life, he was very close to his friend Kouji Mori, and even disclosed Berserk‘s finale to him. Thus, the idea of Griffith was born and his betrayal has scarred every Berserk fans in existence.
Next, Kentaro Miura had to give Guts a reason for being angry so he came up with the Band of the Hawk, where Miura used his own past as a reference to create the group.
The Role of Anger in Berserk
All Kentaro Miura had in mind when he began Berserk was that he wanted it to be a story about anger. So he made sure that the main character was driven by anger, but anger itself is a hard emotion to project as it is easy to overdo.
There are a lot of ways to depict anger — there’s the explosive kind of anger, but then there’s the kind of anger where your face just loses its color and goes expressionless.
Miura decided that he would just focus on expressing his anger and hope that something worthwhile would come up. Now the next question was, how can Guts be angered?
How well the author could evoke anger in Guts was going to make or break the manga. Depending on the situation, it would either create a scary monster out of Guts or he might even become inhuman. Or maybe he would be more scary but in a human way.
Thus, the role of anger and Miura’s personal experiences played a great role in shaping Berserk. It was the author’s real-life experiences and their twisted depictions that made Berserk the unputdownable manga that it is.
You can watch Berserk anime on Crunchyroll.
