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Berserk/Nightmare Fuel: Difference between revisions
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** During the second eclipse, when Griffith is reborn, it is potentially worse. We see Guts get up after the tower has crumbled into a hand-shaped edifice. He is alone. He looks down. His facial expression changes to awe and terror. On the next page, the refugee camps are shown. With a HUGE Sacrifice symbol made up from all the campfires running across them. I get the chills just by thinking about it.
* And now, it's time to experience the Eclipse firsthand (volumes 12-13 and episodes 23-25 respectively), in which the entire event is pretty much [[Nightmare Fuel]] and [[Tear Jerker]] worthy.
** When the Eclipse goes down in the series proper, it marks a crucial turning point, where things turn from grim and gritty medieval fantasy into straight up horror as {{spoiler|Griffith}} does a [[Moral Event Horizon|truly malignant]] [[Face Heel Turn]], accepts the offer to become a Godhand, and marks everyone he's led, including Guts and Casca, with the infamous Brand of Sacrifice. Things go from bad to worse for them and the rest of the Hawks ''very, very quickly''. {{spoiler|Many people we had come to like get killed very horrifically, many of them being eaten alive until only Guts and Casca are left. When Casca's sword breaks at the very worst possible time, she learns that the demons have even ''worse'' in mind for her than being eaten. Guts in the meantime has made a very badass showing against a whole mess of demons, but when he sees Casca naked and in the hands of the demons, Guts tries to save her, only for a demon by the name of Borkoff to clamp his massive jaws around Guts's left arm before he can reach her. And then Griffith, reborn as the fifth member of the Godhand, Femto, flies down right in front of him, brings Casca down to him, and then [[I Have You Now, My Pretty|starts having his way with her]] -- which is made ''even worse'' due to the fact that, because the Brand causes serious pain when its bearer is in the presence of a demon, and she's as close as anyone can possibly get to a ''member of the Godhand'', she is ''[[Cold
** {{spoiler|Casca's}} ordeal alone crosses [[Moral Event Horizon|SO]] [[Complete Monster|MANY]] [[Tear Jerker|LINES.]] {{spoiler|As if being raped and being in excruciating pain because of her brand is bad enough, but it's the ''way'' that Femto is raping her that deems the act as so heinously vile. Femto does some truly horrific things to Casca that can only be described as pure ''sexual sadism''... things that [[You Do NOT Want to Know|you don't even want to describe]] just out of respect for this woman. Casca is being violated sexually, physically, mentally, and emotionally.}} Not to mention that that [[Hope Spot]] stunt that {{spoiler|Femto}} pulled was really nasty {{spoiler|as he allowed Guts to get ''just close enough'' to he and Casca after he chiseled off his arm only to get him dog-piled mere feet away. It's as if Femto did it just so Guts could get front row seats to see exactly what vulgar things he did to Casca.}}
** This is the point where the anime ends, and in the manga, that's only the ''beginning''. Because it turns out later that {{spoiler|Casca was pregnant with Guts's child when she got raped by Femto, and as a result of this, the child was horribly tainted by Femto's evil, and is born premature and deformed. Despite being tainted by evil, the child still cared for its mother a great deal, to the point of summoning ghosts to protect her from Bishop Mozgus's [[Cold
** For lack of a better word, volume 13 is powerful: it makes you want to [[Nausea Fuel|throw up,]] [[Tear Jerker|cry,]] throw up again, guzzle down five gallons of [[Brain Bleach]], and eat [[Ridiculously Cute Critter|an adorable puppy]] for good measure just to get over it because you '''will''' feel as if {{spoiler|[[Adult Fear|you're getting raped yourself]].}} It is truly a nightmare in itself to have to read volume 13. We understand if you don't want to - and we aren't forcing ya.
* For a good deal of the series early on, before Guts found his new [[True Companions]], became [[The Big Guy]] for the [[Five
** The Count returned from a mini-crusade to find his wife in the midst of a pagan-orgy, was driven mad with the pain of the betrayal, and used the Behelit to take away the emotions that hurt him so much. Even then, he still showed sorrow (as an Apostle, mind you) over the way that his daughter treated him differently, even though he had gone to great lengths to keep the cause of her mother's death a secret. In the end, he allows himself to be sucked into ''hell'' by many of the people he'd killed rather than sacrifice his daughter. Guts, inversely, not only killed an elderly priest to use as a decoy against the Count, but even used the Count's innocent daughter Theresia as a human shield to halt his attack...before proceeding to blast him with his [[Arm Cannon]], brutally decapitate him, and then ''torture him further'' because the Count is ''[[The Juggernaut|still alive after all of this]]''...all right in front of Theresia. He actually dragged the Count over to her so she'd have a front row seat.
** Rosine was in an abusive household, and discovered to her despair that the stories of fairies in the distant forest were nothing but myth. Then, as her father is ''beating her mother on the very ground that her dreams and innocence were shattered,'' the Behelit takes away them both and turns ''her'' into a "fairy," and grants her the ability to turn other children into "fairies." When Guts finds her, not only does he leave a trail of mutilated and burnt child-corpses in his wake (the converted children turn back into humans when killed), he gleefully burns the fairies-in-progress, and outright ''terrifies Rosine.''
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*** Did we mention that Vargas is as mutated as he is because ''he'' was partially eaten himself by the Count?
** And then there's Inquisitor Mozgus. who is just as horrible as you'd expect a [[Knight Templar|fanatical religious nutjob with too much power and not a shred of objectivity]] can get. While it's pretty obvious from the start that he's Bad News, his vilest act we see makes him a [[Complete Monster]] of the first order: when a band of starving refugees attempts to steal some of the ample foodstuffs sent to Mozgus and his retinue, he spots among them a woman with a starving infant. When she begs him to feed her child, he gently takes her along to his residence, lauding her courage and dedication. He sends away the child to be fed and cared for, then escorts her to a room while extolling the fact that while her intentions were good, she still has to expiate her sins... And then he opens the door, where we see the other refugees being horribly tortured, and the poor woman is dragged, stripped, and tied to another torture device over her increasingly frantic pleas... Then the door closes. It's as nightmarish as it sounds, if not more so. The horror starts [http://www.mangareader.net/96-1138-50/berserk/chapter-18.html here]
*** Somehow the fact that he quite obviously ''truly'' believes he is doing the right thing makes it even worse. An unrepentant [[Card
* How about Ganishka's method of drawing new soldiers for his demon army? He throws pregnant women into vats made up of stitched together Apostles, their children become monsters and rip their ways out of their mother's wombs, and the remains are given to the newborn for food.
* Trolls from the Qlippoth, whose primary method of reproduction involves forcibly impregnating captured women from villages, with the births of new trolls being every bit as horrific and lethal to the poor women involved as that of Ganishka's demon soldiers.
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** First, we have Princess Charlotte and her old father, the King of Midland. She looks identical to her mother, the Queen, which... caused some problems. Canonically, he ends up trying to rape her, after his rage that Griffith slept with her. The idea of this is ''very'' disturbing, and definitely requires a ton of [[Brain Bleach]]. This alienates her from her father to the point of disowning him and refusing to see him when he's on his deathbed, his health having seriously deteriorated because of the guilt of what he had done.
** Then there's Guts and his adoptive father Gambino. Guts was adopted by Sys, Gambino's lover, after she miscarried, despite superstition that states that you shouldn't pick up a child from a dead body. Several years after Guts was taken in, Sys died of a plague, which was tragic enough because it left Guts without a significant mother figure in the years to come, but it also hardened the heart of Gambino against Guts, [[You Should Have Died Instead|whom he felt should have died instead]]. Despite Guts looking up to him and doing everything in his power to make the mercenary leader proud, including bringing him his part of the pay for every battle, Gambino hated Guts so much that at one point, he sold the poor kid to one of his men, a creepy pederast by the name of Donovan, for three silver coins, which leads to Guts being raped despite his best efforts to fight the big man off. Things between Guts and Gambino come to a head when Gambino, after losing his leg to a cannonball, gets drunk one night, comes into Guts's tent, and tries to murder him, forcing Guts to kill him in self defense.
** And then there's the relationships between the three central characters themselves. After meeting and being defeated by Griffith, Guts moves up in the ranks of Griffith's mercenary band, eventually becoming a commander of raiders, and the two of them form a bond that is very much like brotherhood (or if you're [[Shipping Goggles|that way inclined]], [[Ho Yay|more than that]]). Meanwhile, Casca has been Griffith's trusted [[Number Two]] ever since Griffith saved her from being raped as a little girl. Griffith gradually becomes obsessed with Guts, such that when Guts decides to leave the Hawks after deciding that he's not going to be a part of Griffith's dream, Griffith's thoughts during the resultant duel, about how he would not let him go, are very [[Yandere]]-ish. And after being defeated, he goes to see Princess Charlotte and proceeds to bang her, which he mainly did as a rebound, which gets him thrown into the Tower of Rebirth to be put to the torture. By the time Guts and Casca have rescued Griffith (and fallen in love), Griffith has come to ''hate'' him, and the focus of his obsession gradually moves to Casca. But when he finds out that Guts and Casca are in a relationship and are thinking about leaving him behind...oh ''boy'', does he [[Despair Event Horizon|lose it]]. And to make things ''even worse'', this is the point where Griffith finds his [[Artifact of Doom|Behelit]] again, triggering the events of the Eclipse, which are better covered elsewhere on this page. ''No one'', especially not [[Star
* Rosine's little [[Crap Saccharine World]] is fairly disturbing, specially due to the fact that her "elves," who rape and kill each other, are basically [[Kids Are Cruel|still children]] ''[[Kids Are Cruel|playing]]''. When we see the cocoons in which they are transformed, things reach a ''really disturbing" angle when we learn she plans to turn her childhood friend into one of the little bastards; [[Sarcasm Mode|thankfully]] we later see (courtesy of Guts destroying the cocoons) [[Nausea Fuel|the deformed children inside then]].
** The absolute worst part of Rosine's "elven kingdom" is the "Adult attack", where they pin each other to the ground and rape each other with their stingers. Depressing, horrifying, and slightly narmful in a way that produces an entirely new feeling of awkwardness mixed with terror.
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