I know I post a lot about jojos bizarre adventure, but if it were not for Berserk, I wouldn’t even know about jojo.
At 18, I started reading/watching Berserk. I had never seen anything like that. I’ve never been into anime like that, but I heard a lot of great things about it
Berserk is super dark, it’s twisted, it’s certainly not for the faint of heart, but it taught me important lessons.
I related to Guts. I too felt alone, like life had it out for me, and that my life would always be a struggle with no end in sight. It was an inescapable thing. I felt like a struggler with no cause or reason behind it. Like it was just the cards I was dealt from birth (in a way, it is)
But reading berserk helped me realize that life is a struggle and that’s okay. Life is a battle and that’s okay. If that’s the path you’re given, you have to see it through until the end because the only option is death.
That mentality has carried me through the worst parts of OCD, isolation, and crazy bitch thinking I’ve found myself in.
Because I—like Guts in Berserk—is a person that must fight or die. So that’s become my strength. It’s why I can’t quit, because that message is so ingrained in my subconscious that I’ll cut off my own figurative arm and be rid of whatever is making me miserable before I let myself die.
As life has become more difficult with age and world events have made things worst, this is the only reason why I feel I’m here.
Thank you, Kentaro Miura. You saved my life more than any medication did. Because you gave me the strength to embrace my problems and misery and fight it instead of numbing myself to it.
Had I not read Berserk until it’s hiatus point, I also would have never gotten into JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (a series I heard was similar so I gave it a try) and jojo has played a huge role in my life. It became my all time favorite series.
I wouldn’t like what I like, or be who I am without Kentaro Miura. His work has impacted my life in ways I can’t even describe.
I keep thinking about this one splash page which the fantranslators of the Kaze To Ki No Uta translation I read would have inserted at the beginnings of volumes.
Kaze To Ki No Uta is a manga which I could best compare to being stabbed in the chest repeatedly by Aubrey Beardslay and Thomas Mann while being yelled at and degraded for eight volumes or so. It's not "literary-pornographic", so much as "literary-obscene". It's effect is similar to the Marquis de Sade, in how Sade wrote his pornographic works to be so completely monomaniacally perverse, so obsessively, compulsively so, and so deeply immersed in the farthest, most homicidal forms of perversion that nobody at all could read his works as scintillating, and yet the people who translated Kaze To Ki No Uta thought of it as this:
This is the kind of manga which should be guarded by men with guns from the average hentai or fujoshi, and yet here we are.
🐸 Something that makes you smile for fandom reasons?
(Let's do another fandom. Deepest apologies if you do not happen to know it, but if you do... Berserk. 8'D
OKAY. SO I KNOW IT'S BEEN A HOT WHILE SINCE IT HAPPENED BUT MAN. WHEN RICKERT SLAPPED GRIFFITH??? MY SOUL WAS FREKKIN' SENT, AND GETS PROMPTLY RE-SENT EVERYTIME I RE-READ THE SERIES TBH.
MY ASS WAITED SO. DANG. LONG. FOR THAT NASTY TRAITOROUS SCHMUCK TO HAVE SOME KIND OF CONSEQUENCE HAPPEN TO HIM; AND WHO SHOULD DELIVER IT ON THE SHINING PIMP-HAND OF JUSTICE, BUT MOTHER-FLIPPIN' RICKERT. SEROTONIN DELIVERY UNREAL.
GET REKT FICTIONAL SON, IDEC IF IT DIDN'T 'HURT', YOU KNOW YOU'RE SALTY AF ABOUT IT. 100/10 CAN'T WAIT FOR CASCA AND GUTS TO SHOVE THE DRAGON SLAYER DOWN YOUR THROAT. >8P)