What Happens
The Guardians of Desire, Chapters 4-6
The Count taunts a seemingly unconscious Guts, mocking the fragility of human beings, until Puck calls him out, arguing that by becoming a demon in order to hide from his pain, he’s the fragile one. The Behelit falls out of Guts’s pouch and Puck tries to escape with it, but they're interrupted by the arrival of Theresia, who recognizes her father’s face on the monster she sees before her. Guts reveals he was only faking unconsciousness but causes the Count to hesitate by taking Theresia hostage, which gives Guts an opening to shoot the him with his hand cannon and, because his fingers are broken, take his sword in his teeth (!!) and decapitate him. He then repays the Count for his earlier taunts by torturing him in front of Theresia. As he lies bleeding to death, the Count calls out desperately that he doesn’t want to die and his blood flows onto the Behelit, which causes it to rearrange itself into a face and cry tears of blood, transporting everyone to a new dimension that resembles an M.C. Escher drawing. The Brand reacts especially strong as five beings the Count calls “the Great Ones” emerge from the shadows.
Puck quickly realizes these “Great Ones” are, in fact, the Godhand. Guts, meanwhile, recognizes one of them, angrily calling out “Griffith!” Angered by the latter’s off-hand dismissal of him, Guts picks up his sword, once again in spite of his injuries, and lunges at Griffith, arguing that the latter is where he is now because of him. Griffith, however, dispatches Guts without laying a finger on him as the rest of the Godhand watches academically, intrigued by Guts’s hatred for Griffith, whom they call “Femto”, the one responsible for marking him with the Brand, and how it lets him move despite his injuries and the great pain the Brand causes by being so close to demons as powerful as them. As Guts is once more knocked to the ground the Godhand turns to the Count, whose desire to live triggered their summons and their leader, Void, demands that the Count offer them a sacrifice in exchange. He tries to offer Guts, but that’s not good enough. They say that Guts has already been marked for sacrifice, and besides, he’s only the Count’s enemy. He needs to offer something precious to him, so much so that it would be like giving up part of himself. In other words, it must be the only thing that qualifies – Theresia.
Unfortunately, she’s the one thing the Count isn’t willing to offer, but the Godhand insists he need only do what he did last time, and one of them shows all present the real truth of seven years ago. Returning home from a campaign against the pagans in his territories, the Count found more of them performing an orgy in the castle catacombs – and one of them was his wife. He flew into a rage and killed everyone else present, but in spite of her betrayal and the depraved acts she had committed, he could not kill her. The Behelit reacted to his despair, summoning the four (yes, four) members of the Godhand, who promised him release from his torment in exchange for one simple thing – the sacrifice of his wife.
In a flashback, a younger Guts listens as a long-haired, equally-young soldier surveys the aftermath of a battle while ruminating on the nature of fate and how he believes certain individuals are born to be movers and shakers, their station in life irrelevant compared to their destiny.
Back in the present, the Count hesitates to offer Theresia to the Godhand, but they remind him that he is dying, and impress upon him the urgency of his fate by giving everyone a glimpse of Hell, an endless, swirling sea of souls into which he will be consumed, all individuality lost, the fate of all those caught up in the affairs of demonkind. But even still, he cannot give them his own daughter and Vargas’s prediction comes true as the Count’s victims drag him to Hell. Another wave of souls tries to take Guts, but he breaks free by firing a shot at Griffith, whom it doesn’t even touch, and the Godhand depart, returning the others to the ruined throne room in the castle.
Theresia is devastated by what she’s seen, refusing to believe it’s the truth, and Guts says she should just kill herself if it’s that painful, with Puck horrified to realize he means what he’s saying. Theresia takes Guts’s knife, but Puck tries to stop her, and then the floor breaks away under her. Guts is able to save her as she grabs onto his sword, but as Puck offers to heal the wounds in her hands she declares that everything went wrong as soon as Guts showed up. Blaming him for her father’s death, she vows she will someday kill him, and a seemingly indifferent Guts retrieves the Count’s Behelit and departs, but Puck discovers he’s more upset than ever over recent events.
The Golden Age, Chapter 1
As some mercenaries ride past a tree of hanging corpses, the lead riders notice the body of a baby under one of them. Their leader, Gambino, calls it a grisly sight, but his girlfriend, Shisu, is drawn to the child, Gambino’s companions ascribing it to the grief of her recent miscarriage. Gambino tries to urge Shisu to leave the supposedly-dead baby, but it cries out. He opts to let her keep it as a form of consolation, but his companions wonder if it’s a bad omen, picking up a child in such a place.
Three years later the child, who has been given the name Guts, watches Shisu die of the plague. At six, Guts is being used by Gambino as a spear-carrier while he trains him in swordfighting, refusing to be lenient despite the objections of his fellow mercenaries, who also wonder if Guts is responsible for Shisu dying of the plague. But these rumours only drive Guts to work harder for Gambino’s recognition, and several years later he is sent into battle, killing his first man at the age of nine. His performance earns him a small reward and a compliment from Gambino, but that night a large man named Donovan suddenly enters his tent, pinning him to the ground before he can reach his sword…
Commentary
Yeah, if I’d been killing people since I was nine, I’d probably have issues too. I know I’ve defended Guts, up to a point, so far, but there’s nothing to be had here – what he does to Theresia is just plain cruel. The Count was already dying and helpless; torturing him had no practical purpose and only served to rub it in, and his “just kill yourself if it’s that bad” to someone so emotionally shell-shocked shows no empathy for her situation. In less than an hour she’s found out her father had become a demon, that he lied to her about her mother, who was a heretic, looked on the face of Hell, spent who knows how many terrifying minutes wondering if her father would sacrifice her, and seen him dragged away to have his very consciousness consumed. And she’s what, twelve maybe? Sure, compassion and empathy may not have been a big part of Guts’s upbringing, but that doesn’t make it any less inexcusable.
Not that any of Guts’s actions have been excusable, but there’s been hints up to now that he isn’t some kind of sociopath or a complete monster. Rather, the whole point of explaining his actions and attitudes was to emphasize that he feels the need to act the way he does to keep his sanity in the face of all the death and suffering he witnesses. Unfortunately, it’s a double-edged sword. Tell yourself something often enough and you’ll generally start to believe it, and as Puck’s observation points out, that’s what’s happening here. He hasn’t completely gone off the deep end – he almost cries at the end of the storyline, after all, but he’s getting dangerously close.
Where the first volume established the setting, these last two have established the story. We’ve learned the true nature of the Godhand, seen glimpses of Guts’s history with Griffith/Femto, and the reason for Guts’s enmity towards them and Griffith in particular. It isn’t an overwhelmingly profound story, the Count being a rather straightforward case of trying to hide from your pain, only to do more harm than good to yourself and others in the process, but it still provides a contrast in the way people handle grief and loss. Whereas treachery consumed the Count, in Guts’s case it made him strike back and seek revenge. Neither method seems like a particularly good way to handle it, both having become worse for it, but I think that’s the point. Everything we’ve read so far is meant to raise the question of what, exactly, would make someone like Guts the way he is and drive him to risk his life in a fight against something much more powerful than himself. He hasn’t exactly been doing a good job of opposing them either. Every time he kills one of the Godhand’s agents it’s only after much suffering has already been caused. When he finally does face them his unable to harm them at all and barely escapes alive. Given his eventual fate he doesn’t have much of a choice but to persevere, but that many pyrrhic victories and sense of powerlessness is clearly taking its toll, and regardless of what it’s turning him into it still does him credit that he can go on. Even if this part of the story is nothing groundbreaking, it still obliges the reader to face the question of whether they could do the same in similar circumstances.
For all that Guts seems to be fighting a losing battle, however, there is at least one ray of hope. The Godhand is unable to just kill Theresia on their own – the Count has to consent to it, which proves that they are capable of a great deal but not all-powerful. In the second flashback Griffith reflects that “not even a king can live exactly as he pleases” and how “we are all at the mercy of a great tide…fate, or whatever you wish to call it.” Whether it’s the needs of a kingdom or some higher cosmic law, there is always something preventing those in power from being completely unrestrained, and in this case there seems to be some higher, not-entirely-malevolent force keeping the Godhand from freely exercising their agenda, and while it seems to be a small thing in this case, hopefully it’ll work against them again in the future.
Personally, I was happy that Theresia survived the first time I read this volume, and not just because she didn’t deserve the alternative. If she had died it would have had the effect of numbing any further atrocities in the story, since the fate of any innocents would be a foregone conclusion. This shakes things up a little and prevents them from becoming too predictable, but given what she now has to live with, it’s debatable whether it’s better. But like the Godhand’s limitations, it gives us another point of light in an otherwise dark story by letting us know if you’re innocent you’re not automatically screwed. No promises on mental scarring, however.
Don’t have much to say about the new storyline yet, but from what we’re able to see here it explains a few things about Guts. It’s also noticeably different from the previous one, given the lack of supernatural elements apart from a few superstitions, and the unpleasantness is on a human level, so at least we’ll get a break from dark forces seemingly beyond human ability to defeat. What we do have, however, is plenty of medieval warfare, and if that’s as interesting as dark fantasy, as it is for me, it should keep the story interesting in spite of the change in style.
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