Berserk Proved that Guts Never Needed Griffith

Chapter 329 of Berserk reveals that Griffith wasn’t the one who helped Guts accept others – it was an inherent characteristic Guts tried to ignore.

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Warning! Spoilers ahead for Berserk chapter 331!

Fans of Berserk have understandably been under the impression that Guts would have remained a loner if Griffith had never forced him to join his mercenary troupe the Band of the Hawk. But a famous flashback transpiring before the Golden Age suggests that Guts was already capable of accepting and loving others – maybe even himself.

The flashback follows Guts during his solo mercenary days long before he met Griffith in the manga by the late Kentaro Mirua. w A fellow companion named Martino betrays the boy’s trust during a moment of weakness, leading to the young warrior’s imprisonment in chapter 329. Although this is an unfortunate predicament on its own, Guts is also horribly injured and succumbs to a high fever while snow flurries through the barred window of his prison. Guts would have assuredly died if he didn’t receive help from an elf named Chitch who is bound to a lone flower growing from the stone floor. A prisoner like him, Chitch heals Guts by using the leaves from her flower, an endeavor she quickly expedites once Guts tells her he’ll take her and her flower to a field of flowers just like hers.

Of course, Guts believes Chitch is just a fever-induced hallucination. But when he awakens sometime later after his fever has broken, he finds himself covered in leaves. Chitch is gone and her flower is wilted. In her excitement, she must have plucked too many leaves from her flower and disappeared as her existence was bound to it. Regardless, the anti-hero Guts takes her flower with him when he’s forced to participate in a rigged duel he’s destined to lose. He almost dies twice during the confrontation, not because of the stacked odds against him but because he gets distracted when the wind blows Chitch’s flower away and when, during an ambush, he looks desperately for the flower instead of fighting for his life in chapter 331. The flashback then ends with Guts returning Chitch’s flower to the field that he promised to take it when she was still alive.

There are many clues that indicate Guts was destined to change in the manga Berserk long before meeting Griffith – and it’s not just because he goes out of his way to help an elf. When he first converses with Chitch, Guts believes she’s the physical manifestation of his weakness of being soft-hearted in the form of a child. Of course, he later learns she’s real, but this doesn’t discredit his earlier acknowledgement, for it serves as a confession where he admits a characteristic about himself that readers don’t know before then. He has always been soft-hearted, even before his life becomes intertwined with Griffith’s Band of the Hawk. It is a quality he is both well aware and ashamed of about himself. He even tries to repress it and succeeds for a while before inevitably failing when he risks his life to ensure he returns Chitch’s flower back to its kind.

Additionally, this was an especially low moment in Guts’ life that should have cemented his belief that trusting others on the battlefield will just result in death, a value instilled in him by his abusive father Gambino. The fact that the mercenary Martino was the first person whom Guts trusted who taught him otherwise, only for Martino to take advantage of that trust at Guts’ own detriment, should have made it impossible for him to ever put his life in the hands of others again. And yet, Guts does countless times afterwards. First, when he goes out of his way to ensure he keeps his promise to Chitch, then when he devotes his life to Griffith’s Band of the Hawk and then again when he forms his new group of allies and friends after the Eclipse.

Guts may have hardened his heart as best he could to follow Gambino’s advice, but his inherent soft-hearted nature would never allow it. Griffith didn’t open Guts’ heart to the possibility of accepting others into his life. It was just the first example that readers saw of this in Berserk.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/berserk-manga-331-guts-griffith-chitch-help-others/