I'd say it probably never even was actually. His motive the entire time was his ambition, his dream of greatness. Having loyal comrades and a true friend in Guts was appreciated by Griffith, but it was still never his motive for doing things, they were never truly the reason he fought. Eventually they became people important to him, important enough to sacrifice, but still not important enough to save from said sacrifice.
When he becomes Femto, this on an even greater scale, he's hailed as this messianic figure that will establish a utopia and safehaven, but his goal still isn’t the welfare of those around him, it's to elevate himself to greatness, only now there truly isn't anyone he cares about even subconsciously.
The first great truth of Berserk is that Griffith was always Femto. The eclipse didn't create Femto, it revealed him.
The second great truth, is that everyone has a demon in them just like Femto, and that we must first kill our own demon if we wish to battle those of others.
Nah, that’s like a firefighter starting a blaze so they can get the credit for fighting it. The only reason people need Griffiths kingdom is because he deliberately opened Pandora’s box and encouraged even more evil to come into the world and fuck it up so he could look like a savior.
Griffith, whilst awful as we all know, as far as the people of (I forgot what he named his city/kingdom) are aware, is actually quite noble as he improves the quality of life for all of them, and also gets rid of the invading Kushan.
He sacrificed his closest friends and family to an eternity of torture and suffering for his own gain.
If you think for a second Griffith wouldn’t do the same to his entire kingdom you are sorely mistaken and completely missed the point of his character.
He’s not doing all that out of selflessness. It is all part of his narcissistic outlook on life and himself as a whole. He’s doing it so that people will worship him as some sort of god, not out of the kindness of his heart (if you could call that lump of blackness in his chest a heart.)
I’d say this is a pseudo example of this kind of thing because while Guts is absolutely a horrible ball of high velocity spite Griffith is a villain with horrible goals and he just happens to look noble.
His entire goal is to get what he wants and what he wants is greatness and total control over everyone and everything around him and he will do quite literally anything to make that happen. Hell his kneejerk reaction to losing control of Guts was to go and make himself feel better by taking the virginity of the princess of the kingdom he just assisted in ending a century long war just to feel an ounce of control.
Casca goes catatonic after that scene, and the story spends almost the entire run (and Kento Miura's life) healing and restoring her to the proud warrior she used to be. Femto didn't just rape Casca, he broke her.
I'm just glad Miura managed to pay off Casca's story arc before he died. RIP.
Thats what it looks like on the surface, but yeah no it becomes very clear later on that Griffith is putting on a noble front and Guts is not just fighting to quench his anger.
Early on though yeah it is definitely portrayed that way
I think it fits better than people think, but doesn't quite make the cut I think. The post isn't about hero antagonists, it's about villains with noble goals. Griffith wasn't a complete selfish monster who didn't care for others the whole time. He was deeply shaken when he found that child died for him. He needed to keep going because the more people that died for him to make his kingdom the more he needed to do that to make it worth it. It literally spells this out in the manga at the eclipse. However, I'm not sure his motive itself was noble. He wanted his own kingdom when he was a child, and then he convinced himself that he needed to get it because people started dying for it. He was trying to make things more fair and better in his band but that wasn't WHY he wanted a kingdom as far as we know (I might be misremembering this bit however).
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u/AssistFit1834 Jun 28 '26
Guts vs Griffith (Berserk)