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Berserk creator credits Frozen and Mad Max: Fury Road for changing young people's thoughts on gender

Young people are used to women with agency and Kentaro Miura wanted to explore exactly what that means outside of his work on Berserk

Duranki Manga Cover — Image credit: Dark Horse

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Tue Aug 11 2026

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Though Berserk will always be his best-known work, it isn’t the only manga that Kentaro Miura produced during his lifetime. Duranki, a story about a young hero named Usumgal who was part man, part woman, and part god without really fitting into any of those categories, was partly inspired by young people’s shifting views on gender and fashion. This is something Kentaro Miura credits Frozen’s Elsa and Mad Max’s Furiosa with helping to bring about.

The character of Usumgal is distinctly androgynous in a way that leans into the blurred lines between gender in today’s world. During an interview shortly after the launch of Duranki, Kentaro Miura discussed the influences behind the characters in the new manga. For Miura, he saw the public’s changing views on gender and wanted to work on something that played on that. “I feel like androgyny is relevant in today’s world,” he explained. “From ‘Frozen’ to ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ there’s been a continuous stream of works depicting strong women who clearly assert their own will, and it’s become the standard.”

This wasn’t the first time that Miura played with gender identity or expectations in his work. Berserk has Casca, who is introduced as a woman trying not to be viewed as a woman in the typically masculine field of warfare. Meanwhile, Griffith is viewed as an almost inhumanly beautiful man with obvious feminine or androgynous features while he was human. So clearly Miura enjoyed playing with gender expectations long before the world was introduced to Elsa or Furiosa. He was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included...