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Among manga fans, few have been as difficult to please as Berserk. The original manga by Kentaro Miura is one of the most impossibly beautiful comics in the world, with deeply detailed armor and monsters that defy description on nearly every page, not to mention some of the best depictions of swordfighting I’ve ever seen. The Berserk fanbase is practically ravenous for an anime adaptation of the manga, but we may never get one – and not because of all the violence and sexual assault.

That violence is obviously a barrier to making a great Berserk anime. The manga opens up with a depiction of sexual violence before moving on to torture, rape, incest, and all manner of things that make people rightfully squeamish. However, the violence and gore in Berserk are part of what makes it great and worth reading; this is a story of struggle in the face of unimaginable pain and suffering. Guts and Casca do not merely survive; they endure in spite of everything that happens to them.

Miura’s true gift as a writer was knowing exactly how far he could push Guts before he became irredeemable in the reader’s mind. We almost immediately see him acting cruel and violent. He slaughters anyone who gives him even the slightest reason. He is perhaps one of the least sympathetic characters in manga when we first meet him, but that is because Guts’ backstory is even more depraved than he is.

We eventually get an extended flashback to exactly why Guts is the way he is in what is called The Golden Age arc, which is probably the best-known part of Berserk after it was adapted into a beloved anime series in 1997 and a less-beloved trilogy of films starting in 2012. The arc shows us Guts’ life before he joined the Band of the Hawk. We see his friendship and admiration with Griffith and his growing romance with Casca. We see him experience love for the first time in his life, and we see him plunge into the depths of despair at losing his lover and his friends in one fell swoop. 

For certain, the Golden Age arc is the most iconic part of Berserk, but I would argue that it isn’t nearly as impactful without what came before and what comes after in the manga. Berserk is one of the most masterful examples of non-linear storytelling you’ll find in comics. Those chapters that lead up to the flashback are crucial to Guts’ journey and to the reader’s understanding of him as a character. We need that set up, the gentle introduction to a world that is broken and disgusting yet depressingly familiar, to appreciate the true horror of Griffith’s ascension to the God Hand. 

I would even argue that the parts of the series that come after The Golden Age, with Guts and Casca trying to rebuild their own shattered psyches and find the resilience to heal following unimaginable trauma, are the most important parts of the series. This is the part where Miura’s fixation with everyone’s suffering pays off. As dark as things get, Guts gets through it, not just because he is too angry to die but because he still has something worth living for.

Non-linear stories like this are difficult to bring to life well. While the payoff is certainly there, it is still difficult to ask people to start at what is a seemingly inconsequential moment in the series before getting to the part that is constantly hailed as one of the best bits of any manga ever. A full anime adaptation of Berserk would probably need people to spend several episodes with Guts being insufferable before we get to see why. We’d have to have probably two seasons in the Golden Age arc before skipping forward again and continuing the story. Even throwing in the fact that Miura’s death in 2021 means we may never get to see the end of the Berserk story, this unorthodox story structure is what is truly standing in the way of getting the Berserk anime adaptation we all want and deserve. 

Look, I’m a Berserk sicko; I will watch just about any adaptation they make of this manga because it is so good. And I know that eventually, some studio out there will see the value in making a Berserk anime from the beginning as Kentaro Miura originally envisioned it. People will cite the ultra-violence and the incredibly detailed art as the reason we haven’t had a truly ambitious Berserk anime, but, really, it is the fact that no one wants to wait to get to the Golden Age arc that keeps this from happening.

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