How Berserk implements the tragedy formula

In her video on Tragedies, Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions defines and describes the formula of the ancient Greek Tragedies. It’s a great video which I reference a lot here that I recommend watching. All general descriptions about how the Tragedies work comes from that video.

The tragedy was a genre of plays in ancient Greece that all followed the same general structure. The first hallmark Red describes is that the audience knows in advance that it’s not going to end well for the hero. The question isn’t if things go bad, but how bad and when. In this way a tragedy builds tension for the entirety of the play by hinting at the beginning that something bad is going to happen.

In Berserk this is accomplished by having the prologue be set in the present, and the main story line we will be focusing on, the Golden Age arc, set in the past. This prologue is very dark, both with regards to the colour palette and the themes. We learn a couple of key pieces of information here, the most noticeable being that the main character Guts is a man with a metal hand prosthetic that can shoot canon balls and an enormous sword who travels from place to place to hunt down nightmarish monsters. He avoids other people as much as he can, except when he can use them to find the next monster to slay.

The next piece of information that is important is that there is a powerful monster Guts seems to hate personally that is called “Griffith”. The other monsters he hates simply because of what they are and what they represent, but he seems to have a personal history with this “Griffith”.

The main story starts with Guts’ birth and his early childhood. He was born and raised on the battlefield and started participating in wars as a mercenary at an early age. Much like in the prologue Guts fights alone, only his opponents are still human and not monsters. Then, early in the Golden Age Arc Guts meets Griffith, a leader of a group of mercenaries, for the first time in an antagonistic encounter. But nothing big comes out of it and Guts actually joins Griffith’s group, the Band of the Hawk. Clearly the event that makes Guts hate Griffith so much still lies in the future.

Now usually in a tragedy the tragic hero starts out in a good position so that they have a lot to lose, but that is clearly not the case here. Guts is born out of his hanged mother’s corpse, grows up on the battlefield and makes a living by fighting in war. Most of the Band of the Hawk are society’s outcasts, plebeians who have nowhere else to go but to become mercenaries.

What Miura is doing here is that instead of having fixed stakes from the beginning, the stakes are gradually raised over time by having the characters’ situation grow better and better. Instead of pushing you towards the cliff, Miura puts you in a roller coaster, a roller coaster that is currently climbing slowly to gain height, but how high is unknowable to you because your seat is facing backwards so that you are constantly reminded about how high up you are without knowing when the roller coaster’s descent will begin and for each passing moment you become more aware of the fact that your inevitable fall is becoming higher and higher.

Except, the ride doesn’t climb very fast, and, the view is starting to become very pleasant: army after army is conquered by the Band of the Hawk, Guts grows friendlier to his comrades in arms and Griffith comes closer and closer to achieve his goal. Sometimes you see something supernatural, such as the Crimson Behelit or Zodd, which causes you to involuntarily look down just often enough so that you never completely forget your destination.

Shakespeare introduced collateral damage to the Greek formula. Instead of letting the downfall just affect the tragic hero, Shakespeare happily kills of unrelated characters in his plays. The sudden death of a side character further heightens the tension and the stakes by planting the question “Who else will die?” in the audience’s head. In Berserk this aspect becomes more and more noticeable the longer the story goes on, the closer Guts becomes to Griffith, Casca and the rest of the Band of the Hawk because you remember in the back of your head that none of them except Griffith shows up in the prologue. There Guts is completely alone with nobody to rely on. What will happen to them? The answer to that question of course lies ahead, towards the end of the ride, towards where the roller coaster will have completed its ascent. But you can’t look ahead and see how far that is, because once again, your seat is facing backwards.

The second hallmark of the tragedy is the tragic hero’s fatal flaw. Something about their personality doesn’t work at all with their environment which then inevitably causes the downfall. I think there is no one person that fits this role perfectly in Berserk. The best candidate is probably Griffith because it is his unending ambitions and his refusal of acknowledging his friends as friends that causes him to accidentally alienate his friend and his subsequent feeling of being betrayed by his possession, which in turn makes him impatient and rush ahead in his plan. His goal, to become king, requires him to be perfect, but he is only a human.

This is a bit unusual though since Guts is the main character, and the tragedy usually needs to be from the perspective of the tragic hero to work. We need to be able to see into the character’s head to understand this fatal flaw. Otherwise it often becomes a story with an entirely different genre. For example Hamlet could be seen as a murder mystery where a young man becomes crazy and starts murdering people.

I think a more satisfactory answer is that it is the entire Band of the Hawk that is the tragic hero. Each member adds their flame to the hawks’, to Griffith’s flame, so that they can be part of something greater. It is not just Guts’ story, it’s also the tragedy of the entire Band of the Hawk, and since Griffith is the Hawk the Golden Age Arc still works as a Tragedy. This makes the tragic hero’s flaw complex. A big part is Griffith’s aforementioned flaws, but it is also the flaws of the other members. They all were too willing to follow a leader that didn’t care enough for them, couldn’t care enough for them because they are soldiers who will eventually die for him, and wouldn’t want to care for them because he can’t see them as his equal since they follow his will. Guts, however, wasn’t content with being just one of Griffith’s soldiers. He wanted Griffith to acknowledge him as a friend, an equal. An impossibility if he were to remain in Griffith’s Band of the Hawk, which becomes a flaw in the Band’s cohesiveness.

And finally, of course, the tragedy must deliver on its initial promise and let the hero fall. After building the stakes and the tension for so long the Golden Age ends in a swift but dramatic and brutal finale inevitably caused by the flaws listed above. If the buildup was a climbing roller coaster the finale is more akin to a free fall, and the experience of reading through it speaks for itself. If you haven’t already I highly recommend reading it, and the subsequent story arcs as well. Just like the stakes weren’t kept static in the Golden Age, Berserk kept on going using the Golden age as its foundation, adapting its format and themes as Guts continued to struggle through different phases of his life. That is, until a couple of months ago when the author suddenly passed away.

Rest in piece Kentaro Miura. Your work will be remembered fondly.