I'm sorry, was that supposed to be a counter-argument to a single thing I've just said? This doesn't denounce or legitimize a single thing I mentioned about Bruce's portrayal in Beyond. In fact, all it does is prove me even more right.
Bruce is living alone, cut off from the streets he once defended and suffering everything you've just mentioned...and he still manages to find time to make constant quips and dry, sarcastic comments to Terry throughout the show. His past and brooding didn't consume his character like it did in the Arkham games, and is precisely why THAT portrayal was infinitely better.
All you just did is highlight my point with a neon marker. Congratulations on elevating everything I just said as reinstated fact. You're practically doing my work for me.
You and I weren't watching the same shows, or reading the same comics, were we?
So let me see if I understand this:
Guts goes from an anti-social loner to a mercenary with beloved comrades and brothers at arms, learns to live and fight for people outside of himself for the first time....then watches all of them vanish before his very eyes, spends an agonizing and lonely crusade trying to avenge them, to the point where he's cutting himself off from everyone around him in a coarse and heartless state of exile....and then, when he inspires a new team of people to follow him in admiration, and he isn't completely, 100% open or warm with them because he's both an anti-social, paranoid loner with trust issues the size of the Great Wall, and doesn't make friends with them immediately...despite recent chapters showing minimal bread-crumbs of him slowly breaching his wall of distrust and hatred to show compassion to them....
...and this somehow comes off as a poorly-written function for him?
What in God's name did you think was going to happen? You think Guts was going to skip among the buttercups with a brand new batch of "Bestest Friendsies" (people whose relationship with him over a few weeks couldn't POSSIBLY equate to the years he spent with the Band of the Hawk) people he literally just met, immediately after the crusade against apostles? A crusade, I might add, made him a cold, uncaring and dispassionate bastard to even his own spouse, as Goto rightfully criticized him to be....and this takes away from his character?
I know that exposure to both Metal Gear trash passing off as anime nowadays might've tainted your perception of this most basic element of basic story-telling, but there's this magical thing we have in the folds of a proper story:
It's called pacing.
If Guts immediately befriended people right after a period of hate-filled isolation, it would have the same, paper-thin feeling of shallow story-telling that every by-the-numbers Moe High School Soap Opera has. It would shatter the immersion. It would reduce his character to a whimsical, emotional stain. It would be lazy.
Which, given by the media works you glorify, only makes sense why you would look at it as bad writing.
You ever hear of the "charactres" in a work called Lord of the Rings?
That little anthology of books you may or may not of heard of from your self-contained, pristine echo-chamber of bad anime and one-dimensional crap-shoots masquerading as characters, is universally-praised not because of its spell-binding world, its living breathing mythology, its conflict involving a multitude of high-fantasy races or depth Tolkein goes to describe everything from a blade of grass to an entire batallion.
It's praised because its characters---despite consisting of dwarves, elves, necromancers, and wizards---find themselves in a fantastic and stylized world, but have very real and very fleshed-out and believable personalities despite the fantastical nature of the story.
A character can be as distant, stylized, and miles above reality as he/she likes....what matters is if they're relatable. Characters like Dante and Solid Snake aren't unrelatable because they're some fantastical hybrid of human or demon, or the far-fetched product of military gene-splicing...it's because they're one-note caricatures spewing dialogue that would never once be uttered by a single rational human being, and displaying dumb and one-dimensional qualities that the audience can not and will not relate to.
If I can relate to an extra-terrestrial anthropomorphic cat like Lion-O from ThunderCats faster than I can ever relate to what Hideo Kojima claims to a human being in the form of Solid Snake, there's a definite problem in someone's narrative competence.
Old news, Methuselah. If you had done your research, you'd know that the entire team of script writers for the fifth film were brought in immediately to replace the ones in On Stranger Tides.
Know why? Because Johnny Depp openly stated that unless the writing improved, and the character of Jack Sparrow wouldn't be bastardized any longer for comedic effect, he wouldn't return for a sequel. It got to the point where he not only chose the writers, but had active involvement in the new movie's script...so much so, that he chose writers that were fans of the first film exclusively, where Jack Sparrow still retained dignity as a character...just like I've been saying.
So, yeah. The real world is sure sweet to wake up to....especially when I'm right.
Really? He didn't break out into murderous rampages at all after that?
Not in the fight against Rosine? Not in the butchering of innocent children as they visit him as ghosts?
What about the Chapter of the Holy Demon War? The one where Guts kills more Apostles than any other arc in the series, going as far as to recreate the Hundred Man Slaughter but with Trolls instead...fighting a livid battle with the temptress Slan, fighting in rabid rage against Zodd and Grunbeld for daring to call themselves the "New Band of the Hawk"?
Again...
The way you talk about Beserk...it just....
It's like listening to Anita Sarkeesian talk about video games. It's more funny than anything else. Ignorant and misinformed, but funny.
Uh, no. No it isn't. Kentaro Miura has repeatedly stated that the first game is not canon or tied to the manga at all, and is just a "what-if" scenario he penned himself. The second game is a partial adaptation, and even THAT has a non-canon scenario stuck in it.First is canon and tied to manga and second is partial adaptations, so deep knowledge there, for a fan of franchise
And no. I'm not a fan of Berserk as a franchise in its entirety. I don't consider myself part of the fanbase whatsoever, but that's mostly because I don't like Berserk in every adaptation it has taken...just the original manga, and to a lesser extent, the films.
Is that why Griffith's role as the protagonist is still the central conflict of the story, specifically because of what he did to Guts? Is that why Casca regaining her memory is still a pivotal narrative point, because of who she is and what she means to Guts?
He's about as much of a "strong supporting figure" as Luke Skywalker is in the original Star Wars trilogy. Everything going on in the story still directly ties to and involves him.
And by the way, the series DID NOT start out as a "strong historical drama". I don't know where or how you got that from. The dark fantasy element of the story was prevalent in the first four volumes of the manga, and the Golden Age Arc has been widely emphasized by the author as something that went far longer than he ever intended it to.
To decry Berserk for having fantasy elements is like decrying Hellsing for having Nazis in it. Have fun screaming at the bulk of the source material, bud.
I played and finished the second game just last week, and I can guarantee you that Guts speaks more in the second game than he does in the first. He talks directly to other characters, and shouts at his enemies in-game almost constantly...and doesn't talk to Puck so much as he does to Schierke. Not to mention how much he interrogates and argues with the likes of Charles, Slan, and the Band of the Hawk.
This is what happens when people ride on minimal knowledge and YouTube footage to supply for actual information about a series, and start professing it as truth to actual fans.
They look like vapid Otaku shrieking mispronounced verbiage at native Japanese speakers. A sad spectacle, to be sure, but an entertaining one, nonetheless.
Don't worry. We hit ludonarrative dissonance right around when"Tony Montana is a mopey, tragic, brooding character", and "Guts is a power fantasy for kids" staggered in drunkenly into the conversation.
Seriously, I'd consider putting an end to replying, but this is just too much fun to listen to.
