Berserk: Shinen no Kami - Reviews

This review is nothing but spoiler on this 17-page "chapter".

~SPOILERS~

A good divergent supplement to the Berserk storyline it also adds a new "Major" boss that may be the puppet master behind the entire series. I can see why Kentaro Miura didn't want to add it when he originally wrote it. The being that is that world possible "god" is a giant heart that has too many valves, with a ton of eyes in its "body", damn these quotations, attached to a helix that has a whirlwind of emotions swirling around it like a hurricane. It saying that this visage is nothing but its core. It raises more questions than it answers but it does answer Griffiths' question of who it is, and what it wants. It took a few minutes to read definitely worth a few reads to just let it sink in. Nothing super existential but only to Griffith and his place in the universe.

This chapter has essentially been removed from the main series because it apparently gave away too much of the grand scheme of things too early. So of course, I've decided to read it even earlier in the timeline than it originally came out--when I've only read two chapters of the main series and haven't even been introduced to Griffith as a character yet. I'm getting mega premie'd, boss, and I'm loving every slightly confusing second of it.

I don't care for the way the god-heart is portrayed as being both a cause and an effect of collective consciousness. It seems to suggest that it can manipulate the consciousnesses of humans and thus manipulate history, but aren't consciousnesses what spawned it? How can you manipulate the source of your own existence (wouldn't that be manipulating yourself)? And also, why is it talked about as though it's an unintentional byproduct (with people perhaps not even being aware of its existence), but also talked about as though it was an intentional creation because people desired "reasons." This just feels like some of the philosophical ideas the author clearly wants to riff on and the cosmology fe's creating don't blend together all that neatly. It also feels kinda dumb how this singular person (Griffith) is so all-important...though maybe that aspect is cooler within the context of the series itself.

The art is pretty neat. We see a Griffith, hollowed out and with tears within feir skin-shell that show feir hollowness and how feir current body is unstable and not intended to be in this plane of existence. And then there's a giant black heart floating in the void, with gusts of air violently circulating through its ventricles. These "air" currents don't actually look all that good though, in my opinion. The artist kinda fell flat in feir attempt to create a psychedelic atmosphere.