Derik Badman's Journal

While sitting this morning, I realized that this journal is like the imaginary conversations I have in my head all the time. Sometimes they are with some vague me I am talking to, sometimes a specific person, and sometimes it's just a vague someone(s) else. This journal is kind of all that, me talking to some imaginary audience. I don't know that that concept changes anything, though perhaps it clarifies to me a bit how to think about this project.

I finished up the fourth volume of Kentaro Miura's Berserk deluxe edition this morning. I don't think I've written anything about this manga before. I read a bunch of volumes last year when there was a really cheap sale on the ebook version, and then these deluxe editions started coming out so I never finished the series in the electonic version. These are nice black hardcovers, slightly larger then normal, collecting three of the regular volumes.

Berserk is dark fantasy of a very manga sort. It is not really interested in world building, throughout the volumes I've read I never had any sense of geography or society. There is a lot of generic pseudo-medieval backgrounds, but one never gets a sense of anything specific beyond the few characters that are required. There are undifferentiated kingdoms at war, and various leaders how mostly all seem awful, and generic peasants in the background.

It's also very human centric for fantasy. There's one elf, who is more like a fairy, and there are demons, crazy, weird, awful, creepy demons that seem to grow in variety as the story continues.

There's really no epic quest (to the point I've read), rather, like many manga, it has a lot of focus (at least in the early parts) on characters and their "be the best at a thing" (fighting) and their "dreams". But unlike a general "fight to the top" storyline this one is filled with creepiness and horror and a sense that the dreams of the different characters are in direct conflict.

The first section of the manga, also like many manga, is a little different, generic, kind of confusing. But then it jumps back in time (narratively, the characters don't time travel), and the story really picks up. At the point I've read the story hasn't returned to that first point in time. I kind of wonder if it ever does, or if that first section is written off as a kind of trial run, first draft. One thing I've learned in reading manga, is often the first volume and the second volume are dramatically different in one way or another as the creators and editors seemingly react to serialization and make changes to the concept. It can make it hard to make any judgemenets based on one volume (great for sales I guess), as I've read a few manga where the first volume was lackluster but I ended up really enjoying the rest of the series. Berserk is one of those cases.

One thing that bothers me about the manga is it's occasionally leering gaze. This volume of the deluxe edition, for instance, has a creepy scene where the decrepid king (who the protagonists are currently working for) basically molests his daughter (she's an older teen I guess). It's awful and the king is not drawn with any sympathy for his actions, yet, the daughter is also drawn in such a way that she is sexualized and perhaps shown a little too much from the view of the king, in a way that is uncomfortable on a meta level.