Paulo Seabra

Some things are a matter of duty, some things are a matter of principle. Sometimes in life you need to burn the bridges and burn the ships, and then carry on in whatever path you've chosen. Indeed, sometimes two fierce rivals will hate each other but still deeply respect each other, while they may truly love a friend and yet not really respect him. Similarly, a student may love a teacher he doesn't respect, and may respect a teacher he absolutely hates, depending on how cool or how strict the teacher is. This is because for one reason or another, and maybe for reasons that are even a little irrational, we tend to see conviction as an inherently admirable thing, whether or not we are forced to. Then again, it is a strange thing to admire because some men of conviction have done truly wicked things in the same measure as some other men of conviction have done great things. It might as well be a double-edged sword, but whatever the case may be, the fact remains that conviction is ...

In such a great story, to pick the greatest moment so swiftly is bound to be wrong. Then again, in such a great story, to pick any given moment as its greatest is always a safe bet. I'll pick this moment now but tomorrow I might give you five different ones. That is because this story in particular, what with all its monsters and the sheer violence they go around inflicting, it seems to me actually has its greatest moments in the details, in the quiet times, quiet but not necessarily peaceful, because there's still a whole lot of torment going on within the characters' spirits. For example, you have young Guts looking over the bonfire of dreams, you have Captain of the Raiders Guts defeating Griffith and walking away to forge his own path, you have Black Swordsman Gus inspiring Farnese to pick up a sword with which to fight off monsters in the night, and so on. Most of those great moments would include Guts of course, but it is a testament to Kentarō Miura's genius that...

People who love one of these stories tend to either really love, or at times really hate, the other. I guess it's just one of those sports teams kind of thing. Anecdotally, I'd say that there are more fans of Berserk who delved into A Song of Ice and Fire rather than the other way around, perhaps because the former, while universally beloved amongst manga fans, didn't quite achieve the same level of international fame throughout its ongoing run and adaptations, whereas Game of Thrones was a colossal hit. In any case, and being a fan of both, the comparisons between them got me thinking, and when going through the main themes within each story, I've found quite a few similarities which, if anything, are fun to point out. Before even getting into the stories themselves we can find some interesting meta stuff in that both stories began quite a while ago, Berserk in 1989 and Ice and Fire in 1996, both born into a certain medium, manga and novels respectively, but they...

Berserk is amazing, there's just no way around it. I read the manga twice and will most certainly read it at least once more when it is finally completed in 2097... Though like everyone else, I initially thought the original anime was insufficient. The show spent hours with these characters, building a world in which reality as we know it still applies, only for it to be insanely flipped in the end, leaving no possible escape for our protagonist, Guts. It was only when I read the manga that I began to see the whole story differently, both in philosophical terms, that is to say, the underlying meaning of its world, as well as in psychological terms, that is to say, the personality and mental state of its complex characters. Comparatively to the manga, the story depicted in the original anime is of course reduced to the Golden Age Arc almost in its entirety, as well as two short snippets of the Black Swordsman Arc, one of those snippets being the very first episode, and the second s...