At this point I have to assume that Berserk is Japan's answer to Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones - both are long-running series, both feature lots of death, both are stagnating as the authors take breaks, and both are at risk of Author Existence Failure before completion.
Well, more like ASoIaF is a shallow Western shadow of Berserk. The schemes are more banal, the combat is less intense, the struggles are less personal, the monsters are less monstrous, the mysticism is more mundane, and the setting is more real-world tossed-salad (in the same way that the WoT world is). ASoIaF's merits, such that they are, are that it provides a venue for people who want to rant about canals, write about relationships between preteen girls and grown men, pretend to be surprised by Zombie Apocalypse #675473, indulge in truly intense schadenfreude, watch as all the plot-armored characters survive death again and again, and try to claim that Daenerys isn't an incompetent fool because she's a strong independent womyn who needs a bunch of old men stuck in the past to tell her what to do while she fucks up freeing slaves halfway around the world from the plot.
Meanwhile in Berserk even the characters who are practically defined by a single motive are still nuanced, interesting, and dynamic. Griffith is pretty much the only person who
doesn't change over the course of the series, and there's some metaphysical significance to that.
It also helps that Miura isn't a whiny hypocritical little shit about derivative work the way Martin is.
(And if you buy into my hypothesis that story quality:fanfiction quantity [adjusted for audience size] is an inverse relationship which forms a left-skewed bell curve when graphed, Berserk is an objectively superior work.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3143969 times)