Berserk

Pros

• My inspiration when I started doing this came from reading Berserk and it helped me find meaning in suffering and made the bad days less hard until today.
• Also, the Idea of Evil in Berserk is a good shout. But if you decide to check out Berserk, make sure to look up trigger warnings if you have any
• I'm a sucker for a bleak, genuinely badass anti-hero in fiction, for which Caine and Guts from Berserk are usually enough.
• I recommend the manga Berserk by Kentaro Miura.
• Other recs like **Berserk**, **Hollow** by Brian Catling, **Pilgrim** by Mitchell Luthi, **Blackwing** by Ed McDonald, Jesse Bullington's work, Clark Ashton Smith's stuff, and R. Scott Bakker's **Second Apocalypse** series or Anna Smith...

Cons

• There is a lot to like about it, but I feel the author struggles with writing female characters and I did not like the overuse of sexual violence against both men and women for what felt like shock value.
• Lots of SA and pointlessly graphically violent. Also really, really good. So, you know, mixed feelings.
• There isn't a really good Berserk adaptation. The only one that's close to decent is the '97 anime, and even it leaves out huge chunks of story and context. If you want what makes Berserk so good, you HAVE to read the manga.
• I think Berserk is excellent, but at a certain point (*well* after the Eclipse, actually) I got sick of all the sexual violence and put it down; it felt like just shock value at a certain point rather than any kind of interesting narrati...