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Every creative person has both Guts and Griffith inside them, explains Beserk creator Kentaro Miura
Every creative person could go full villain at any given moment.
NewsbyTrent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer
Published on Fri Aug 14 2026
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“Within you are two wolves,” goes the saying. It has become a cliché that the internet often skews toward comedy without addressing the initial meaning. It is less about the duality of man and more about the two potential paths before us all: one good and one evil. Kentaro Miura understood that, as he explained in an interview, within every creative person is both the hero and villain of Berserk.
Kentaro Miura gave <a href="https://mangabrog.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/berserk-artist-kentaro-miura-interview-i-actually-dont-think-i-could-let-such-a-long-grim-story-end-with-a-grim-ending/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>that insight during an interview in 2000. As part of his story about the childhood friend who helped inspire the two main characters of Berserk, Miura mused about how young boys often find themselves tempted by both light and darkness. Griffith, Miura says, represents the comfort of knowing exactly what they want to do, while Guts is the person we become when we fail and reexamine our goals. “Maybe Griffith and Guts are symptoms that affect boys,” he said. “When a boy seriously tries to do something, he could become either one.”
When asked if this applied to him, Miura could see him becoming more like either Griffith or Guts. “They’re both there. When things start going well, Griffith starts sprouting up. If Berserk were to start to slip and fail, I’d probably go back to Guts. Anyone trying to build up something experiences both sides, I suspect. This is something I only realized talking about it now.”
It is worth remembering that that interview was given in 2000, when Berserk was still dealing with the direct aftermath of the Eclipse and Griffith’s ascension to the Godhand, so Kentaro Miura admitting that he thought everyone had a little of Griffith in them was maybe not meant to be a good thing.
Each week, Popverse’s resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say “greatest,” in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included…
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Trent Cannon: Trent is a freelance writer who has been covering anime, video games, and pop culture for a decade. (He/Him)
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