Griffith Quotes

The courtesy is the tell. Griffith calls a man he has never spoken to at length "my friend" twice in one duel, and the offer of a choice is made at the moment the choice has stopped existing. Guts picks the shoulder, Griffith takes it, and the next thing he says, holding Guts' face in both hands while the band cheers, is that Guts now belongs to him. Read the two lines together and the politeness resolves into ownership: the choice was between two ways of being acquired. What makes this more than villainy is where Griffith learned the manner. Episode 12 shows him selling his own body to a nobleman for the band's funding, and the composure he brings to that room is the same composure he brings to this one. He offers Guts a choice because nobody offered him one, and the show does not decide whether that is generosity or its imitation.

Steelman the cynical reading first: a leader who reminds a subordinate that he risked his life for him is collecting on a debt, and Griffith has just been told by an immortal that Guts' death is bound up with his own ambition, which makes the investment worth protecting. That reading has real support. Zodd's prophecy in the previous episode was addressed to Guts, and Griffith heard every word of it. But the objection cannot explain what Griffith actually did, which was throw himself in front of a creature that had just cut through a room of his soldiers, for a man who had lost two duels to him. Nothing in his plan required it, and the plan is the one thing Griffith never sacrifices for anyone. Casca will say later, in the anime's longest speech, that he becomes unnerved when Guts is in danger and acts impulsively. This is the episode she is describing. The question is manipulative and the act behind it is not, and Griffith is the kind of man in whom both are true at once.

Erwin Smith gives the other half of this speech in Attack on Titan. His dream, the basement, has killed hundreds of scouts, and at Shiganshina he asks Levi's permission to keep pursuing it into a suicide charge; Levi's answer is to order him to give up on it and die. Isayama lets the dream be judged from outside. Miura never does. Nobody in the 1997 series ever tells Griffith his dream is not worth the men it costs, because everyone who could say it is standing in the fire keeping warm. The speech is being made to a princess, in a garden, as seduction, and its claim that abandoned dreams go on smouldering is a warning about Griffith that Griffith does not recognize as one. Erwin at least knew he was a monster. Griffith describes the cage in perfect sentences and does not see that he is also describing the door he will walk through in episode 24.

Casca tells this story to Guts as evidence of who Griffith was, and it is the only account the anime gives of him before the mask set. The boy had wanted to be a knight and looked at Griffith as if at a hero; Griffith is at the grave alone, and Casca finds him. What she describes next is the decision that follows from the grief: he goes to Lord Gennon and sells his body for the money to make the band big enough that boys like this one stop dying, then tears his own arms open telling her the arithmetic was rational. Set against the Griffith of episode 10, calmly explaining to a princess that men live and die by their dreams, this is the same idea before it hardened. The younger man could still ask whether the boy was happy. The later one has stopped asking, because he has decided that the dead chose their battles, and the dream has to keep winning to make the choosing mean anything.

As a battle speech it says the same thing three times and the third time it is a tautology. Whatever the Japanese line does, the dub gives Griffith a rally that any commander in any war could deliver, and the scene lets it stand with trumpets. The odd thing is that the actual Doldrey plan makes the speech dishonest. Griffith's tactic is a staged retreat: the main body of the Hawks is meant to be seen losing, so that Adon's cavalry pours out after them and Casca's small detachment can take the empty fortress from inside. The men being told to stake their lives are the bait, and survival was never what the fight demanded of them. Griffith's better speeches are the private ones, to Charlotte, to Casca over the squire's grave. Put in front of an army, he sounds like every other general, and the series seems to know it, because the win is credited to the plan and not to the words.

Griffith is answering the Queen's last argument, which was rank: she is royal, he is common, and therefore he cannot. He has already locked the doors. What the reply commits him to is a rule with no exemption clause, and the series is going to test whether he means it. Within the year he is the loser: caught in Charlotte's bed, stripped of title, and handed to the King's torturer, and the rule he stated in the fire says plainly what should happen to him. It does not happen, because Guts and Casca go and get him, which is the one thing the rule never allowed for. Compare the two Griffiths of this episode. The one in the corridor telling Guts he has never dirtied his hands is asking to be judged; the one at the tower door has just done the judging himself, for a plot against his life, and needed no army for it. The loser must die is not a battlefield principle. It is what he tells himself so that the fire counts as a battle.