Continuation discrepancy: How can Schierke read Guts' mind through her body of light?
Added 2024-03-04 13:00:12 +0000 UTCPart 4 of this series from Walter about various major discrepancies in the Continuation compared to Miura's Berserk.
[371] How can Schierke read Guts' mind through her body of light?
In episode 371, Schierke wants to check on Guts' state, but can't open the door to his room on the Sea Horse. So she uses her body of light to go through the wall, and then, just floating next to him, she sees memories associated with his sword. When these fragments (depicted linearly, like a slideshow) show a memory of Griffith, the Beast of Darkness manifests and slams its jaws shut, blocking her mind reading and repelling her back to her body.
It’s unclear how Schierke does this. The group can use telepathy by tying one of her hairs around a finger, but that’s not what happens here. There is one past occurrence when Schierke perceives some of Guts’ memories: in volume 27, when she rescues him from the armor. But it’s very different.
At that time, she used her body of light to enter the armor after it was activated. She saw the raging fire that represents the armor’s Od, and diving inside it, found the memories of Guts that fueled said fire: his days among the Band of the Falcon and what happened during the Eclipse. All of that took place within the armor itself, because it’s a magical item with special properties. It showed us how the armor works, and how Flora’s talisman protects Guts’ ego from shattering.
But in episode 371, Schierke simply peeks inside Guts’ mind from the outside, as if being in her body of light was sufficient in and of itself. That is simply not how Miura had established things. It implies mind reading abilities that are unlike anything else she had done until that point in the series.
And it begs the question: if Schierke had the capability of accessing people’s minds so easily, then why did the group need to get help from Danan? Why even introduce the Corridor of Dreams at all? If Schierke could access Casca’s mind simply by floating near her, she could conceivably have rooted out the “main culprit” all along.
The truth is that, quite clearly, she doesn’t have those abilities. She can do limited telepathy in specific cases, not unlike how Puck catches fleeting feelings from people nearby, but she can’t peer into people’s mind to this extent. By the same token, the way in which she’s repelled is completely incongruous, since she’s not even inside of him.