Anatomy of Fate and Causality #4: “Everything Was Decided from the Start”—The God Hand’s Causality and the Mechanics of “Hacking Fate”

“All is within the flow of causality.”

In Berserk, these are words spoken again and again by Void, the leader of the God Hand.

Individual will and effort, even love and obsession, are swallowed by the vast currents of the age; every tragedy and every choice, they say, was decided from the very beginning.

But why do they call it “causality” rather than “fate”? What is the true mechanism behind the “fate” and “causality” that Void speaks of? And why does Guts continue to be called a “Struggler” within their perfect equation? Using the “multi-layered 13-Phase Theory,” a theory of story structure that lies beneath the work, this chapter unravels the true nature of the “causality” presented by the God Hand.

1) Rewriting “Fate” with Demonic Power—The True Aim of the God Hand

Void says the following in the story:

“If it is the natural order that fate transcends human understanding and toys with the children of man, then it is causality that the children of man confront fate with demonic power.”

A very important structure is revealed here.

The unreasonable tragedies and cruel endings that befall human beings are, by nature, “fate”—something no one can escape. Griffith’s despair, as he fell from grace, was tortured and saw his dream destroyed, was also where his “fate” as a human being had led him.

What the God Hand does is not simply impose fate. They give a Behelit to a human being tossed about by fate and, with “demonic power (causality),” forcibly rewrite—hack—that original fate into a scenario that suits the God Hand.

Fate: The inescapable, cruel reality (the unreasonable ruin of a human being).
Causality: A system that brings a demonic will into play, makes the person pay a “sacrifice (the cause)” and rewrites the future into a “rebirth (the effect).”

From the human point of view it looks like “a hell decided from the very beginning,” but in reality it is nothing other than “an alteration of fate” precisely engineered by the God Hand.

2) “Love, Hatred, Pain, Pleasure”—Even Despair Was Part of the Scenario

As Slan exulted in the midst of the Eclipse, the ritual through which Griffith was reborn as Femto required not only terror but an emotional overload in which “love, hatred, pain, pleasure, life and death” were all mixed together.

In other words, the fact that Guts was there—raging, suffering, struggling to save Casca—was not “outside the plan” for the God Hand at all. It was “the finest ingredient for completing the ritual”—exactly as scripted.

Even Guts’s intense emotions were nothing more than elements built into the God Hand’s equation.

3) A “Pinhole in the Dam” in the Perfect Equation—The Skull Knight’s Intervention

Where, then, did their perfect “causality”—their program of alteration—begin to go wrong?

Their one miscalculation—the bug—was “the Skull Knight’s rescue of Guts and Casca,” when he broke through the barrier and burst in.

By design, the Eclipse ritual should have closed with everyone cruelly devoured and completely dead. But when the Skull Knight carried the two of them away, an enormous contradiction—a pinhole in the dam—appeared in the system of causality: “offered as sacrifices, yet still alive.”

The God Hand’s calculation: Everyone would die, and the cycle of sacrifice would be complete.
The resulting breach (the pinhole): Survivors bearing the Brand of Sacrifice remain in the mortal world and begin, little by little, to erode the system of causality itself.

Guts was able to exist as a “Struggler” not only because of his own obsession, but because this “pinhole” dropped him into “a gap (the space between) in causality.”

Frighteningly, however, it is also possible that even this event, which looks like a bug, was orchestrated by Void of the God Hand.

4) Conclusion: From the Macro Structure to the “Facts of the Phenomenon”

The God Hand’s “causality” was a program for rewriting fate to suit a demonic will. Yet even that seemingly perfect system was cracked by the “pinhole” of the Skull Knight’s intervention, and it came to unleash an irreversible bug: Guts.

With the overall background—the macro structure—now in place, we will close in on the greatest core of the story: the concrete depiction of the Eclipse itself.

Thank you for reading to the end. I hope you discovered something new.

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