Berserk
The storyline specializes in taking sympathetic characters and putting them through horrible shit.
- When we first meet Casca, she's an intelligent and capable Action Girl who at one point leads the Band of the Hawks to rescue Griffith from his horrific year-long torture ordered by the King for having sex with his daughter. But when Griffith later does his infamous Face–Heel Turn, she loses everyone in the Hawks to a whole mess of demons summoned by the evil Godhand, and then gets stripped naked by demons who have naughty tentacles in mind for her before being raped by the newly-transformed Griffith, who has joined the Godhand as their fifth member Femto, right in front of Guts, the man she loves, who is Forced to Watch. The horror of the experience completely shatters poor Casca's mind and leaves her unable to speak, effectively leaving her as an Empty Shell. Guts is furious at Griffith both for this and the betrayal that led up to it. It takes three to four whole arcs and more than twenty long real-world years for Casca's mind to get restored, but she still bears some pretty damned heavy trauma because of the whole thing.
- The universe hasn't been kind to Guts either. A poor innocent baby who is rescued from under the tree where his mother was hanged while she was pregnant, Guts is a pretty nice kid early on his life. He willingly serves the mercenary group that raises him, and gives all of the money he earns to his surrogate father, Gambino, and devotes his life to trying to please him. After Gambino sells him to a mercenary named Donovan for three silver coins, who proceeds to rape him despite Guts's best efforts to fight him off, he starts to lose his innocence (as if living day to day by killing people wasn't enough of a stressor), this loss of innocence finally solidifies when Gambino, having lost his leg in battle and no longer able to fight or lead his men on the battlefield, gets massively drunk and attempts to murder him because he believes that Guts is cursed and blames him for the death of his lover Shisu, Guts's surrogate mother, from the plague, and Guts is forced to kill him out of self-defense. Guts still has nightmares about the experiences as an adult, even before the Eclipse goes down.
- Griffith was once a nice guy (albeit with a Manipulative Bastard streak), highly charismatic, who lead a mighty group of mercenaries and, through his leadership and strategy, was on the fast-track to becoming a noble and realizing his dream of leading his own kingdom. Then Guts, his best friend and closest confidant, decides to leave the Band of the Hawk in his own effort to be Griffith's equal. Beside himself with grief, he sneaks into the Midland Kingdom's castle and takes the virginity of the princess, getting him arrested and tortured over the course of a year, leaving him unable to speak, walk, or even use his hands. Then his closest friends, who rescue him, take pity on him, something he wanted least. After all that, it's not so hard to see why he would decide to become a demon, kill off his men, and make Guts and Casca's lives a living hell from that day forward...
- Many Apostles have had their lives go completely to shit as part of the process of causality leading them to their Despair Event Horizon, their sacrifice and their transformation, but none more tragically than Rosine. An imaginative and clever little girl from an abusive household, strongly hinted to have been a Child by Rape (her mom was raped during the war and her dad abuses both mom and kid due to this), all she wanted was to find the elves that she always believed in and get away from her horrible home situation. When she runs off looking for the elves, she doesn't find them, but her parents find her. Her mom is just glad that she's okay and alive, but her abusive father is furious, and starts viciously beating on her. The blood from the beating and her despair activates the Behelit, which leads to the poor frightened little girl who just wanted elves to be real finding out that she could have been one herself and not just some filthy cruel human, and proceeds to sacrifice both her parents in order to become what she thinks is an elf.
- Theresia, a twelve-year-old girl and the daughter of The Count, one of the early Apostles that Guts kills in the series, is a classic case of an innocent daughter sheltered from the world and wanting more than anything to be free of her "cage," as she explains to Puck, who the Count has captured and brought to her as a "pet." She tells Puck that her mother was killed by pagans, and her father became different ever since, almost like he wasn't even human anymore. When Guts's battle with the Count makes a wreck of the castle, the door to Theresia's room becomes undone, and Theresia can finally escape. But when she arrives at her father's chamber, she is horrified upon seeing the monstrous Apostle form of her father, is taken hostage by Guts in a What the Hell, Hero? moment, and then is forced to watch as Guts puts him through the same torture that he puts other Apostles through. And then the Count's Behelit activates and the Godhand arrive. After a brief battle with Guts, Femto, the newest member of the Godhand, demands that Theresia be sacrificed so that the Count can continue to live. And then, as Theresia watches in terror and horror, the other Godhands reveal to her the truth about her mother's fate — that she had joined the pagans and was conducting an orgy in the Count's own castle when he arrived, that he found himself unable to kill her despite her utter betrayal, which drove him over the Despair Event Horizon and allowed the Godhand to show up, and that the Count himself sacrificed her in order to become a demon. This ordeal, along with having to watch her father get Dragged Off to Hell after refusing to sacrifice her, is enough to drive Theresia to attempt suicide, but she finds the will to live again when the ground below her gives way and she grabs Guts's outstretched Dragon Slayer. Poor little Theresia is left with an utter hatred for Guts, manifested in one of the scariest Death Glares ever as she vows to kill him one day.
