#mocked or disparaged for sending me something in earnest

[bthump]

I think I have diagnosed Griffith with 2 things after reading the manga, but am curious to know what you think

1. ⁠Narcissism. His entire worldview revolves around him. He thinks he is the protagonist. When he states that he can only respect another person who has their own dream and would do anything to make that dream a reality, he is putting a tremendous amount of weight on his "respect". And when someone actually does what the fuck he claims will earn his respect, he doesn't give it, because in the end it breaks his ego. In the eclipse, it's unearthed that deep inside, all along, he believes that all of the individuals in his army exist, living or dead, to serve him. That they died purely for him, not even considering that they yearend a life that was better then what they had, and surviving the front could have granted that. He never felt for a second that he actually owed anything else to anyone else.

2. ⁠Sociopathic tendencies: Griffith lacks true empathy. He views the world, and it's moral balance as a ledger, that he can add and subtract pros and cons to equal the karmic balance in his own eyes, and as such he "Greater goods" a ton of stuff that the fandom excuse or don't even consider prior to the eclipse, like burning the queen to shreds and sending guts on an assassination mission. He sells himself off to Gennon for the "good of his army", but this is just Griffith making ends meet to continue his ambitions of conquest, all of which are for his purpose. He excuses great amounts of evil because he is a narcissist and a sociopath. Other people's genuine state of being are not within his comprehension, and their situation is meaningless to him.

I gotta be honest, I'm pretty surprised you don't already know my opinion on this, since like my whole Fandom Brand is being a Griffith stan who thinks he's a genuinely good, empathetic person as a human lol, and I feel like I discuss that all the time. If you're very new around here and haven't really read many of my posts yet, then yeah, fyi we have deeply differing takes on Griffith.

And just as a warning, around this corner of fandom you're pretty much just going to see exasperated disagreement with this opinion, because it's what the majority of (English speaking) fandom tends to think about Griffith and the people who follow my blog tend to be pretty tired of it.

If you're genuinely interested in my own thoughts though, I'll link a few posts that explore my take on Griffith's personality in some depth:

Do I think Griffith is cruel

How Guts is not a better person than Griffith

Quick take on the Eclipse sacrifice

Griffith and power/control

The meaning of the Promrose Hall speech

Why Griffith lost his shit during the second duel

How Griffith both parallels and contrasts Gambino

Griffith's feelings for Guts are positive

Griffith's entire internal conflict throughout the Golden Age examined at great length

And just as an additional note, I generally don't engage with media through a psychiatry lens. Diagnosing fictional characters with personality disorders isn't my kinda thing unless the text is heavily implying it, because I view characters as tools that exist to help construct the meaning of a story, not as real people. If the narrative isn't interested in clinical psychology, then neither am I, basically.

But needless to say if Griffith was real I don't think either of those diagnoses would fit him, based on my layman's understanding of sociopathy and narcissism, for reasons I've discussed a lot in those linked posts, among others.