About Guts' Trick to Survive Ganishka's Lightning

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In Episode 275, Guts performed used the Dragonslayer sword as a lightning rod to avoid Ganishka's lightning. It is a striking scene but it raises some questions on its plausibility.


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Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the lightning rod trick. The confusion I had about the trick was how Guts was able to infer that it was his best choice of action when it was explained by the throwaway line that "lightning does strike high places". With only this line, I could have been assumed that Guts would just leap or push himself onto a lower platform. Even though Guts is known for doing death-defying stunts with sword, I think there is not enough information and character history to explain how he would perform this stunt when the line suggests other alternatives.

Thoughts?
 

Aazealh

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Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the lightning rod trick. The confusion I had about the trick was how Guts was able to infer that it was his best choice of action when it was explained by the throwaway line that "lightning does strike high places". With only this line, I could have been assumed that Guts would just leap or push himself onto a lower platform. Even though Guts is known for doing death-defying stunts with sword, I think there is not enough information and character history to explain how he would perform this stunt when the line suggests other alternatives.

I don't see what's hard to understand. Did you expect Guts to recount that time a guy told him that lightning hits higher points in vivid detail, with the precision that metal is a conductor while wood insulates from electricity? It's simply unnecessary. It's enough to know that it's something he had been told at some point in his life but hadn't yet seen for himself. Furthermore, what "lower platform" are you talking about? In that scene Guts is standing on top of a turned-over, destroyed ship in the middle of the sea. He's wounded and he's wearing a heavy metallic armor. He had nowhere to go but into the sea, and certainly couldn't have moved fast enough to escape Ganishka's lightning. Propping up the Dragon Slayer as a lightning rod was pretty much his only solution.
 
Did you expect Guts to recount that time a guy told him that lightning hits higher points in vivid detail, with the precision that metal is a conductor while wood insulates from electricity? It's simply unnecessary.

I don't think that I was specifically asking for Guts to explain his thought process and memories that lead to his trick. If there might have been some info I had missed that would help explain the scene through cause-and-effect, I could change my assessment.
 

Aazealh

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I don't think that I was specifically asking for Guts to explain his thought process and memories that lead to his trick. If there might have been some info I had missed that would help explain the scene through cause-and-effect, I could change my assessment.

I don't understand what you're talking about. What cause and effect? He had heard that lightning is known to strike higher points, and in this desperate situation he acted on that knowledge and used the Dragon Slayer to try and deflect the attack. He had no other option except throwing himself into the sea and risk drowning, and even then it doesn't look like he could have avoided being hit.
 
Looking back at the area where Guts is in 274, I agree with you since it does not look like there was any viable places for him to take shelter. And I was under the impression that with all the ship debris at the harbor, he could have found another place to hide but no. And Guts certainly cannot go into the sea due to the definite risk of him drowning which is compounded by the fact that the earlier lightning strikes released him from his berserker mode that helped him stay afloat earlier.
I guess it was something of a wishful thinking for me to see if Guts had came across this knowledge earlier from his mercenary days as a neat bit of continuity, but I concede. It was a nice exercise in exploring the logic and characters of the series though. Thank you.
 

Aazealh

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the earlier lightning strikes released him from his berserker mode that helped him stay afloat earlier.

That was actually Schierke who used her magic to push him back towards the surface, but yeah, that wasn't an option anymore since she had been cast back into her own body.

I guess it was something of a wishful thinking for me to see if Guts had came across this knowledge earlier from his mercenary days as a neat bit of continuity, but I concede. It was a nice exercise in exploring the logic and characters of the series though. Thank you.

Well I mean it would have been nice, but not every little thing can be preestablished, otherwise the story would become bloated. These parts are left up to the reader's imagination.
 
The confusion I had about the trick was how Guts was able to infer that it was his best choice of action when it was explained by the throwaway line that "lightning does strike high places". With only this line, I could have been assumed that Guts would just leap or push himself onto a lower platform. Even though Guts is known for doing death-defying stunts with sword, I think there is not enough information and character history to explain how he would perform this stunt when the line suggests other alternatives.

Guts grew up travelling and camping. Avoiding high areas and tall trees during a lightning storm is a basic outdoors survival lesson.
 

Walter

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Guts grew up travelling and camping. Avoiding high areas and tall trees during a lightning storm is a basic outdoors survival lesson.

Guts was living outdoors, which is different from "camping." Anyway, Guts seems surprised by the result of his little experiment. It doesn't seem like he had personal experience with avoiding lightning. Instead, it was more like something he heard once, but never practiced himself.
 
Avoiding high areas and tall trees during a lightning storm is a basic outdoors survival lesson.
Not trying to dogpile or anything, but a quick web search shows the first lightning rod was invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century. The science behind lightning and electricity was pretty much non-existent for the time period Berserk is set in, amounting mostly to myths and superstitions. The idea of a basic survival education is quite modern in that sense.
 

Aazealh

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Alright this thread was over four posts ago, there's no reason to keep it going with this aimless discussion.
 
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