All hail IoE!
look at those tentacles surrounding Caska, are they planning to include the Eclipse?
Like you didn't know that Berserk was a ******.Good trailer for an eroge or a GCI ******.
In the manga they're called trolls, the small haired monkey things lol.I wouldnt put it ******.....but definitely graphic.
But we have yet to see the orcs/trolls animated
I don't see it that way. I'm not advocating for the depiction of rape in the manga per say, but within the Berserk world it kinda is the norm. It's medieval times, it's like GoT so of course there would be rape, for example Caska almost getting rape by that noble before Griffith came in and "saved" her. The reality is that cases like that happened in real life, nobles raping peasants and servants.
Omg wow. Was this from E3? I didn't get to catch the live stream. I hope it won't be butchered too badly...
...err Snk is a shounen, same as Bastard!! . You can't really compare them to Berserk, it's not the same demographic. I remember one instance of someone about to get raped in VS although I'm not sure since it's been ages since I last read it, and Miura is definitely from the old school, compared to some of the authors whose works you mentioned. If we just compare Fist of the North star, which is a shounen, it's defnitely more violent than today's shounens. Old school authors take way more risks than the younger generation of authors. And I'm sorry but without the troll rape and what it does I wouldn't find the trolls half as gruesome as they're made to be in the manga. To some reading Berserk is like going through a catharsis, because the world is 10 or 100 times more fucked up than our world, and rape is part of that violence as much as heads and guts flying imo.
I wouldn't call Bastard a seinen. Just having nudity isn't enough to label it as seinen. Japan have more laid back rules when it comes to nudity, they're actually pretty ok with that because the Japanese traditionally didn't have that taboo, of depicting nudity. For example I saw(in a vid) once an ad for a hair salon in Japan featuring an anime-ish girl who is pretty nakey. Nothing wrong with that in Japan, the only problem the Japanese have is with depicting genitalia, which is kinda ironic. If you take Berserk for example, while there is some nakedness and sex scenes, it definitely is that genitalia isn't represented, and is often blurred, especially the male genitalia. So when you take Bastard!! for example, even though there is some nakedness and the author is rereleasing his older stuff so he can include the H scenes that he didn't get to release the first time around, the structure is pretty much that of a shounen. There's a lot of fighting involved, and it's even light in tone. Nothing as deep or as profound as Berserk, so you could say that putting manga in categories is just a way to say what is safe for everyone to read, and what isn't. Berserk is definitely NOT safe to read for everyone, and its themes are for a mature audience, which so happens to be what seinen means.Talking about demographic is complicated. Bastard! was serialized in a shōnen magazine, now it's in a seinen one. Just like MPD Psycho. And Shigurui, which is more gruesome than Berserk, is a shōnen, and the magazine in which it was serialized changed to a seinen. Pretty hard to put some of works into cases, and they're not isolated cases.
When I see some seinen works like Chi which don't have anything serious, I can say that demographic doesn't affect that much the content of works. As long as it's good. =P
But you're right on the catharsis part.
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Seinen means mature(actually it means young adult or youth) in Japanese, so anything that can be seen as something that can be read by a more mature audience fits that description. So yes the themes also count not just the graphic content.
Typically, the only thing that matters in determining such a thing is the demographic of the magazine it runs in, nothing more, nothing less. Not every editorial department pays as much attention to such things, so not every Seinen magazine is going to have 100% "mature" or "dark" series in it
Yes it's a musou game.It was already mentioned by @THM Nindo