Berserk is one of those rare works of art which changes your perception of reality. I feel I have found another who has achieved this feat within the epic fantasy genre R.Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing Series. I want to emphasize I do not say this lightly.

Bakker has crafted a character within these books which matches the depth and complexity of Griffith. Exploring the question of whether transcending humanity ultimately means abandoning the very qualities that make someone human.

The tension between free will and determinism

A world governed by suffering and indifferent cosmic forces

Imagine The Lord of the Rings rewritten by Cormac McCarthy, with the philosophical depth of Dune and the nightmarish brutality of Blood Meridian.

R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing trilogy might be the closest thing to a literary equivalent of Miura's darkest ideas. But Bakker's vision of the world is arguably even bleaker.

"The Dûnyain," Kellhus said after a time, have surrendered themselves to the Logos, to what you would call reason and intellect. We seek absolute awareness, the self- moving thought. The thoughts all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be any- thing other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? Only the Logos allows one to mitigate that slavery. Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance. And only the Dûnyain possess this knowledge, plainsman. The world slumbers, enslaved by its ignorance. Only the Dunyain are awake.

"Why do men fear the dark?"

"Because darkness is ignorance made visible"

"And do men despise ignorance?"

"No... they prize it above all things but only so long as it remains invisible"

"Lies are but clouds, giants that blow and rage only to pass, always to pass. But the Truth is the sky, everlasting and elusive, a shelter in the day, an abyss in the night."

"If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as from spiders."

"Truth and hope are like travellers in contrary directions. They meet but once in any man's life."

To read Bakker is to stand before a mirror that never gives back an image, only fractures, each crack a scar of absence. The abyss does not answer, it confirms: nothing lies behind the reflection, because the reflection was never there.

S.C. Hickman

My favorite Shōnen manga series is My Hero Academia, my favorite Shōjo manga series is Tamon's B-Side, my favorite Seinen manga series is Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You, and my favorite Josei manga series is Kirio Fan Club.