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Berserk fans are used to waiting a long time for new stories and chapters to come out, but there is one chapter that is even harder to come by than most. Berserk Chapter 83, which comes at the end of the iconic Golden Age arc, isn’t included in most collections of the manga because Kentaro Miura felt that chapter’s depiction of God locked the story into a direction he wasn’t ready to go into just yet.

Back in 2009, the members of Skullknight.net, an online forum (remember those?) dedicated to Berserk, sent a letter to Kentaro Miura with a series of questions about Berserk. Against the odds, Miura responded with the help of an assistant and a translator. One of the questions that they asked was why Chapter 83 was left out of Berserk Volume 13 when it was published. The answer is that Miura thought that the chapter’s exposition pushed the story in a certain direction too early, so he pulled it from subsequent publications.

For reference, Berserk Chapter 83 comes near the end of the Golden Age arc and sees Griffith brought before the Idea of Evil, a mysterious entity from The Void. This Idea of Evil was created by mankind’s subconscious evil thoughts, making it both the ego and God of the Berserk world. The whole chapter is a bit of a lore dump, which is why Miura decided not to include it in future collections of Berserk. 

“It’s because I wanted Berserk’s world to be revealed just that far, not any more than that,” Miura explained in his letter to the Skullknight forum. “The appearance of God in the manga conclusively determines its range. I thought that might limit the freedom of the story development. I myself don’t know if the Idea of Evil will show up in the manga or not.”

The Idea of Evil, which serves the purpose of God in the Berserk setting, hasn’t shown up in the manga since 1996, but it remains canon to the lore of the world as it appears in Chapter 82 briefly. However, Miura felt that the full explanation of what the Idea of Evil is and how it relates to Griffith and the God Hand was too much exposition too soon in the story, and had it withdrawn from future collections of Berserk.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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