The Berserker / Fan Works

• Advice and Trust:
  • Shinji and Asuka both went berserk as they were fighting Leliel. That poor bastard got ripped from outside and within.
  • Rei also crossed the line or came dangerously close to it when she was fighting Zeruel, and the Angel threatened her friends.
• While Ragna in BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant isn't Ax-Crazy, he has an absurdly short fuse and once his Unstoppable Rage hits, the level of violence he displays tends to be excessive. When he went berserk on Team CRDL, he almost outright killed Cardin, though he thankfully came to his senses before he could go through with anything. It gets played straight after he gets impaled by Neo and enters what's basically his Unlimited Mode, where he lashes out at everything around him in a feral rage, laying waste to the White Fang and the entire dock.
• Hans in A Brighter Dark fights like one the same way he does in the source material. Being a Deconstruction Fic the consequences of fighting like a rabid animal that doesn't watch its back ends up biting him in the ass. Losing an arm to a raider he wounded but didn't finish, and being stopped by a spearman he ignored when he tries to charge Prince Leo.
• In The Butcher Bird, Herman of the Nightmare Pirates can enter this state at times. Considering he's a Carnivorous Zoan and carries a sword about as long as a man is tall, it makes him quite dangerous, and has allowed him to overwhelm better swordsmen through brute force. He gradually begins to mellow out and becomes Strong and Skilled after becoming a blacksmith.
• The Child of Love: In chapter 3 Asuka took a tip from Asukhon and fought extremely furiously. One month later Shinji was still concerned about it.
  Shinji is on his bed, hands under his head, looking at the ceiling. He is thinking about...about how fierce Asuka was in her last battle. He can picture the rage on Asuka's face, as if she was possessed by some demon.
• Contract Labor:
  • When Keitaro accidentally sees her in her underwear in chapter 6, Naru flies into a berserker rage, knocks him off the stepladder he's using to investigate the hole in her floor, and jumps down to attack him while he's stunned and disabled. Haruka fails to physically restrain her and has to draw a butterfly knife and threaten to use it on her if she doesn't calm down; this is what shocks Naru out of her rage. She's later explicitly recognized as a berserker, and is forced to take tai chi as anger management if she wants to stay at the Hinata Inn.
  • Motoko falls into this during her duel with Keitaro after he breaks her bokken; she continues to attack him in a blind rage with the damaged weapon, and disregards Haruka's warnings and continues to fight even after being disqualified, forcing Keitaro to knock her unconscious.
• A Crown of Stars: If Asuka got hurt Shinji would turn very, very quickly into one. At one point of the story he realized that the mere thought of her being harmed made him wanting to kill people and burn things down.
• Desperately Seeking Ranma features Akane as this, from a combination of reasons but not helped by physical issues in her brain. She doesn't really want to be this way, and even tries therapy. Played both ways — generally, her targets are either people who can take a horrific mauling (Ranma, Ryoga) or are inanimate (everything around). Note that she's not invulnerable to this, just too mad to care. Cologne does refer to her as a berserker when talking about further training (albeit after she's cured of the biggest physical issue and had a good amount of therapy regarding some of the mental ones).
• Jayne in Forward, to the point where "... Jayne saw red" are practically Arc Words. It's actually a weird sort of Character Development for him, showing that he now cares enough about the crew (especially River) to become incandescent with Unstoppable Rage when they're hurt or threatened.
• Game Theory has berserker lineages, bloodlines engineered to have a reduced fear response and enhanced magical abilities in combat. Mei, one of the original characters, is such a person, and while it allows her to deal with the stress of combat on her first deployment like a veteran, it also causes her serious problems in her normal life and makes her extremely reckless because her risk assessment skills are completely screwed up. Nanoha might be descended from a berserker lineage as well, although that's in-universe Wild Mass Guessing.
• Some examples found in Supergirl story Hellsister Trilogy:
  • Satan Girl loves fighting and slaughtering. Violence and murder actually turn her on, particularly when she confronts her template whom she hates:
  <TearyoureyesoutandEATTHEM,> sent Satan Girl, not even conscious of her speech. <RipyouapartandseveryourINTESTINES.>
  • Her son -properly named Berserker- isn't any calmer.
    "I would like to meet him, in Armagetto or any other place," said Berserker, the son of Satan Girl and Mordru. "I would take his Astro-Force and force it into his guts, before I ripped his body asunder."
• Megami no Hanabira's Reo Kawamura: always screaming, always on the offensive, with a penchant for demons like Gozuki and Yuki Jirou, who pack a metric asston of power at the cost of finesse and strategy. She even gets a demon named Berserker on Day 5, and more than once it simply tanks an enemy's attack, roars in psychotic fury, and proceeds to beat the offender to death with its bare hands.
• The Mass Effect story Mesozoic Effect combines this with dinosaurs to create Berserker Packs for use by T-Rexes. The results are about what you'd expect.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide Asuka tends to go berserk when she fights. She stabbed Samael to death in a savage rage when it drove her mad. And during another battle, Asuka and her Unit-02 went berserk and brutally ripped Unit-08 apart.
• The Night Unfurls:
  • The Good Hunter subverts this. He fights aggressively, he feels no pain, his fights tend to end messily, and many people note how "crazy" he is. However, Kyril is not some Ax-Crazy, bloodthirsty buffoon with rage issues, but rather a stoic, pragmatic Consummate Professional who happens to be really strong. Besides, he typically kills in silence instead of yelling "rawr" all the time.
  • This trope is double subverted when Kyril eats a Beast Blood Pellet in Chapter 26 of the original. For a few moments, he behaves like an unfettered beast who howls and smashes into the enemy line like a meteor, clawing, biting, and rending terrified mooks into pieces of offal all the while.
• Once More with Feeling: As soon as Shinji came face to face with Sachiel he charged savagely and furiously, killing it in less than one minute. He fought so brutally he made NERV believe that it was Unit 01 that had gone berserk.
• The One I Love Is...: In the Final Battle Shinji went completely nuts when he saw the MP-Evas had tore apart and eaten alive Unit 02 with Asuka inside. He fought like a savage beast, roaring "I'LL KILL YOU!" the whole time, and he did not stop until every last one of the MP-Evas were dead.
• Outcast: The Founders and the Student Council of St. Hetalia Academy discover that Russia is the carrier of a rare gene for "Blood Rage," a condition that re-wires his brain during intense combat. It can magnify an average man's strength and stamina by a factor of ten, and there's no telling what it will do to Ivan under the effects of the Golden Arrow Pin. This discovery comes at the worst possible time: when Ivan is in the middle of a Founder-sanctioned gladiator match with the Spirit of Ancient Scandinavia (hosted in the body of an unwitting Sweden). The Rage makes him unable to stop himself in combat until he's knocked unconscious or his opponent stops breathing.
• In the Worm fanfic Quicken, Emma's fighting style is extremely savage and brutal because she's trying to survive and her enemies are dangerous and merciless. As per Word of God:
  The way Emma's fighting style can currently be described here is simply unrestrained violence. She's fighting without limitations and without human dignity and considerations in mind. In reality, people don't jump right away to gouging out other people's eyeballs or ripping off bodyparts with their teeth. They can get to that point, but people hesitate before diving into that. It's a similar reason as to why it's easier — mentally — to kill someone with a gun as opposed to stabbing them to death with a knife or choking them.
• Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness: Kokoa has serious rage issues, which reach a head in Act VI chapter 46 when she discovers Sun spied on her and Gin making love and Sun stupidly pushes her to her Rage Breaking Point by telling her that she's not worthy of Gin at all; Kokoa promptly flies off the handle, punches Sun through a wall, and then chases Felucia and Sun through the halls of Fang Fang's home, attacking them in a blind rage. Arial has to freeze her solid to get her to stop, and even then, the others have to chain her in place to stop her from going after Sun any more, all while she growls and snaps at them like a rabid dog. Kokoa is subsequently horrified when she discovers that her attack on Sun left her with a fractured skull, ruptured her eyes, and left her essentially brain dead, and while she swears that she didn't mean to hurt Sun that badly, the others point out that Kokoa's rage-fueled, violent actions beforehand speak differently.
• Scar Tissue: When Shinji gets angry he is... scary. All of those times his Humongous Mecha turned berserker? It was copying him when he loses control.
• Seventh Endmost Vision: Tifa appears to be an involuntary one; she seems to have flashes of rage she can't quite control. While not directly called this, it's heavily implied to be PTSD from the War.
• Francis from Shadowchasers: Conspiracy is a modern example. He has two mystical tattoos that let him go berserk, but it takes about an hour to enter the state. Once he does, he can keep the rage for another full hour, has Super-Strength and is tough enough to shrug off even a bullet wound easily, but collapses from exhaustion once the hour is up.
• Played for Drama in the Magical Girl Crisis Crossover Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights.
  • A Hate Plague pseudo-virus, modeled after the effects of real-life diseases such as canine distemper and rabies, is supposed to inflict this on Alph, but it appears she's able to fight off the effects by shapeshifting to her wolf form. Several chapters later, it becomes apparent that the virus wasn't countered at all, only slowed down... and a series of devastating traumas at the hands of the story's Legion of Doom accelerates it further. She progressively becomes more aggressive and loses the ability to distinguish friend from foe, lashing out at her own family and crewmates in an attempt to protect Fate, her master. Her body and sanity deteriorate to the point that Fate has no choice but to effectively euthanize her, granting her a Mercy Kill.
  • When Joker brainwashes the Nothing Card with More than Mind Control, Sakura and Shaoran have to deal with a Madly Roaring Person of Mass Destruction with The Power of the Void whose dead-set on killing them as brutally as possible. Even Joker is implied to be put off by how bloodthirsty she briefly becomes.
• Super Readers' Biggest Adventure does this to Wonder Red, where, before she gets her Mid-Season Upgrade, gets her Berserk Button pressed in the form of the Evil Reader and Lexicon beating up the other Super Readers, and unlocks the aptly titled Berserker Mode, where she reacts on nothing but her rage. When the Evil Reader sees this, his first reaction is an Oh, Crap!, but then he reveals he has a Berserker Mode of his own, and activates it. Despite being much more powerful than Wonder Red, his overuse of his powers causes him to lose his transformation halfway during the battle, and Berserk!Wonder Red proceeds to give the Evil Reader a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Thousand Shinji:
  • Shinji tends to become one when he gets pissed off... which is a very usual occurrence in this story.
  • On the other hand, Asuka IS one. Shinji and Rei call her a berserker several times even before she becomes a follower of Khorne, God of War, Anger and Blood. Not only does her Eva get painted like a Khornate berserker, but she steadily transforms into a Super-Soldier capable to summon massive war-axes out of thin air.
• In Transformers Meta, Grimlock is the berserker of the Autobot team. His vulgar perspectives and behavior are theoretically due to his being subject to experimentation during the Abominus Initiative, where he was transformed into a monstrous persona. This gives him the Dark and Troubled Past. More than once, he has fallen into an Unstoppable Rage, commonly because It's Personal.
• Under the Northern Lights: Most of the time, Heikko the Humongous is cheerful, absent-minded and generally a friendly Gentle Giant. When it comes time to fight, however, he quickly becomes a frenzied mass of sprinting, axe-wielding muscle with no interest in anything beyond throwing himself in battle to mangle the nearest foes, laughing and whooping all the while.

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