Vinland Saga, you’ve heard of it, it is this incredibly serious, mature and realistic series telling a tale of Vikings, rich in great characters, whose visuals are breathtaking and it has one of the greatest stories to ever be conceived in manga and anime… except, all of this is a lie. Vinland Saga as a narrative isn’t really enticing, and the realism dies on the very first minute of the first episode of the first season where a guy chops 4 men standing separately in a square-like formation and a mast in the center of them with a single axe swing, and it doesn’t get better from there. As a series, Vinland Saga is not even that bad, but when it is sold as this “serious, mature and realistic” series when it is actually closer to a typical shounen nekketsu series in execution, then it comes out as a pretty bad and you can blame it as a big part of why Vinland Saga bothers me so much.

Whenever I hear people saying that this season is boring, it makes me feel confused, it’s not like Vinland Saga had been fun in the first place. The first season had an easy to follow plot, so you can understand why people were bothered by the change, however, the pacing of the first season was horrible, to the point even someone who hasn’t read the manga like me can notice it was dragged far more than it should’ve just so it wouldn’t get to the so called Farmland Saga arc to have the teenagers entertained by fights between Vikings so they wouldn’t pay attention to the ridiculous characters, so when the more grounded second season came, it seemed like a complete 180 degrees change from the first one, as it was more centered on the characters and opportunities to showcase the writing and the contemplation of its own themes because, if no one noticed until now, the first season was the prologue of the story, and this is what the first season was building up to, and I know it’s not the fault of anyone but the people at Wit studio who thought that making the first season 24 episodes long was a good idea.

There was this episode that was mainly focused on Thorfinn and Einar doing work at the farm, it was entirely about moving trees and stuff, and I actually found it entertaining, it was easily better than most of the stuff from the previous season, since we are seeing how Thorfinn changed from this shell of a non-character into someone different, who has different reasons to live aside from revenge. And actually, that is what makes Thorfinn much more better this season, last season he was an empty husk searching for revenge as his only motive and not having character aside from that, even Sasuke from Naruto is far more interesting than this, however, after Askeladd died, now Thorfinn has no more reason to keep searching for revenge, not because he finally managed to get it, but because after years he got to have a reasons to live besides revenge. When you look at his evolution, this makes sense, after all, his father was a pacifist, and as much as I could complain that this Viking who was on a lot of battles changing into a pacifist after holding the hand of his daughter a lot, that is not the point of what I’m talking, he taught Thorfinn that he should try to not use violence, but then he had turned out as the exact opposite of what his father hoped back in the first season, it makes you see he has grown up as a person by this season, maturing into a man similar to his father.

However, this is a double-edged sword, as you can see now Thorfinn is even more of a pacifist than his father to the point of receiving as many punches in the face without reacting, he went from Sasuke to Gandhi across the span of this season. When this scene where, after Thorfinn received 100 punches to the face, he was able to talk with Canute once again, and after talking for a while and being asked what he was going to do, he answers saying "I'll run away" and the wind makes his hair flow as this big super serious moment that I'm sure many will be gushing over it, I couldn't help but think of a Mexican telenovela watching it, it was very funny, it is understandable why Canute was laughing midway their conversation with how dumb that sounded and with the way it was framed. Worst thing of all, Canute accepts it as if he didn’t rightfully win the battle in the farm to make it his, and then he goes away, reduces his army and everything ends well. And I can’t help but think that I had thought the big amount of unrealistic moments stopped after the end of the first season, but it seems like I was wrong, this was like watching a shoune MC pull a talk-no-jutsu but on a supposedly serious series. This was always the problem with the supposed realism of Vinland Saga, you can see the autor tried to build this realistic world and then put characters with obviously superhuman abilities that don’t get any explanation because well, this is trying to be realistic, so any mention of obvious superhuman abilities will take away that, sadly, not mentioning them also takes the realism away since I’m not blind.

And I don’t know how to feel about the rest of the characters, Vinland Saga’s cast was always a mixed bag, when you will receive really interesting characters such as Askeladd, who was definitely the biggest spark of the first season and probably of the entire series, no wonder he is the favorite character of most of the fans, to characters like Thorkell, who is extremely annoying and the bringer of some of the most unrealistic scenes of the first season and whom I’m happy basically isn’t present on this one. This season isn’t different on that aspect, we have Einar, a man living happily with his family until a bunch of Vikings invade his hometown and kill his mother and sister, so he is sold as a slave and he gets to the farm, he is an example of a character who doesn’t actually change, he is the same across the whole run of the series as he always had the opinion that slavery was bad and would prefer if it didn’t exist. Unlike last season, this one has some more naturally handled developments, such as Olmar’s, who went from this bratty, spoiled, stupid, bothersome person to a calmer man, he had to get through a lot of dumb decisions to get there, from asking Canute to be part of his army, to unintentionally making his father’s farm enter in a fight with Canute’s army, and after seeing the horrors of war, he definitely changed for the better. We also continue where we were left after the change with Canute in the previous season, he is looking to be the rightful king, but at the same time has his hallucinated father’s floating head telling him that he isn’t that much different from him, and this is his conflict during the season, which is definitely better handled than his absolutely unnatural sudden change of personality in the first season.

And it seems like no matter the studio, Vinland Saga can’t get good animation, comparing the anime to the manga is like day and night, Wit did a terrible job in Vinland Saga, there wasn’t a single shot that wasn’t a close-up that looked actually good, every time the background characters were a little afar from the screen they were on clanky ugly looking CGI that burned my eyes, fighting scenes would be as minimalistic as possible as if this series was hundreds of episodes long instead of the 24 episode season where a clearly capable studio was working. However, this season looks even worse, that’s right, the already ugly looking Vinland Saga started looking worse and by no other hands than the people at MAPPA, it seems like every series they take from Wit immediately starts looking worse, just like what happened with Shingeki no Kyojin. Now, the character art from close didn’t look that bad, but when it was from afar? Well, they didn’t even have drawn faces, they unironically wouldn’t have mouth or eyes as if they were a hentai protagonist, if you cannot even bother drawing your characters then how I’m supposed to care about them? And not only that, they kept the ugly CGI walking soldiers from the previous season, just that since in this season less Vikings appear the CGI also appears less, sometimes it’s difficult to decide what is worse, trying and failing hard like Wit did or not trying at all like MAPPA did.

I have come to the conclusion that Vinland Saga is just like Monster, a so-called “mature and serious” anime that, when you watch it, it’s devoid of everything something that actually deserves to be called that would have, ranging from realistic characters, to good animation, to good directing, and it is very high on it’s supposed ideas of matureness, but unlike Monster and its total inability to say anything of intellectual value, Vinland Saga has a thematic value even if it is as simple as that saying which goes “revenge is never good, it kills the soul and poisons it”.

Thank you for reading.