[SPOILER WARNING]

Possibly the greatest redemption story I've read.

Art is great. Charming and very clean art style. Action scenes are great. They convey what's going on really well without ever being confusing or jarring. Yukimura has a great sense of directing. Panels flow really well, he gives attacks a real impact and you never get lost in the movement like with some mangas. The pacing and directing of fights are pretty much perfect. The art keeps improving throughout the series; surprisingly as less emphasis is put on violence and war the action itself gets a lot gorier. Maybe the author wants to portray war as something as awful as possible? Special shoutouts to facial shading which goes crazy at times.

Thorfinn's character development is one-of-a-kind. To see him change throughout two decades, from the very lowest of lows to happiness and redemption, is nothing short of astonishing.

Lots of great characters aside from Thorfinn, with both varied and nuanced personalities and good development. Askeladd's basically the antagonist of the first major arc, but is very likeable and charming. He's still despicabke at times, but so were many vikings at the time. Every now and then you could see moments of kindness from him, he acted as a mentor to Thorfinn of sorts and tried in his dying moments to put him onto a different path. Both Thorfinn and us, the readers, have conflicting feelings about him in the end.

Many supporting characters also get really good arcs, like Halfdan's son Sigurd. Sigurd is initially very similar to his dad and honestly pretty annoying. He and his servants chase after Thorfinn's party since his wife Gudrid escaped with them, serving as comic relief for a good while. But after a certain point he is treated seriously by the author, and we can see him reflect on his experiences. Ultimately he realizes that his quest of getting his wife back felt largely pointless since he didn't even love Gudrid, and that his prickly demeanor was mostly a facade that he has put on due to fearing his father and feeling pressured to succeed him. In the end he returns to Iceland and rejects his father, deciding to go his own way with his childhood sweetheart and servants, which are really just his friends. Halfdan even accepts this, being proud of Sigurd for standing up for himself. That's just one of many examples of characters with really well-developed character arcs.

The plot is amazing. Thorfinn's journey is long and winding, with many twists along the way. I love how the series simultaneously is so grand and epic in its entirety but can still be mundane in parts (e.g. slave arc). It's a very suspenseful series, a real page-turner. A big thing I liked was how unpredictable the plot was, especially during the War arc. People would constantly change sides and double-cross each other, and new motives and plans would be revealed which drastically changed your perception of characters. Most arcs would start out relatively simple and then build tension as it went along, ending in chaotic sequences where multiple parties would foil each other and things very seldom went to plan.

Great themes and exploration. They raise some real poignant points. It's an anti-war series of sorts, which is weird since so much of it is action - action which is lovingly rendered in all its gory glory. It felt a little hypocritical at first, reading Yukimura's epilogues that talked about hating how prideful the vikings are and wanting to show more sides to them. In the end though I gotta say it's a very effective strategy. It's a somewhat standard medieval action series for 50 chapters before suddenly turning everything on its head. It very effectively shows the horrors of war, the cycles of violence that come with vengeance and hostility and the consequences are warring and murdering indiscriminately. Definitely some pretty heavy stuff.

But it also talks about what you can do to atone for your wrongs and what it means to be a true warrior, coming to some pretty awesome and surprising conclusions. It shows that courage, kindness and strength of character are just as much of a strength as physical might, if not more. This series has a lot of humanity, despite all the bloodshed and awfulness it depicts, In it are a great many touching, inspirational and heartwarming moments and quotes. A lot of works set in medieval time don't properly address all the fucked up stuff that happened during this period. Vinland Saga goes to great lengths in showing the atrocities that the vikings did but also their (often vastly different) thoughts and their attitudes e.g. towards death. It also shows other sides; slaves, normal working people, women, children. I like how nuanced this take on medieval society is; it's not just "viking strong, viking fight, cool viking".

I'm giving it a 9 because while the latest two arcs are fantastic, it at times turns to tropeyness a la modern Berserk. I'm really hoping it sticks to the landing on the ending; I wouldn't be surprised if I bumped it up to a 10 if so.