This Week in Anime

Why Vinland Saga's New Season is Even Better

Steve
Nick, to be honest, I've only been able to take a glance at this week's assignment, but from the looks of it, we're in for another one of those tepid, slow-life, "learning to harvest barley because my party leader threw me off a sheer cliff" type of shows. Boooring.

Okay, I can't bring myself to carry on this charade any longer because after being exposed to the umpteenth anime about buying people—for fun!—it was beyond refreshing to see the long-awaited second season of Vinland Saga pull no punches about how inherently dehumanizing slavery is.


And by "refreshing," I mean harrowing. Like it should be.

Stirring poetry and smearing blood on a newborn. The Vikings are back, baby.

Yeah, it's immediately apparent that the story's taken a dramatic turn regarding tone and content, as it should! Recall the final moments of the first season, when Askeladd's grand gambit and sacrifice utterly shattered Thorfinn's grasp on his entire life. Everything he'd been living for disappeared in an instant. Both he and his narrative need to recalibrate from square one, essentially. And to drive that point home, we don't even begin the season with Thorfinn.

Sorry dude, the audience is pretty familiar with the pillaging horrors at this point, so you get the CliffsNotes tragedy and powerful yet ambiguous directive to live from a loved one.

And lucky for him, Einar gets assigned to a farm for troubled young men trying to cope with their inherent frailty in a society that valorizes destructive standards of violence and machismo.

I love this dude's kindergarten teacher energy here like he's trying to get two kids to play together in the sandbox.

Only, of course, as Einar learns more about the farm, he finds that it too has impenetrable systems of hierarchy that oppress the people, like him, at its lowest rung. This isn't a culture that Ketil intentionally fostered, but it shows that the institution itself is unsalvageable. As long as one group of people is allowed to treat another group like property, no amount of magnanimity can counteract it.

And the terrible kicker is that this is one of the best offers Einar will get after having his home and family destroyed by the Danes. So he's more than eager to put as much backbreaking work into it as needed, so long as there is that pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel. Everything else around him is just that dark.

His axe technique needs some work, though.

And he'll get plenty of help from the world's saddest horse.

And you know the cruelty is especially irrational when it closely resembles high school bullying despite being a millennium removed from the invention of the locker room.

It's nice to know that insecure jocks with cowlicks have been around since immemorial.

When you get down to it, though, there's not a lot separating Olmar from season 1 Thorfinn—at least in terms of bravado, not skill. But that bravado is the more sinister component, and Olmar's character arc is where we see that darkness creep back into the story. Because as much as everyone (including me) loves to make the "Farmland Saga" joke, Vinland Saga hasn't forgotten how to exhibit and interrogate violence in meaningful ways.

He's just an adolescent who wants to get out of his father's shadow and thinks becoming a man is the way to do it. The problem lies in defining what a "man" is and how one becomes that.

And this is one of many places where I'm blown away by how smartly and sensitively Vinland Saga is written. These bodyguards are closest to the "warriors" that Olmar valorizes, but we see them here in a time of relative peace, and it exposes all of them as a gang of bored, rowdy boys letting off steam. Olmar's like a toy to them—something to distract them for a time. Of course, he can't see that, but it's painfully apparent to the audience how fundamentally empty and immature their antics and beliefs are.

And there's nobody fitter to crash their party than somebody who has internalized that futility, albeit to an opposite, equally destructive extreme.

Yeah, it was evident from his attitude up to that point, but his showdown with FOX exhibits the kind of nihilism Thorfinn has embraced without any other direction. It's a colder, harder nihilism than FOX's wanton emptiness.

Thorfinn's also holding up a mirror to FOX's entire group. He probably has a body count comparable to their collective total, which is what it has gotten him. He's a stone masquerading as a human. Their sense of valor is a house of cards, and it's so satisfying to see it immediately crumple when their boss walks in.

Valor is stored in the nose.

Speaking of complicated emotions, let's circle back to the boyfriends. Despite only being around for four episodes so far, Einar's already established himself as an indispensable counterweight and companion to Thorfinn.

But like Thorfinn, he's also dealing with the pain, anger, and trauma weighing down his soul. It almost drives him to strangle Thorfinn, and then it drives him to cut to his metaphorical quick. Because while the weight of their pasts might be too much for either of them to bear alone, they might be able to do so if they have each other as an outlet and helping hand.

Yeah, even with the studio change, I'm glad to see the second season's staff is largely unchanged. It continues to be smart about its direction, especially when using closeups to communicate emotions like the anger, desperation, and frustration of no lip balm in the 11th century.

For the first time, though, he has someone to wake him from those nightmares. Which is rough in its own way, but it's an opportunity for Thorfinn to begin to heal. To begin to understand what healing even means.

That's right, this week's episode doubles as a history lesson and an exhibition of just how hard puberty can hit one person.

Canute's all grown up, and he seems determined to exercise softer power than his father, but softness is highly relative when your baseline is Viking warfare.

As with the other character arcs, there's a sense of tragedy here, too, seeing this once-gentle lad embrace such ruthlessness. But I can't deny it's also very satisfying to see him finally wrest control of the reins of fate like this with such a fiery spectacle.

I wouldn't call Thorkell the best judge of character in the show, but he is perceptive and understands that Canute's approach can open up whole new cans of much more dangerous worms.

That, or he's just really upset about not meeting his daily dismemberment quota. It could swing either way.

However, even the fiercest warriors have their weaknesses.

Love this conniving son of a gun and his ever-thickening facial hair. By the end of the season, I predict he'll have a full-on wizard beard and a list of war crimes spanning the length of the North Sea.

Yeah, I think (and would hope) that everyone knows by now that Vinland Saga is an exceptional manga and anime. But it's worth emphasizing that the sea change in this second part is a bold narrative gambit that is paying dividends in terms of thematic complexity and sensitivity. It feels like we're finally getting to the story that Vinland Saga wants to tell, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here.