Welcome all, to a (late) episode of Vinland Saga! This one was actually rather hard to write, for a variety of reasons. The episode was great but the contents… Well if you’ve seen it you know, and if you don’t then buck up because it’s about to get brutal. Without further ado, lets dive into the episode.
Like I said, this was a particularly brutal episode of Vinland Saga. Not because of some great big battle, or because a lot of people died. Rather it’s because of just how little Vinland Saga held back on something we’ve seen multiple times before in watered down ways: The beating of a slave. It’s happened a lot up until now, particularly with Gardar. And we’ve been largely disconnected from it, with it happening in the past, or just seeing the after-effects of it. But this episode… We not only watch it happen, it happens to a character we have become close to and come to care for, and in a particularly brutal way. There’s no remorse here, no trussing it up to look nice. It’s just a man beating a woman with a stick because of his own insecurities. And it hurts. And it should hurt. Because it’s not ok.
What Vinland Saga does with this scene is it destroys the myth of “The Good One”. Up until now Ketil has largely been portrayed as a decent guy. Cares for his slaves, sets them up to succeed and buy their freed, doesn’t want to harm or mistreat them. He’s “One of the good ones”. A good man operating within a bad system. And both myself and Vinland Saga have tried to sell that to you, purposefully so. To get you to buy into it. But here that myth shatters. There are no “Good ones”. There is no “acceptable” slavery. At the end of the day, Ketil has owned people and forced them to work for him, keeping their lives in his hands and propagating a system of mistreatment and evil. And this episode, this scene, shows how that attitude is still there, deep down.
Some people will try to excuse this, that Ketil’s life is falling down around him. His home is about to be attacked by a king, multiple guards are dead, his favored slaves all tried to run away. It’s a lot for man. And yet we see how, in these critical moments as his life is falling apart, he chooses violence. As Thorfinn would say, he chose violence as his first option, not his last. Contrast this with Thorfinn’s scene, where he openly admits that he broke his oath and regrets his decision. He never wants to pick violence, ever, even if it means running away. To him, it’s the worst decision you can make. And I think that’s a stark, beautiful contrast between these two characters.
Part of what makes the scene, and this comparison, works so well I think is because of the timing. Not in the real life, but the order of the scenes. Vinland Saga blatantly skipped the reunion of Thorfinn and Leif because it would be a happy moment between all of this somber brutality. It would ruin the tone of the episode, and so it makes sense to hold of on it. On top of that it showed us Thorfinn’s perspective on it all, a strong condemnation of violence that the series has been repeating since episode 1, immediately before Ketil giving in to that same violence. It’s another pretty clear condemnation from Vinland Saga. The fact that some people out there are trying to defend Ketil through all of this? It just makes me concerned for the media literacy of the internet.
Finally lets talk about the coming war, and the preparations happening for it. Obviously Ketil and his men are gearing up to defend themselves. And they have a few heavy hitters! Snake, Thorgil, there’s some strong names in there. They lost a few men to Gardar sure, but I doubt 5 guards will make that big a difference. The more notable thing in all of this to me is how Ketil himself is now resolved to fight for the farm. This is a man who has largely avoided violence, yet as we saw with Arnheid he’s decided to all in on it now. Picking out his sword, armoring up, he’s devolving into every bit the Viking his son is. Contrast this with Olmar, his other son, who appears to be going in the opposite direction. Should make for some interesting family squabbles moving forward.
So yeah, all in all a fantastic, if particularly brutal, episode of Vinland Saga. This sort of marks the beginning of the end for the arc. All of our preconceptions are coming crashing down, reality is breaking in to this idyllic farm life Thorfinn has lived for the past few years, and Leif has arrived to see him home. Will our lead survive? Obviously, wouldn’t be much of a show if he didn’t and he won’t even be taking part in the fighting. The more important question is in regards to our supporting cast. What will become of the Ketils? Canute? Einar, Arnheid and Snake? How many lives will Ketil’s greed and Canute’s pride take? It should be interesting to see.
The fact people are actually defending Ketil at sll is just sickening. There is no bloody excuse for what he did. He is just a pathetic coward. If only Snake intervene sooner.
And to think, there are some people who think the farm arc is “boring”.
People who think this farm arc is boring are shounen tards who don’t care about anything aside from constant action. Vinland Saga clearly shits on the standard shounen fare we get these days even if they happen to be far more popular than Vinland is. After I was exposed to an actual good batch of anime from 2006 when I was 16, which was a really good year for anime, I lost interest in most shounen tropes when I saw what the medium could actually offer.