The main story follows Thorfinn’s target who he sticks to like glue, always ready to challenge him to a duel to the death, his only requirement for completing his revenge. This side-plot not only explores revenge and forgiveness, but dovetails into Thorfinn's own predicament neatly, forcing him to reflect on what he's doing with his life. Yukimura occasionally takes a break from the main story to focus on the concept via random characters, most humorously with a Christian priest who attempts to teach some Vikings about the concept of 'love' which they just don’t get. Not the 'man on a mission' revenge, but the exploration of the concept, the idea of it all. It is one of the best ideas to base a story around. What Vinland Saga is more about than anything else is revenge. As it is, as mentioned earlier, Yukimura walks that thin line with skill.
Yukimura doesn’t go all out and have Thorfinn inflict misery on innocents, which would make the manga even more interesting, but would also alienate a large percentage of readers too. He can walk past a woman getting beaten and raped without a care in the world this is the protagonist we're meant to root for. He watches the world burn and die around him without blinking because he is already burnt and dead inside. Silent and moody, he rarely speaks and when he does he is blunt and to the point.
As of this review, we have yet to see this transition from normal child to adult killer, but I have no doubt Yukimura will provide us with more glimpses of what that boy went through to get to where he is when the story begins. The flashback provides us with the motivation, the reasoning, but doesn’t reveal the details, the important montage of scenes showing a boy growing up and losing his humanity in the process we don’t see it seep out of him gradually, which would be fascinating and make for great drama. Yukimura gets Thorfinn's flashback out of the way early in the story, and it’s a good decision as the boy is so fresh-faced, so loveable and innocent his love for his father so pure, that to suddenly cut from the flashback back to the present and all the while leaving an essential gap in-between the question that’s on the reader's mind for most of the manga is: how the hell did that young boy end up like this? Based in reality and unflinching, our youthful protagonist, Thorfinn, is a passive-observer to atrocity and active-partaker to violence when it’s in his best interest, to further his goal. If Vikings arrive in your village, you will be killed or if you’re extremely lucky sold onto slavery, no matter if you’re young, old, man, woman or child. There is no such thing as a Viking displaying the positive nouns mentioned in the first sentence of the review. There is no mercy and no survivors if they can help it. Vikings pillage villages, they rape and plunder. Not so in Yukimura's love letter to old fashioned beheadings, as Vinland is about Vikings. This manga is brutal because Vinland Saga's atrocities are reality-based and certainly not romanticised, whereas other manga usually are more fantastical or divided clearly between good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, or simply 'here is the protagonist, just root for him'. is a fantasy and the other is an adaptation of a romanticising novel. More brutal than Berserk, Vagabond or anything of that ilk.
It’s not dry and lifeless, and at the same time it’s not completely in the realm of fantasy. He grounds his work with research, yet at the same time leaving it open for creative exploration. Vinland Saga almost has nothing in common with Makoto Yukimura's previous much praised work, Planetes, except for his passion for technical realism. Pointy weapons making minced meat of people. Set in 11th-century Europe, Vinland Saga tells a bloody epic in an era where violence, madness, and injustice are inescapable, providing a paradise for the battle-crazed and utter hell for the rest who live in it. One day, when Askeladd receives word that Danish prince Canute has been taken hostage, he hatches an ambitious plot-one that will decide the next King of England and drastically alter the lives of Thorfinn, Canute, and himself. Not yet skilled enough to defeat him, but unable to abandon his vengeance, Thorfinn spends his boyhood with the mercenary crew, honing his skills on the battlefield among the war-loving Danes, where killing is just another pleasure of life. However, Thorfinn is not part of the group for the plunder it entails-instead, for having caused his family great tragedy, the boy has vowed to kill Askeladd in a fair duel. EditSynopsis Thorfinn, son of one of the Vikings' greatest warriors, is among the finest fighters in the merry band of mercenaries run by the cunning Askeladd, an impressive feat for a person his age.
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