vinland saga thoughts bc i have to put them somewhere
vinland saga has such an immense scale of time, place, and emotion--how much one matters, how much any event matters, even the fall of an ancient society. in the "dawn in the age of the twilight of man" all these powers are hastening, moved by some kind of loss that drives them out of nowhere to wholeheartedly fucking do something and make a difference--to leave a legacy not of personhood but one of peace, oneness, universality, avalon, vinland, paradise, whatever their creed calls it. to achieve the highest possible level in this lifetime of self betterment and escape the base needs to fight and quarrel and everything else so trivial, and to spread as much of that betterment as possible to others so that the next person might not have to start the journey again from level zero. i feel like everyone who knew the Way at some point just saw the vastness of the sky and said fuck it, i want nothing more than to be enveloped in the love of all that is, which is exactly how canute experienced his revelation.
also fucking RIP motherfucking askeladd. my fav. thorfinn deserved to kill him and yet the way of the world is not so spectacularly triumphant, glorious, or expository. i feel so fucking bad for this kid that this whole 24 episode season was one big prologue intended to fuck him up, but at the end of the day denying thorfinn a final duel with askeladd is another way of keeping him away from the brutal and trivial traditions of the danes, in askeladd's mind. after all it was slaying his father that at once opened askeladd's life to the ability of following the 'artorial' Way while also marking the end of any possibility that he himself might truly embody the return of artorius. he wants thorfinn to do better. when canute asks why askeladd himself cant assume the throne, he answers that he's just a viking, a brutal fucking viking. so he resigns to raising canute, in whom he sees himself, to fulfill the legend of artorius' second coming. whereas at the beginning of the show he doesn't have a clear self-motivating purpose or anything beyond a latent ideal of the fading world, he now pledges his life to canute, to artorius, to thors' vision of vinland, and to the christian notion of love as illustrated in the show: "someone has to do it. not a god, not a hero, but somebody."
poor thorfinn had two fathers die and what is he to do now? but once he figures that part out, he's good. that goes for all of us too
