Review of Vinland Saga Season 2

So, going into this season, I was biased by two pieces of information. The first was what I had been told repeatedly by fans of the series, namely that S1 was just an appetizer for a very strong story to come and, simultaneously, that this season would be a slow one by comparison to the first. The second was that I had seen the first season and I thought I knew what to expect: a powerful shonen anime with strong seinin themes. Part of what held the first season down for me was that Thorfinn was a shonen character in a seinin world and, formuch of the series run, didn't advance beyond his basic desire for vengeance. That's fine, but in a series with the likes of Askeladd, having Thorfinn be the protagonist just makes for a relatively weak comparison. Given how S1 ended, it also made me question whether I would like this season at all. So simultaneously, there was a lot of hype behind this and also reasons to tamp down the hype, and I wasn't really sure where to take all that.

To everyone who was hyping this up, if anything, you undersold it. Sure, this season started off slow, but there are scant few series that can pull off such a staggeringly great payoff like this. Two episodes in this season will live rent free in my head and are contenders for among the best episodes I've seen in any show. Even when the action truly gets going, it doesn't have the same feeling as it did in S1 - there's no sense of some heroic struggle here, even if a particular character still wants it, and that's much to this season's credit. Thorfinn isn't the same person he was in S1. He can't be, and his evolution as a character is spectacular. I've seen other characters struggle with their bloody pasts before, but it's never quite been like this. And this season wouldn't work if he wasn't balanced expertly with other characters who were going through their own evolutions, particularly Einar, Arneid and, more importantly to the world at large, Canute.

It's not a perfect season. I feel like one of the central conflicts of the season was resolved a little too completely and simply, even if it was far from easy, and while I write off the pacing as a problem, it did still feel like it was dragging unnecessarily in places. These things are easy to overlook, though. The animation is still excellent, the narrative has dramatically improved, and even the concerns I had initially were quickly either proven entirely wrong or shown to be minor concerns.