Vinland Saga Season 2 Is Delivering One Of Anime's Best Tonal Shifts
"Vinland Saga," one of the best shows of 2019, is finally back with new episodes, and ... it feels like a completely different anime. Truly, if you watch the first season and then expect the new episodes to remain an action-packed, blood-soaking, bones-breaking, skull-crushing show about Vikings just massacring people in battle (and outside of battle too) with over-the-top feats of strength, like one dude just using a giant tree trunk like a baseball bat, you might be shocked. "Vinland Sag" has become a rather slow and meditative drama mostly set at a farm.
Likewise, the little edge-lord kid we saw grow from a wide-eyed brat to a merciless killing machine has gone from a blond Levi Ackerman to a slave working at a farm, with his biggest preoccupation being clearing a field and plowing it rather than not being stabbed to death. Not to say the series lacks violence or fights, but when we get them, they're not very exciting, but rather traumatizing and gruesome.
This is the magic trick "Vinland Saga" pulls in its second season, to completely recontextualize what came before and flip it on its head through a vastly different tone. It works wonderfully, and results in one of the most significant transformations anime has seen in years.
The price of violence
Anime is full of some of the most hyped moments on TV, whether it's character moments, fights, or shocking reveals. But for the most part, a show will remain consistent in tone throughout. You know what you're getting yourself into, and even if things mature or escalate, it is recognizably the same show.
That's not "Vinland Saga." While the themes remain the same, the approach is completely different, and the change can be jarring. After spending all of season 1 making violence look cool — through the eyes of the characters — this season is breaking down those walls and reconstructing them, showing fights to be pointless and cruel. Rather than thrilling fight scenes meant to be exciting, with pure sakuga (particularly great animation) in every scene, we get grotesque and pointless feats of violence that serve no one, and enough reaction shots from disgusted bystanders to make you sick to your stomach too.
Indeed, the trick this season pulls is showing that everything we thought to be true tonally in the first season was a sick and twisted version of reality filtered through the values of Thorfinn and the other characters. This show has always been an exploration of violence in the time of the Vikings and how that impacted every aspect of daily life. After selling us and convincing us that the values of a Viking warrior as being noble and cool and that Valhalla is a worthy goal, season two now shows how stupid that is, how senseless and pointless it is to believe that being a man is all about ending others' lives, that strength is found in death.
One of the greatest character stories
Nowhere is this clearer than in the episode where Thorfinn has hallucinations, which use the iconography of Valhalla before twisting them. Rather than a heavenly paradise for warriors to fight all the time, we see a hellscape where zombified Vikings fight non-stop, standing on an endless lake of blood with no escape. This, plus the aforementioned change in framing for the fight scenes from thrilling to off-putting, helps recontextualize everything we have seen in "Vinland Saga," as the show leaves behind its prologue and enters the story of redemption it has always wanted to tell.
With this change, "Vinland Saga" joins the likes of "Trigun," "Attack on Titan," "Madoka Magica," and of course, "Neon Genesis Evangelion," as a show that drastically changes tones and focus. Just like "Evangelion" went from a darker but nevertheless kind of conventional mecha show with clear tokusatsu inspirations to a mind-melting exploration of the human psyche, the story of Thorfinnis almost unrecognizable from where it began.
Indeed, Thorfinn is joining the likes of Walter White and Tony Soprano as having one of the greatest character arcs in TV history. Like Zuko in "The Last Airbender," Thorfinn's journey of redemption is not quick or painless, but a slow and arduous reflection of his crimes and how he's been shaped by his goals. It is fascinating to watch, and the show is just getting started.