#war is inevitable and the goal of life is to enter valhalla + hes naturally super strong so he fits perfectly in that culture

[tomwambsganshater]

Vinland saga gets a lot of criticism for being unrealistic and too naive in its pacifism but I feel like that's a fundamental misunderstanding of thorfinn's character. His ideology isn't supposed to be universal, he develops it because of his circumstances, he's killed too many people and inflicted too much misery to be able to stomach any more of it, to the point that defending himself disgusts him. It's not a method to live your life or to change the world, it's his specific emotional reaction to his experiences. He's not even preachy about it either, when he meets Canute he admits that he knows he can't change the world that way, and that he can't judge whether Canute's way is right or wrong. His vinland plan is an attempt to create a society from scratch based on his radical pacifism in hopes that it'll meaningfully stick and become a value for the next generations, and thus create a society where it's the norm, but as we can see in the story and just history, it's going to fail. I don't know how exactly it's going to end, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be by telling the reader that "You should be a pacifist all the time and violence is never justified". The story's always been nuanced, Thorfinn himself is just incapable of stomaching it.