1,000
@Robby said in Vinland Saga:
@Chrior said in Vinland Saga:
But then it's ruined by the fact that we're promised a journey to find One Piece and then we stop for ages in the Alabasta civil war and, by the time it's finished, instead of continuing the journey, we have a big timeskip and go straight to the final war, while being just informed that yes, they found One Piece.
Okay, I know this is from two years ago but... was it really THAT upsetting that there was a time skip? We saw the part of the journey that ended the civil war and the major character arcs for everyone involved in it... and then the next two years of the journey were relatively uneventful. They peacefully made it to town, traded somehorns, got rich, then came back. Covered in a super quick flashback, no biggie.
If the author has been doing the series for 17 years and is burning out, I'd much rather they high speed it through a not-important part in the middle that is JUST about "getting money so we can then start the real adventure" so they can spend proper time on the ending, rather than spending months or years just going through a filler town where the characters don't grow or change or do anything super new or interesting....
only to then end up hyper rushing the actual finale because they're tired of the series and burned out and just desperately want to be done.
I'm looking at you Oda.
Oh hey, AP forums is back up! I had not really noticed yet. Glad to see it up and running and all brand new!
And it's nice to see you picked up Vinland Saga and loved it! It is still an incredible series, despite my previous complaints.
On this topic, I think other posters have already mostly explained my point of view in the meantime. To answer directly to your post, yes, I absolutely stand by what I said before. I think the timing with which we followed this story makes a huge difference in how we perceived these developments. And I think the same applies to people who started following it during the Askelad plot and had to deal with the farm saga as it was coming out. I loved the farm saga because I got to read the whole thing in one go and could adapt quickly to the change in tone and pace compared to the previous part of the story. But I can imagine that the people who picked up the story early on would be a bit weirded out by how it turned out then.
Although Vinland Saga is mainly about exploring character developments and not about events per se, I think it's also a really good historical series. And I have a deeeeeep fascination with this time period. And, in particular, I have a deeeeeeep fascination with the Byzantine Roman Empire exactly in this time period. So the promise of a seafaring adventure where we could explore the viking trading routes across eastern Europe all the way down to Constantinople was GOLD for me.
So I was left really disappointed when we were cut really short and just treated to a one-page flashback saying nothing really happened over the rest of the journey. You can say that it might have been the author's intention from the start, but it didn't feel that way AT ALL, from my perspective. It feels much more likely that the author really got tired of that idea and decided to skip all the way to Vinland proper and get to the end of the series faster. Which might be a wise decision, like you argued by comparing it to the way OP has been developing lately. But it was still greatly disappointing for me. It was a missed opportunity, and claiming that "nothing really happened so it was better to skip straight to the end" just feels like an excuse for "the author didn't want to come up with anything for that portion of the story". It was the author's decision to write that "nothing really happened", not an inevitable thing.
The fact that the Roman Emperor's personal bodyguard and elite regiment of the army was a VIKING UNIT had an immense potential for exploration in this series. We could have gone all the way to the different theatres of war that the Empire fought in during Basil II's reign, in the Balkans, in Armenia, in Syria/Levant... So many different settings and cultures and experiences that could have been shown...
I still enjoy reading Vinland Saga, but I have to keep trying to forget that part of it, otherwise I will just get mad at the author over and over again.
