It’s like that orgy in Moscow everybody got upset about a few years ago, except the guests were dressed up as medieval characters. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty cool idea for a party but anyway. Vikings is pretty much a bunch of modern people playing dress-up, and also tripping on acid.
The costume design in this show is particularly insane even by TV standards. It’s like Vikings was originally going to be a Lord of the Rings series but was changed to something else at the last minute. That’s pretty consistent with the rest of the production, and it seems like no one did any research at all. There are some vaguely historically correct moments, or allusions to historically correct moments, like when a Viking warlord pretends to be dead to get inside a city he wanted to loot – but these memes are already so well established in popular culture it’s not impressive for the writers to know about them.
Not only was there no research, the writing got lazy and repetitive really quick. Betrayal is the most shocking plot twist, so naturally, Vikings has a betrayal every five seconds. People casually switch sides then switch back again like it’s not even a big deal. The worst offender is Rollo, the main character’s brother. He goes from “I love my brother” to “I want to kill my brother” in the very next episode, and then back again. Rollo switches sides so many times I don’t know why anyone is even surprised by it anymore. These betrayals are particularly tedious because they’re so obviously only there to fill up time. If the characters weren’t repeatedly betraying each other, there wouldn’t be much else going on in the show.
Another trope is that everybody has spooky visions. That’s okay when it’s one character, but not when it’s every character. Though this does confirm my theory that everybody in this show was doing drugs. Were the vikings exploring the world for loot, or were they looking for more and better drugs? Maybe both.
But the biggest problem is that Vikings pushes modern tropes sooooo hard it was impossible for me to maintain any kind of immersion. And not just modern tropes, but incredibly preachy political messaging. The Saxon Christians are closed-minded bigots and the Pagan Vikings are woke progressive liberals. Okay we get it, Christianity is bad and paganism is in right now. It is just so incredibly tedious how every single thing in the media has to be a vehicle for bashing Christianity and praising whatever the opposite of Christianity is in that context.
This portrayal of course is completely ahistorical, because Saxons and Vikings would have dressed and acted very similarly, there wasn’t a particularly massive cultural divide.
Cuckolding also comes up a weirdly large number of times, like one or more people on the writing team was particularly into wife sharing and gang bangs. It was really jarring for this kinky theme to come up so often. Is there a single character in this show who knows with some degree of certainty who his father was?
The main character’s (first) wife Lagertha is particularly prolific, and is on a speedrun to sleep with every Chad and rich character in the show, but who can even be mad at her at this point?
Lagertha’s father trained her to be a shield maiden and she’s terrible at it. More like a speared maiden.
Then there’s the main character himself, Ragnar, and his main personality trait is that he smirks.
His second personality trait is that he invites total strangers to plow his wife (I’m not making it up, he does actually do that).
It was probably a good decision for the monk to say no, because Ragnar probably wanted to plow HIM too. Never volunteer to be the middle car in a train.
But the most annoying character is Floki, an edgy tweaker neo-paganist LARPer you might meet at Burning Man. Seriously, they try so hard to make him cool and edgy it’s embarrassing.
And of course, just like your tweaker cousin at Burning Man, Floki hates Christianity. Why would he hate a religion he didn’t know existed five minutes ago? Who knows.
The Christians being bigoted and close-minded trope gets tiring quick, but the Christian rules aren’t even applied consistently. Everybody in Wessex whores around just as much as the Vikings. King Ecbert has a bathhouse where he literally cucks his own son, and not even with himself – he gives away the princess to the monk guy and she gets knocked up. Like literally why would he want to do that? This happened in the second or third season and that’s when I gave up watching. Vikings wasn’t even attempting to have a plot at this point was just living out their sexual fetishes. The last episode I watched was when the son finds out he got cucked and starts a KKK movement against the peaceful Viking farmers. Enough was enough and I lost interest.
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Ian Kummer
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I stopped watching when Ragnar was killed. I heard that in later seasons they had black woman as
the leader of the vikings. It is like Mel Brooks’ ”History of the world”.
I stopped watching when Ragnar was killed. I heard that in later seasons they had black woman as the leader of the vikings. It is like Mel Brooks' ''History of the world''.