Vikings

I never got sparing Horik's son. I mean he's the only one of Horick's children who could ever be a threat. It makes even less sense when you consider that it would have been far more logical to spare Horick's daughters, and wed them to his friends and children in order to insure loyalty and consolidate his hold on the Danish throne.

Not when the family being in harm is your fault to begin with. Ragnar decided to cheat Borg out of the alliance (from Borg's perspective) and paid the price for it. It's cause and effect. Borg didn't go out to wipe out the Ragnar bloodline out of hatred, he did so because Ragnar's treachery needed to be answered. And going by the logic of the time period, the majority would have agreed with him. Acknowledging he fucked up and settling an alliance would have been the best thing to do, both morally and politically wise.

For that matter Ragnar's backstab and execution of Borg is a double-edged knife. Yes, it means everyone would dread inciting his wrath for his ruthlesness, but it also means that he will (theoretically) be seen as a treacherous viper who respects no law and breaks his word at the drop of a hat. Instead of seeing him as The Dreaded a lot of people would begin seeing him as a rabid dog who needs to be put down before he betrays anyone else. Breaking Sacred Hospitality was some serious shit.

Basically, if Machiavelli's advice is "If you can't be loved, be feared, but never be hated", Ragnar is basically abandoning the first altogether, aiming for the second, and hitting the third.

I sense that was due Ragnar's boomerang sense of honor. At one point he will act dutiful and just and the next he'll cheat, betray and lie. In this particular incident Ragnar decided to honor King Horik's final wishes (which were for his son to be spared), which Ragnar did and is now paying the price for.

edited 18th Mar '15 9:06:13 PM by Gaon

It was actually Horik who cheated Borg...he was playing those two against each other the whole time, and the only way out for Ragnar was taking out both of them.

I'm going to watch the episode again later today. I could have sworn Borg admitted that it WASN'T Ragnar's doing to begin with, but since Horik was too powerful to attack directly he was going to attack Ragnar instead. If he did know that, then his attack on Ragnar was NOT honorable and was, in fact, uncalled for. And if I'm wrong it just reinforces the assertion that these writers are going off the deep end and I probably won't watch too much more of this show from the characters being idiots. I certainly won't have a higher opinion of it than Game of Thrones, which I just about only watch for Danaerys nowadays.

I watch Game of Thrones for the White Walkers at this point.

You are totally right. Borg outright said that he was blaming Horik more, but since Ragnar had left his people under the care of "his wife and his drunken brother" he would attack Kattegat instead.

It's a retread of the big problem with the series overall, imo: It doesn't know whether it wants to be the dramatized history of the Viking invasions of Britain, or whether it wants to be a fantastical saga with occasional plunges into reality.

Oh, I think Hirst has made a decision now...sadly he went for the saga, because what he had beforehand was way better.

If I were in Borg's place, I wouldn't have attacked Kattegat. I'd have sent what troops I could to reinforce the place as a show of good will, and waited for Ragnar to get back before springing an alliance offer against Horik on him.

And maybe challenged Rollo to a brawl or something to get even for the whole Siding with me but reneging thing. Because I would have considered that just lame if it happened against me, but I wouldn't want to fuck up Ragnar's family too much. After all, I'd want Ragnar as one of my stronger allies for taking on Horik, and he might be able to recruit some others with promises of future raiding trips.

Mm....I really wonder what Ragnar is up to.....he better hatched a plan together with Lagertha, or I will never forgive him.

Oh joy. We get our very own Red Wedding event. Now can the King of Wessex go to Hell?

I really don't like the direction their going with in the Saxon Viking feud

Also Judith is a fucking moron.

Well at least there's no longer any doubt about whether King Eschbert's a Designated Villain or not. Basically this show really is going the same route that Game Of Thrones is, where almost nobody deserves victory and we're just watching horrible people screw each other over day after day. And they both have blonde women who actually deserve to wipe out the bad guys and have their happy endings.

Who'd be game of throne's blonde woman in that case? Cersei? You could be talking about Daenerys but she's white-haired. Unless blonde also refers to white-hair.

And yeah I'd say the show is walking the razor's edge of morality that Game of Thrones walks. But here's the thing, Game of Thrones does it well (at least in my opinion). You feel like everyone's a dick, but everyone (except the Mountain and Ramsay Snow) are varying shades of gray, and you can sympathize with them. And most of all, there are kind-hearted and heroic people (Davos Seaworth, Brynden "Blackfish" Tully, Jorah Mormont, Barristan Selmy, Grey Worm, Missandei, Jon Snow, Sam), so it's not just doom and gloom. It's rich in morality.

Vikings is, on my view, attempting to do that and ending with the opposite result. Instead of adding some black and ending up with shades of gray, plus rare shades of white and black, it ends up adding all of the black ending up with only shades of black.

Ragnar started off kind-of-good but is now a ruthless machiavellian dick who cares for nothing but himself, Ecbert similarly started as pretty much the model king, but is now a shakesperean supervillain, Floki started as an asshole and slowly became the sum of all evils when it comes to Viking culture (particularly with his fundamentalist shenanigans), King Aelle has a unhealhy tendency to throw people into snake pits (though since he did nothing evil in seasons 2 and 3 he's almost starting to gain my smpathy), Princess Kwenthirith is one of the worst-written characters in recent memory and a comic book supervillain. Athelwulf was a good (if perhaps unhealthily devout) person, but is now a fundamentalist Christian who commits genocide at the drop of a hat.

Aethelstan was a good guy and then he decides to cheat with a married woman. Siggy was a good person, and now she's dead. Lagertha and maybe Aslaug are the only people who don't deserve to be butchered.

For that matter, the show is starting to run into some Unfortunate Implications to me, what with not a single Saxon character being a good person (maybe Judith?). Aethelstan is a good person, but he's effectively abandoned his Saxon past and turned into a pseudo-Northman.

Aslaug's borderline. She did help wreck Ragnar's marriage to Lagertha, and she's a fussy Princess who has to be chided into doing what's right for her family. In fact, I'm not sure I see too many redeeming qualities to her, but I was always biased toward Lagertha and I'm sure if she leaves the show I will stop watching and quite possibly find other things with Kat Winnick in them to watch instead.

YMMV....one of the reasons I stopped reading Song of Ice and Fire is because there was no one left rooting for. While with Vikings, I do understand where the characters are coming from, and I am certainly able to root for Ragnar, Lagertha and Bjorn, who are all desire power not for the power, but because they want the best for their people. In any case, it is kind of pointless to compare the shows. They don't really have that much in common.

I know, I wasn't comparing them except on superficial factors and how they're both making me feel.

And while, yes, Ragnar is fighting for his people, he's also fighting for himself and screwing his life up with that selfishness. He wants lots of sons, but he doesn't want them to outshine him? That seems counterproductive. He traded a steady, loving partner who could either take care of the household or fight with him on the front lines, for someone with an extremely well built womb who couldn't even accept living in less than ideal conditions without being chided into it by someone else. And I'm sure she knew she was an affair from the start, which was less than great of her to say the least.

Well, the 'affair' thing makes sense in context: Viking society didn't consider it a crime or taboo if a married person went and slept with someone who was unmarried. If both people were married (and not to each other), it was considered a crime.

So Aslaug being a fling for Ragnar (especially considering Ragnar is a noble in an age where taking multiple concubines was seen as perfectly reasonable) isn't really all that big a deal in-universe. It's more about Lagertha not being okay with it than it is about wider social morality.

Though an interesting unanswered question is where he got the name "Lothbrok" from. In the saga, he got it for killing a linnorm (a wingless bipedal dragon) wearing a pair of trousers that he'd dipped in tar to resist the linnorm's venom. "Lothbrok" roughly translates to "Shaggy Breeches."

edited 24th Mar '15 4:43:11 AM by math792d

That is a point. As I said, I was always biased towards Lagertha. I've seen Kathryn Winnick in other things, and I like her. And I liked how she and Ragnar were together.

I think showing how stupid Ragnar was is kind of the point of the show.

If it were, we wouldn't have the Saxons being fucking bad guys. It's almost like they DESERVE to lose to the Viks and have Dragon ships sailing from their coastlines to every other port in Europe. I'd say they're definitely working to show that Ragnar made a mistake, but he's not seeing or learning from it. If anything, he's getting down on marriage period now, rather than just realizing how good he had it with Lagertha.

It's still the Vikings who attacked first. The point is more to show how their actions fit into the context of the period.

Point. They started the whole thing because they didn't have anything to trade for money, and their culture values warriors.

They would have had something to trade if Ragnar had been Norwegian or Swedish (the geography is ambiguous). Fur trade was a booming industry in Scandinavia for hundreds of years, far into the Late Middle Ages.

Maybe in real life, but not the show. They made it abundantly clear that the Kattegat people were poor, what with Rollo saying the folks in the east were as poor as they were as justification for not going back there.