YMMV / Thor: Vikings

• Ass Pull:
  • The basic premise requires completely disregarding everything about how magic is said to work in mainstream Marvel continuity.
  • The ending. Even after being boosted by Strange's magic and defeating Jaekelsson's crew, the man himself still has the upper hand on Thor. Except since Thor has to win in the end, one "No More Holding Back" Speech later and Thor is suddenly able to knock him into orbit. It comes out of nowhere and only works because Thor has to win.
• Complete Monster: Harald Jaekelsson is a sadistic, psychopathic villain who embodies the worst stereotypes of Vikings. In 1003 AD, Harald leads his men to rape and slaughter all inhabitants of a village before setting sail for the new world. Cursed by a wise man to sail for a thousand years, Harald and his men arrive at New York as nigh-invincible zombies. Setting about to slaughter, pillage and rape all they find, Harald and his comrades turn New York into a near death camp, with Harald selecting the seat of his new throne built of human bones at the Empire State Building. When he faces Thor, Harald tries to humiliate the God and taunts him to go die a coward's death before casting him into the Hudson River. Despite only having a brief appearance, Harald marks himself as one of the most truly vile beings the God of Thunder has ever faced.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Due to the incredible amounts of Continuity Snarl and the fact that the entire story is clearly Garth Ennis taking an unwisely granted opportunity to shit on Thor, pretty much nobody takes this series as canon to Earth-616, despite Ennis insisting that it is. Many Thor fans despise this series and refuse to consider it canon, citing the vast array of continuity errors and blatantly bad writing for the sake of authorial satisfaction as evidence that it can't be canon.
• Inferred Holocaust: Zigzagged. In the comic, the trope is Averted: Dr. Strange explicitly states that atrocities caused by Harald and his crew have inflicted widescale psychological trauma, and Manhattan will probably see mass suicides and other such secondary cataclysms as a consequence. But then the trope is Inverted when none of the aforementioned ever happens, as the story is subjected to Canon Discontinuity.
• Moment of Awesome: How does Thor defeat Jaekelsson, a foe that cannot die? He punches the guy into space, where he is left to float in a void for all eternity.
• Misaimed Fandom: As is typical for a Garth Ennis comic, it's intended to paint Thor (and the rest of the Avengers) as ineffectual and unheroic. The other Avengers are knocked out offscreen, and Thor himself requires the aid of three "normal" people to defeat Jaekelsson's crew. The problem is, without Doctor Strange's magic and Thor's leadership, those same people wouldn't have stood a fighting chance, and Thor is ultimately the one who defeats Jaekelsson himself. Meanwhile, the police and army are graphically slaughtered en masse just to establish how evil and unstoppable the Vikings are. For a comic meant to make Thor look lame, it accomplishes pretty much the exact opposite. It arguably even proves the point of the superhero genre—it takes superheroes to solve problems that regular people can't.
• Moral Event Horizon: Jakaelsson and his men do not cross the line, they jump over it at high speed from the first page of the comic when they butcher a innocent village, kill all men and children, rape all the women and kill them too after they are done.
• Older than You Think: Believe it or not, the premise of immortal Vikings appearing in modern times to cause havoc was used in an Ibis the Invincible comic decades earlier.
• Padding: A lot of the blood and gore beyond the first two issues could easily be removed or cut down without affecting the story since it has already been established how evil Jaekelsson and his crew are. Its only purpose is to extend an incredibly thin story.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A lot more could have been done with Magnus as a character, being a Teutonic Knight forced to fight alongside a pagan god. Had the series been longer, and perhaps more nuanced, this could have been the catalyst for some serious character development on his part over the course of the story. Instead, he gets probably the least focus of the three historical warriors Thor recruits.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Even people who dislike this series will often admit it had an interesting concept, and would have been more so if someone as divisive as Garth Ennis — who famously dislikes the superhero genre — hadn't been the one writing it.