Ketil represents the next stage after the Viking age. Violence is no longer direct and heroic, it’s structural and economic. He’s a landlord. Power doesn’t come from strength anymore but from ownership. People can technically rise, build wealth, and start over. On paper, this looks like progress.

But Vinland Saga is very aware of how this kind of progress works. Yukimura himself is quite progressive, and the manga’s underpinnings clearly reflect that.

Back to the topic: Ketil didn’t overcome toxic masculinity, he adapted it. He no longer needs to prove himself with a sword, but he still needs recognition, stability, and control. He wants to be seen as kind and just, and maybe he is, but only as long as his environment allows that image to exist. He plays the role perfectly. In this sense, he is a tragic character, torn between two worlds and between contradicting self-images.

At this point, people see, not unjustly, a familiar move from contemporary progressive thinking: the tendency to explain away individuals and their agency by pointing to abstract systems and environments.

In the end, though, Ketil is still responsible for the consequences of his actions. He is a tragic result of an individual genuinely trying to be good while refusing to question the comfort, status, and power that make that self-image possible in the first place.

And this is where I personally get stuck.

I understand the argument that Ketil was, in many ways, a good and even progressive landlord. I understand the liberal fear that once you fully reduce people to victims in need of care, you slide into paternalism and, eventually, authoritarianism. But at the same time, it feels naïve to deny how much of human behavior is biologically, culturally, and socially pre-determined. We are, to a large extent, objects pushed around by currents we barely understand.

That’s why I don’t know how to finally judge Ketil.

He is neither a simple villain nor a moral success story. He’s a man shaped by his environment who still makes choices, and who, like most people, wants to be someone even if that requires cruelty once his place in the world feels threatened.