"Another complaint about Vikings." Topic

So the series has rightfully gotten flak for the bad costumes, and silly art style.

But watching the first few episodes again.
I noticed Ragnar has like 15 treller. That's a lot of slaves, he would be a big and very wealthy guy. Yet he lives in what looks like a fishing shack, dresses in rags and his property doesn't seem to have any proper fields for growing food.

Ha, sorry, thought it was a complaint about vikings in general, was very intrigued…. "Those gosh darn vikings, always raiding my coast! And their darn silly long boats, what's up with that?"

Chal

GF….you're arguing for "reality" on a television series….
Stop and think about that for a moment compadre…lol…

Not reality, logic. You can have as much silly fetish armor and weird unhistoric characters.

But even in this fantasy version of Vikings, slaves has lots of value. It's just bad tv making.

You stole my line, Murphy. But clearly Ragnar isn't using his labor force efficiently, and it's hard to get a lot of enthusiasm out of slave labor anyway.

He could spend more time managing his property and offer his workers a profit-sharing plan, and just imagine how many people would tune in every week to watch.

It's a TV show.

For non geeks who just want a show.

Got it?

So it would be perfectly fine if in game of thrones, kings landings was 3 huts and an outhouse?
Or if in black sails the private ships was a raft of straws. It has nothing do with geek, it's about quality.

Luckily for me I didn't know what a treller was so I just thought they were groupies.

It's called immersion. It's one of, if not the, most important thing in a movie. Empty coffee cups can ruin it: YouTube link

Straying from the subject. Never watched the Vikings TV series. Guessed they wouldn't get the immersion right. Right.

But was right with Chal when I read the header

All their houses seemed very drafty. Even a trading community needs fields for food. Far too many candles burning. These guys never picked up any armor from the dead. Never fought in formation. Never pursued broken enemies. The women had very finely made fabrics. Etc.

Cough. Watched every episode.

Empty mead cups. So hate that.

It's very hard to make any hard and fast judgements about the early medieval period, we know very little about it from a very limited amount of sources.

My understanding is that real early medieval clothing was quite subdued in colour, and thanks to considerable cross pollination between cultures of the time there were all sorts of influences on dress, fashions and styles of armour.

I quite like the show, because if it plays fast and loose with the historical aspects of the Viking era it does capture some of the feel of the period, and doesn't attempt to make them confirm to modern standards of behaviour.

The absence of wookies was a great disappointment.

For me it's just a guilty pleasure, I try not to think to hard about the timeline, the women, the accents, the hair cuts, etc…

It did look like only one person knew how to put together boats (no instructions) and actually marveled at Anglo Saxon tables so would definitely place it pre-IKEA era – so definitely historically correct.
My only pet peeve was the same design on every shield -really liked those little big man decals etc. and would have liked to see them on the shields in the show instead.
What was realistic was the difficulty in affording anything in Iceland.
The let's pretend to be loyal/disloyal and do the opposite in the next episode ending up Blood Eagled got a little old though.

The absence of wookies was a great disappointment.

Best one-line review of Vikings ever. Sums up all the problems in a terse, scornfully sarcastic dismissal.

- Ix