The Villain Is the Hero of Their Own Story: What Vinland Saga Teaches Writers About Building a Great Antagonist
Spoiler Warning: This article discusses character motivations and plot developments from the first season of Vinland Saga (the War Arc), including a major identity reveal and the resolution of one character’s arc.
Here is a strange thing that happens to almost everyone who watches Vinland Saga. The story gives you a clear hero—Thorfinn, a boy whose father is murdered in front of him—and a clear villain—Askeladd, the mercenary who ordered the killing. You are, presumably, supposed to want the villain dead. And then, somewhere along the way, something inconvenient happens. Askeladd becomes the most compelling person in the story. By the end of the first season, a large share of the audience is more invested in the murderer than in the boy trying to avenge his father.
That is not an accident, and it is not a flaw. It is the result of a deliberate, teachable set of choices by manga author Makoto Yukimura, the creator of Vinland Saga. Yukimura built an antagonist so complete, so internally coherent, that he stops reading as an obstacle and starts reading as a person. For writers, Askeladd is one of the best available case studies in how to build a villain who feels real. Here is how Yukimura does it, broken into principles you can actually use.
Meet the Villain Everyone Loves
First, a little context. Vinland Saga is a historical epic by Makoto Yukimura, set in early-eleventh-century Northern Europe during the Viking invasions of England. It was serialized by Kodansha—briefly in Weekly Shōnen Magazine in 2005, then in the seinen magazine Monthly Afternoon until 2025, running to 29 volumes (Wikipedia). Yukimura, who made his debut with the acclaimed science-fiction manga Planetes, won the Grand Prize in the manga category at the 2009 Japan Media Arts Festival for the series. The anime adaptation’s first season, covering what fans call the War Arc, was produced by Wit Studio and premiered in July 2019; a second season by MAPPA followed in 2023.
The protagonist is Thorfinn, son of Thors, a former elite warrior who abandoned battle to live as a peaceful fisherman. When Askeladd’s mercenary band kills Thors, young Thorfinn attaches himself to that same band, living among his father’s killers for years, waiting to grow strong enough to challenge Askeladd to a duel. Askeladd, for his part, keeps the boy around and manipulates his thirst for revenge to his own ends. It is a poisonous, fascinating relationship, and it is the engine of the entire first season.
The reason Askeladd works isn’t that he’s charming (though he might be for some). It’s that Yukimura gave him every quality a real person has and a cardboard villain lacks. Reviewers noticed immediately: Den of Geek, in a piece openly questioning whether he’s a villain at all, described Askeladd as just as often the victim as he is the villain, with his humanity surfacing in his dealings with Thorfinn and Prince Canute. That ambiguity is the whole point. Let’s break down how it’s constructed.
Principle One: Your Antagonist Doesn’t Care About Your Hero
The single most common mistake in amateur villain-writing is building an antagonist whose entire existence revolves around the protagonist. The villain wants to defeat the hero, or ruin the hero, or is defined by some past grievance with the hero. Everything about them points inward, toward the main character, like a satellite that has no orbit of its own.
Askeladd is the opposite. His deepest motivation has nothing to do with Thorfinn at all. As the story gradually reveals, Askeladd is of mixed Welsh and Danish heritage—the son of a Welsh noblewoman who was enslaved by his Danish father—and he was raised on his mother’s stories of a legendary British king. His true, hidden agenda is the protection of Wales, his mother’s homeland, from the very Viking conquest he outwardly serves. Every raid he leads, every alliance he betrays, every king he manipulates, secretly advances this goal. Thorfinn is, to Askeladd, a useful tool who wandered into a plan that predates him and will outlast him.
This is what makes Askeladd feel like a person rather than a plot device. He has a life that the protagonist is not the center of. When you build an antagonist, give them a goal that would exist whether or not the hero had ever been born. The hero should be an obstacle to the villain—not the other way around. The moment your antagonist wants something real and specific for reasons of their own, they stop being a function of the plot and start being a character in it.
Principle Two: Let Them Be Right
A great antagonist is not just sympathetic; they are frequently correct. Askeladd is the smartest person in almost every room he enters. His band follows him not because he is the strongest fighter but because he always has a plan—he reads terrain, politics, and the psychology of everyone around him, and engineers outcomes three moves ahead of his rivals. When the revenge-obsessed Thorfinn demands a duel, Askeladd doesn’t simply refuse; he converts the demand into leverage, dangling the promise of a fight to keep the boy useful and loyal.
This matters because a villain who is always wrong is never threatening and never interesting. If the hero is right about everything and the antagonist is a fool, there is no tension—only a countdown to the inevitable. But when the antagonist is intelligent, capable, and sometimes more clear-eyed than the hero, every confrontation becomes genuinely uncertain. Askeladd sees the world of Viking violence for exactly what it is, with fewer illusions than almost anyone around him. His cynicism is often simply accurate. A reader cannot dismiss him, which means a reader cannot stop paying attention to him.
The practical lesson: let your antagonist win arguments. Let them see things the hero refuses to see. Give them a worldview that is coherent and, on its own terms, defensible. You are not required to agree with them. But if a thoughtful reader can follow the logic and think “I understand why he believes that,” you have built something far stronger than a straw man waiting to be knocked down.
Principle Three: Depth Through Revelation, Not Just Change
There is a popular assumption that the way to deepen a character is to give them an arc of transformation—to have them change over time. That is one valid method. But Yukimura uses a different and underappreciated one with Askeladd: depth through revelation. Askeladd does not fundamentally change across the War Arc. Instead, the story slowly peels back layers, and each new fact recontextualizes everything that came before.
The most striking example is the reveal of his birth name. Askeladd is a Danish-sounding alias; his real name, he claims, is Lucius Artorius Castus, and he asserts descent from the bloodline of Britannia’s legendary king. Suddenly the ruthless Viking commander is reframed as a displaced heir quietly working to shield his ancestral homeland from within the empire that threatens it. Nothing about his past actions changes—but the meaning of all of them does. (A fun aside for readers who follow this series: that name, Lucius Artorius Castus, belongs to a real second-century Romano-British officer whom some historians propose as one seed of the King Arthur legend—the same historical figure whose name sits behind the Fate franchise’s Artoria Pendragon, discussed in a recent post here. Two very different series, quietly drawing from the same obscure well.)
His character is also rooted in a formative wound—his mother’s enslavement and suffering—of exactly the kind that so often sits at the base of a memorable character’s psychology, a dynamic explored in an earlier Haribon piece on character wounds. The difference is that Yukimura withholds this wound and reveals it gradually, so that understanding arrives as a series of small detonations rather than a single early info-dump.
For writers, this is liberating. You do not have to force every important character onto a change arc. You can instead build a character who is fixed and consistent, then control the order in which the audience learns who they are. Reveal the wound late. Let a single fact reorganize everything the reader thought they understood. Consistency plus staged revelation can produce a sense of depth every bit as powerful as transformation.
Principle Four: The Villain Can Be the Best Teacher
The most daring thing Yukimura does is let the antagonist become the protagonist’s teacher. Over their years together, Askeladd doesn’t only exploit Thorfinn. He shapes him. He critiques the boy’s reckless fighting, pushes him to think beyond the next swing of a blade, and challenges his narrow, revenge-poisoned view of the world. The man who destroyed Thorfinn’s family becomes, in a genuinely unsettling way, the closest thing the boy has to a father.
This deliberate blurring of the line between hero and villain is where the richest storytelling lives. When the antagonist and protagonist are locked in a relationship that is part hatred, part dependence, and part mentorship, neither can be reduced to a simple label. Thorfinn cannot fully hate Askeladd, and the reader cannot either, because the villain is also the source of the hero’s growth. The clean moral geometry of “good guy versus bad guy” dissolves into something that feels far closer to how real human relationships actually work: contradictory, entangled, and impossible to sort into tidy boxes.
If you want your antagonist to haunt your reader, give them a real and complicated relationship with your protagonist—one that cannot be resolved simply by winning a fight. Let the villain teach the hero something true. Let the hero owe the villain something they wish they didn’t. The more the two characters are woven into each other, the harder it becomes to look away.
The Theme Underneath It All
None of this is decoration. Yukimura has been explicit that Vinland Saga is, at its heart, a story that condemns violence—written, paradoxically, by filling the page with it. In an interview marking the manga’s conclusion, he explained that he plotted the series knowing the protagonist would begin in brutal violence and travel toward something else entirely. Yukimura has said plainly that he hates the concept of violence, and that a world meant to interrogate violence should be saturated with it so the horror lands honestly.
Askeladd is the vehicle that carries this theme. He is the fullest embodiment of the story’s central question: in a world that insists might makes right, what does strength actually cost, and what is it for? He is brilliant and powerful and, ultimately, trapped inside a cycle of violence he understands better than anyone yet cannot escape. When his story reaches its stunning conclusion at the end of the War Arc, it lands with such force precisely because he was never a simple villain to be defeated—he was a whole human being, and the story treated him as one. A great antagonist doesn’t just oppose the hero. They carry the theme of the entire work in their body.
How to Use This in Your Own Writing
Pulling these principles together gives a practical checklist for building an antagonist who feels like a person rather than a plot obstacle.
Give them an independent goal. Your antagonist should want something specific and real for reasons that would exist even if your protagonist never had. The hero is an obstacle in the villain’s path, not the sole reason the villain exists.
Let them be competent and sometimes right. A villain a reader can dismiss is a villain a reader will forget. Give them intelligence, a defensible worldview, and moments where their read on the situation is simply more accurate than the hero’s.
Control the order of revelation. You do not need a transformation arc to create depth. Build a coherent character, then decide carefully when the audience learns each piece of who they are. Withhold the wound. Let one late fact reorganize everything.
Entangle them with the hero. The most memorable antagonists are bound to the protagonist by something more complicated than opposition—mentorship, dependence, kinship, mutual understanding. Make the relationship impossible to resolve with a single victory.
Let them carry the theme. Ask what your story is really about, and then make your antagonist the character who most fully embodies that question. When the villain is the theme made flesh, defeating them stops being a plot event and becomes a moment of genuine meaning.
The Takeaway
Askeladd works because Makoto Yukimura refused to treat him as a mere obstacle. He gave him a hidden purpose, real intelligence, a buried wound, a complicated bond with the hero, and the full weight of the story’s central theme. The result is a “villain” that a huge portion of the audience loves more than the hero—not because Yukimura tricked anyone, but because he did the hard work of making a whole person and pointing him in opposition to the protagonist.
That is the real lesson. The best antagonists are not evil in the cartoon sense. They are the heroes of their own stories—people with goals, wounds, logic, and dignity, who happen to stand across the field from the character we’re following. Build your villain with the same care you give your hero, and you may find, as so many Vinland Saga readers have, that the character standing in the hero’s way becomes the one nobody can forget.