Last week,Vinland Sagadirector Shuhei Yabuta took to Twitter to apologize to fans forhaving to abandon shipon not adapting some original anime content that were supposed to flesh out the characters involved in the ongoing Slave Arc or Farmland Arc of the anime. In addition, one of these original story plans was an episode that was supposed to dig deeper into the past of Snake, the overseer of the farm where Thorfinn is currently working and rediscovering himself.
Shuhei Yabuta: I would like to apologize to everyone. I had been planning to create some short stories that would delve deeper into the story and characters, in addition to the main content, for the production of season 2, one of these stories was an episode about the past of snake that I had received from Mr. Yukimura before. However, I have decided to abandon this plan in order to prioritize the production of the main content.
The series of tweets he posted after reveals that Yabuta had received the green light for the episode’s content from the original author, Makoto Yukimura. Furthermore, the original stories or scenes were to be woven into episodes 16 and 17, as those episodes supposedly had some elements that already hinted at the inclusion of the non-adapted scenes.
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The storyboards and sets were all finalized and ready to go as well. Unfortunately, the director had to cut corners and leave them out to prioritize the adaptation of the main story content in the episode.
Many fans took kindly to the creator’s decision and dedication to the work, as evident from the ongoing adaptation’s top-notch quality. They also wondered if the missing content could somehow be adapted into an OVA (Original Video Animation Episode) at a later date (and get it included in the Blu-ray release).
Whether this is possible or not isn’t entirely clear at the moment, as the director referred to the missing content as a “short animation” (çç·¨/tampen), meaning the content was only about 5-15 minutes in length at most. We could only hope that Studio MAPPA would listen to the voices of the fans and give the director the space to reclaim what was lost.
It is well known that many characters in the Vinland Saga have historical counterparts, and fans speculate thatSnake is a nod to the novel Red Orm, as his real name and some of his life events in Vinland Saga bear similarities to this novel, especially his connection to Byzantium (the ancient Greek city that later became Constantinople, known today as Istanbul).
Moreover, his title as the warrior of Miklagard gives the game away, as Miklagard (lit. Great City) was the name theVikings gave to Constantinople. Historically, 6,000 Scandinavian-Russian Vikings served in the Byzantine Emperor’s army, suggesting that the scenes we are about to see are from his time there before he returned to guard the farm.
