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I love Vinland Saga (until the "Macedon" Arc) and the first season of this anime did it absolute justice. Askeladd is one of the best characters I've ever seen in anime. There is just one problem. The storyline was predicated on the fact that Thorkell willingly gives them Canute, which I apparently just skimmed through while reading the manga because watching it in anime form really highlights the stupidity of this pivotal plotpoint that makes the subsequent chase that much more silly and you can't take it as serious as the show wants you to. That is all. Still a good anime, but such a ... plotline makes it go down from a serious tale about Vikings, to an action adventure chase with still a really strong ending because Askeladd was the real protagonist all along!

I guess this was actually a premonition towards the bullshit plotpoints that will come later on.

The one episode that really stood out to me in this already funny Spinoff is the last one as it is the PERFECT comedy episode and will thus be the focus of this review, so full spoilers for episode 12, I'll spoil the whole episode basically.

Sagara as usual does some military schenanigans in school, that has become his role for this series btw, he doesn't protect Kaname, by this point he simply lets out all his pent up military paranoia out into the public for laughs and giggles. Except this time he tops it all and brings a fucking experimental chemical weapon into the classroom. ... Long story short in a funny and self aware way it leaks out and when he comes back he demands from the class that they need to immediately close all the doors and airways and informs them that they are currently all infected with a deadly virus and are going to die lol.

From this moment on the chaos ensues and we see the dynamic of Kaname and Sagara in its full glory.
Obviously all the students are hysterical and just wanna get out, the teacher herself already lost conciousness, when Kaname, as Kaname does, steps in as the class rep and calms everybody down with an emotional speech.

Just when everyone gets calm and assumes Sagara is being overly weird again Shinji reassures them that, yes, the virus is deadly and akin to the ebola virus it is going to kill them, but not before they experience incredible pain. And in the moment of the darkest despair rises a sense of comradery between the students as they accept their fate in each others arms, when Sagara casually informs them that there is a cure for the disease, but it is only enough for ONE person. The sheer betrayal these students commit in that moment is just comedy gold. Like they universally take a step back from hugging one another and are ready to go into a battle royale to see who comes out alive from this.

Kaname keeps the reins on a thin thread and proposes that they need to decide the person with a lot.
All the comradery dissipated in the next scene and the students all were left with only a sense of dread as they wrote their wills and called their family members to inform them of the situation, but as if that wasn't enough each lot was written by a different student and each one of the loser lots did not just say "you lost" or "no", but came with a wide variety of pettyness and backstabbing that just encapsulated the whole episode, Kaname's order and Sousuke's chaos.

For you see in all of the series usually Kaname's order comes out on top at the end of each episode. Every time Sagara does some stupid military shit, like that time in art class, or that time in the food stand or that time at the beach, you get where I'm going with this, Kaname puts a tight leash on him like he's a pitbull named Baby. The only time this doesn't really work out is with the Rugby Club? which also happens to be the second most funny episode.
But in the most calm way the harbringer of chaos asserts his dominance by simply drawing, the winner lot.
The only way I can describe the reaction to this happening is that the episode needed the tag mindbreak next to comedy.

In the end all the students revert back to their most animalistic state and their loud noise makes a teacher come and open the door into their classroom, thereby bringing the deadly virus out into the whole school, then the city and then possibly the whole country lol. If you wanna see how it ends I definitely reccomend it.

Spoilers Ahead!!!

The world was trying to be interesting, but after some arcs you realize it doesn't make any sense.

The premise is that they're in the future, but have no technology that would be available in our current times and live in small villages. And that is because after the total destruction of society as we know it and many centuries of tyranny, their supwepowers, or cantus as they call it, has given them so much power that they don’t need or want technology anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The people of this time have another concern. They have to actually be wary of their own powers, so that ... somebody amongst them doesn’t run amok and annihilate them. Therefore, the collective effort of the village has lead to killing off anybody that doesn't behave the way they are supposed to, the main focal point being on the children and their development though.

That is the main focus of the story, instead of making any technological or economical progress like in Dr. Stone, they do this. Even though in the past, at the peak of their technologiccal progress, the cantus users changed their dna to the point where they normally die if they kill one of their own, they still left an attack inhibition woven into their dna which makes using the cantus on another human impossible and in turn makes karmik demons and fiends way more threatening than they should be. They could focus more on making technological progress so they could one day at least make this problem less threatening. The problem at hand is never touched upon and all the attention is on killing children that don't behave the way the system wants them to. In fact, nowhere in the show do we see any effort to mix their powers with technology in any clever way that could progress their society even though most of the grown ups should be experts in handling their superpowers. They instead spend their time with, actually, I don’t really know what most of the grown ups do in this story. I assume most of their duties reverted back to the middle ages where most of them are japanese farmers. The only things that get highlighted in the show though, is that the adults are making decisions and killing kids.

The dark tone the show sets for itself falls completely flat, not only because of the bad animation, boring character focus and bad power system, but also because it goes so far to create a dumb scenario just to speak about the way japanse society treats kids. Anybody with a brain would see by the midpoint onward that for a story with seemingly supernatural powers set in the future and it’s many implications, your focus shouldn't be on the damn kids. Basically, the only way this story can work is because grown ups are dumb or evil and refuse to progress.