Thors

They called him the Troll of Jom, and the reputation was earned in a mercenary brotherhood that trained the hardest fighters in the Baltic. Then his daughter was born and he deserted, faking a death at sea and settling on a remote Icelandic farm where nobody asked questions. He raises sheep, hauls timber, and refuses to carry a sword, which the neighbours read as modesty and his son reads as weakness.

The line that follows him through the rest of Vinland Saga is his answer when asked who his enemies are, which is that he has none. It sounds like a slogan until you watch him apply it under pressure, disarming men without killing them and taking wounds rather than dealing them. The story spends hundreds of chapters testing whether the position survives contact with the world.

For Thorfinn he is both father and obstacle. Everything the boy does afterwards is an attempt to be the warrior Thors used to be, aimed at exactly the values Thors abandoned, and Makoto Yukimura lets that misunderstanding run for years before anyone corrects it.