In Short #

Violet Evergarden is a fantasy TV-show with an additional special episode and two movies that is set in a fictional world roughly set in the 1800s inspired by the European industrial revolution.

It directly inspired me to write letters to people I care about deeply (more on that later) and gave me some ideas for my own writing.

I highly recommend the show, special, and the movies.

If you’re short on time, watch the show and the last movie. The special and the first movie are of a similar format as the show. The last movie is placed after a small time skip and concludes Violet’s story.

Premise #

The titular Violet is a young orphan girl who is given to major Gilbert as a “tool”, a weapon for war. She’s a stunted child. Gilbert shows her kindness, gives her the name “Violet” and teaches her to read and write.

She follows him through the war. The inciting incident is the assault of a fortification in which both Gilbert and Violet are wounded severely. Violet looses both of her arms and Gilbert is ending up missing in action. Before they are separated, he orders Violet to live on and tells her “I love you”, the latter she does not understand.

She gets mechanical prosthetics which I always find a fascinating concept.

Eventually, she ends up becoming an “auto memories doll” – a ghostwriter who writes (emotional) letters for other people. She starts out bad at it, due to her lack of emotional experience. The show then explores her progress in which she’s shown to help write letters for different people that all express different concepts of love (siblings, parent-child, romantic love, etc.) which help her to understand the “I love you” message of major Gilbert.

The Good #

I really enjoyed the whole franchise. It was gorgeous to look at, the voice acting was enjoyable, and it made me emotional multiple times.

I appreciate how the show displays Violet’s progress. From physically adapting to her prosthetics – at the beginning she uses her teeth to remove her gloves, later on she’s able to remove them with her hands – to how she grows able to understand the emotions of the people she has to write letters for.

The lessons on love Violet learns can be broadly split into three categories:

• Between siblings
• Between parents and children
• Between romantic partners

Most stories are actually about parents and children. Sometimes parents have letters written for their children, sometimes it’s children having letters written for their parents.

I don’t want to spoil too much here, just two examples that very emotionally impactful to me:

The first story happens about halfway through the show. Violet is helping a dying soldier to write letters to his parents and his lover back home. Violet delivers the letters to them herself and with that carries the gruesome news that the soldier died.

Another tear-jerker is about a sickly mother who has Violet write letters to her young daughter that she’ll receive on her birthdays. The daughter feels that Violet is taking her own time with her mother away.

As someone who struggles to express his emotions with speech sometimes, I found the message of “put your feelings into words” to be very inspiring. I actually started to write some letters to people I care about deeply.

Not every episode of the show is actually about writing letters, there’s quite some variety and even some action.

The Bad #

Some points I’m not too fond of:

There’s some action in the show that I don’t really think is necessary. It does show Violet’s experience with combat off well. Therefore, I do understand why it is here.

Violet is supposed to be around 14 years old at the time of the show and about 18 by the last movie. Her character design does not look like a 14-year-old girl to me. But I guess, that’s just an anime thing, where only a few ages seem to exist: Babies, kids, adults, and old people.

The final movie ends – I try not to spoil any details here – in an ambiguous way. One interpretation of that ending makes me a bit uncomfortable. This ambiguity is part of the reason why I’m inspired to write myself: I find the idea of an alternative interpretation of the ending to be a fascinating story in of itself.

Conclusion #

As stated before, I highly recommend the show, special, and the movies despite the few flaws I pointed out.