Violet Evergarden is one of those shows that you’ve probably at least heard about if you’re the kind of person who’s reading this blog. It’s fairly recent, the anime releasing in 2018, but it caught just about everybody’s attention and generally in a positive way.
And yet I went into this show basically
unspoiled. I heard a lot of people talk about how good it was, but
very little about the content. I wasn’t even certain, from what
little I was made aware, if Violet was actually human or if she was
some kind of robot. There might be a reason for that confusion.
In my opinion, there are two things
that are really worth the hype in Violet Evergarden – the titular
character, and the setting. Let’s start with those.
So, how about Violet? Violet is a
young woman. She’s human; she gets a job as an “Auto-memory Doll”
but that’s more or less a fancy name for a fashionable sort of
scribe, and doesn’t indicate her being anything different than a
normal young woman. On its own, that is. Violet is pretty far from
normal herself. Raised under unknown conditions, our earliest
flashbacks to her show her as an early teen and also some kind of
super-soldier, capable of combat feats that mean she’s more than a
match for adult men. In the last days of the great war that’s just
ended, Violet lost both her arms, but she’s fully able thanks to some
fancy mechanical prosthesis.
While machine parts can make her body
sound, her mind is another matter. At least at the start of the
show, Violet is incredibly cold, having no understanding of human
emotions even though she does seem to feel them. Of particular
interest to Violet are the words “I love you”. Her handler,
Major Gilbert Bougainvillea, told her those words at height of their
last battle together, but by the time she’s regained consciousness,
Gilbert is gone (She’s told he’s elsewhere; officially he’s missing
presumed dead, and it’s heavily implied that the army just failed to
find his body), leaving her with only a bequest, those last words
that she doesn’t understand, and the nagging curiosity to learn what
they mean.
Exploring Violet and her quest to
understand the meaning of “I love you” (and essentially all of
what it means to have feelings along the way there) is the backbone
of the show.
So, how about the setting? The world
in which Violet Evergarden takes place isn’t Earth. It doesn’t have
the same geopolitics and I’m not sure you could construct them on the
same globe. Society, culture, and technology are all very
reminiscent of Europe after the first World War, but there are some
differences, most notably Violet’s mechanical arms and, to a lesser
extent, her freakish combat ability. To a lesser degree, I don’t
believe that the job of the Auto Memory Doll has any precise analog,
at least not with the kind of popularity that the Dolls in Violet
Evergarden seem to enjoy.
And honestly, I’d love to see more
settings like this. Violet Evergarden’s world doesn’t have any magic
or monsters; it’s constructed on the same rules that the Earth we
know is constructed on. It’s not consumed by a strange style like
Steampunk either; it’s a world that’s extremely grounded and that
feels very real. But at the same time it’s not exactly a period
piece or an alternate history piece, because the world has its own
periods and its own history. There’s no ‘point of divergence’ –
much like a fantasy universe, Violet’s world stands as its own thing.
It combines the relatable nature of the real world with the freedom
to create of fantasy, and I am honestly struggling to think of any
other setting that leverages that in the same way that Violet
Evergarden does.
In any case, the show opens with Violet
in the hospital, recovering. She’s fitted with her metal arms and
then picked up by Claudia Hodgins, an old friend of Gilbert (and,
don’t let the name fool you, a rather big and strong ex-soldier man)
who is upholding his promise to take care of Violet in the event that
Gilbert himself couldn’t. He first brings her to the estate of the
Evergardens, relatives of Gilbert, who were all set to take her in.
Thanks in large part to her harshness, which borders on cruelty,
that… doesn’t really work out. She takes the surname and legal
identity, but ends up crashing at Claudia’s new place of work, a
private postal service.
While there, seeking the meaning of the
words “I love you”, Violet becomes enamored of the work that the
women there do. These ladies are Auto-memory Dolls, and their task
involves writing letters for people. It’s not just a matter of
penmanship (they use typewriters) and taking dictation, though; a
good Doll interprets what her client is trying to say and
ghost-writes the letter to express the feelings that the client might
not have the will or erudition to put into words.
Violet, of course, starts her career as
a staggeringly terrible doll, writing a love letter or two like
they’re military reports. Eventually, she’s sent to a school for
training dolls, and while there starts to actually make human
connections thanks to being befriended by another trainee. She
starts to understand, in her own way, how people can say one thing
and mean another, and by the end of her training course has found
(while still largely ignorant of her own feelings) enough empathy to
pass more than the technical requirements with flying colors.
From there, most episodes are fairly
isolated, showing Violet taking a job and seeing to the important
things her client of the week wants to say. These range from helping
her co-worker with family troubles, to preparing years upon years of
birthday cards from a dying mother to her young daughter, to
preparing for publication false ‘correspondence’ to frame a state
marriage as a romantic one. Now and then her work is less
interpretive, such as copying textbooks for an observatory or helping
a drunk and despairing playwright finish and present his new
manuscript.
A huge part of the charm of the show is
how much effort goes into each of these events. Even the ones that
are small and down to earth seem monumental, and there’s a good
degree to which Violet herself can be a little invisible next to the
issues and emotions she’s helping these single-episode characters go
through. It really is amazing just how much of an impact these
stories can have when they only get a single episode to introduce
their character, address that character’s problem, and ultimately
resolve said problem. Yet the single episodes pretty much always
land, and Violet manages to inch forward with slow-burn development
on the side. In a process that’s gradual in the extreme we see her
discover emotions, come to terms with her past as a super-soldier,
and start to make real progress.
Eventually, though, we do have to spend
some real time addressing Violet herself. After learning that
Gilbert is thought to be dead, Violet goes a little crazy, running
off on her own to search the site of their last battle while we get
detailed flashbacks to her history that was largely only hinted at up
until then. It’s a two-part affair that shows both how they started
and how it all ended before returning us to the present where Claudia
confirms that, while Gilbert’s body was never found, his dog tags
were, meaning he’s considered dead. Violet, broken, has to discover
her reality all over again, now that she doesn’t have a sensible hope
of living for Gilbert any longer. She sees, though, the good that
she can do as a Doll, and Claudia helps affirm that while the bloody
deeds of her past can never be washed away, that doesn’t negate what
she’s doing with her life going forward, leaving her to keep on
living and working as a Doll, trying to bring happiness to people
rather than death.
You wonder, after those episodes, why
the series is still going. Are we really going to get a better
climax than that? As a matter of fact, we do. There’s one breather
episode, but after that we launch into a trio that run things a
little darker and more military than before. In the first, which is
its own thing, Violet paradrops into a war zone to take a request for
a soldier, who’s wounded before Violet arrives. The folks attacking
recognize Violet by her reputation at war and aren’t willing to mess
with her, but while she’s able to record the young man’s last wishes
for his childhood friend, she isn’t able to save his life, and has to
deliver a love confession from a dead man, an experience that brings
the new and more human Violet to tears.
After that, Violet ends up getting
entangled with a serious story of terrorism and warfare. Gilbert’s
older brother (who hates Violet’s guts and is still with the army) is
set to protect a dignitary for a treaty signing, while one of
Violet’s co-workers is there to notarize it. Violet boards the train
(heading home from her previous assignment… sort of) and it’s a
good thing too, because a group of insurgents attack. No letters
this time – Violet fights them off using all her old skill with a
new resolve to not kill anyone again, ultimately subduing the
attackers and dealing with the bombs they put on the train bridge for
an encore.
This ends with the VIPs safe, grudging
respect for how she’s become more than a weapon from Gilbert’s
brother, and Violet returning home to write one final (for the
season; she’s still going to do doll work for the forseeable future)
letter: her own feelings, which she now understands, to her beloved
missing-presumed-dead Gilbert
And that’s Violet Evergarden… is it
worth the hype?
Quite frankly… yes. It’s a rare case
that a show gets as popular as Violet Evergarden did and is still
able to back up the inflated reputation. It’s not a perfect show, by
any means – the first few episodes are quite hard to watch if you
have a limited tolerance for social awkwardness, and the dramatic
irony regarding Gilbert’s status (as well as the leaving ajar of the
door for him to return like a soap opera) goes on a bit long.
Further, while the episodic nature is extremely well executed, it
really does mean that the show only kicks into full swing when Violet
learns that Gilbert is supposed to be dead. The stuff that comes
before is good, especially in isolation, and time is needed to have
Violet grow as a person, but compared to what comes after it’s night
and day.
In the end, I give Violet Evergarden an
A. It’s very close to an A+ at that, something that I don’t even
debate handing out often, but there were enough points where I was in
pain for the wrong reasons and enough structural weirdness that I
don’t think it’s quite on that exalted level. Still, I would
strongly recommend it.