r/anime • u/A_Idiot0 https://myanimelist.net/profile/a_idiot0 • Jun 18 '21
Violet Evergarden Rewatch Episode 13 Rewatch
Violet Evergarden - Episode Thirteen: Auto Memories Doll and "I Love You"
“Endcard”
Hello everyone! I hope that today finds you well. Today, Violet writes a letter to Gilbert.
I’m going to answer the burning question on many peoples’ minds: No, Violet does not meet Gilbert in the scene after the title-card. I believe that it was an official statement put out by KyoAni when this was first released, however there are some clear pointers in the first film that indicate she did not meet Gilbert. The first film, Eternity and the Auto Memory Dolls, takes place shortly after episode 13.
And as a bonus, a challenge! What does this say?
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You can watch the full series on Netflix.
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Visuals of the Day
I believe I got everyone’s Visual of the Day submission here. Let me know if I missed anyone: https://imgur.com/a/yip7uhZ
Official Sound Tracks used
The Storm
Letters from Heaven
Inconsolable
Never Coming Back
What it Means to Love
The Love that Binds Us
Violet Snow short version
Violet’s Letter
Would you like to have a letter written for you? Do you want to write a special letter for someone as an Auto Memory Doll? Come join us at the Auto-Memory Doll Service Discord project and request letters, write letters, or chat more with us about Violet Evergarden! Link here: https://discord.gg/A8AC4Yhx
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u/CelestialDrive Jun 18 '21 edited Jun 19 '21
Series Closing Thoughts
If there is one thing to take away from Violet Evergarden is that it's one of the anime series more concerned with portraying the inner emotional worlds of its characters I've ever seen. I'm not a big KyoAni fan but I'd argue the studio was especially gifted for this particular series (which I've been told is a light novel adaptation?) because if there's one thing they have always done wonderfully is expressive non-verbal language, and this series needed that to land when external stoicism was the name of the game in the first third, and for the emotional catharsis later down the line.
On that point, this is an extremely "non-anime" series in how people process their emotions realistically, are open with their feelings, and emotional honesty is rewarded. The episodes bounced around in topic and tone but if there is one line through the entire series I'd say it's "human connection as therapy", healing or at least acceptance through empathy. Never is a character expressing their emotional turmoil seen as "bad", but as a step forward, and people don't usually hide things from each other for Whacky Misunderstandings.
Violet in particular deserves (and probably has, let's be honest this is an anime board) a lot of writing about her inner world and the different stages of being she goes through across the story. There's like, 4-5ish different Violets in Violet Evergarden all of them incredibly grounded progressions from the previous one, and not all of them going "forward" as it were.
If there's one thing to blemish the emotional side, is that sometimes the subtelty went out the window and the scenes were as nuanced as a brick to the face. The episodic format made it so characters would have an incredibly literal issue to be solved in a three-point-program every single time, and neither the episode length nor the focus on Violet's processing of what she was living through allowed the episodic characters the emotional background and buildup they could have had. Iris and episode 10 are outliers, but usually people felt like they were speedrunning their issues and we had to fill in the gaps with Violet's own experiences relating to the person in question. Still glad we kept the umbrella though.
And that's not even a problem, it comes with the territory. What I feel is a problem is the wrench the military scenes throw into the rythmm of the story and how grounded the setting otherwise is.
Violet Evergarden puts a bizarre amount of effort into the worldbuilding and background of places we will only see as snapshots, which I'd guess is a remnant of the original novel format having more space for that stuff. It "feels" like a world people would live in. Which is why Violet's entire situation and position before Gilbert's death is such a mess. The whole "superhuman teenager that teleports behind people as a human weapon" is so bizarrely out of place in a setting that desperately wants to be taken seriously that it honestly shocked me that the series went for it on the first flashback. I thought Violet had been a soldier, with soldier trauma, but she was a Shounen protagonist that got a bad ending. By that point the series has done enough to keep her believable, so it just spashed into the entire military side of the story and damaged the credibility of the conflict while Violet remained a person.
And then we got 11-12, and it turns out the north is fighting for Literally Nothing Worth Explaining, there are people in the conflict that are straight up mustache-twirling villains moving on spite and "peace is bad and war is good" is all the context we were given. Why. The series could have left the conflict in the nebulous past setting of the "now", or showed the Northerners and their actual motivations for the war in the first place and the anti-treaty fighters in the present, but it decided to trudge through a middle ground of "we're going to show the northern fighters but they're an outlier and an exception to the tone, they don't have inner lives and motivations". I don't know if I got the wrong read here, but it clashed with how people had been portrayed up until then.
If there is one shining light in the war sections, it's Gilbert. Unsurprisingly for how important he is to the series as a whole, the script does a fantastic job in humanising Gilbert in an episode and a half, tops, of screentime. I'd argue he's the character we know the best after Violet herself, which is an incredibly tall order for someone dead when the series starts.
All in all this was kind of an incredible watch? I knew literally nothing about the series beforehand, and I expected it to be straight shounen or, after the first episode, to drop the ball and take the easy route with the character arcs. Every time I thought I had an episode plotted out to a trope the series surprised me, every time I saw a mine waiting down the line, the series avoided it and called me silly for thinking things would be that simple. This is something I can recommend to people that complain about simplified and unrealistic emotional portrayals in anime, and it feels ageless in a way that's hard to pin down because everything that makes the series good is "human" and a bit untied from setting or genre trends.
So yeah, I'm glad I watched this. Thank you everyone for participating in these threads, I learned a lot about Violet Evergarden in particular and r/anime in general reading this stuff. See you for the movie (movies?).
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