Violet Evergarden Illustrates the Joy of Receiving a Letter in the Age of Social Media
“The letters Violet wrote, allowed time to move again…”
This is my first post of the year and the decade! I’d been working on this piece for quite some time, actually. I began working on it right after the Fate/Grand Order post but I had been suffering writer’s block on it. However, I really wanted to write a *love letter* to this series because I enjoy it that much. I also wanted to pay tribute to KyoAni after what they went through last summer.
When you read this, I’ll have finished it and moved on to my “best of the decade piece.” Once this goes up, I’ll be binging lots of content for my best of lists (2019 and the decade) So look forward to those.
Now, what makes “Violet Evergarden” so special?
Many anime attempt to tackle different forms of communication and how the technology we use to communicate evolves. “Steins;Gate” looks at text messages being sent back in time to change the future. The film “Summer Wars” imagines a future where social media is used for everything from talking to friends, managing business relations, tracking peoples’ health, managing infrastructure like waterways and traffic systems, weapons intelligence, and gambling. Sword Art Online depicts a future where virtual reality can send users’ minds into a lifelike world that feels exactly like our own.
But “Violet Evergarden” is different. In this world, there are no cellphones, computers, or game consoles. It’s an alternate world, but reminiscent of Europe at the turn of the 20th century. The premise of the series revolves around the fact that so much of the population is still illiterate, there’s an entire business for commissioning ghost writers to write letters for others. The women who write these letters are called auto memory dolls, named after the blind wife of the inventor of the typewriter. Letters serve as the primary form of long distance communication AND short distance communication in this world. In “Evergarden’s” universe, letters can convey what words of mouth cannot.
In this sense, Violet Evrgarden both hearkens back to the days where people sent letters to each other before social media, and it makes letters the primary form of communication. Really, there’s no other way this series could work. I can only imagine how the story would move if instead Violet showed people how to send proper DMs on Instagram, or even how to write emails.
More than that, though, “Violet Evergarden” is about writing, or more precisely, a writer. The titular character learns how to write letters for others, and in doing so, learns more about herself through each project. Through its episodic nature, “Evergarden” conveys how one writer improves both her skill in the field, and her ability to connect with others. It also shows its audience the impact of words.
In that regard, Violet is an excellent protagonist. Writers are often isolated, and will tell you as such. They sit at home a lot of the time working on their writing, going through draft after draft, and while I cannot speak for any writers other than myself, this can lead one to lag when it comes to communicating with people, and also understanding how they think and feel. A lot of this is ironic because written work is supposed to do that for them. So their work can portray these beautiful things that have a firm grasp on human emotion even if the writer behind them does not. For a more comedic example of this, I highly recommend “Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun,” about a romantically oblivious male shoujo manga artist.
But the key here, though, is how through that writing, the writer better understands those things. As Violet talks to her clients, she gets to know them, their stories. The things that make them happy and sad. She uses that to improve her work even further, and through that work, the lives of those people are improved further.
Violet begins as a blank slate. She’s an orphan who Major Gilbert Bougainvillea took in as a soldier under his command. After the war ends, she cannot find him anywhere, but the last thing she remembers is him telling her “I love you” during the final battle and she becomes an auto memories doll working for Claudia Hodgins, a friend of Gilbert’s, in order to figure out what that means.
Violet’s first “client” is a woman who wants to write a love letter in response to a man who asked her out. The woman wants to play hard to catch, but Violet doesn’t understand, so she writes her words literally. The woman later returns, upset, saying the letter was no good and that the man got angry. The other Dolls begin to doubt her ability as a Doll, but Violet persists on becoming a Doll to figure out the meaning of “I love you” and they accept.
To get a better understanding of how to write good letters, she enrolls in a school where she meets Luculia Marlborough, who lives alone with her brother Spencer after their parents died in the war. Her brother beats himself up over it because he feels he wasn’t able to protect them but Luculia is just glad he’s alive.
Violet fails to pass the class. Despite her typing being fast and accurate, she is still unable to understand peoples’ feelings and compose them into a letter that doesn’t feel like a war report.
One day, after school, Luculia and Violet sit down together so she can write a letter to Major Gilbert. However, Luculia tells Violet her story about her and her brother and how she wants to mend their relationship.
Without telling Luculia, who had left after no progress on Violet’s letter to Gilbert, Violet writes a letter to Spencer on her behalf. She finds him drunk and lying on the street, and gives it to him personally. The letter simply reads “I’m happy that you’re alive. Thank you.” That moves Spencer to tears, and Violet graduates from the school after Luculia tells the instructor about it. Violet learns at this point that only a few words can carry significant meaning.
Violet next accompanies her co-worker Iris to her hometown and is tasked with writing invitations to Iris’ birthday party arranged by her mother in order to find a suitor for marriage. Iris’ family originally commissioned her for that purpose but she injured her arm that day and Violet was brought in to help. However, Iris doesn’t want to get married.
Invitations are simple enough but it’s the aftermath that poses a problem. Despite Iris telling Violet not to send a letter to Amon Snow, someone who already rejected Iris, Violet does so anyway after Iris’ parents tell her to send one, and Iris breaks down at the party upon seeing him. She yells at Violet that she “really doesn’t understand peoples’ feelings,” and Violet realizes that she still has a long way to go, but also that it takes a lot of courage to tell someone “I love you.” She did well with Luculia’s letter to Spencer, but it takes more to gain an understanding of human emotions.
At this point, Violet knows she needs to make things right, and writes letters written on Iris’ behalf to her family and party guests. She does well with a wonderful letter and mends the relationship between Iris and her family, now understanding a bit more about emotions.
That’s the other real strength of this series, Violet’s learning happens bit by bit while still showing real results, at a brisk pace. We see Violet really grow from an emotionless doll to someone who can put human expression into words better than most other people.
Some time later, Violet is now a well known Doll who gets many requests, this next one being from a playwright, Oscar, who must write his next play, which he intends to be for children, about a girl Olive who travels through a fantastical world. He later reveals that “Olive” is a stand-in for his real daughter Olivia, who he lost to illness. He wanted to finish her story through this play. However, he has writer’s block and can’t seem to finish it.
In one memory, Olivia said one day she would cross the lake behind their summer home. After Oscar sarcastically suggests Violet cross the river, Violet agrees and goes to do it. Before Oscar can stop Violet, she takes Olivia’s old parasol and takes a leap from the other side of the lake.
In the beautifully animated scene, Violet attempts to cross the lake as Olivia had wished. Because of Violet’s gesture, Oscar sees Olivia through Violet and he’s able to finish this story, and Olive gets back home by flying with a parasol across a lake.
Violet was able to help Oscar overcome his writer’s block and help him let go of Olivia. He was able to finish Olive’s story, and now many other people will see that play.
Even when only transcribing Oscar’s play, Violet was able to communicate, through body language, with him, and she helps him in a way that will in turn help even more people.
Violet doesn’t make it all the way across the lake, but she makes it far enough. Far enough for him to overflow with emotion.
However, after finishing the job, Violet begins to question herself, wondering if it’s really okay to write letters for others with the same hands that took so many lives during the war.
This is an important development because it shows Violet learning more about herself along with others. The letters she writes help her to grow as much as they do her clients, and for perhaps the first time in the series, Violet begins to question her worth. She asks if it’s truly okay to be writing letters that bring people together, to mend relationships when she herself has ended so many during the war. She had always viewed herself as just a tool, but now she finds herself wanting to be more than that. She wants to help others and save lives instead of take them.
This episode ends with Violet learning that Major Gilbert went MIA during the war and is presumed dead, which others had kept from her.
At this point the series takes a two episode detour detailing Violet’s past and the war as well as her relationship to the Major and Hodgins.
I won’t go over this in detail because it has less to do with the writing of the letters and Violet’s ability to use them to bring people together but the ending of this detour is worth mentioning.
Gilbert had given Violet one final order before he presumably died; for her to live freely. Not to be burdened by her past.
Once she calms down, one of the deliverers at Claudia’s company suggests Violet deliver letters with him and she takes a walk through the town putting letters in the mailboxes in peoples’ doors. After hearing the reactions to the letters, Violet comes to understand how exciting it is to receive a letter, and the staff members remarks how “every letter deserves to be delivered.”
Later, Violet walks through town again during the day and sees how the lives of all the people she’s written for have improved their lives. Luculia and her Spencer are spending more time together as family, the kingdoms and Drossel and Flugel have been brought together by happy marriage after Violet wrote love letters for the princess of Drossel, her partner from an observatory where she transcribed translations for documents has been exploring under the stars, and Oscar’s new play has been a resounding success.
After asking Hodgins if it’s really okay for her to be bringing people together with her letters, he simply replies that she can’t erase the past, but everything she’s done as a Doll won’t be forgotten either.”
Violet takes on her next cases as a professional. The first the audience sees being a long assignment writing many letters for an ailing woman with a young daughter named Ann. The episode features Violet as she bonds with Ann and writes the letters for the mother, her client. The mother, Clara, is gravely sick and doesn’t have long to live.
The emotional climax comes at the end of the episode. What Violet was actually doing was writing 50 (yes, FIFTY!) letters addressed to the daughter, Ann. They are to be delivered to her on each of her birthdays for the next 50 years. A montage of Ann receiving some of the letters as an adult plays out before we shift back to the present. In a notable moment, Violet cries, truly for the first time, saying she had to hold back her tears the whole time she was there. She’s realized the pain of losing someone close to you.
In the last case of the series, Violet heads to the battlefield to write a pair of letters for Aiden Field, a soldier in the neighboring country of Ctrigal. Some extremist groups there oppose the peace deal between the warring nations and civil war has broken out between them and the moderates who want the deal.
Violet appears again on the front lines not as a soldier herself, but as a Doll. However, Aiden is critically injured and uses his dying words to convey to Violet what he wants to say in is letters. After he dies, she buries him and delivers the letters to his parents and his childhood friend and crush Maria.
Violet delivers the letters, and cries again when the soldier’s loved ones than her for delivering his letters. Though they are devastated over Aiden’s death, they continue to thank Violet for “bringing him home.” In delivering Aiden’s letter, she brought all his feelings that he wanted to convey in his letters, though Violet insists she does not deserve thanks because she was unable to protect him.
The last step in Violet’s journey is the air festival. After taking a moment to stop some extremists from disrupting the peace treaty signing, Lieden holds its first air festival since the war began. People write letters that will then be dropped from an airship. For the first time, Violet writes a letter of her own. Not for someone else, just her. She writes it to the Major. She writes to him that she still believes that he’s out there alive somewhere but has learned to let go and live free, and now she finally understands what “I love you” means.
Violet’s growth as a person shows us, the audience, the power of words, and how they can affect both the receivers as well as the senders. The power of messages have saved people in this series. These letters have allowed people to express their feelings in ways spoken words can’t.
In many ways, social media has allowed us to accomplish some of that ourselves. Granted, we’re writing these posts and messages ourselves, but we can scribe words and send them to whoever we want all over the world. I don’t think people realize that; they get lost in the flood of content.
By stripping long distance communication down to letters and making the characters unable to write them, the audience can truly appreciate what it means to use words to bring people together. We can appreciate how a simple message like Violet’s letter in episode 3 to Luculia’s brother, despite being two sentences, can help people and save their lives. In turn we can also appreciate how they help those who send them, by showing them that power that they can see with their own eyes. And we can appreciate how they allow people to say “I love you.”
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