[This review will include my overall opinion on the series, along with most of its additional content and this movie, as one finished and complete story. If, somehow, you have watched this movie but have not watched the show it is concluding, consider yourself warned for spoilers for both? I suppose.]
“Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.”
- Gilles Deleuze (L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze)
“Humanity tends towards the organized body, the body with organ, the male member. The modern human is dressed in blue, as far from the red-blooded feminine as
...
it is possible to be, gendered and sexed in a world still solidified in the mold of brotherhood and patrilineal inheritance. The female body is already diseased, on the way to the limits of life, while the phallus functions as the badge of membership, or belonging – to one’s self, society, species.”
- Sadie Plant (Coming Across the Future)
There is a distinct difference and an uncanny similarity between inspiration, suggestion and command. Language, in most cases, and especially in the case of granting any sort of foundational education on something, takes the form of command, whether intentionally or supra-intentionally. But despite this, all three of these are forms of the subject being made to act towards something. In this instance what I would like to discuss is emotionality, and its own inspirations, suggestions and commands. There is an inherent and unmissable subtlety to the emotional, as opposed to the informational. Exposition "exposes", which makes this word for the granting of logical and critical information about a setting perfect for getting across the point, but what is the equivalent of this in granting the viewer psychological information? In fact, what is psychological information in the context of storytelling?
There is an absolute plethora of ways to dissect what emotionality and psychological information is, but allow me to demystify and simplify this, for the sake of a clarity of vision in what will soon become my discussions about Violet Evergarden, and its countless failures. A story, at its core, reduced eidetically, is a conveyance of narrative information. This narrative information, while conveyed, is given to the listener, who in most cases is not yet cognizant of the information, and therefore it is up to the narrator to convey the information in a way befitting of the narrative. When the narrative itself, in the case of something as formal and logical as, say, a battle in a war, is about the losses, the arms used, the territories captured or lost or what have you, it quickly becomes apparent that we are sharing purely analytical information. What happens, however, when we mean to capture some sort of philosophical content, or at the very least we intend to make our listener believe that what we are sharing means to convey some form of intellectual information, which is fully intent on making one think or believe differently than they did prior? It is in these cases that we must functionally switch from a conveyance of simple analytical information and create both theoretical and emotional content for our narration. Or, put in a much more pedestrian way, we make the listeners Think and Feel.
Thinking and feeling are obviously base-level activities and despite our best efforts to create jokes about those of us who cannot do one or the other, we must at some point be confronted with the fact that every single one of us, even our strongest detractors, think and feel *something*. But in the case of a narrative medium of a primarily emotional and psychological quality, we intend to uniformize this phenomenal quality for all involved, or, simply put, make everyone think and feel the same thing. There are simple and suggestive ways to do this, so let's now turn our attention towards inspiration, suggestion and command. For inspiration, I'd like to bring up a purely textual medium. When Cormac McCarthy writes "one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew" in Blood Meridian, we are not merely led to envision something as though it were happening, since this writing is clearly ever so evocative, but we are also inspired to think and feel the exact same way. The average reader meditates on the brutal nature of the massacre in this scene and about the very nature of violence, in a way that makes them consider what may drive someone to do that to the most defenseless among humans. They also feel disgusted through that evocation of an image of the slaughter of defenseless infants, or at the very least they surely feel the grotesque nature of this. Obviously violence and grotesqueness are obvious and unsubtle by nature, but this is exactly why evoking these subtle meditations on human nature through violence is good writing. We then move to question what differentiates suggestion. For an example of suggestive narration on emotionality, I'd like to turn to something with audiovisual qualities. In Serial Experiments Lain's second episode, Girls, there is a scene in which Lain traverses her school's hallway, when a nondescript, spectral being seems to move through her. Her reaction is somewhat unfazed, at least compared to the audience's, but the sudden nature of this event confuses and unsettles the viewer, and this unsettling atmosphere is made stronger by the generally stark and lightless presentation of that being, plus the somewhat ambient, industrial-adjacent soundtrack for that given scene. This is stronger in nature than mere inspiration, it is suggestion of emotional content, which I believe to be the most straightforward way of conveying emotional information without downright manipulating the listener into believing as we do. Which is precisely what I define as command in this specific case.
Command, being our third and most important category right now, is one of the most primary reasons for the profound failures of Violet Evergarden's narrative. It is the driving vehicle of both the emotional content in Violet Evergarden's storytelling, as well as its character-craft, and even in its spectacle. As I once put to someone, Violet Evergarden is an extremely successful anime in lying to the viewer about being character-driven, through sheer spectacle. But allow me to slow down and elaborate on all of these points, after which I will give examples, break down my main criticisms and deliver a final verdict.
Finally arriving to the story I am trying to paint a horrid portrait of, let's talk about this show. Violet Evergarden is the story of a young, presumably 14 years old or so, war orphan, our titular character, who survived this story's equivalent of World War II, or at the very least something extremely thematically similar in terms of weaponry, jargon and culture, but more on this and the lack of meaningful world-building later. Violet herself survives, though loses two arms, and is unsure of the status of major Gilbert, an extremely important character, who remains only present through mention and flashback for the vast majority of this story. Gilbert is seen as a plot device to drive forward most aspects of Violet's story (and despite how clichéd it is to center the character progression of a young woman entirely around her relation to an older man, I will not be creating any sort of feminist analysis of this, as there are significantly more important points to be discussed here.) and is, both in status and relation to Violet, relatively ambiguous for the most part. We see, therefore, sketched for us, a trajectory for the character of Violet: a story not just about the act of integration and territorialization (remember for a second that Violet is a "wild" quark, she has been an orphan for an unexplained amount of time and has spent the majority of her adolescence in war), but also about the psychological effect that a recapitulation of societal interaction and "civilized" characterization on someone still maturing. These are supposed to be the major points of reference, and in fact are the major points of reference for her character, for the first half of the anime series. Let's first talk about these points, as I believe the first few episodes to be the strongest point of the narrative for several reasons.
We begin with a rough return to society for Violet. She has robotic arms (or rather, inexplicably perfect prosthetics) she needs to get accustomed to, no job or job prospects, legal guardians she does not particularly care for, and who serve zero narrative purpose other than a simple convenience (accidentally introducing the idea of Gilbert being dead later on), and a more metaphorical guardian who does not serve much more purpose, but is significantly more connected to both Violet and Gilbert through having served in the war. It is now every episode's purpose to show us stepping stones in Violet's journey first towards understanding human interaction and intersubjectivity, then to immerse herself in the minutiae in it, and finally to become a fully functional part of society who is able to shed the horrible scars of trauma that having served in a war from such a young age and also losing an amalgam, but "important" figure would obviously cause. This is the intended trajectory, albeit the first episode already teases one of the worst mistakes they make regarding this trajectory (the metaphor of being "on fire" for trauma, which we will return to shortly) and we will now discuss the execution of this trajectory.
The first half or so of the story, or rather, everything up to the moment of Violet's realization of Gilbert's death (which always-already requires immense suspension of disbelief and is handled poorly) is about her attempting to understand why this figure she always followed and was clinging onto would tell her, in their final moments together, before disappearing and possibly dying to an explosion or bleeding out or somesuch, that he loved her. This phrase, "I love you", is a primary element of the story, start to finish, and its ambiguity is also a cause of many headaches (as there is a 12 or above year age difference between Violet and Gilbert, and therefore their love for one another should, in most other cases, unless one specifically wants a story that is adjacent to grooming and pedophilia, be a sibling or parent-child type of love), as love is a primary and extremely self-apparent, yet ridiculously hard to define emotion. Violet slowly but surely makes sure to partake in the work that her metaphorical guardian, Claudia, organizes, a sort of personalized sending of letters for those who cannot phrase their own emotions or cannot write, the Auto Memory Dolls. She clearly wants to be a part of this sort of work for her own needs, as she fully intends to understand the meaning of love through learning as much as she can about human emotions. Yes, the story does initially point out how impossible it would be for someone who was raised in violence and bloodshed only, with such robotic (yes, the arms are actually a metaphor and they are a really blunt and uninteresting one) emotionality to convey in letters feelings of adoration, love, loss, grief, and other such wildly abstract concepts, but this is very quickly brushed away (as is her physical recuperation and usage of her robotic limbs) so as to quickly make her into the most promising Doll at the company. This is done in order to give us the thing that will inevitably ruin any suspense of disbelief and lead us to my first definition of the ways in which this anime commands, the formula.
Formulaic is something which is repetitious not necessarily in a way as to crescendo off of itself, but rather in a self-same manner. Always adapting the same point, over and over, often in the same way, and always reaching the same conclusion. Today's episode of Violet Evergarden is an episode in which Violet has to go to a place far from Leiden, the HQ for their Doll company, and meet someone who is themselves eccentric or has some form of eccentric request for one or several letters, which is, in the form of a twist, revealed to be a form of emotional release for both the person requesting the letter, and also for Violet, who is still trying to come to grips with her own grievances and losses. Does this sound familiar? Well, that's because I described most episodes of Violet Evergarden. We very quickly move past the actual act of reterritorializing Violet into the very effeminate and very submissive Female Figure, who acts through her doll-like beauty and robotic intellect, and we must now consistently address and re-address her grief towards all she lost in the war. This is where the show commands you. At the end of most episodes, there will come the most somber moment of the subplot, with sad classical-adjacent music, an overabundance of violins, slowly moving wordless shots or a montage, the confrontation with the theme of death in some way, and some more "character growth" for Violet. That last one was a joke, there's not really any across all of the show or the movie, but there is a consistent command in these scenes for the viewer to feel sad but hopeful, get to the point of tears, think about the overwhelming weight of loss and grief and death, and then be wishful for Violet to live a normal life someday. This is our constant ending point and we consistently introduce Violet to two-dimensional non-characters who act as nothing more than vessels for her to open up more and more towards human nature. "Is it possible for a human to learn how to be human?" According to this show, all you need is to beat yourself over the head consistently with the same exact conclusion to some of the most primordial questions about existence and you will learn.
Moving on from the established formula, just as the show does, we must address that I did not describe every episode of Violet. Some, in fact, are different, and their difference is exactly what makes the show worse than a simply repetitious and meaningless but pretty meditation on loss. There is a swift departure from this theme of dealing with grief and reterritorialization, in which we must briefly confront Violet with her own compliance with orders and conformity to the army and somehow pretend that we are actually making any meaningful commentary on the post-traumatic stress that soldiers face when they are confronted with the fact that they are complicit in murder. We quickly confront Violet through a showy flashback with not just the fact that her ambiguously beloved major is dead but also the fact that she is a mass murdering psychopath, supposedly, and show her being the best soldier ever, because the thing she must excel at is everything, she was perfect at murder and now she is perfect at emotionality-conveyance, obviously. This arc needs little elaboration from me, as there is little elaboration to begin with in the show itself. We make no effort to make any meaningful or concise statements in the episode and a half focusing on the combat and its effects, but rather simply tell Violet that she must become okay with the fact that she killed a bunch of people and that she will never be the same but she can try to live a life as such. Rather than addressing the fact that she was enslaved as a child, forced to be conscripted into an army that is implied to not even be her own country's forces, and was essentially just a tool for combat, we have been making strong statements about how she is a person of her own right and we must now also treat her as an adult when it comes to confronting her sins. This not only feels extremely heavy-handed and meaningless in the grand scheme of the show, but is also really ass-backwards in comparison to the otherwise relatively relaxed and meditative themes of finding the self. But that's okay, because as soon as we reach a haphazard and half-hearted conclusion, we move on to the proper last arcs of the show, which will truly establish why it's disappointing.
A major mode of interaction with the stories given in the first half of the story is to slowly but surely meditate on the same themes each episode, which is why it drastically shakes up one's expectations and alters them irreparably that most episodes in the latter half include some form of combat or extreme situation, there is a lot of tension and a lot of violence on screen, a constant return to Violet's past in war, but in meaningless spectacle. This is how they thrill the viewer and this is how they hide how little is actually being said consistently, which clearly works as these are some of the most celebrated episodes. Our main character, by this point, is still somewhat robotic, but dares to act on her own volition, is still somewhat sociopathic, but does not kill people (wow, look at the benevolence on this one) and is somehow still combat-ready in the same way Penny, the robot girl from RWBY, is. An unassuming doll-like exterior hides the most perfect and unbeatable soldier ever, who strikes fear unarmed into multiple armed men, can block and deflect grenades with her robotic hands, can disarm a bomb by simply tearing it off its hinges. Yes, I am describing things that actually happen in this show about finding acceptance in society, territorializing, and writing letters, unfortunately. Without further ado, and with no more meaningful topics to discuss, we have reached the end of the shitshow that was Violet Evergarden, whereupon we are confronted with a relatively meaningless and extremely middle-of-the-road ending where Violet writes a letter, again, to the major, and submits it to some festival or other, and then we end on just essentially everything being the same as it had been since practically the third episode, with Violet supposedly having accepted the passing of the major, but in a Kierkegaardian way, still hoping somewhere under this infinite resignation (no, I do not wish to actually compare Violet to the knight of faith, this is in jest) and we as the viewers are left with some false and commanded overwhelming emotion or other, but no real conclusion, plus a teaser at the very end about opening a door, leaving her surprised. (of which nothing real comes.)
Before I move on to how this is ruined even further by the existence of this movie, I would like to address the extraneous issues with this story. I will move through these with relative haste, as they make me feel miserable about having watched it, and they are somehow still not quite as bad as the actual story being told. For one, yes, the animation is absolutely phenomenal and is instrumental to the spectacle obscuring the meaninglessness of the topics they attempted to convey, I will not debate this, but I really do not generally care about the quality of animation when it comes to animated series, I am always more interested in the plot and especially the characters. The music is extremely forgettable and emotionally manipulative cinematic classical music, nothing need be said more. The secondary characters and especially the tertiary (episode-specific) characters are given no real emphasis or development, they might be relevant or important for one episode or perhaps two, but Benedict, Cattleya, Claudia, Iris, etc. will be nobody's favorite characters, as their significance is so minute they barely even resemble characters to begin with. Claudia and the major's brother, Dietfried, will be relevant to the further review of the movie, but Dietfried especially reaches zero actual development in the base show aside from, by the end, begrudgingly not despising Violet for no apparent reason other than to have an antagonistic force in the story. Another important and somewhat upsetting measure is the world-building, which is not only sorely lacking, but has absolutely horrendous implications for Violet herself. Everything about the time period the story is implied to be set in, from the technological advancements, the arms used in the war scenes, the sorts of structures and clothing assigned to the characters, implies us to be somewhere within the middle of the 20th century, as a basis for comparison and to be embroiled in, or rather, just barely crawling out of, this setting's equivalent to the second World War, and everything about Violet's specific chosen army and nation is (similar to, funnily enough, another anime I quite fervently dislike, Frieren) themed in the German language, with some outliers for other Western European languages, but the uniforms themselves, the names of all places, etc. are quite German, while in the conclusion arc, where the Gardariki army, the enemy in this war, shows up, their own areas are snowy tundra, their weaponry and uniforms and even their names are often akin to Russian equivalents, and more. This is, although I'd like to believe this to be coincidental, especially with the overwhelming force of their armed forces and the implication that Violet was a war orphan taken as a mere slave, treated as less than human for being-other, and forced to act as a human tool and soldier for this German army, essentially making her this universe's equivalent to Hitlerjugend. Some may obviously call me on this and say it's "obvious conjecture", but I did specify that this is, in my hopes, simply an extremely elaborate and horrid coincidence. Though, due to another coincidence in the movie, I do believe the author might simply have some less than savory views. More on this later, let's now turn our attention to the movie.
"Should the starting-point for the understanding of history be ideology, or politics, or religion, or economics? Should we try to understand a doctrine from its overt content, or from the psychological make-up and the biography of its author? We must seek an understanding from all these angles simultaneously, everything has meaning, and we shall find this same structure of being underlying all relationships. All these views are true provided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into history and reach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective."
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception)
Four entire years have passed. What changed? Well, times are a-changing, and phones, which are obviously evil if you write letters for a living, are slowly but surely driving Dolls out of business. This is no problem for Violet, obviously, who is so unbelievably perfect and famous and incredible that she has no trouble finding work. This movie will focus on one subplot which is the same exact formula as much of what the show was, the plot of the sickly child attempting to convey his love and grievance to his family, and leave them with something. This is obviously still formulaic, but is easily the most evocative part of the movie, as you are at least used to the formula and can enjoy it for being one of its better implementations. Some may bemoan that I am leaving out the parts set in the present, but I assure you, I have many words for that whole abomination. For now, let's stop discussing the subplots and focus on the meat of the movie and why it's the worst continuation of Violet imaginable. We reintroduce the viewer to a virtually unchanged version of Violet. 4 years have passed but she is still struggling with the exact same issues she was during the show, in the exact same ways, and she still has the same extremely undiegetic skills and potential, as previously. She is widely beloved but is still robotic, she is accepted by the community but she is still delusionally hopeful, she is everything she was, and if anything, this Violet is even further backwards than she was at the end of the series. We get to introducing the fact that the major is alive, which is in and of itself immediately an undoing of everything the show itself stood for. Though the show often alluded to the possibility of the major still being alive, it did make half of the story, and most of the episodic conclusions themselves, about an acceptance of the grief of living without those we love in a world that takes them from us. But, obviously Violet is introduced to this fact as well, and we are then subjected to the most painstakingly long and boring cat-and-mouse game imaginable, as we learn that the major is in fact also the greatest person ever and is singlehandedly making the community of a small island better by himself by being their teacher, letter-writer, mentor, handyman and everything else as well, but due to being so perfect, he was incapable of handling his own trauma in any meaningful way, so he immediately rejects the notion of meeting with Violet, and we have to watch the two of them just barely miss each other or specifically fail to meet with each other until the very end of the movie, which then gives us several other issues to work with. Before fully diving into what is wrong with the movie's portrayal of both of these characters and with their relationship, I would like to address some other problems with the movie.
I believe I've made it quite clear that despite the formulaic nature of the first half of Violet's story, it is the enjoyable segment of all of this, since there is a tangible intent behind the constant reiteration and the attempts at elaboration. Although it usually remains the exact same idea being conveyed, there is the constant intent both of emotionally blackmailing the viewer, and the added intent of making some surface-level philosophical meditation about the nature of human interaction and about the different forms of love and loss possible. It is in this way that the subplot about the sickly child manages to convey the initial meaning behind Violet Evergarden better than the actual primary plot of the movie, since it is about a character who is experiencing a loss of choice and agency and having to confront both their own regrets and their own inability to deal with these regrets in a timely-enough manner as to actually reach any sort of sustainably happy conclusion to their life, so he writes these letters more so as a sort of acceptance than any sort of redemption. He loved his family, but clearly resented them, he wanted to live, but didn't make this clear, this is a much stronger foundation to a story than the actual story being told, about the man who was supposed to be dead, but isn't, just so we can make the freshly adult and virginal Violet immediately throw away all the agency she learns to be romantically involved with a man she met as twice her age and her owner.
We are first introduced to the fact that this story will in fact be about romantic love when realizing that the 4 years passed just to make sure Violet would be of age, but then this is in fact very much sealed when the Violet side of the main plot begins with a meandering and honestly quite unimaginative arc about Dietfried, Gilbert's brother. The two of them rekindle their ability to be in each other's presence due to Violet still consistently visiting the grave of the brothers' mother, and then is invited, in front of Claudia, Violet's metaphorical guardian, to trudge through a bunch of Gilbert's childhood books and toys and such on their family's ship. In a conversation following this, between Claudia and Cattleya, who are at this point very much seen by the viewer as the father and mother figures in Violet's life, there is the overwhelmingly disgusting implication that, if the major did not later turn out to be alive, Violet's parental figures would be fine with her going to the major's older brother for an intimate comfort as a way to put herself through the trauma of having lost the major. This, I remind you, is still 4 years after the start of the show, the show in which she supposedly puts herself past that very same trauma, with Cattleya actually saying "It's clear Violet still has feelings for the major. Those feelings may crush her if nothing is done about them. The captain may be able to comfort her in ways we cannot." It is in this implication of an obviously unhealthy and extremely ethically unsound and uncomfortable coping mechanism and the formerly discussed ridiculously huge coincidence that I find, maybe this author's views are simply unsavory. But I digress, let's move on to the final and most awful issue to be discussed here.
Gilbert's age, from what I can remember, is never quite discussed, but he is seemingly in his early 20s when meeting Violet for the first time, who is a mere child, somewhere from 8 to 10 years old, and they spend years together with this young adult giving this child her name and raising her during wartimes, which may be a sweet story if his death actually happened and was the cause of all this grief truly, or if their relationship were that of a parent and child or two siblings. Instead of this, what we actually get, is a halfhearted but still disgusting implication of romantic entanglement and love, which is fully and truly reinforced by the final panel shown in this movie, that of Gilbert and Violet holding hands together, both on a bed. It also tells us that Violet was never heard of again after she suddenly stopped working as a Doll and disappeared to live with the major. I don't believe I need tell you more, but surely if you would like to defend this, you can say "well, it's only implied, not confirmed." I digress.
There is also, I believe, merit to be told in how little is actually done with the quite generous (140 minutes) length of this movie. Obviously we have mentioned the subplot about the child, which is entangled with the main plot only as a way to add tension about whether Violet will be able to leave the possibility of the major's visage behind, which she is obviously incapable of doing, but this does not take up too much time, and the grotesquely mishandled arc with Dietfried isn't quite so long either, quite a bit of the movie is simply about teasing that the major is alive, then deus ex machina-ing this knowledge to the actual characters (there is an astronomically low chance of what actually ends up happening, actually happening) and then this meaningless back and forth once on the island, where they have to make sure that the person is actually the major, and then it is, and then he hides, and Violet isn't allowed to meet him, and then we reintroduce the subplot to add tension but clearly this isn't enough to make Violet leave, but the major still won't meet her, so of course, the one thing necessary to make her dreams come true, once again, a man appears to do her job for her, Dietfried makes it possible by suddenly appearing, mildly scolding his brother, and then making him go after Violet, who of course by this point has given up, so as to give you the extremely emotionally overcharged and manipulative scene of this perfect and untouchably faultless girl diving into the ocean just to swim to her beloved. Once again, the female character has zero actual agency, but the male character makes it possible for her to find happiness in the arms of her significantly older beloved, why not?
And in conclusion, after this complete ass-backwards building of a single character's supposedly character-driven but extremely shallow ouroboric narrative, after the absolutely abysmal and suspect world being built up, after all the extremely heavy pathos and ridiculously heavy-handed emotional blackmail intended for the viewer, we are left with one last thing to discuss, the events of the modern day, which first serve only as a way to tutorialize the viewer on how to enjoy Violet Evergarden content at the beginning ten or so minutes of the movie, by reminding them of things that happened in the show, especially the things that were most highly praised by the viewers after the release of the anime. And, once our story concludes, we see this girl find some form of kinship with the character of Violet and seek out the remnants of her effect on the world in a museum and on that island and other such things. This is meant to be two things at once, for one, a conclusion to a fantastical period drama, where we are shown the conclusion that our protagonist truly had an effect on the world and such, and for two, a postmodernist insertion of the viewer into the story, as we ourselves are meant to be the modern youth who finds kinship with Violet's journey towards self-actualization and a fully realized portrait of the self. Neither of these work, and we are left feeling as though this was just wasted time in a movie about nothing.
So now we must be sure to say, Violet Evergarden is not really about much. It's an extremely pretty and shallow work about the supposed actualization of a girl who does not and can not exist without the image of the man to guide her and give her some form of community. Violet does not exist without the major, who himself is an extremely shallow and terribly implemented, unnecessary character by the end, and has no real arc or purpose. Violet's, on the other hand, is simply to create, to find, to be with this major. Violet is barely a character in her own right, because every time she reaches any stride towards finally embodying her own character traits, the story thrusts her back into the grasp of being on this journey towards the major. Everything in this story revolves around a character who represents nothing and is simply there to drive along a meaningless narrative that peters out as if it never even truly began. Violet Evergarden has so many things to say, but it has nothing to say about any of them, meaningfully. It is a show that intends upon so many wonderful concepts and fails to deliver every single one of those concepts.
The one thing I would like to grant Violet Evergarden is that it intended to be creative. There is an actually creative and interesting story hidden somewhere between the lines of miles of conjecture and meaningless drivel and sadly and pathetically executed attempts at making something philosophical, grandiose, deep, beautiful, etc. Something about aesthetics could be placed here, the actual philosophical discipline, but there is nothing truly beautiful hidden beneath. Violet Evergarden promises to you, with its reaches towards profundity, a dive into the metaphorical ocean, as she herself did into a physical one, but you shatter yourself against the pavement in realization of the fact that you dove into a puddle, with no depth.
If your intent in watching anime is to be baited into tearing up at miserably simple and extremely shallow formulaic mini-stories that never truly give you any conclusion other than "if you can't handle grief, don't worry, your loved ones never actually died." then this is for you. If you are looking for something simple and repetitive about self-actualization and grief and, like me, you thought Frieren was disappointing, since it failed to be about those things, the first 7 or so episodes of this are for you. But if you want to watch something that's more than an empty spectacle that is a veneer for anti-matter as a story, then I urge you, watch something other than Violet Evergarden. And if you enjoyed the show still, and think my criticisms of it are unfair, or exaggerated, especially skip this movie. There is at least something to be enjoyed about the show, but this movie desecrates even that little. Thank you for reading my thoughts.
tl;dr for the feeble-minded: the show is bad, don't watch
Mar 26, 2025
Violet Evergarden Movie
(Anime)
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Not Recommended
[This review will include my overall opinion on the series, along with most of its additional content and this movie, as one finished and complete story. If, somehow, you have watched this movie but have not watched the show it is concluding, consider yourself warned for spoilers for both? I suppose.]
“Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.” - Gilles Deleuze (L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze) “Humanity tends towards the organized body, the body with organ, the male member. The modern human is dressed in blue, as far from the red-blooded feminine as ...
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jan 10, 2025
Sousou no Frieren
(Manga)
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Not Recommended Funny Preliminary
(140/? chp)
Part II - It Got Worse (and Why)
"[...] there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore." - Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life) The anime adaptation of Frieren - Beyond Journey's End is a sensation. Not quality-wise, as I believe it to be a disappointing mess which I've already outlined in my review of the anime itself, but popularity-wise, in terms of "hype", it you will. It is currently (as of 2025, January 10th) the #1 anime on MAL ... as well as the manga being in the top 40. So what is it, that makes Frieren tick for so many, and why is it that I, specifically, think it to be an incoherent, disappointing, confused and headache-inducing mess? Allow me to try to explain and hopefully convince you that, yes, I am an extremely pretentious person, but no, I don't have any personal bias, this is a real and actual reason to dislike this story. In Japanese, the original title is Sousou no Frieren, which contains a double entendre of "to bury" and "to kill", which resulted in the two less popular translations of Frieren at the Funeral and Frieren the Slayer. This latter one will be the only actual title that ends up being relevant or meaningful but let's ruminate on both Frieren at the Funeral, and the canonical subtitle of its English release, Beyond Journey's End. The original setup of the overarching "plot", if one can call it thus, is the death of Himmel, the hero, an extremely shallow and two-dimensional character who was massively in love with our clueless main character, Frieren, the elf. It is past the point of Himmel's death that Frieren embarks on a journey towards understanding the nature of humans, which sparks the first "philosophical" theme of this mess we're in, the extremely long life-span of elves and its effect on their relationships with the other races. Thus, the funeral, since that's our kick-off. The other major theme is meant to be a deconstruction of the hero's journey as I'm sure many intelligent reviewers have already informed you, since Frieren and Himmel were part of a heroic party of adventurers, whose quest was to save the world, and the story starts after their success already. So we have a genuinely intriguing philosophical conundrum about the passage of time, its dilution in its abundance, etc. as well as a deconstructive critique of the open-ended nature of the hero's journey on paper. What this outlines is what you, the hypothetical reader of this review who presumably hasn't read or watched Frieren, must already know, as this is what everyone talks about. Let's explore why this is meaningless to any potential readers of the actual work now. Frieren begins as something close to an iyashikei. (In order not to make this review even longer, I urge you to look up the term if it's alien to you, it's even present here on MAL!) The extreme sluggishness of the initial micro-plots and the calm meandering and meaningless pseudo-philosophizing sets up a show which will keep ruminating and meditating on its hefty themes which we've outlined, until, very early on, suddenly it does not wish to be this way anymore. There arises the need once again for contrived reasons for another journey to begin with Frieren and her newfound apprentice, Fern, and they even get a new member of a party, a warrior, so it truly just ends up falling back into the trope it meant to deconstruct, a simple journey in fantasy. Frieren ceases to soul-search in a way similar to any good iyashikei or even a decent intellectually-aligned slice of life and begins its first demon-focused arc. This leads to little focus on any themes of philosophical or emotional merit and instead shows us the action-packed world of a character who is completely undefeatable for plot reasons, which I'll get back into later. Frieren turns, suddenly and heavily, into a shonen, and a fake-deep battle shonen at that. From this point onwards, there will be a formula of one major arc of battles and action followed by some meandering and meaningless side-questing on the major journey, and this formula persists to even the most recent chapters. This also requires some elaboration momentarily. With this sudden shift into battle-heavy arcs the story loses most of the weight that it had in the very beginning, and the issue that keeps the reader reading it to begin with is lost slowly but surely. The battles themselves are not much to write home about. There are never any stakes as it's seemingly impossible to kill any of the main characters and even when a character were to be killed, they are always miraculously saved or brought back in some way. Character retention, despite this, is abysmal, as most of the cast that is introduced in the (rightfully) dreaded tournament segment of the Mage License Exam or whatever it's called arc is relegated to being tertiary characters that simply assist one-by-one, occasionally even two of them, per major arc of the story, so you have other characters who fight aside from the main three, who are obviously untouchable and unkillable. The fights themselves, in minor arcs, often happen off-screen or are squared away with one minor panel, while the major ones often consist of the main characters being pinned down by some force they have no way of defeating until suddenly Frieren does The Thing and every evildoer dies instantly, the end. So, for a battle-focused shonen, it's actually horrendous. Moving on, what about the initial themes and the focus on philosophical rumination, where does it go from then on? Well, you know, uhh, fuckin' nowhere. All of its themes derived from real thinkers tend to be extremely surface level and not even particularly meaningfully explored. The entire Golden City arc is focused around an exploration of the concept of qualia by a demonic character named Macht. His entire shtick is attempting to find out what the difference is in a human's and a demon's Nagelian "what-is-it-likeness", colloquially known as qualia. For those of you who haven't heard of Nagel, this is a philosophical paper from 1974, which explores the non-mechanical, non-physical function of qualia, the quality of experience. There is a difference in all species' qualia, which is evident from the beginning of the debate. Where does Frieren take its meditations on qualia? Nowhere. The conclusion that is drawn from Macht's arc is that qualia... exists. And people are different from demons. Therefore coexistence between them must result in bloodshed. So, once again, it's a long-winded and pseudo-intellectual excuse to have our main characters fight the demon. These themes are never explored beyond the assumed intelligence of the 14-to-16-year-old reader, so one is never given any meaningful thoughts to grapple with. This is the high schooler's idea of deep writing. Speaking of the writing: it gets worse. As most other things, the writing is seemingly relegated to being a secondary thing to the action and spectacle so oftentimes, entire chapters are dedicated to characters spewing whole pages of meaningless exposition to one another, all in the name of "world building", completely outside of their general characteristics. Another issue with it is that it's ridiculously stilted and wooden, there is often zero personality to the writing, aside from specific characters having laser-focused extremely specific one-liners which they are legally required to say every single time they are on-screen. It becomes tiring quite quickly and fails at making the characters anything more than two-dimensional caricatures of what a meaningful personage is. Despite this, information about the world isn't abundant, so every other chapter, more exposition is needed, thus further demolishing the personality of conversations. The world that we've built up thus far in these 140 chapters, by the by, is extremely derivative and I wouldn't hesitate to call it boring. It sometimes plays around with the joke of expectations, like the one point where it is implied that dwarves live underground and a dwarf corrects this by saying they do live above-ground, but the whole reason this joke even works to begin with is because so much of the world is strict rip-offs of Tolkienian Western fantasy writing that it's almost miraculously amusing when something actually differs. Aside from this, any meaningful political theme of the world is often quickly brushed away. The conclusion, for example, of the Golden City arc, would, in any coherent setting, have wide repercussions on the world at large, or at least the area of it that the main party is traversing at that time, and yet all we get is a stupid excuse for another side-quest to begin and then it never matters ever again. The story often seems to tease at returning momentarily to the soothing quality of its early iyashikei-esque arcs by suddenly grinding to a halt, but especially in the arcs following those that have been animated, any small gesture or interaction is relegated to wordless, single-panel pictures, so the tiny moments and memories that Frieren is meant to cherish by measure of the original meaning of the story are never actually seen or touched by the reader. They, as well as most smaller fights, take a "tell, don't show" approach, of a Marvel-quality one-liner telling the reader "this place sure was interesting" or "this fight sure was tough", but those qualities are never explored, simply implied. Another telltale sign of the extremely diminishing creativity of the author is shown to those with any cursory understanding of the German language, as all the characters and locales are named in German and if you understand what the specific words mean, it becomes extremely childish, once again reinforcing what I said about the high school-tier writing. A strong warrior quite literally named "strong", a mage who turns things into gold called "to make", a man building a bridge to go to the other side of a canyon called "to go", it's extremely disillusioning and ruins my immersion readily, whenever it rears its ugly head. A lack of direction and creativity also ends up demolishing this main theme of self-reflection and coming to grips with one's mistakes, missed opportunities, just overall an interaction in the bygone past, when (from here on, this paragraph will be a mild spoiler) Frieren gets quite literally just transported into the past to meet the members of her heroic party again. This is not only in complete opposition to the very point of the entire story but it ends up resulting in absolutely nothing for the following 20 chapters. Another extremely important portent of doom that I feel compelled to address has to do with what I previously mentioned, character retention. As I previously mentioned in my review of the anime adaptation, there is a character added to the main party quite early on, Sein, who means to establish the proper chemistry of the group as the fourth member, which also creates the analogue to the original Hero's party, as they were also four members and had their own priest, which Sein serves the purpose of. He is then unceremoniously written out of the story. In the most recent arc, I'm assuming in response to the absolute disbelief of the anime's follower base, he is written back into the story just as unceremoniously as he left, and guess what? He exists initially just for the convenience of saving the life of a character who might otherwise have died, but out of convenience, his own personal goal of finding his childhood best friend ends up once again intersecting completely with Frieren's own party's goal, as one of their assailants is, in fact, the very same best friend. How convenient! Speaking of convenience to the plot, it will oftentimes happen that the timelines of the villains and heroes just so happen to line up so no actually enticing and exciting developments happen and things are simply proceeding exactly as the story needs them to, in order to stay properly as the hero's journey requires them to. Ever wonder why Frieren's deciphering of a spell and her opponent's demolishing of the magic barrier protecting Frieren and her party both take exactly two months? That's right, it's just because the author wrote themselves into a corner and now needs things to conveniently line up so the story does not veer into anything interesting or exciting. All of these characters, Sein, Denken, Land, Übel, etc. seem to exist primarily just to be devices to further Frieren's journey, so let's finally address the elephant in the room: What the fuck is the point of Frieren even taking this journey, if it's only the battling, banter and one-liners we get from it? Absolutely fuckin' nothing, there is no development to be gained and all of the moments they're meant to cherish are buried under this pseudo-intellectual drivel and boring, one-sided battling. Enemies become more and more exaggerated until this initially quiet story about a mage grappling with mortality and her own lack of it is fighting in a huge metropolitan wizard town against fucking shadow assassin warriors who are supposedly the strongest combatants in an entire empire but for contrived plot reasons have gone rogue and now simply wish to kill all mages. I know, that seems exaggerated, but no, their super evil and very meaningful goal is quite literally to "extinguish all mages". When did this story about the value of life, of memory, of nostalgia, of cherishing the little moments, suddenly turn into John Wick and the Sorcerer's Stone? "As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost no one can do it properly." - Peter Sloterdijk (Du mußt dein Leben ändern) I need also to address the effect that the anime adaptation had on the manga and its reception. Let's get something out of the way here: The anime does, in fact, repair a lot of the cracks in the firmament. The music, the animation, the color, the presentation, all of these do have an effect on the overall emotional value of the downtime and they even manage to make the meaningless and shallow battles in the story somewhat more enjoyable, even if the faults and stilted, wooden nature of the writing will show through regardless, in the end, just as it did for a lot of people during the Exam arc of the anime. This will, likely, fix some of the smaller issues I had with the foundation of the manga, when the second season is released and these things are put into proper motion, but the issues at large are with the very body of the work, rather than its organs in the aesthetic foundation. The story itself is flawed and bleeding out, devoid of connection to those organs in many points, whereupon closer inspection will reveal that it is simply not as profound as one might have craved. The actual art and presentation of the manga is not great. The faces are unsearchable, since most characters have very little expression to back up any emotional substance to their sentiments, as well as any active events, such as battles, being of little to no visual substance as well. The backgrounds are pretty, but when what ought to be the foreground is in the background, pretty won't save it from becoming devoid of connection, once more. In order to try and focus down my criticisms, I will attempt to now establish an overall frame of critique for Frieren. The primary problem that I'd like to establish is that despite the initial setting and premise, the author clearly does not understand how to create the atmosphere that they were aiming for, nor the themes that they wanted to establish, in a consistent and coherent way. This confusion about their own work led them to create something that goes the opposite direction and ends up simply recreating the trope the work was attempting to deconstruct. In this failed attempt, the characters and their development is quite readily sacrificed, the dialogue is oversimplified and heavy terminus is used only to create the idea that something meaningful and deep is being conveyed without any actual conveyance of such things, the side characters and secondary arcs are meaningless and happen primarily off-screen anyway, and the story seems to be going nowhere anyway, since not much of substance has happened since the Exam arc, except for introductions to more imposing demons that meant absolutely nothing and had zero emotional weight. The humor also became so utterly formulaic that in the last 80 chapters of the manga I snorted at one joke and chuckled at one other, there were no more reactions. I might be a humorless fuck, but I'd still like to think I can at least laugh. So, with all that said, can we at least say that it succeeds at being the battle shonen that it has become? Nope, as I've established, that's also out the window quite readily. "One ascends into profundity, but profundity is nothing but a complication of the shallows, and 'one' is nowhere." - Nick Land (The Thirst for Annihilation) In order not to complicate this always-already complicated review any further, I will conclude here: Frieren is a mediocre battle shonen hidden beneath a veneer of meaningless platitudes towards surface-level ontological and epistemological themes that could be more aptly and meaningfully explored in singular chapter of the stellar iyashikei that Frieren was once seemingly meant to be. An artifact of charred remains, a dream of unfulfilled promise in the face of complete and utter failure. Frieren manages not simply to be Gonzalez, the mechanical fuck-up, the unforced error, that leads to all further fuck-ups, but also to be Bartman, the poster boy for its own damn failure, parading the corpse of a particularly enticing and relatively unique story, stored in a robe woven from the fabric of derivative, boring and drab shlock. If you love battle shonen that makes you seem way smarter than you actually are to your classmates in the 9th grade, pick this up. If you want something that actually delivers on any of the promise of the extremely strong beginning, try Mushishi or Violet Evergarden or whatever. Or just drop it 4-5 episodes or so into the anime. Have a good one, friends.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jun 14, 2024
Dungeon Meshi
(Anime)
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Recommended
Essentially, I am simply happy to have gotten a better fantasy anime than Frieren. This show very clearly sets up exactly what it intends to do from the get-go: It has gorgeous animation, good humor, lovely looking food, some important things to say about ecology and personal philosophies, as well as some deep-running brief stints with surreal and mystical plots that will likely be unraveled fully in season 2.
It never intends to do more than is the capacity of its wheelhouse, but all it does, the brief little quips, the returning jokes, the occasional emotionally charged moments and the comfortable vibes, it does excellently, all ... the while maintaining a solid, easy-to-follow and engaging plot that leads further and further into the worldbuilding as it goes. The comparison I posed at the beginning is obviously only there to bait your engagement and, potentially, since this is a website filled with weebs, your unjust rage, but I do mean it. Fantasy is so thoroughly explored as a genre both in Western and in Eastern fiction that it's never an easy thing to say that you're going to write something fantasy-adjacent. How do you say something new in a genre with such a long history and so many groundbreaking ideas already posed? Frieren had such an idea and fumbled it spectacularly with its absolutely abysmal shonen garbage, while DunMeshi manages to forego such a horrid abdication of the plot by simply going for humor for most of this season. Highly recommended for any and all fans of brief skits, comfortable vibes, colorful and stupid characters and, thankfully, no real fan service! Except for that one scene, for the lesbians. But hey, one is okay.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Mar 17, 2024
Sousou no Frieren
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings Funny Preliminary
(27/28 eps)
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Having gotten most of the way through Frieren at the behest of multiple recommendations, chief among which was a friend who was truly surprised by the first few episodes, expecting nothing but a good isekai and getting instead something more unique, I felt it important to write down my thoughts, whether people read them or not, and especially whether they agree or not.
Frieren is a truly interesting, maybe even bewildering experience, split entirely into a completely separable duality. One half of it is the half that every single person praising it to high heavens has written their video essays about, and this paragraph probably won't ... say anything that the Gigguk video you've seen hasn't. The story begins with an obvious but clever deconstruction of the traditional post-Tolkien fantasy adventure and the Hero's Journey. A group of unlikely, medievally themed folk with hearts of pure gold embark on a journey to save the world, and manage to do just that, becoming heroes and heroines in the process. Here, we start at the end point of this trope, giving us a refreshing look at what exactly happens to our clichéd heroes after everything is said and done, all to introduce us to Frieren, the elf mage of the party. The age range of elves in this world is purposefully kept vague, but it's anywhere between thousands of years to infinity, meaning all of her party members, two of whom are human and one who is a dwarf, will all die in what is essentially the blink of an eye from her point of view, and she will look, feel and talk the same the entire time. This, in conjunction with the fact that she is fairly young in elf years, makes the passing of Himmel, the leader of the adventuring party and the crux to most events in this season of this show, a turning point in Frieren's life where she begins to attempt to look for connections to humans, to try and better understand a race of people, who live for a far shorter time than she does. And the emotions are there, the pseudo-philosophical thoughts are there, the visuals are gorgeous and the concept is, while not being ground-breaking, still good enough to make you think about why and how you enjoy media and, if you're lucky, even about why and how you spend time the way you do. That first half is the part of Frieren that everyone talks about, the one that made it rise in popularity, the one that made people talk about it as though it were already on the level of the classics of the 90s, a paradigm shift in anime, a completely unexpected "instant classic". Not to mention, that half of Frieren is fundamentally within the realm of thought-provoking slice of life, something like Mushishi, but for an audience more accustomed to modern story tropes and fantasy character archetypes and less attached to surrealist aesthetics, or to a lesser degree, even those who want a more serious show with a moe and feminine outlook (partially like myself). So, having squared away what may sound to most as unabashed praise, you may be left wondering "Okay, what's your problem then? Why the mixed feelings rating?", but don't worry, we're getting there. See, I referred to what I was describing as one half of Frieren on purpose. The story starts within the confines of all I've said so far, but somewhere along the line, past the introduction of the third party member of this new and wacky adventuring party Frieren stumbled into making, Stark, we begin the first of the blunders this story makes, with the beginning of the Aura arc, wherein suddenly, the carefree, comfortable and thought-provoking nature of the narrative thus far is cast aside for what is essentially a mediocre attempt at framing a shonen narrative structure in a fantasy aesthetic structure with mild deconstructive elements, but an overall focus on flashy and creative animation and action. To someone who came into this from a background of shonen, this would most likely not be much of a bother aside from the sudden whiplash of the entire narrative focus being different than it was before, and if you have that sort of interest and background, this will likely not be a point of contention for you, but if one were to approach Frieren from the perspective of wanting to see exactly how far the deconstruction goes and what the end product will be, as well as how far the concepts can be taken along their threads of reconstruction, it would be a highly disruptive moment in the flow of the story to suddenly have it shift gears and turn action-heavy instead of the light and slow pace of before. This, however, seems completely fine with the conclusion of the Aura arc behind you, as the story does, in fact, do a 180 and return to the parts that initially draw you in, especially once the party is filled up even more, with the addition of Sein. This is where the second, even more serious blunder occurs. Sein's addition to the party is woven into the narrative in a heavy-handed but reasonable way and finally, the story adds a counterpart to Frieren in a way Fern and Stark are to one another. The blunder here, however, is that practically by the time you're used to this new flow, he is removed from the party, with absolutely no return in sight, either, possibly even in the incredibly likely season 2. And once that all is squared away, we arrive at the lowest point of this season, wherein we are now reintroduced to the shonen territory with what is essentially the tournament arc of Frieren, in the form of the first-class mage exam. This takes up almost the entirety of the remainder of the season. It adds a load of new characters, some of whom successfully add to the story and some of whom seem completely unnecessary to pander to certain expected archetypes within a traditional shonen cast at large. There is not much to be said anymore, this practically has all the flaws that the Aura arc had before it but accentuated even further by being even more filled with tropes, action and wowing animation to make you forget that at one point, you would genuinely have been happy to get one of those often memed Himmel flashbacks just to break up these episodes a little bit and add back some of the charm this story initially had. To conclude, Frieren is half of a masterpiece, but unfortunately due to a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of how to integrate the things that fully immerse a contemporary anime viewer into a high-concept story, it shoots itself in the foot over and over again in an attempt to be both high-concept and mainstream-adjacent. It is something that most people will be able to enjoy, but it has flaws that will make the viewers like myself and some of the people whose opinions I hold truly dear feel let down by it. I believe that it can be recommended in the sense that everyone will likely get something out of it, but I absolutely do not condone the public image of it as a return to form for the roster of classic anime, and cannot see it as anything more than the Castor and Pollux of creativity and compromise.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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