Character · Violet Evergarden
Gilbert Bougainvillea
He said three words to a child soldier on the worst night of the war, and she spends a whole series working out what they meant.
In Otakana the clue reads: Major who taught a soldier the words I love you
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Violet Evergarden
- Letters
- 7 · Hard
Major Gilbert Bougainvillea was handed a girl with no name and no language who had been raised as a weapon. His brother wanted her deployed. Gilbert took her instead, gave her a name out of a flower, taught her to read and write, and tried, badly and sincerely, to make her something other than an instrument. He remained her commanding officer throughout, which is a knot the series never pretends is simple.
The last thing he says to her in the burning building is that he loves her. Violet, taught the vocabulary of orders and almost nothing else, does not know what the phrase is for or what she is supposed to do with it. The rest of the series is her taking work writing other people's letters in order to find out, which is a very literal way to build a story and it works anyway.
Kyoto Animation adapted Kana Akatsuki's light novels in 2018 and spent an unusual share of the budget on small things: hands, ink, the mechanics of a typewriter. Gilbert appears mostly in flashback and in Violet's head, so the character exists largely as an absence, and the show is disciplined about leaving him there.
Spelling GILBERT
GILBERT is seven letters and an ordinary English name, so the trouble is Japanese rather than English. The Japanese reads Giruberuto, with two inserted U's that the English spelling does not want, and English speakers who learned the name from the audio tend to hear an extra syllable. Hard G at the front, as in gill. The family name, Bougainvillea, would have been a far crueller row.