Character · Violet Evergarden
Violet Evergarden
She types other people's love letters with hands made of metal, looking for one definition she was never given.
In Otakana the clue reads: Former soldier learning to write letters about love
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Violet Evergarden
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Violet Evergarden was a child soldier before she was anything else, and the war ended without leaving her a use. She takes work as an Auto Memory Doll, a job that means sitting with a client, listening, and turning whatever they cannot phrase into a letter. She starts out transcribing precisely what she is told, which produces some of the worst correspondence ever committed to paper.
The job teaches her what the army did not. Each episode hands her a stranger with a feeling and no words for it, and she has to work out what a person means as distinct from what they said. Her prosthetic hands, built to operate the typewriter, are the show's neatest image: a weapon's fingers doing the most delicate clerical work available.
Kyoto Animation adapted Kana Akatsuki's novels in 2018, at the height of the studio's reputation for detail, and the results are extravagant even by that standard. A film followed in 2020. The show's reputation as a reliable cry is thoroughly earned and slightly unfair, since the crying is a side effect of a series that is mostly about grammar.
Spelling VIOLET
VIOLET is six letters, the English flower, and the novels name her after one on purpose. The Japanese stretches it into Vaioretto and doubles the T on the end; English keeps neither of those. Take the plain English word. The game wants the given name and not EVERGARDEN, which is the family she is placed with and, appropriately for this show, also a garden.