#the concept of interpersonal drama between the cast and exploring more of that is cool and id like to see that more

[rascal-rosie]

I finished all of archie sonic what do i even DO with my life now

[mogsk]

So I watched an anime called “Violet Evergarden” recently, the elevator pitch of which is basically “feral girl is taken in by military man, turned into a child soldier, military man dies, but not before telling her ‘I love you’, but she doesn’t know what that means, so after the war she becomes a ghostwriter with the ostensible aim of figuring out what ‘I love you’ means through other people’s expressions of love via letter-writing.

It’s a good little concept, and while I enjoyed it, it’s also stuck in my brain as being profoundly odd from a storytelling perspective.

Like, the initial premise is v strong, Violet’s driving objective is to understand the last thing she heard her father figure, “The Major”, say to her before she blacked out and woke up with no arms. She was a feral orphan child with little grasp of language or expression, and so she is burdened with not understanding what this very important person to her was trying to convey before they parted ways. Good shit.

And it seems to carry this fairly well at first. Each episode varies in how much it advances the central plot, but each boils down to Violet having to learn a lesson about how people express their feelings for each other, how they express love through words, or how they fail to do so, and so slowly she goes from only being able to produce very precise and terse letters which read more like military reports, to being able to swoop in and fix people’s interpersonal problems with the power of a well-dictated love note.

Where it kinda falls apart for me is about halfway through the series, where we see that Violet has more or less grown into her role as protagonist in an anime about the power of letter writing and the meaning of love (-ish). She’s gotten so good she’s tasked with facilitating one half of a romantic correspondence between the nobles of two nations whose relations are still tense after The War (which Violet fought in), and so have decided to arrange a marriage between their noble children -- a 14-year old girl and a 24-year old man.

Now up to that point, the messaging around the central theme felt odd, but it made sense, like, Violet is growing to understand love, and so how the show does this is by giving her a lot of weird and fraught situations around that theme: we have a woman who is in love with a man, but she wants to play hard to get which Violet ruins by writing a letter that just directly states ‘I have no feelings for you, please stop calling on me��. So then she goes to letter-writing school where one of her classmates has an alcoholic brother who she wants to express her love and thanks towards, but doesn’t know how to pierce the barrier of grief surrounding him due to the death of their parents in The War. 

It keeps on like this p consistently, the central question “What is love? What does someone mean when they say ‘I love you’?” is addressed fairly cleanly, but then, once the issue of Violet’s struggle with being able to convey people’s emotions becomes effectively resolved, we kinda start to leave the rails!

Back to the mid-point episode, so, through trying to properly convey this 14yo princess’ feelings, Violet learns what her true feelings are. No, it’s not that she is discontent with being forced to marry a man ten years older than her because, you see, they already secretly met at a royal party when she was, like...10?? And he found her crying and was, like, “Hey kid, you okay?” and that was the first genuine expression of human emotion outside of her dutiful maid she’d ever gotten. You see, what her discontent is is that she knows the man she met, with a heart so simple and pure he feels compelled to comfort a crying child, would never write these letters, and so Violet conspires with the prince’s ghostwriter to allow them to have a more honest correspondence (which is then reprinted in all the newspapers around both countries.)

What got me about this episode is how it, like, throws all these different narrative threads in the air around this central theme of “What is love?” -- the concept of arranged marriage, the idea of confusing appreciating someone’s kindness for having other feelings for them, the MAID who is, like, the princess’ closest friend and confidant, but who has to explain that, once she’s married off, they will have to part ways because she doesn’t serve the princess, she serves the royal family and there’s this great scene where the princess is weeping after she says that and the maid is like “I cannot accept that command, I will continue standing here right by your side” and it’s really intense!

But then...it all gets dropped in the interest of the final note being...yeah sometimes you have to marry a guy in his twenties when you’re just a teenager, but love’s just funny like that ig!

Which sounds ungenerous, and like, I wanted that to be the case, I wanted it to be setting up something, like, “Despite Violet gaining proficiency in letter writing, she still is struggling to understand the more nuanced dimensions of love and so her shortsightedness will come back round to bite her in the ass” (it does not, we even get a montage of all the people she’s helped including the newly married royal couple smiling happily at the camera.) 

We then get more episodes like this, where Violet’s done learning about Love and is now in effect teaching it to others. She does this by...sitting and looking pretty with a guy while they wait for a comet to go by, imitating a playwright’s dead daughter so he can be inspired to finish his play, and...writing a bunch of letters on behalf of a mother dying from anime mom disease, but who wants to be able to speak to her daughter as she grows up through a series of pre-written birthday letters.

And, like, in isolation, it’s all very moving! Each story has a very touching emotional drive to it, but it seems like the question of “What does ‘I love you’ mean?” p much falls to the wayside, even after we get the big 3/4s of the way through reveal that the Major is dead and Violet didn’t know! So we’re treated to flashbacks of their relationship, including the moment where he repeats that damning phrase!

But then we really don’t pick it back up again? It kinda superficially grows in relevance as we approach the conclusion, but it’s never again properly addressed until after a sudden spat of military drama breaks out with people trying to reignite The War and Violet suddenly having to put down her typewriter and pick up her combat knife, but now, for some reason, she refuses to kill people because...she isn’t just a tool?

And I think this is what ultimately frustrated me, is that those are two great themes “Discovering what it means to love” and “Can a person conditioned to fulfill a specific purpose ever be free to choose their own path?” but the problem is, the series really has centered itself on the former while kinda sorta implying the latter, but in the final scenes, we are suddenly given a resolution to the latter (which is basically Metal Gear Solid, “You are not your DNA”, “Just live Snake” that’s been done beautifully and with more thought already by, well, Metal Gear Solid) whereas the former, what was the entire driving force behind Violet’s character development is kinda sorta hand-waved off as “What is love? I still don’t think I know, but maybe that’s just how it is!” which is fucked up coming from someone who by the midway point is basically counselling or facilitating love between people!

So, like, I enjoyed it a lot, there were some great moments and the supporting cast, while mostly one-dimensional save for Violet herself, made for at least nice scenery, but I’m just so blown away by how they seemed to manage to forget (or ceased wanting) to tell the story they laid out in the beginning in favor of some p uniform military drama that suffered precisely because most of the series was dedicated to developing the central theme that it ultimately seemed to abandon, or perhaps came across as being burdened with having to carry into the conclusion.

Also it was super fixated on dads, like, The Major is basically Violet’s dad, his best buddy who goes on to hire Violet as a ghostwriter has a big reveal in the end that he’s been writing letters to his hypothetical future child, the sad dad playwright with the dead daughter -- I dunno what to do with all this besides the usual base level of suspicion I have for all dead-heavy content, but yeah!

There’s two movies, a side story from mid-way through the series and a sequel, and I feel like I almost have to watch them at some point, just so I can tie a neater bow on how I experienced this whole story, but yeah, Violet Evergarden, come for the cool metal typing hands, stay for the heartfelt explorations of what it means to love people, shift nervously in your seat when dads suddenly become involved!

[tanadrin]

I've never watched any Star Trek (except for one of the movies a few years ago and a couple scattered halves of TOS episodes) but I've always kind of wanted to get into it and you've been making DS9 sound really good; do you recommend starting with it or some other series? If some further aesthetic preference information is needed, I really like everything I've read of your writing.

DS9 is often considered the Best, for a lot of reasons. I think some of those are that it has long, multi-episode arcs, especially later in the series, and explores some pretty complicated political and moral themes around insurgency/occupation/war--all this for a series that debuted in 1993, no less--and was able to do more with developing a recurring set of characters and locations because the cast wasn’t off to a new planet every week. Also, TNG, especially in its early season, was still a little too constrained by Roddenberry’s creative control, and some of the things the writers were clearly ready to explore already in TNG were shot down by Roddenberry who had a couple of very specific things he didn’t want to make part of his version of Star Trek. Roddenberry wasn’t super interested in war stories or interpersonal conflict for its own sake (and considering some of the shit that gets passed off as Star Trek now, between the Nu-Trek movies and Discovery, that second point looks pretty smart in retrospect), but more in super-high-concept hour-long stories that stood on their own. That was fine as far as it went, and I actually think TNG has some of the best episodes of TV SF of all time: (Inner Light, Darmok, Frame of Mind, and--I realize this is an extremely controversial choice for some--Masks. But if that’s not your bag, TNG is probably not for you. Like, TNG is very much TOS, with a slightly tweaked concept and better effects, but it’s filling the same niche in the genre.

TNG and DS9 are both really good, and I think you’d do well to start with either if you want. Their biggest flaws are things that are common to all 90s TV--they feel a little dated, the sets are small, the shots are framed in specific ways, they don’t have the huge effects budgets of modern TV, and DS9 sometimes struggled to show the big space battles that were important to its plot as a result, and so on. TNG also does the planet-of-the-week premise better than its successor in that regard, Voyager, which had really uneven quality. Plenty of great episodes; Year of Hell is a fantastic two-parter, with a Moby-Dick style alien captain who’s really interesting and, for once, a plot about time travel technology that doesn’t suck ass; Course: Oblivion is a SUPER bleak episode with an ending that is 10000% my jam; but also plenty of stinkers: Threshold, infamously; and the Kazon were super irritating recurring villains that never worked, as was Seska; some characters like Janeway, Kes, and Seven of Nine were played by great actors but the writers didn’t always write them consistently, and in the case of the latter two, sometimes it seemed like they didn’t even know what to do with them at all).

Enterprise struggled to figure out what it wanted to do with the Star Trek format, and at first tried to follow in the vein of TOS/TNG/Voyager, and didn’t really get its footing until season 3, and didn’t get really properly good until Season 4, and then got cancelled, and Discovery... sigh. Discovery can’t stop reminding the viewer at every turn THIS IS STAR TREK! and the dialogue is bad, and the high-concept SF elements are rushed and sloppy, efforts to deal with the encrusted years of continuity are dealt with hamfistedly, and it’s pretty to look at, but other than the cool ships and the way Anson Mount’s ass looks in that TOS uniform, there’s not much to appreciate relative to older Star Trek.

If you actually enjoy retro SF, not merely “can appreciate it on an intellectual level,” I would start with TOS. It’s fun, it’s kinda campy, and the sets are cheap, but it’s clearly lovingly crafted, and genuinely well-acted. I think a lot of people think they know TOS because they’ve osmosed it from the culture generally, but I think the genuine article is always going to be more interesting, Kirk especially [insert your own link to the Kirk Drift essay here]. But if that’s not your cup of tea, or you’re more interested in newer entries, the choice of TNG or DS9 is down to whether you want high-concept planet of the week SF, or less high-concept (though it still has its share of godlike aliens and energy blobs), more character driven (in the original sense of “has really interesting characters,” rather than what it has come to mean now, “an endless churn of juvenile-ass high school-type drama and bad dialogue;” cf. Discovery) stories.

If you’re going to watch Star Trek movies, the general consensus is: avoid Nu-Trek like the plague, and only watch the even-numbered ones. That order holds up once you get into the later movies only if you include Galaxy Quest as a Star Trek movie (which it is, obviously), and I want to particularly recommend Wrath of Khan because I re-watched it recently and there really is no substitute for Ricardo Montalban hamming it up with his waxed pecs lovingly displayed.