'Violet Evergarden' Episode 9

This episode picks up right where the previous episode left off; Gilbert has been shot by the enemy. During the next few minutes, we get to see the events leading up to the death of Gilbert, and how Violet loses her arms. We get to see Violet express extreme amounts of emotion, the sheer desperation that she is feeling in order to get Gilbert to safety, despite the fact that she had lost both her arms. To add to that, there was no way for Gilbert to muster up the strength after having been shot multiple times by the enemy.

In present day, we get to see just how deep Violet's denial is. She had gone to the site of the battle with the intention of trying to pick through the rubble in the hopes of finding any trace of Gilbert, no matter how faint. Anticipating this, Claudia meets her at the site and tells her that he is willing to wait as long as he has to, 'til she decides to come back home. She relents, and on the way back they are stopped at a military roadblock. Here we get the information that there is a rebel group that is making trouble by fighting, despite the war having ended. As they leave to take another route, Violet sees her younger self in one of the soldiers, a representation of the past that she cannot seem to let go of.

With no other way of knowing how to cope, she locks herself in her room, refusing to go out or even meet her friends. Both Erica and Iris are worried about her, and with no discernible way to communicate their feelings, they decide to write a letter. During this time of worry, Luculia’s brother arrives wanting to hire Violet to write a letter of thanks to his sister. Iris and Erica funnel their feelings along with the request by the brother into the letter and have it sent directly to her.

When receiving the letter, it is already night, and Violet is surprised to see the mail is still being delivered. The mailman lets her know that much of the letters were not delivered and were in fact left abandoned. As such, he is working overtime to deliver all the day's letters. She offers to help him, and in doing so discovers the importance of linking people by means of sending and receiving letters. Something she learns by the reaction people have towards receiving a letter, and she herself getting one for the first time.

Throughout this episode we get to see her experiences in the past, both in the part of her life where she took lives, and in the part of her life where she helped to bring people together. We get to see this second aspect by the way the episode shows each of the people she helped in the place they now find themselves in. Luculia’s brother, Pincess Charlotte, Erica, Iris, Leon, and Oscar were all shown in this montage.

After helping the brother, she walks home and comes across a pot of violet flowers, and she thinks back to the moment when she was first given her name. She was told to live a life that lives up to the name that she had been given. Once we had been shown the two sides of her past, we literally get to see her take the first step forward towards the future that she wants for herself. Despite the fact that having the will to do so is the first step, we all want to hear the outside acknowledgement of our decisions, and so she runs over to Claudia and asks him point blank if it is okay to live the life that she had been living so far despite the life that she had lived. He in turn affirms what we know. That it is okay to live, and to want to be someone better, to accept the past and move forward.

During this episode, we get to see just how good the show is when it comes to their plants and pay-offs. Things that were set up in the first episode and were sprinkled in throughout are all being paid off while also setting up seeds for the future.