'Violet Evergarden'—Episode 4

This episode focuses on Iris as both Violet and herself travel to Iris’s home town for a request. Prior to this episode, we have seen Iris in a very limited fashion where she is primarily in the background. We know that she is not afraid to voice her thoughts, and is quite prideful of herself. However, during this episode, we get to see a completely different side to her. This is emblematic of how we tend to be in actuality, we show a different side of ourselves to the friends and co-workers, when compared to the side we show to the family that we grew up with.

This episode took me back to my childhood where we lived next to a farm, and everything in front of us was paddy fields, cows, and greenery. As rural as you could get really, and to a certain extent, there is a lot of how she is feeling that I can relate to. The desire to come to the city and make a name for myself, in her case it is in being the most sought after Doll, whereas in my case it is to make films. While the show is not about her and she is in fact a supporting character, this similarity really strikes home with me in more ways than one. From the way I behave in front of my friends and those I work with when compared to my family being another.

This episode truly exemplified the awkwardness one feels when it comes to expressing their emotions honestly to their parents, and so the line by Violet really struck a chord with me where she says that sometimes there are things that we cannot express face to face, things that we can express only when the feelings are written down.

We also get a sense of how emotions transform relationships that people have with each other. How close two people could be, and how they could drift apart based on the strength of emotions that they feel towards each other. What this episode does incredibly well is that it shows Iris as a character that wears her heart on her sleeve, incredibly self conscious and emotional, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. We are all similar in this aspect in varying degrees, as these emotions drive us to be contradictory to that which we desire. Once more illustrating the complexity of human emotion.

By having Violet write a letter to her parents and friends that came to her birthday party, she managed to gain a deeper understanding of who she is as a person. This is as opposed to when she had to sort out her feelings alone and was bombarded by her parents with regards to her marital status, and wanting to play matchmaker, complied with the fact that they want her to quit being a Doll and come back home. What makes this episode great is the idea that people have the capacity to understand each other when their emotions are communicated, and interpreted in a concise manner. Both the daughter and the parents were able to finally understand each other, if only slightly, as a result of the letter.

Another highlight of this episode is the importance of communication, to make sure that you are on the same page with whoever it is that you are with in regards to any type of relationship. That being said, we are all humans, and once more as Violet said, people tend to contradict themselves and sometimes even lie to themselves about what they are feeling, and this makes them hard to truly understand.

This is an episode that I appreciate far more the second time that I watched it when compared to the first time, and the above are the reasons why.