Getting the positives out of the way first, the art direction is beautiful IMO, and makes for very good WEBMs and screenshots.
Sadly, it seems KyoAni focused only on style, none on substance as Violent Evergarden is as much of a failure of an anime as the girl is as a character. The plot line is an unimaginative, bland piece of garbage that just shouts "THIS IS SAD" at your face because the writers weren't creative enough to come up with a story or even learn the art of subtlety, even the supposedly subtle messages are blatantly obvious like their use of wind, shadows, and flower petals. To make a point and give you an idea of how ridiculous everything about this anime is, the first non-flashback fight scene we see is Violet doing the Naruto run to dodge bullets point blank, HELLO KYOANI??????
Violet is meant to be an unrelatable character, I understand the whole point is Violet gaining her emotions but KyoAni is over-reaching, they don't have the skill make Violet seem anywhere close to realistic or believable and her character is just boring and alienating, it's hard to care about her because of all the failings in storytelling so you don't really care what happens in the story. The best part of the show were the slightly more interesting throwaway characters but KyoAni even fails at this conveying emotion through these relatively normal characters. The show falls into an overly tiresome trend of trying to make the viewer feel sad over characters they never got a chance to know or relate with.
Violet Evergarden is completely shameful and it's disgusting how little effort was put into this show. I feel insulted watching this show because it's clear that the studio thinks of anime viewers as drooling idiots who'd cheer for anything they're told. This show is pretty much just bad fanfiction written by a middle schooler.
