There is even one episode with a little girl that has a similar story to one of the characters of Clannad. It's the one where she's losing her mother to some unknown illness and the thing that she has in common with this girl from Clannad is she's becoming orphaned at a young age and has to live alone, taking care of herself. I don't understand the point of these episodes, they're just trying to emotionally manipulate the audience in a contrived way and why nobody appears to have come to take them into a home? Not only that, it's also implied in the light novel that the girl had depression! Judging from her dialogue when she said something like "As a child, I could do nothing but cry". Why? Because she appears to have no caretaker or therapy to help her cope with her grief! The child is going through death of a loved one at a really early age and nobody even cares! How stupid is that?
I tried watching like 6 episodes of it before dropping it. There is crying in just about every episode of the show, which isn't strange for something that's a bit like a soap opera but you know, this is why I'm not a soap opera fan. There is little in the way of comedy or light-heartedness despite its colorful tone. Violet Evergarden is much too involved with trying to pull at the emotions of the audience. There are people being mean to others and the people that Eleven Evergarden (I'll get to why I call her that in a minute) meets always has to have some tragic backstory at hand.
Besides the plot being way too sappy, I also don't like the story of it. What's the point in the idea of having people write letters for people? It's such a childish idea, I mean, why can't people write the letters themselves? It's like a 4 year old came up with this.
The character Eleven Evergarden seems like she has some interesting character development of learning how to feel and understanding other peoples' emotions but one thing I didn't get is why she seems so sheltered as to not know why "I love you" means? Maybe they explained this more but I just wasn't patient enough to watch it to the moment. And in the first episode, she undressed in front of a guy like, I'm just going to call her Eleven because she has as much social skills as Eleven.
There is no memorable music in there and this is coming from someone who loves just about any soundtrack in a piece of media.
I think that Kyoto Animation has potential due to their exquisite art style but just need help with toning down the melodrama of their stories. Maybe adding quite a bit of light-hearted comedy while keeping the melodrama to like a minor amount or so would make them more tolerable for me to watch and then maybe there would be a better balance of drama/comedy and happy/sad.
