Violet Evergarden is predictable.

There came a time while I was watching the tenth episode of Kyoto Animation's adaptation of Akatsuki Kana's light novel where a mother mentions that she is writing a letter for someone "Far away". I knew more or less right away who that was going to be. Sure enough, by the time the credits rolled I discovered I was right, and yet I still felt an overwhelming knot of sadness in my chest, and I still felt that emotional weight hit me as full-force as if I'd never known how it would end.

Violet Evergarden is predictable, but that doesn't matter.

What matters in Violet Evergarden is the journey. Through wonderfully acted, lovingly-drawn characters, KyoAni, director Ishidate Taichi and lead writer Yoshida Reiko take the audience by the hand and into the world that Violet Evergarden, Claudia Hodgins, Gilbert Bouganvillea and so many others live in. We see Violet grow first-hand as she learns about how to live with other people, and the messy, complicated, ofttimes contradictory nature of human emotion. We become so fully engrossed that by the time the story beats we've come to expect happen, we still find our hearts aching alongside Violet's

I've spoken with friends recently about the idea of an "Emotional Buy-In" with drama series: The point at which the media leverages an emotion in an attempt to engage the viewer and get them emotionally invested in the story. The understanding the creators pitch us is that if we give a little of ourselves to the media, we'll receive payment in full by the end of the series. In some shows the buy-in is easy to spot: Arima Kousei's gazes on in wonder as Miyazono Kaori plays her violin, lost in a side of music that is completely alien to him; Takasu Ryuuji proudly states that as a dragon he's the only one capable of standing alongside the fiery and complex Aisaka Taiga. In Violet Evergarden that buy-in happens at the end of the first episode.

At this point in the series, we know a handful of things about Violet: 1) That the Major was her only companion 2) That she is incapable of understanding human emotion, although she may be capable of feeling them herself 3) She believes, based on half-truths, that her Major is still alive. When the first episode draws to a close, Violet reveals the reason that she wants to learn more about human emotion by becoming an Auto Memory Doll is because she wants to understand the last words spoken to her by the Major: "愛してる / I love you". Immediately, we are promised a story of grief, of loss and of love. We know that Violet is someday going to realize what love is, and that she loved the Major, too. We also know, cruelly, that she will learn he did not survive and she will be left with that pain.

The show still manages to utilize this to find ways to surprise us. By letting us focus on what we know is going to happen in their one hand, the creators are able to misdirect us just enough that they can spring a twist on us from the other hand. We might think that Violet learning about Gilbert's death is going to happen towards the end of the series, but it instead happens a little over halfway through, when Violet still doesn't understand love but has experienced enough to be overwrought with grief. We spend episodes watching her desperately deny the truth. We watch as she attempts to strangle herself out of a combination of grief and guilt. It's an emotional gut punch that we're not expecting to get at the midway point of the series.

The ultimate misdirection is the revelation towards the end of the series that not only did Violet have emotions that she was incapable of expressing when she knew Gilbert, but that she very clearly was in love with him too. Again, we're so fixated on the idea that she'll realize this eventually in the end, that we don't expect to see a flashback of Violet telling Gilbert, as desperately as she can, that she doesn't want to take orders from anyone but him. Knowing that this is one of their final conversations lends an air of sorrow to the scene that more than makes up for Violet's relative inability to be emotive.

Violet's journey is strewn with these bittersweet, poignant and heartbreaking moments. You expect some of it, but it's handled with such elegance that you cannot help but still be overwhelmingly moved by it. The show ends the first episode asking you to invest just a little bit of emotion in Violet's journey, and by giving that to the show you are more than paid back in full.

Flawless.