bluebeartora

-In order to carry (and justify the change of) such an underdeveloped and unemotional character, the story has to go through massive emotional jumps that despite being effective come inevitably across as fake and engineered for the purpose to be tearjerkers

-the structure of the show also tries to characterize the main characters by proxy and does a really poor job at doing so. They expect that by presenting to the viewer vague and relatable concepts we can translate them into the main characters without proper development, all in order to keep both the episodic nature and an overarching plot.

-and finally, this show pursues beauty above all else. Everything is beautiful. And everything is fake.
All the people in Violet Evergarden are beautiful, they live beautifully, love beautifully, suffer beautifully, and also die in such a way. All their stories are the idealised versions of a perfect and pristine world, reflecting a young girl's idealised(and naive) drama novel. All so manufactured and artificial

There are other defects (episode 11 is one of the most terribly written episodes that I had watched recently) but this is the main focus of why this anime fails. And thank god they decided to keep Gilbert dead because that would have been disastrous. Not only it would have required even more suspension of disbelief(and they already make things pretty dodgy with all the liberties they take for the sake of melodrama) but it would have shattered that little character development that Violet had