CW: attempted sexual assault, attempted sexual assault against children

An interesting but rather badly written and framed story about a letter writer/observer who was formerly a child soldier/weapon that I'm kind of amazed was somehow turned into the rather enjoyable Netflix series and films by Kyoto Animation.

I'm only reading a translation, so maybe in Japanese it's much better, but the prose is halting and frustrating, and character development is bizarre. It's not a fun read by any stretch of the imagination, even before you look at the actual despicable content.

If you're looking for what inspired parts of the series, four of the chapters in this novel were adapted into episodes in the anime, along with part of chapter six. Chapter five, which is about Violet visiting a prisoner, was not, likely to keep the show rating down, and likely for the same reason parts of chapter six did not make it into the anime and films almost entirely. Chapter six concerns the time Dietfried gave Violet to Gilbert, and actually details more about Dietfried and Violet's first meeting, Dietfried's thoughts on the matter, more about Dietfried and Gilbert's relationship, and Gilbert training Violet to be more useful to him on the battlefield.

Most of the chapters are from the point of view of male characters looking at Violet, save for one chapter, often in ways that objectify her, mentioning their own lust and sexism. As we're never given a window into Violet's POV, it keeps her thoughts and reasoning closed off, and is kind of... creepy to read, honestly. You can only read so many times

Spoiler

how often she was at risk of being assaulted as a child

, or how weird total strangers were to her as an adult. The anime modified this by keeping the focus on Violet for almost the entire story, save in a few cases where the POV was on clients, and Violet often felt just as much an active participant in the POV as the clients were. In the anime, a few male clients were also not given POV roles, or their roles were minimized, so it helped a lot. And the emphasis was most often on the fact that we were in Violet's head, not theirs.

While I do appreciate learning more about Violet and Dietfried and Gilbert's backstories, and even Hodgins to some extent, I feel like we only have more questions, and the answers we got only make this universe stranger. I suppose you could argue that war is hell and soldiers and their commanding officers often make horrendous decisions, so that's accurate, but the entire scenario of how Violet ended up at Gilbert's side is... even more ridiculous when told almost in full like this.

It's really not a great read. I'd suggest just watching the anime.