Time for a slightly different genre, I think. Manga, to be precise. 70s shoujo manga - for some reason I don't get into the new stuff. Bit like my taste in music, really - not only do I not have any newly released songs on my iPod, I don't even know what the popular ones are...
Back to the manga. I've been online since... oooh... 1999, just about, when we got a dial-up connection at home. I've been online for about 8 and a half years, give or take. (Oh, what I wouldn't give to be back in 1992, when I thought MSPaint was really snazzy and my favourite computer game was Chip's Challenge, which came with my very first computer!) I only found out that Japanese comics were really popular because of the internet - Japan didn't really make an impact on my consciousness before then. It was a place where the sun rose first and people ate raw fish on vinegared rice and... kimonos? Sumo wrestlers? Er...
Anyway, I was a bit weirded out by some series. Crazy hair, invocations of magic spells (when I've never been one for fantasy), and you have to remember that my parents never shelled out for any non-terrestrial channels. (To this day, we only have a digi-box, and even then only since last October or so.) The only anime on TV was Pokemon, and I was a bit old for that. Cue the internet. Wow, there's historical stuff!... Oooh, what's this?... A historical manga about the French revolution? Cool! Wait... is that a chick, or...?
It was a chick. It was Lady Oscar. The Rose of Versailles, or Berusaiyu no Bara, is a historical drama/romance set in pre-revolutionary/revolutionary France. It was originally meant to be about Marie Antoinette, famously oblivious French Queen who inspired her citizens to a frenzy of decapitation for being bloody useless, and her lover Count Hans Axel von Fersen, but the mangaka, Riyoko Ikeda, made a little mistake if she wanted her readers to love the Queen and Fersen. On the second page, a child is born. And it's not the Queen - General de Jarjeyes has just seen his sixth child. His sixth daughter. And he's desperate for an heir, who has to be male. His solution is not to adopt of child, but to raise Daughter Six as he would a boy - and he starts off by naming her Oscar Francois.
Oscar grows up to be a perfect heroine. Out of interest, I fed her stats into a Mary Sue calculator - she's got a boy's name, that's not good, she's got great hair, that's not good, she had a nontraditional gender role, bloody hell - and she came out as irredeemably bad. But the thing is - she's not. I like her. Everyone likes her. She's got an even bigger fan club in Real Life than she does in the fictionalised court at Versailles.
Back to the story. Oscar becomes the Captain of the Queen's bodyguard and lives a devoted and happy life... mostly. She ventures off, on occasion, into the seedy underbelly of Paris, and attracts the attention of a pretty young girl, Rosalie Lamorliere, who eventually gets rescued from the gutter... and falls in love with Oscar a bit. Later, Oscar encounters the Black Knight, who's her first real key to understanding that not all is well in the country ruled by the Bourbons...
Oscar breaks away from the royal family and gains a new command, made up of soldiers whose respect she'll have to earn. They know she's a noble and a woman, and they won't willingly submit to her command. Oscar learns, through these experiences and also through her love with her manservant-companion Andre, how to change for the times and how to live for herself and her beliefs rather than for some cosy ideal. She eventually dies fighting on the side of the people; the fall of the Bastille is ascribed partly to the strength of her command and her courage.
The amine adaptation of the manga more-or-less ends here; there's a final episode where the characters still alive in 1794 reminisce about her and inform the viewers about the Reign of Terror. This is more extended in the manga; most of the penultimate volume is dedicated to relating the story of the royal family and Fersen's final fate. (And the last volume - well, that's an extra story involving Oscar's niece, who, apart from unusual intelligence and a naughty streak, has a frightening amount of feminine intuition for a six-year-old. It's thematically unrelated to the rest of the series, being supernatural in nature - it's a horror story, to be honest, with more than its share of WTFery, but it's a good read.)
I've barely scratched the surface of the plot of this work of art. How could I? I don't want to give away all the spoilers, because I'd like people to buy and read it. I don't want to spend hours writing this entry, or have it be a zillion pages long. But I'd like to make it clear - if you think manga's all about Sailor-Moon-esque Magical Girls (though I don't know why you'd bitch too much about Sailor Moon, as the anime, at least, is quite watchable) or giant robots or boys having sex with buggered (ha!) dynamics between them, it's not. There's something for everyone, and I'm certain this manga has something for quite a lot of people.
Problem. This manga can't be found in English. There's a fansub of the anime out there, but in my opinion the anime doesn't hold a candle to the manga. (Though it's mercifully free of padding, the animation is decidedly primitive, and much of the humour in the manga is gone.) But the manga? I read it in German - I bought the first two books from Dussmann's on Berlin's Friedrichstrasse, which is the absolute best bookshop in the universe - and naturally you can get it in French, and you can obviously get it in the original Japanese, and in some other European languages. But not English. It was never licenced in English, and it never will be at this rate. It was written in '72-'73, and after 35 years... chances are slim. All the scanlations I've found are incomplete, and cover less than the first volume of the manga, when the art was less refined. Aaargh... I've been translating (mainly for my own satisfaction) out of the German, but I doubt my translation'll make it to a scanlation; I'm a fandom lurker.
I learnt almost all I know about the French Revolution from this manga. So it's safe to say I'm sketchy on it - I mean, the main conceit of this series is that a woman could make it as the Imperial Guard commander or some such title, and all the high ups would know - and be A-OK - with the fact that she's not in possession of a Y-chromosome. What else has been changed? Well, the Rosalie Lamorliere I mentioned above was a real person, but she was only Marie Antoinette's chambermaid while M-A was waiting for her headectomy. Oscar didn't exist, obviously. Jeanne de la Motte wasn't Rosalie's sister; she did engineer the Diamond Necklace affair, and yes she DID accuse the Queen of being a lesbian and get branded with V, though. But all this wasn't a concern to the original readers, and this isn't a history textbook after all. If it works dramatically, it's OK.
This manga's a bit of an institution in lots of places. Japan, obviously - there's still debates over Oscar and Andre's relationship. Oscar's the original Bifauxnen - an attractive man... wait, she's a girl who's happy with being a girl, but she dresses in male clothing and often gets treated as a man. A rather popular character in Japanese manga and anime. In Europe and other places the anime was aired, Oscar became a very popular character too - although some of the men also garnered attention from the fans, Oscar was the shining star. And who attracted me to the manga? It was Oscar, of course.
I'm just ever so glad I found this work. It's fantastic. It's stirring, it's emotional (manga seems to let you cry a little more, it doesn't make you feel guilty about emotions, and it's perfect for someone like me who lies the pretty pictures... eeeee!), and it has an incredibly cool heroine. Learn another language, if you need to, and buy it now.
Some links:
Rose of Versailles at Ex: Manga - a much better analysis of the series. Has a couple of pics of the artwork, too.
Live eviL - if you want to watch the anime, you could start here...
Tololy's Box - Tribute to the Rose of Versailles - Fantastic blog post: describes Lady Oscar as an idol/role model to Arab girls. Has some clips! Read this if nothing else.
Lilicious - A link to their scanlation page for Rose of Versailles. They've only done the first volume, and you'll probably have to be very patient, but hey - at least you can read the first volume in English!
Matt Thorn's Essays - some essays on shoujo manga. All very interesting, and I believe most of the essays he wrote have parts about the Rose of Versailles; it was a pretty seminal work, after all...
I would like you regard this site, Riyoko Ikeda's fan site http://riyokoikeda.altervista.org/
Posted by: camilla | 05/24/2010 at 02:39 PM