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[[quoteright:306:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rose_of_versailles_cover_art_01.jpg]]
''Berusaiyu no Bara'' (''The Rose of Versailles'') is a historical drama manga by Creator/RiyokoIkeda, depicting France from the last years of the Ancien Régime to the dawn of UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
If you were wondering about the scope of anime, this series places the bar well above your initial guess. Incorporating many French historical figures and the very real political nuances of the period, this series can be read either as a political (leftist ''and/or'' rightist) screed or as a heart-rending love story. Either way, it is more than worth your time.
A {{Takarazuka}} adaptation of this work is one of the most popular. There's also "''Lady Oscar''", an obscure LiveActionAdaptation by French director Creator/JacquesDemy generally considered to be SoOkayItsAverage. It is notable, however, in that it came out before the manga had ever been officially translated, resulting in famed translator Frederik Schodt having to scramble to make one for the production company. He did this by blazing through the manga and writing his translations right on the pages in pencil.
The manga is notable for being highly influential for the {{Shoujo}} category. Elements of it can be seen in shows like ''Anime/RevolutionaryGirlUtena'' and ''Anime/LeChevalierDEon''. In 2009 a live action series called ''Series/HakenNoOscar'' aired in Japan, which constantly references ''Rose of Versailles''.
While the anime and manga saw a wide release in much of the world during the 1980s under the name of ''Lady Oscar'', one notable exception was in English. The first two volumes were released in the early 80s as a teaching tool for Japanese to English, but aside from this release, the manga has never been released in English officially. Similarly, the anime went unlicensed in English for over 30 years before Right Stuf International finally picked it up in late 2012 for a subtitled-only release in Spring 2013. You can watch it legally [[http://www.viki.com/channels/10630-the-rose-of-versailles here]] or [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4U0FQ15BX8BdijOOBnhFsutAWdYEtNLH here.]]
Not to be confused with the Japanese PowerMetal band Music/{{Versailles}}, or {{BaraGenre}}.
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!!This show provides examples of:
* TheAbridgedSeries: ''WebAnimation/RoseOfVersaillesAbridged''
* ActionGirl: Oscar is as capable as any man in royal service, skilled in fencing, riding, and leading troops in combat.
* AdaptationDistillation: A couple of interesting side stories were removed in the anime adaptation and in addition many themes were oversimplified and outright altered such as feminism and Oscar's finding of a balance with it and traditional femininity as well as the complex love triangles around the characters (in particular Allain De Soisson's romances).
* AdaptationExpansion: The anime has more filler in the early series to fill out Oscar's childhood adventures.
* AdaptationNameChange: Perhaps to prevent confusion with her character Bernard Chatelet, Ikeda changed the name of the regimental commander of the French Guards from Duke of Chatelet to De Vouillet (no nobiliar title specified).
* [[AllThereInTheManual All There In The History Book]]: It's surprisingly faithful to actual historical events. Oscar's desertion in particular is based on ''the entire regiment of the French Guard deserting to not attack the people in Paris and showing up just in time to storm the Bastille'', with [[spoiler:[[ChekhovsGunman the minor character mentioned a couple times that take command after Oscar's death]] being the real life leader of the deserters during the storming.]]
* AlternativeForeignThemeSong: It's easier to count the countries that ''didn't'' use a new theme song. This is most likely due to the show receiving [[MarketBasedTitle a new title overseas]], ''Lady Oscar''. What gets funny is that the Japanese theme is suitably dramatic and somber, while many of its dubs chose cheerful and happy theme songs...despite the content of the show still concerning the tragic lives and deaths of people living through the French Revolution. Even more amazing? [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI8ds68C2m0 The actual French dub]] probably has the perkiest song of them all.
* AngryMobSong: The manga has a scene where a group of Jacobins are singing the Revolutionary version of ''Ça Ira'' and one in which soldiers march to the front singing the ''War Song for the Army of the Rhine'', now better known as ''La Marseillaise''. If you don't know why these songs qualify, just know that they are mentioned on this wiki in the AngryMobSong page for a reason.
* AnimationAnatomyAging
* ArrangedMarriage: Madame de Polignac tries to engage her kids ''twice'' to rich noble people, failing spectacularly and dramatically both times. At some point, Oscar's father attempts to engage her to Count Girodelle, but it also fails. Also, the main reason why Antoinette is the Queen of France is because of her arranged marriage to King Louis, staged by her mother.
* BadassArmy: The French Guards. All of the Household Regiments (each as big as a standard brigade of their specialty) are considered elite, but it's only when Oscar's regiment-sized company of French Guards grenatiers utterly [[CurbStompBattle curbstomps]] ''two'' regiments of the regular army (an unidentified infantry regiment and the [[EliteMooks Régiment de Royal-Allemand]]) that we get confirmation.
* TheBeautifulElite: At least when it comes to Versailles, but that was actually the point in the RealLife version.
** The Gards du Corps are considered the elite cavalry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Royal Household, and are universally beautiful. This even gets [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] by many characters whose reaction to find out Oscar is in that regiment is to admit they should have guessed it from her looks (this number includes ''Fersen''), Bernard (who compares them to good-looking dolls), and Girodelle (who flat-out admits that, having been accepted in the regiment, he ''has'' to be beautiful).
* BeautyBrainsAndBrawn: Male version
** Beauty: Hans Axel Von Fersen
** Brains: Bernard Chatelet
** Brawn: Alain de Soissons
** ... And Andre Grandier has all three!
* BetaCouple: Rosalie and Bernard. Jeanne and Nicolas. Louise and Renier.
* {{Bifauxnen}}: Oscar, of course, though she stays slightly more on the female side thanks to the shape of her face and eyes. She provides the page picture for the trope, and she's also very likely the TropeCodifier.
* BigEater: Oscar says André is one of these.
* BishieSparkle: Constantly.
* {{Bishonen}}: Even UsefulNotes/MaximilienRobespierre is drawn as a ''very'' handsome guy in his first apparitions.
** Which is TruthInTelevision, oddly. Robespierre was noted by contemporaries to be well-kept in RealLife.
* BiTheWay: Maybe, Rosalie and Oscar, depending on your interpretation of the feelings going either way.
* BlackAndWhiteMorality: Not Saint-Just himself, but this is certainly his view of the world when it comes to the nobility. To him, they are all inherently corrupt and wicked and have to be destroyed, even the ones supposedly on his side (echoing the sentiments of his historic self late in life). On the other hand, when Bernard points out in a conversation that killing everyone that he disagrees with makes him a hypocrite at best and no better than the nobles he hates at worse, Saint-Just in no way denies this. He said that as long as the revolution succeeds, he doesn't care what history thinks of him.
* BlastingItOutOfTheirHands: Oscar subverts this, because she's actually pissed at the guy, so she ''deliberately'' shoots his hand and cripples him to make sure he'll never get to shoot again. It's not like she didn't have a huge reason: she had seen him shoot a commoner child in the back just for kicks, despite Rosalie begging him to not do so.
* BloodlessCarnage: Used quite frequently, though a few brief instances of bloodshed can be seen early in the anime adaptation.
* BookEnds: The manga starts with showing the births, in the same year, of Fersen, Marie Antoinette and Oscar, and ends with a page-wide panel with Fersen's body and the words "On September 4, 1755, in Sweden, Hans Axel von Fersen was born. The following November 2, in Austria, Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne was born in Austria. The following December 25, in France, Oscar François de Jarjayes was born in France".
* BreakoutCharacter: The manga was originally intended to focus on Marie Antoinette, with Oscar as a supporting cast member, and hence the story arc of the manga begins with Marie's birth and ends with her death. Oscar became so popular with readers that she quickly took over the focus of the story, and other adaptations of the work focus on her as the main character from the start. In particular, the anime begins with the birth of ''Oscar.''
* BreakTheCutie: Oscar, Rosalie, André, Marie Antoinette, Fersen, Charlotte as a particularly tragic example... most of the cast, really.
* BuryYourGays: Averted! [[spoiler:Maybe even inverted, as the at-least-bisexual Rosalie is the only member of the main cast to survive the last few episodes. She's in a relationship with IntrepidReporter Bernard, but there's still some feeling for Oscar.]]
* ChildhoodFriendRomance: Oscar and André.
* ColonelBadass: Oscar, as a captain in the Military Household, is rank equivalent to a Colonel's: while she commanded a company, Household regiments were effectively oversized brigades, with companies actually being regiment-sized and captains being the equivalent of regular army colonels.
** TheBrigadier: At one point, Oscar is promoted to colonel of the Gards du Corps regiment, that, in regular army ranks, translates to brigadier general. She keeps the rank even she moves to the French Guards and commands a company (again, regiment-sized).
* ComeToGawk
* CostumePorn: Which actually borders on ShownTheirWork. Many of the outfits were that elaborate in RealLife.
* CripplingTheCompetition: Oscar shoots a guy's gun hand in a duel, as this is the only way she can punish him for shooting a peasant boy in cold blood.
* {{Crossdresser}}: Oscar
* DanBrowned: In-universe, Cardinal Rohan displaying a letter from 'Marie-Antoinette du France' to the King. By convention, royalty only use first names in signatures and Rohan belonged to a family that should've known this. This one actually happened, too.
** Real examples, however, exist. For example, Marie Antoinette is consistently referred to as Antoinette wherever she goes, even in her homeland of Austria. Problem is her Austrian name is Maria Antonia, and the ''Tricolore'' flag was first created in 1790 by fusing the flag of Paris (two vertical blue and red stripes) with the white from the Royal Standard, yet the anime has it flown ''backwards'' by the citizens of Paris even before the Storming of the Bastille (the manga does this right, and notes its creation in 1790).
* DancesAndBalls
* DarkerAndEdgier: The manga had many moments of slapstick humor, often with traditional manga comedy expressions and symbols, and tended to use chibi drawings and starry eyes in some dramatic moments for added effect. Even late in the story as the Revolution was brewing into more and more violence there were still manga comedy art. The anime removes all this (and pretty much every joke) and what few humorous moments that remains is portrayed with realistic expressions. In addition the anime got a darker and gloomier (but gorgeous) art direction and some extra scenes of violence were thrown in. However averted in that the manga actually manages to be gorier and the anime even removes some open blood splatter in the final days of the Revolution and the ending is more in the lines of bittersweet with Allain being the ending narrator to the tale .
* DeathByDespair: [[spoiler: In the manga, the painter of Oscar's portrait find Oscar's Nanny dead in her bed, a few days after Andre and Oscar passed away. It has been stated often, earlier in the story, that she could not bear the death of her grandson and would die too.]]
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: This is pretty much inevitable when you're writing a historical drama set in the 18th Century.
** Severe homophobia is the norm, rather than the exception, and accusations of lesbianism hurt both Oscar and Marie Antoinette.
** The story doesn't gloss over the fact that upper-class girls were frequently married off as young teenagers -- or even preteens. Marie being lucky to have a husband in her age bracket is also touched upon, since many of these girls were married to much older men.
* DemotedToExtra: Poor Rosalie got this for being [[TheScrappy unpopular]] [[AmericansHateTingle among Japanese readers]].
* DidntSeeThatComing: A lot. For example, Marie Antoinette didn't see Jeanne Valois [[spoiler: successfully convincing the people that Marie was the culprit behind the Affair of the Diamond Necklace]], and was rather shocked by it. She ''could'' have seen it coming, had she not been sheltered by most of the court and madame Polignac had not convinced her to isolate herself from pretty much everyone who wasn't in her inner circle...
** Also, Jeanne and madame Polignac didn't expect to meet Rosalie at Versailles. This time they couldn't have possibly seen it coming: Jeanne knew Rosalie very well and expected her to remain in the slums of Paris as a working woman and had no knowledge of their mother's death, while madame Polignac, [[YouKilledMyFather who had accidentally run over their mother]] and [[TemptingFate told Rosalie to visit at Versailles if she wanted to complain]], couldn't possibly expect that, in the attempt to do just that, Rosalie would have befriended Oscar, who trained her to act as a lady and brought her in Versailles.
** Both Rosalie and madame Polignac didn't expect Rosalie to be [[spoiler: madame Polignac's illegitimate daughter from Jacques de Valois de Saint-Rémy, last descendant of the House of Valois]], and were rather shocked to find out: Rosalie when Andre discovered that [[spoiler: of all the women named Martin Gabrielle in the peerage, Yolande Martine Gabrielle de Polignac, nee de Polastron, was the right one]], madame Polignac when her daughter mentioned Rosalie's full name).
* DidntThinkThisThrough: A lot of characters end victim of this due to arrogance, but the Countess Du Barry takes the cake. Namely, engaging Marie Antoinette in a pissing match without realizing that, once the already 62-years old Louis XV would die, Marie Antoinette would be the queen and capable of dishing whatever revenge she wished. Ironically, her undoing is at the hands of the king's confessor, who convinces the ailing king to throw her out. She lampshades this later to Oscar.
** Cardinal Rohan did it ''big time'' due his attempts at getting in Marie Antoinette's good graces. Between Marie Antoinette being the daughter of Maria Theresa (who had very little tolerance for him and his womanizing ways), Antoinette having a personal grudge against him for both spreading rumours about her and talking bad of her mother, and her answers at his initial attempts he should have realized earlier that the letters given to him by Jeanne were fakes, especially given that they were signed "Marie Antoinette de France" (by convention, royalty only uses their given names when signing, and with the House of Rohan having ''prince étranger'' status he should have known). And yet he not only failed so, but got duped in the infamous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_diamond_necklace Affair of the Diamond Necklace]]. To be fair he ''did'' find strange the difference between the queen's actions and the tone of the letters, but Jeanne had him meet [[IdenticalStranger a perfect lookalike of the queen]] to confirm her story...
** Averted by Oscar: she does make a point of thinking ''everything'' through, and was able to pull a lot of crap (including ''holding the lover of king Louis XV at swordpoint'') and live to tell (not that she was stupid enough to do it) specifically ''because'' she quickly thought it through before pulling it.
*** Best showed by the pissing match between the countess Du Barry and Marie Antoinette (also the only time Oscar has to think it long enough that we immediately see what made her decide that way): at the start Oscar [[PassThePopcorn just wanted to enjoy the show]], and upon being forced to take sides she thought about the Du Barry being more powerful due being the king's lover, Marie Antoniette being the wife of the Dauphin (and thus both the future queen and, with the king's wife being long dead, the highest-ranking woman in the whole France), and the king already being rather old (he would live only two more years) before taking Marie Antoniette's side. After Marie Antoniette was forced to surrender and Du Barry [[RevengeByProxy tried to take revenge on Oscar by framing her mother for murder]], Oscar spelled it out loud to the countess, [[OhCrap causing her to realize she didn't think it though before engaging in a pissing match with the future queen]] and ''[[CrowningMomentOfAwesome getting away with holding her at swordpoint in her own apartments]]''.
* DiedHappilyEverAfter: [[spoiler: When Oscar is fatally shot, she is smiling- because she sees that Andre- who had been fatally shot himself as well the previous day- had come back from above in order to bring her home. After they both die, they go retrieve Andre's grandmother, who also dies smiling]].
* DistantFinale
* DistractedByTheLuxury: Justified, since the ring given to Marie is also meant to be a memento from her mother.
* DoggedNiceGuy: Louis XVI is presented this way, although in RealLife is feelings towards Marie are more ambiguous. The NiceGuy part also denotes his indecisiveness as a ruler.
* DownerEnding: It's a historical drama set within the context of the UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. ''Of course'' it's got one of these! About half of it is a ForegoneConclusion.
* DramaticWind: So much
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Charlotte, Dianne (Alain's sister), Jeanne.]]
** In the manga, [[spoiler: André almost goes through with it, when he poisons Oscar's wine and plans to kill himself afterwards.]]
* DrowningMySorrows: Jeanne takes to drinking vodka by the bottle after the Affair of the Necklace plays out. Oscar is also seen surrounded by empty wine bottles now and then.
* DutchAngle: A highly distinctive element of the directorial style of Creator/OsamuDezaki, who directed from episode 20 onwards. Often used multiple times during a scene. Borders on overuse, depending on your taste.
* ElitesAreMoreGlamorous: Most of the pre-Revolution regiments featured (and all the named ones: Gardes du Corps du Roi, [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Gardes Suisse]], Gardes Françaises, Royal-Allemand, Royal Suédois, Royal-Cravate, [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Salis-Samade]] and La Fere) are considered elite. Goes double for Oscar's units: in the Gardes du Corps Oscar enrolled into (and later commanded the) Compagnie Ecossaise (Scots Company, so called due originally being composed by Scots emigrates), the elite among the Gardes du Corps, while in the Gardes Françaises (''the'' elite infantry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Maison Militaire) Oscar commands a grenatier company (by that time grenatiers had ceased to be grenade-armed infantry and were elite infantry).
** Special mention goes to the [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Swiss regiment Salis-Samade]]: some of their men, detached to reinforce the Bastille, are those who [[spoiler: [[HeroKiller killed Oscar]]]].
* ErmineCapeEffect: Marie Antoinette's dresses are rarely ever plain, even by royal standards. To be sure, [[JustifiedTrope the pageantry and ritual was half the ''point'' of Versailles and the clothes were a big piece of that]]. Blame Louis XIV.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: considering Robespierre and Saint Just as villains, happens in the manga at Marie's trial: when Hebért accuses her of incest, Robespierre berates him for sullying the Revolution with the charge and Saint Just entertains with the image of executing him (historically, Hebért would give them an excuse, getting executed as a thief).
** In terms of wastefulness, Marie Antoniette compared to the Du Barry: where the Du Barry cared only of showing off her power with loads and loads of jewels and expensive clothes without a care for the expense (doing a lot more than Marie Antoniette to bankrupt France in the process), Marie, even before realizing how much she was wasting, would ''always'' ask the price, and refused to buy the infamous diamond necklace (originally created specifically for Du Barry) because for its price you could build and equip a ''warship''.
* EvenTheGirlsWantHer: Oh, Oscar...
* EverythingsBetterWithPrincesses: Marie is so WrongGenreSavvy that she acts as though this trope applies to her no matter what, which is where a lot of the {{Irony}} in the series comes from.
* EverythingsBetterWithSparkles: BishieSparkle being just one of many types this shows uses.
* EvilMatriarch: Madame de Polignac.
* EyeScream: [[spoiler: André loses vision in his left eye in very messy circumstances. When he died, he had also lost half the sight of his remaining one.]]
* EyepatchOfPower: [[spoiler: André]].
* FacelessMasses: Grayed Colored Masses.
* FlowerMotifs: Even on dresses!
** Some of the female characters are represented by roses: Oscar is the white rose, symbol of purity and innocence, made red at the end of her life by both finding true love and her own blood; Marie Antoinette, dominated by the search for true love, is the red rose; Rosalie is the pink rose, symbol of either gratitude or youth, desire and energy depending on the shade; Madame de Polignac is the yellow rose, expressing both friendship, jealousy, and the deepest of both love and betrayal; her daughter Charlotte, innocent even beyond Oscar herself, is holding a white rose before falling to her death; Jeanne, finally, is the black rose of hate and death.
* ForegoneConclusion: The entire series is based on the life of Marie Antoinette...and takes pains to remind the viewer from time to time about the tragic course of her life.
* {{Foreshadowing}}: Some later events gets warnings. The most important foreshadowings are Marie Antoinette accidentally staining her marriage contract (something that was considered ill omen), foreshadowing the ForegoneConclusion, and Marie Antoinette naming the Salis-Samade and Royal Allemands regiments last when listing the regiments converging on Paris, foreshadowing the status as {{Hero Killer}}s they would aquire by killing [[spoiler: Andre]] (Royal Allemands) and [[spoiler: Oscar]] (Salis-Samade).
* GemEncrusted: The ermine on one of Marie's dresses, her bejeweled headdresses, and all the various dresses trimmed with pearls and jewels.
* GenreShift: Subtly done, and since the anime had two directors (Tadao Nagahama directed the first eighteen episodes, while Creator/OsamuDezaki directed all the episodes after that), the change was when it started; it was a historical type of account about Oscar enduring the endeavors of the court of Versailles and about Marie Antoinette's marriage and trials. Starting around the twentieth episode, the story became more politically charged and introspective and the focus shifted from Versailles to the people of Paris, the French military and, eventually, Oscar and Andre themselves.
* GorgeousPeriodDress: Naturally required in Versailles.
* TheGuardsMustBeCrazy: Surveillance at Versailles is so lax that, [[LampshadeHanging as Jeanne put it]], you only needed a sword and a hat to reach the queen.
** TruthInTelevision: Not only Versailles' guards were ''that'' lazy in RealLife, ''but the historical Jeanne Valois actually did it'' to try and become a friend of Marie Antoinette, who not only had more motivated guards following her but ''knew perfectly who Jeanne was'' and ignored her.
** Hilariously subverted by Oscar's company in the French Guards, who are very good at their job even without Oscar trying to catch lazy guards (and in fact take offense when she shows up by surprise) and ''caught Fersen trying to sneak out of Versailles after a night meeting with Marie Antoinette''. Had Oscar not showed up right as they were arresting him, Fersen would have been thrown in jail without much fanfare.
*** Then DoubleSubverted in the same scene when ''Oscar tells Fersen which gate was guarded by the laziest guards that night''.
* HammyHerald: The guys who announce the guests at Versailles.
* HeroicBSOD: Charlotte spends her last moments in this state, acting like a madwoman [[spoiler: until she kills herself by throwing self off a balcony]]. André also suffers a BSOD of sorts when he realizes [[spoiler: he's going blind, then Oscar tells him she intends to live and die as a man. He absolutely loses it, forcefully kissing her and ripping her shirt; after realizing what he almost did, he tearfully confesses his love and walks away.]]
* HistoricalBeautyUpdate: Everyone.
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Everyone who actually existed; it might be shorter to list those who do not belong to this category.
* HistoricalFiction
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Since the series is told from the perspective of UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette, many of her political enemies got this treatment, notably Madame du Barry and Louis Phillipe II (Duke d'Orleans).
* IdenticalStranger: Prostitute Nicole d'Oliva resembles Marie Antoinette so closely that the Lamottes are able to use her to impersonate her. This one is supposedly TruthInTelevision, too.
** In an [[{{Filler}} anime-only episode]], Duke Orléans also has a boy named Jean impersonate the Queen in a WigDressAccent disguise, and do it well enough to fool her maids and ladies-in-waiting.
* IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim: [[spoiler: Oscar refuses to kill Bernard "Black Knight" Chatêlet, the one to blame for André's EyeScream situation, because of this.]]
** Bernard says this has long since happened to Saint-Just. Saint-Just however doesn't care.
* IncurableCoughOfDeath: Oscar gets tuberculosis, but unusually for the trope, [[spoiler:she doesn't actually die from the cough (though she is informed that it's terminal) but in a far more suitably dramatic manner while storming the Bastille.]]
* IndecisiveDeconstruction: Of the defictionalized variety which is expected since Ikeda based much of the manga on a biography of Marie Antoinette and other historical sources and was a adorer of European culture. Many popular cliches of the French Revolution and even the Shojo and romance genre. For starters rather than overwhelming armies of the French monarchy, peasants are shown being massacred during the violence and riots of the revolution. Furthermore even in cases where the rebels have been able to defeat French forces on their own, they were armed with musket rifles, explosives, and other gunpowder weaponry-the very same tools that the military of the French nobility were using-rather than charging towards them in a brutal melee with farming tools and other improvised weapons. Also the leaders of the Revolution were from the aristocracy and even when the citizenry took the initiative on their own to fight the corruption of the monarch, they consisted mostly of the middle class (many whom were literate and even educated with degrees including high paying professions such as doctor and lawyer), with the lower class participants coming from a military or police background. In the end elements of the French army and scholarly class were shown as being essential in order to defeat the monarchy's army and reform the government. These are just a few and this is not counting in showing the consequences of court rumors, adulterous relationships, cross-dressing, and other tropes common in Shojo and romance stories.
* InThePastEveryoneWillBeFamous: Oscar, besides working with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, randomly bumps into Robespierre and Louis Saint-Juste on many occasions. The manga is even more egregious, and name-drops Napoleon for zero reason, and for only a few pages, in a later chapter.
** Mozart as a child even shows up in the first chapter of the manga.
** The Napoleon name-dropping is only gratuitous for those who haven't heard of the Napoleon-centric sequel to the manga, ''Eikou no Napoleon,'' which is admittedly obscure compared to this series. To those who do know of it, it is more of a case of ChekhovsGunman.
* IntrepidReporter: Bernard, after his CharacterDevelopment.
* IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy: Girodelle/Gerodere.
* KillEmAll: It's an anime based on the French Revolution that largely used real people. Marie Antoinette and her husband are given by that alone, as is Von Fersen. [[spoiler: Nonetheless, only Alain, Rosalie, and Bernard are left in the epilogue.]]
** Fersen's death is particularly egregious: he ''did'' survive the Revolution, meaning he could have been spared, but the manga took care of detailing his lynching in 1810 and has his mangled body as the very last page.
* KingIncognito: How Marie met Fersen.
* KnightTemplar: Robespierre, in the end. Then again, he's almost always portrayed like this in the media, so...
* KnightTemplarParent: Empress UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa
* KubrickStare: Due to the character design, it happens quite often. Lady Oscar herself is particularly fond of the stare.
* LadyOfWar: Oscar, overlapping with ActionGirl.
* [[LetThemDieHappy Let Them Pretend Happy]]: [[spoiler: André starts losing eyesight on his ''remaining'' eye, and at some point he stands next to Oscar's new portrait and starts giving a flowery false description of it to not let Oscar know his eyesight problems. Oscar then tearfully says the picture is as gorgeous as he says it is, not having the heart to tell André that she knows he's almost blind.]]
* LightFeminineAndDarkFeminine: Sisters Rosalie and Jeanne respectively.
* LimitedWardrobe: Most of the cast, especially commoners, though Oscar does go through three different uniforms.
* LoveDodecahedron: Girodelle->Oscar, Alain->Oscar, André<->Oscar, Rosalie->Oscar, Oscar->Rosalie to a much lesser extent, Oscar->Fersen, Fersen<->Marie Antoinette, Bernard->Rosalie, Rosalie->Bernard to an extent, Louis->Marie Antoinette, and there's ''something'' more than a guard/charge relationship between Oscar and Marie Antoinette as well.
* LoveTriangle: André/Oscar/Fersen/Marie Antoinette.
* LukeIAmYourFather: A gender swapped version, played straight: [[spoiler: Rosalie's adoptive mom died after being crashed by Mme de Polignac vehicle. Rosalie swears she will get revenge. The problem is, the answer to her [[YouKilledMyFather You Killed My Mother]] could be "I am your mother!" Rosalie is really the illegitimate child of Mme de Polignac, who had to abandon her to a servant.]]
* ManipulativeBitch: Jeanne de la Motte.
* UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa: As the Empress of Austria and the mother of...
* UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette: And how.
* MarketBasedTitle: The series was released overseas as ''Lady Oscar'', though the English-language releases retained the original title.
* {{Melodrama}}: If you could bottle and sell it, you'd make a fortune from just a few episodes.
* TheMistress: [=DuBarry=].
* MirrorUniverse[=/=]MagicMirror: Episode 7 from Vol.12 involves this.
* MustNotDieAVirgin:[[spoiler: Oscar and André have sex almost at the end of the manga and anime series, apparently losing their virginities to each other as well. ''Both'' die in the GrandFinale.]]
* NoSenseOfPersonalSpace: Countess Montclair is ''way'' to touchy-feely with Rosalie in the sidestory.
* OhCrap: We get a few, but the most notable are Oscar's when she realized Alain could actually defeat her in a DuelToTheDeath and Louis XVI's when he was told of the Storming of the Bastille.
* OjouRinglets: Marie.
* OnlySixFaces: The real reason Orlean's henchman was able to impersonate Antoinette. Also, Jeanne and [=DuBarry=] have ''exactly'' the same face, only Jeanne is a brunette and Du-Barry is blonde.
* TheOphelia: [[spoiler: Charlotte]], after being broken. ''Maybe'', [[spoiler: Dianne before her suicide.]]
* ParentalAbandonment: André is an orphan raised by his grandmother, who works as the Jarjayes caretaker. UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette is distanced from her mother UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa, who marries her off to young Louis as a pawn in her European politics; Louis Auguste himself is being raised by his grandfather the King and his aunts. Rosalie was abandoned as a baby by her 14-year-old mother and raised by a peasant along with another girl, Jeanne; said peasant, Nicole, dies at the beginning of the story [[spoiler: when run over by the carriage of Madame de Polignac... Rosalie's true mother]]. Bernard's mother dies when he is 5. Robespierre's mother dies when he is young. Averted- and how- by Oscar being outlived by ''both'' her parents. Downplayed by Alain's mother being alive until he is in his mid 20s.
* ParentsAsPeople: Oscar's father, and how.
* PassThePopcorn: When the countess Du Barry (lover of then-reigning king UsefulNotes/LouisXV) and Marie Antoinette engaged in their pissing match, Oscar, upon being asked which side she would take, started laughing and stated she would enjoy watching it (her friendship with the future queen would start only ''after'' the pissing match, and only after witnessing Marie Antoniette's reaction at being forced to surrender).
* PastelChalkedFreezeFrame: Any time anything really dramatic happens, it's even odds that this happens.
* PeekABangs: [[spoiler:André loses the use of one eye roughly halfway through the series, and subsequently covers it up with his hair for the remainder of the series.]] Perhaps unusually, he does experience problems with his sight as a result of this, which becomes a plot point later on.
* PimpedOutCape: Marie had the most, and her most pimped out was the one in the manga with the bejeweled ermine dress, because the cape was also similarly trimmed. But in the anime, it was just trimmed with thick, white fur (still enough to count as this trope of course). There is also the king's royal robes. And in the manga, Oscar even has a fur-trimmed cape she wears once. Rosalie either borrows that cape or has one of her own.
* PimpedOutDress: Plenty, given the setting, but given Marie's position, she gets the grandest dresses, even before she shows up in France (the dress trimmed with jewelry-tipped ermine, as seen on the page for PimpedOutDress.AnimeAndManga). Also nearly as grand are [=DuBarry's=] dresses, Rosalie's dresses, and Oscar's dress.
* PinkMeansFeminine: In the manga, Oscar's dress is a light pink.
* PleaseSpareHimMyLiege: Marie successfully saving André from execution.
* PraetorianGuard: Oscar serves her career in the Maison Militaire du Roi de France (Military Household of the King of France, the collection of regiments guarding the King, including the Musketeers of the Guard), first in the Garde Écossaise (lit. "Scots Guard", a company originally composed of Scots expatriates) company of the Garde du Corps (lit. "bodyguards", the senior cavalry regiment) and later as commander of a grenadier company in the Gardes Françaises (French Guards, the senior infantry regiment).
* PrettyInMink: Marie wears [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/marie_antoinette_rov_episode2_9227.jpg a few other furs in addition to her ermine capes]]. In the manga, Oscar even has a fur she wears once, and Rosalie has a cape, and [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rosalie_love_9787.jpg a jacket and muff]].
* PrincessClassic: ''Deconstructed'' through Marie.
* PrincessForADay: Oscar, the one evening she secretly went to the great ball dressed as a woman to dance with Count von Fersen.
** And darkly subverted in one of the anime filler episodes, when a boy named Jean dressed up and impersonated Marie Antoinette. (It turned out it was all part of one of the Duke of Orléans's elaborate schemes.) When Oscar outed Jean and Orléans feared he would reveal his involvement, he [[AlasPoorVillain coldly killed him]].
* PrivateMilitaryContractors: The regiments Royal Suedois, Royal Allemand, Salis-Samade and Gardes Suisses are composed by foreign mercenaries coming from Sweden (Royal Suedois), Germany (Royal Allemand) and Switzerland (Salis-Samade and Gardes Suisses). They are not the only foreign regiments in the army of the Ancien Régime, but they are the ones featured.
** Among them the Royal Suedois and Gardes Suisses are the most important, due Fersen being the commander of Royal Suedois and the Gardes Suisses being an Household regiment.
** Also, the Garde du Corps (Oscar's initial regiment) was created around the Gardes Écossaise, a unit of Scots soldiers entrusted with the safety of the King. While Scots had long stopped serving in the Garde du Corps, the first company (Oscar's command as a captain) was still known as Compagnie Écossaise due being the original unit around which the Garde du Corps was formed.
* QuiveringEyes: Antoinette.
* RaisedAsTheOppositeGender: Oscar, of course. Oddly for this trope, she is completely open about being female and few make anything of it. But that could be due to the fact that by the time Oscar meets Andre at age 7, she already knows she is a girl.
* ReallyDeadMontage
* RedHeadedStepchild: Madame du Barry consistently refers to Marie Antoinette as a redhead even though the latter is obviously a blonde. It's clearly meant to be an insult.
* RequisiteRoyalRegalia: Only occasionally worn, save for state occasions and particularly dramatic moments, like when Marie flung off her ermine cape when forced to speak to Madame [=DuBarry=], signifying Marie's torment at having to give in to a commoner. Of course she was actually giving in to the King, but that wasn't the point.
* RuleOfDrama
* RuleOfGlamorous
* SayMyName: '''"OSCAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!"'''
* SchoolgirlLesbians: Rosalie, possibly Charlotte.
* SequelHook: UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte shows up to provide one for ''Eikou no Napoleo-Eroica''.
* ShadowArchetype
* ShoujoDemographic
* ShownTheirWork: This manga is ''maniacally'' accurate, to the point of ''beating most history tests'', and the actual errors are extremely rare.
** ArtisticLicenseHistory: That said, Ikeda willingly altered the ages of François Augustin Reynier de Jarjayes, Rosalie and the Countess of Polignac and changed the name of the commander of the French Guards for narrative reasons. To explain: the RealLife de Jarjayes was only ten years older than Marie Antoinette, and the history needed him to have his SIXTH DAUGHTER born a few months after Marie Antoinette; the historical Rosalie was born on 19 March 1768 in Breteuil from a shoemaker, not in 1756 in Fontette (and was ''not'' Jeanne's sister); the historical countess of Polignac was born in 1749, yet the manga age her enough to be 15 and [[spoiler: be Rosalie's mother]] in 1756; and the historical commander of the French Guards in 1789 was the duke of Chatelet, but got his name altered in Boulainville to avoid confusion with original character Bernard Chatelet.
* SpoiledBrat: Little Charlotte, [[spoiler: until she goes mad]]
* StabTheSky: Such as when Oscar is pleading for André's life after Marie's horse accident.
* StandardFemaleGrabArea: [[spoiler:During Oscar and André's arguement, when André becomes very upset at her decision to live her entire life as a man he grabs her there, forcing her down. Justified, as this is less about Oscar going fail-tastic at fighting without reason, and more about Andre almost crossing the DespairEventHorizon when he comes to think she's throwing her life away, and Oscar being throughly shocked when unable to face a truth she has been avoiding for so long.]]
* StarCrossedLovers: Oscar and André. [[spoiler:They do get together, but André dies the day after he and Oscar consummate their relationship.]]
** Marie Antoinette is the Queen, Count Fersen is a diplomatic agent from Sweden.
* StaringThroughTheSword: Done at least three times by Oscar.
* SugarAndIcePersonality: Oscar starts out as being seen as this.
* SweetPollyOliver: Oscar, yet again.
* TomboyAndGirlyGirl: Tomboy career woman Oscar- though most people can tell she is a woman from the very beginning- and Girly Girl Rosalie. Antoinette started off as tomboyish when she was a little girl, but when she became the queen she turned into a very frou frou girly girl.
* TheTragicRose: It's even in the name.
* TrueBlueFemininity: In the anime, Oscar's dress color was changed from pink to blue. See also PinkMeansFeminine.
* {{Tsundere}}: Version of the Type A Tsundere. Oscar is known for her stoicism and fierce LadyOfWar attributes, but she also has a severe crush on Fersen and later falls deeply in love with her childhood friend Andre.
* UglyGuyHotWife: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He's more pudgy and plain-looking than strictly ugly, though; in this series, no one is a {{Gonk}}.
* UnsettlingGenderReveal:
** Marie, when she meets Oscar. Repeated with Rosalie.
** The Duke of Orleans [[InvokedTrope tries to do this]] to the king and the prince in a {{Filler}} storyline in the show. They get a teenage boy to [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/princess_marie_imposter_5162.jpg dress up like Marie and impersonate her]], so that he marries the prince instead, thus creating a huge scandal.
* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom: The Duke of Orleans is this for the aristocracy. He styles himself as a liberal thinker, lets revolutionaries gather at his mansion, and secretly feeds discontent against Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The Duke's goal is to gather enough popular support to become King of France, but the factions he supports go on to entirely abolish the First and Second Estates, destroy the Bourbon dynasty, and found the French Republic.
* UptownGirl: Oscar is a noblewoman, André is a commoner.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: Lots of those, specially Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Bernard before his CharacterDevelopment.
* WhamLine: The line below appears after things have started going to hell and changes the entire relationship between [[spoiler: Oscar]] and [[spoiler: Andre]].
--> [[spoiler: Oscar]]: I love you.
* WheelOFeet: In the manga.
* WhyCouldntYouBeDifferent
* WigDressAccent: In an anime only arc, the Duke of Orleans plots to ruin the marriage by having a boy show up in Marie's place. The boy, Jean, already looks a lot like Marie, so the addition of a wig really isn't much of a stretch.
* WiseBeyondTheirYears: The new Dauphin, Louis Joseph, was a nice and sweet kid. [[spoiler: Too bad he also was TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth]].
* TheXOfY
* YourCheatingHeart: According to the Duchesse de Polignac, this is actually the norm among French nobles, as they marry for convenience and not for love (Austrian nobles, however, are expected to stay loyal to each other). She in fact openly admits that both her and her husband have lovers, and Louis XVI and Oscar's parents are actually considered weird for ''not'' having lovers.
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[[quoteright:306:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rose_of_versailles_cover_art_01.jpg]]
''Berusaiyu no Bara'' (''The Rose of Versailles'') is a historical drama manga by Creator/RiyokoIkeda, depicting France from the last years of the Ancien Régime to the dawn of UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
If you were wondering about the scope of anime, this series places the bar well above your initial guess. Incorporating many French historical figures and the very real political nuances of the period, this series can be read either as a political (leftist ''and/or'' rightist) screed or as a heart-rending love story. Either way, it is more than worth your time.
A {{Takarazuka}} adaptation of this work is one of the most popular. There's also "''Lady Oscar''", an obscure LiveActionAdaptation by French director Creator/JacquesDemy generally considered to be SoOkayItsAverage. It is notable, however, in that it came out before the manga had ever been officially translated, resulting in famed translator Frederik Schodt having to scramble to make one for the production company. He did this by blazing through the manga and writing his translations right on the pages in pencil.
The manga is notable for being highly influential for the {{Shoujo}} category. Elements of it can be seen in shows like ''Anime/RevolutionaryGirlUtena'' and ''Anime/LeChevalierDEon''. In 2009 a live action series called ''Series/HakenNoOscar'' aired in Japan, which constantly references ''Rose of Versailles''.
While the anime and manga saw a wide release in much of the world during the 1980s under the name of ''Lady Oscar'', one notable exception was in English. The first two volumes were released in the early 80s as a teaching tool for Japanese to English, but aside from this release, the manga has never been released in English officially. Similarly, the anime went unlicensed in English for over 30 years before Right Stuf International finally picked it up in late 2012 for a subtitled-only release in Spring 2013. You can watch it legally [[http://www.viki.com/channels/10630-the-rose-of-versailles here]] or [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4U0FQ15BX8BdijOOBnhFsutAWdYEtNLH here.]]
Not to be confused with the Japanese PowerMetal band Music/{{Versailles}}, or {{BaraGenre}}.
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!!This show provides examples of:
* TheAbridgedSeries: ''WebAnimation/RoseOfVersaillesAbridged''
* ActionGirl: Oscar is as capable as any man in royal service, skilled in fencing, riding, and leading troops in combat.
* AdaptationDistillation: A couple of interesting side stories were removed in the anime adaptation and in addition many themes were oversimplified and outright altered such as feminism and Oscar's finding of a balance with it and traditional femininity as well as the complex love triangles around the characters (in particular Allain De Soisson's romances).
* AdaptationExpansion: The anime has more filler in the early series to fill out Oscar's childhood adventures.
* AdaptationNameChange: Perhaps to prevent confusion with her character Bernard Chatelet, Ikeda changed the name of the regimental commander of the French Guards from Duke of Chatelet to De Vouillet (no nobiliar title specified).
* [[AllThereInTheManual All There In The History Book]]: It's surprisingly faithful to actual historical events. Oscar's desertion in particular is based on ''the entire regiment of the French Guard deserting to not attack the people in Paris and showing up just in time to storm the Bastille'', with [[spoiler:[[ChekhovsGunman the minor character mentioned a couple times that take command after Oscar's death]] being the real life leader of the deserters during the storming.]]
* AlternativeForeignThemeSong: It's easier to count the countries that ''didn't'' use a new theme song. This is most likely due to the show receiving [[MarketBasedTitle a new title overseas]], ''Lady Oscar''. What gets funny is that the Japanese theme is suitably dramatic and somber, while many of its dubs chose cheerful and happy theme songs...despite the content of the show still concerning the tragic lives and deaths of people living through the French Revolution. Even more amazing? [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI8ds68C2m0 The actual French dub]] probably has the perkiest song of them all.
* AngryMobSong: The manga has a scene where a group of Jacobins are singing the Revolutionary version of ''Ça Ira'' and one in which soldiers march to the front singing the ''War Song for the Army of the Rhine'', now better known as ''La Marseillaise''. If you don't know why these songs qualify, just know that they are mentioned on this wiki in the AngryMobSong page for a reason.
* AnimationAnatomyAging
* ArrangedMarriage: Madame de Polignac tries to engage her kids ''twice'' to rich noble people, failing spectacularly and dramatically both times. At some point, Oscar's father attempts to engage her to Count Girodelle, but it also fails. Also, the main reason why Antoinette is the Queen of France is because of her arranged marriage to King Louis, staged by her mother.
* BadassArmy: The French Guards. All of the Household Regiments (each as big as a standard brigade of their specialty) are considered elite, but it's only when Oscar's regiment-sized company of French Guards grenatiers utterly [[CurbStompBattle curbstomps]] ''two'' regiments of the regular army (an unidentified infantry regiment and the [[EliteMooks Régiment de Royal-Allemand]]) that we get confirmation.
* TheBeautifulElite: At least when it comes to Versailles, but that was actually the point in the RealLife version.
** The Gards du Corps are considered the elite cavalry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Royal Household, and are universally beautiful. This even gets [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] by many characters whose reaction to find out Oscar is in that regiment is to admit they should have guessed it from her looks (this number includes ''Fersen''), Bernard (who compares them to good-looking dolls), and Girodelle (who flat-out admits that, having been accepted in the regiment, he ''has'' to be beautiful).
* BeautyBrainsAndBrawn: Male version
** Beauty: Hans Axel Von Fersen
** Brains: Bernard Chatelet
** Brawn: Alain de Soissons
** ... And Andre Grandier has all three!
* BetaCouple: Rosalie and Bernard. Jeanne and Nicolas. Louise and Renier.
* {{Bifauxnen}}: Oscar, of course, though she stays slightly more on the female side thanks to the shape of her face and eyes. She provides the page picture for the trope, and she's also very likely the TropeCodifier.
* BigEater: Oscar says André is one of these.
* BishieSparkle: Constantly.
* {{Bishonen}}: Even UsefulNotes/MaximilienRobespierre is drawn as a ''very'' handsome guy in his first apparitions.
** Which is TruthInTelevision, oddly. Robespierre was noted by contemporaries to be well-kept in RealLife.
* BiTheWay: Maybe, Rosalie and Oscar, depending on your interpretation of the feelings going either way.
* BlackAndWhiteMorality: Not Saint-Just himself, but this is certainly his view of the world when it comes to the nobility. To him, they are all inherently corrupt and wicked and have to be destroyed, even the ones supposedly on his side (echoing the sentiments of his historic self late in life). On the other hand, when Bernard points out in a conversation that killing everyone that he disagrees with makes him a hypocrite at best and no better than the nobles he hates at worse, Saint-Just in no way denies this. He said that as long as the revolution succeeds, he doesn't care what history thinks of him.
* BlastingItOutOfTheirHands: Oscar subverts this, because she's actually pissed at the guy, so she ''deliberately'' shoots his hand and cripples him to make sure he'll never get to shoot again. It's not like she didn't have a huge reason: she had seen him shoot a commoner child in the back just for kicks, despite Rosalie begging him to not do so.
* BloodlessCarnage: Used quite frequently, though a few brief instances of bloodshed can be seen early in the anime adaptation.
* BookEnds: The manga starts with showing the births, in the same year, of Fersen, Marie Antoinette and Oscar, and ends with a page-wide panel with Fersen's body and the words "On September 4, 1755, in Sweden, Hans Axel von Fersen was born. The following November 2, in Austria, Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne was born in Austria. The following December 25, in France, Oscar François de Jarjayes was born in France".
* BreakoutCharacter: The manga was originally intended to focus on Marie Antoinette, with Oscar as a supporting cast member, and hence the story arc of the manga begins with Marie's birth and ends with her death. Oscar became so popular with readers that she quickly took over the focus of the story, and other adaptations of the work focus on her as the main character from the start. In particular, the anime begins with the birth of ''Oscar.''
* BreakTheCutie: Oscar, Rosalie, André, Marie Antoinette, Fersen, Charlotte as a particularly tragic example... most of the cast, really.
* BuryYourGays: Averted! [[spoiler:Maybe even inverted, as the at-least-bisexual Rosalie is the only member of the main cast to survive the last few episodes. She's in a relationship with IntrepidReporter Bernard, but there's still some feeling for Oscar.]]
* ChildhoodFriendRomance: Oscar and André.
* ColonelBadass: Oscar, as a captain in the Military Household, is rank equivalent to a Colonel's: while she commanded a company, Household regiments were effectively oversized brigades, with companies actually being regiment-sized and captains being the equivalent of regular army colonels.
** TheBrigadier: At one point, Oscar is promoted to colonel of the Gards du Corps regiment, that, in regular army ranks, translates to brigadier general. She keeps the rank even she moves to the French Guards and commands a company (again, regiment-sized).
* ComeToGawk
* CostumePorn: Which actually borders on ShownTheirWork. Many of the outfits were that elaborate in RealLife.
* CripplingTheCompetition: Oscar shoots a guy's gun hand in a duel, as this is the only way she can punish him for shooting a peasant boy in cold blood.
* {{Crossdresser}}: Oscar
* DanBrowned: In-universe, Cardinal Rohan displaying a letter from 'Marie-Antoinette du France' to the King. By convention, royalty only use first names in signatures and Rohan belonged to a family that should've known this. This one actually happened, too.
** Real examples, however, exist. For example, Marie Antoinette is consistently referred to as Antoinette wherever she goes, even in her homeland of Austria. Problem is her Austrian name is Maria Antonia, and the ''Tricolore'' flag was first created in 1790 by fusing the flag of Paris (two vertical blue and red stripes) with the white from the Royal Standard, yet the anime has it flown ''backwards'' by the citizens of Paris even before the Storming of the Bastille (the manga does this right, and notes its creation in 1790).
* DancesAndBalls
* DarkerAndEdgier: The manga had many moments of slapstick humor, often with traditional manga comedy expressions and symbols, and tended to use chibi drawings and starry eyes in some dramatic moments for added effect. Even late in the story as the Revolution was brewing into more and more violence there were still manga comedy art. The anime removes all this (and pretty much every joke) and what few humorous moments that remains is portrayed with realistic expressions. In addition the anime got a darker and gloomier (but gorgeous) art direction and some extra scenes of violence were thrown in. However averted in that the manga actually manages to be gorier and the anime even removes some open blood splatter in the final days of the Revolution and the ending is more in the lines of bittersweet with Allain being the ending narrator to the tale .
* DeathByDespair: [[spoiler: In the manga, the painter of Oscar's portrait find Oscar's Nanny dead in her bed, a few days after Andre and Oscar passed away. It has been stated often, earlier in the story, that she could not bear the death of her grandson and would die too.]]
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: This is pretty much inevitable when you're writing a historical drama set in the 18th Century.
** Severe homophobia is the norm, rather than the exception, and accusations of lesbianism hurt both Oscar and Marie Antoinette.
** The story doesn't gloss over the fact that upper-class girls were frequently married off as young teenagers -- or even preteens. Marie being lucky to have a husband in her age bracket is also touched upon, since many of these girls were married to much older men.
* DemotedToExtra: Poor Rosalie got this for being [[TheScrappy unpopular]] [[AmericansHateTingle among Japanese readers]].
* DidntSeeThatComing: A lot. For example, Marie Antoinette didn't see Jeanne Valois [[spoiler: successfully convincing the people that Marie was the culprit behind the Affair of the Diamond Necklace]], and was rather shocked by it. She ''could'' have seen it coming, had she not been sheltered by most of the court and madame Polignac had not convinced her to isolate herself from pretty much everyone who wasn't in her inner circle...
** Also, Jeanne and madame Polignac didn't expect to meet Rosalie at Versailles. This time they couldn't have possibly seen it coming: Jeanne knew Rosalie very well and expected her to remain in the slums of Paris as a working woman and had no knowledge of their mother's death, while madame Polignac, [[YouKilledMyFather who had accidentally run over their mother]] and [[TemptingFate told Rosalie to visit at Versailles if she wanted to complain]], couldn't possibly expect that, in the attempt to do just that, Rosalie would have befriended Oscar, who trained her to act as a lady and brought her in Versailles.
** Both Rosalie and madame Polignac didn't expect Rosalie to be [[spoiler: madame Polignac's illegitimate daughter from Jacques de Valois de Saint-Rémy, last descendant of the House of Valois]], and were rather shocked to find out: Rosalie when Andre discovered that [[spoiler: of all the women named Martin Gabrielle in the peerage, Yolande Martine Gabrielle de Polignac, nee de Polastron, was the right one]], madame Polignac when her daughter mentioned Rosalie's full name).
* DidntThinkThisThrough: A lot of characters end victim of this due to arrogance, but the Countess Du Barry takes the cake. Namely, engaging Marie Antoinette in a pissing match without realizing that, once the already 62-years old Louis XV would die, Marie Antoinette would be the queen and capable of dishing whatever revenge she wished. Ironically, her undoing is at the hands of the king's confessor, who convinces the ailing king to throw her out. She lampshades this later to Oscar.
** Cardinal Rohan did it ''big time'' due his attempts at getting in Marie Antoinette's good graces. Between Marie Antoinette being the daughter of Maria Theresa (who had very little tolerance for him and his womanizing ways), Antoinette having a personal grudge against him for both spreading rumours about her and talking bad of her mother, and her answers at his initial attempts he should have realized earlier that the letters given to him by Jeanne were fakes, especially given that they were signed "Marie Antoinette de France" (by convention, royalty only uses their given names when signing, and with the House of Rohan having ''prince étranger'' status he should have known). And yet he not only failed so, but got duped in the infamous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_diamond_necklace Affair of the Diamond Necklace]]. To be fair he ''did'' find strange the difference between the queen's actions and the tone of the letters, but Jeanne had him meet [[IdenticalStranger a perfect lookalike of the queen]] to confirm her story...
** Averted by Oscar: she does make a point of thinking ''everything'' through, and was able to pull a lot of crap (including ''holding the lover of king Louis XV at swordpoint'') and live to tell (not that she was stupid enough to do it) specifically ''because'' she quickly thought it through before pulling it.
*** Best showed by the pissing match between the countess Du Barry and Marie Antoinette (also the only time Oscar has to think it long enough that we immediately see what made her decide that way): at the start Oscar [[PassThePopcorn just wanted to enjoy the show]], and upon being forced to take sides she thought about the Du Barry being more powerful due being the king's lover, Marie Antoniette being the wife of the Dauphin (and thus both the future queen and, with the king's wife being long dead, the highest-ranking woman in the whole France), and the king already being rather old (he would live only two more years) before taking Marie Antoniette's side. After Marie Antoniette was forced to surrender and Du Barry [[RevengeByProxy tried to take revenge on Oscar by framing her mother for murder]], Oscar spelled it out loud to the countess, [[OhCrap causing her to realize she didn't think it though before engaging in a pissing match with the future queen]] and ''[[CrowningMomentOfAwesome getting away with holding her at swordpoint in her own apartments]]''.
* DiedHappilyEverAfter: [[spoiler: When Oscar is fatally shot, she is smiling- because she sees that Andre- who had been fatally shot himself as well the previous day- had come back from above in order to bring her home. After they both die, they go retrieve Andre's grandmother, who also dies smiling]].
* DistantFinale
* DistractedByTheLuxury: Justified, since the ring given to Marie is also meant to be a memento from her mother.
* DoggedNiceGuy: Louis XVI is presented this way, although in RealLife is feelings towards Marie are more ambiguous. The NiceGuy part also denotes his indecisiveness as a ruler.
* DownerEnding: It's a historical drama set within the context of the UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. ''Of course'' it's got one of these! About half of it is a ForegoneConclusion.
* DramaticWind: So much
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Charlotte, Dianne (Alain's sister), Jeanne.]]
** In the manga, [[spoiler: André almost goes through with it, when he poisons Oscar's wine and plans to kill himself afterwards.]]
* DrowningMySorrows: Jeanne takes to drinking vodka by the bottle after the Affair of the Necklace plays out. Oscar is also seen surrounded by empty wine bottles now and then.
* DutchAngle: A highly distinctive element of the directorial style of Creator/OsamuDezaki, who directed from episode 20 onwards. Often used multiple times during a scene. Borders on overuse, depending on your taste.
* ElitesAreMoreGlamorous: Most of the pre-Revolution regiments featured (and all the named ones: Gardes du Corps du Roi, [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Gardes Suisse]], Gardes Françaises, Royal-Allemand, Royal Suédois, Royal-Cravate, [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Salis-Samade]] and La Fere) are considered elite. Goes double for Oscar's units: in the Gardes du Corps Oscar enrolled into (and later commanded the) Compagnie Ecossaise (Scots Company, so called due originally being composed by Scots emigrates), the elite among the Gardes du Corps, while in the Gardes Françaises (''the'' elite infantry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Maison Militaire) Oscar commands a grenatier company (by that time grenatiers had ceased to be grenade-armed infantry and were elite infantry).
** Special mention goes to the [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Swiss regiment Salis-Samade]]: some of their men, detached to reinforce the Bastille, are those who [[spoiler: [[HeroKiller killed Oscar]]]].
* ErmineCapeEffect: Marie Antoinette's dresses are rarely ever plain, even by royal standards. To be sure, [[JustifiedTrope the pageantry and ritual was half the ''point'' of Versailles and the clothes were a big piece of that]]. Blame Louis XIV.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: considering Robespierre and Saint Just as villains, happens in the manga at Marie's trial: when Hebért accuses her of incest, Robespierre berates him for sullying the Revolution with the charge and Saint Just entertains with the image of executing him (historically, Hebért would give them an excuse, getting executed as a thief).
** In terms of wastefulness, Marie Antoniette compared to the Du Barry: where the Du Barry cared only of showing off her power with loads and loads of jewels and expensive clothes without a care for the expense (doing a lot more than Marie Antoniette to bankrupt France in the process), Marie, even before realizing how much she was wasting, would ''always'' ask the price, and refused to buy the infamous diamond necklace (originally created specifically for Du Barry) because for its price you could build and equip a ''warship''.
* EvenTheGirlsWantHer: Oh, Oscar...
* EverythingsBetterWithPrincesses: Marie is so WrongGenreSavvy that she acts as though this trope applies to her no matter what, which is where a lot of the {{Irony}} in the series comes from.
* EverythingsBetterWithSparkles: BishieSparkle being just one of many types this shows uses.
* EvilMatriarch: Madame de Polignac.
* EyeScream: [[spoiler: André loses vision in his left eye in very messy circumstances. When he died, he had also lost half the sight of his remaining one.]]
* EyepatchOfPower: [[spoiler: André]].
* FacelessMasses: Grayed Colored Masses.
* FlowerMotifs: Even on dresses!
** Some of the female characters are represented by roses: Oscar is the white rose, symbol of purity and innocence, made red at the end of her life by both finding true love and her own blood; Marie Antoinette, dominated by the search for true love, is the red rose; Rosalie is the pink rose, symbol of either gratitude or youth, desire and energy depending on the shade; Madame de Polignac is the yellow rose, expressing both friendship, jealousy, and the deepest of both love and betrayal; her daughter Charlotte, innocent even beyond Oscar herself, is holding a white rose before falling to her death; Jeanne, finally, is the black rose of hate and death.
* ForegoneConclusion: The entire series is based on the life of Marie Antoinette...and takes pains to remind the viewer from time to time about the tragic course of her life.
* {{Foreshadowing}}: Some later events gets warnings. The most important foreshadowings are Marie Antoinette accidentally staining her marriage contract (something that was considered ill omen), foreshadowing the ForegoneConclusion, and Marie Antoinette naming the Salis-Samade and Royal Allemands regiments last when listing the regiments converging on Paris, foreshadowing the status as {{Hero Killer}}s they would aquire by killing [[spoiler: Andre]] (Royal Allemands) and [[spoiler: Oscar]] (Salis-Samade).
* GemEncrusted: The ermine on one of Marie's dresses, her bejeweled headdresses, and all the various dresses trimmed with pearls and jewels.
* GenreShift: Subtly done, and since the anime had two directors (Tadao Nagahama directed the first eighteen episodes, while Creator/OsamuDezaki directed all the episodes after that), the change was when it started; it was a historical type of account about Oscar enduring the endeavors of the court of Versailles and about Marie Antoinette's marriage and trials. Starting around the twentieth episode, the story became more politically charged and introspective and the focus shifted from Versailles to the people of Paris, the French military and, eventually, Oscar and Andre themselves.
* GorgeousPeriodDress: Naturally required in Versailles.
* TheGuardsMustBeCrazy: Surveillance at Versailles is so lax that, [[LampshadeHanging as Jeanne put it]], you only needed a sword and a hat to reach the queen.
** TruthInTelevision: Not only Versailles' guards were ''that'' lazy in RealLife, ''but the historical Jeanne Valois actually did it'' to try and become a friend of Marie Antoinette, who not only had more motivated guards following her but ''knew perfectly who Jeanne was'' and ignored her.
** Hilariously subverted by Oscar's company in the French Guards, who are very good at their job even without Oscar trying to catch lazy guards (and in fact take offense when she shows up by surprise) and ''caught Fersen trying to sneak out of Versailles after a night meeting with Marie Antoinette''. Had Oscar not showed up right as they were arresting him, Fersen would have been thrown in jail without much fanfare.
*** Then DoubleSubverted in the same scene when ''Oscar tells Fersen which gate was guarded by the laziest guards that night''.
* HammyHerald: The guys who announce the guests at Versailles.
* HeroicBSOD: Charlotte spends her last moments in this state, acting like a madwoman [[spoiler: until she kills herself by throwing self off a balcony]]. André also suffers a BSOD of sorts when he realizes [[spoiler: he's going blind, then Oscar tells him she intends to live and die as a man. He absolutely loses it, forcefully kissing her and ripping her shirt; after realizing what he almost did, he tearfully confesses his love and walks away.]]
* HistoricalBeautyUpdate: Everyone.
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Everyone who actually existed; it might be shorter to list those who do not belong to this category.
* HistoricalFiction
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Since the series is told from the perspective of UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette, many of her political enemies got this treatment, notably Madame du Barry and Louis Phillipe II (Duke d'Orleans).
* IdenticalStranger: Prostitute Nicole d'Oliva resembles Marie Antoinette so closely that the Lamottes are able to use her to impersonate her. This one is supposedly TruthInTelevision, too.
** In an [[{{Filler}} anime-only episode]], Duke Orléans also has a boy named Jean impersonate the Queen in a WigDressAccent disguise, and do it well enough to fool her maids and ladies-in-waiting.
* IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim: [[spoiler: Oscar refuses to kill Bernard "Black Knight" Chatêlet, the one to blame for André's EyeScream situation, because of this.]]
** Bernard says this has long since happened to Saint-Just. Saint-Just however doesn't care.
* IncurableCoughOfDeath: Oscar gets tuberculosis, but unusually for the trope, [[spoiler:she doesn't actually die from the cough (though she is informed that it's terminal) but in a far more suitably dramatic manner while storming the Bastille.]]
* IndecisiveDeconstruction: Of the defictionalized variety which is expected since Ikeda based much of the manga on a biography of Marie Antoinette and other historical sources and was a adorer of European culture. Many popular cliches of the French Revolution and even the Shojo and romance genre. For starters rather than overwhelming armies of the French monarchy, peasants are shown being massacred during the violence and riots of the revolution. Furthermore even in cases where the rebels have been able to defeat French forces on their own, they were armed with musket rifles, explosives, and other gunpowder weaponry-the very same tools that the military of the French nobility were using-rather than charging towards them in a brutal melee with farming tools and other improvised weapons. Also the leaders of the Revolution were from the aristocracy and even when the citizenry took the initiative on their own to fight the corruption of the monarch, they consisted mostly of the middle class (many whom were literate and even educated with degrees including high paying professions such as doctor and lawyer), with the lower class participants coming from a military or police background. In the end elements of the French army and scholarly class were shown as being essential in order to defeat the monarchy's army and reform the government. These are just a few and this is not counting in showing the consequences of court rumors, adulterous relationships, cross-dressing, and other tropes common in Shojo and romance stories.
* InThePastEveryoneWillBeFamous: Oscar, besides working with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, randomly bumps into Robespierre and Louis Saint-Juste on many occasions. The manga is even more egregious, and name-drops Napoleon for zero reason, and for only a few pages, in a later chapter.
** Mozart as a child even shows up in the first chapter of the manga.
** The Napoleon name-dropping is only gratuitous for those who haven't heard of the Napoleon-centric sequel to the manga, ''Eikou no Napoleon,'' which is admittedly obscure compared to this series. To those who do know of it, it is more of a case of ChekhovsGunman.
* IntrepidReporter: Bernard, after his CharacterDevelopment.
* IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy: Girodelle/Gerodere.
* KillEmAll: It's an anime based on the French Revolution that largely used real people. Marie Antoinette and her husband are given by that alone, as is Von Fersen. [[spoiler: Nonetheless, only Alain, Rosalie, and Bernard are left in the epilogue.]]
** Fersen's death is particularly egregious: he ''did'' survive the Revolution, meaning he could have been spared, but the manga took care of detailing his lynching in 1810 and has his mangled body as the very last page.
* KingIncognito: How Marie met Fersen.
* KnightTemplar: Robespierre, in the end. Then again, he's almost always portrayed like this in the media, so...
* KnightTemplarParent: Empress UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa
* KubrickStare: Due to the character design, it happens quite often. Lady Oscar herself is particularly fond of the stare.
* LadyOfWar: Oscar, overlapping with ActionGirl.
* [[LetThemDieHappy Let Them Pretend Happy]]: [[spoiler: André starts losing eyesight on his ''remaining'' eye, and at some point he stands next to Oscar's new portrait and starts giving a flowery false description of it to not let Oscar know his eyesight problems. Oscar then tearfully says the picture is as gorgeous as he says it is, not having the heart to tell André that she knows he's almost blind.]]
* LightFeminineAndDarkFeminine: Sisters Rosalie and Jeanne respectively.
* LimitedWardrobe: Most of the cast, especially commoners, though Oscar does go through three different uniforms.
* LoveDodecahedron: Girodelle->Oscar, Alain->Oscar, André<->Oscar, Rosalie->Oscar, Oscar->Rosalie to a much lesser extent, Oscar->Fersen, Fersen<->Marie Antoinette, Bernard->Rosalie, Rosalie->Bernard to an extent, Louis->Marie Antoinette, and there's ''something'' more than a guard/charge relationship between Oscar and Marie Antoinette as well.
* LoveTriangle: André/Oscar/Fersen/Marie Antoinette.
* LukeIAmYourFather: A gender swapped version, played straight: [[spoiler: Rosalie's adoptive mom died after being crashed by Mme de Polignac vehicle. Rosalie swears she will get revenge. The problem is, the answer to her [[YouKilledMyFather You Killed My Mother]] could be "I am your mother!" Rosalie is really the illegitimate child of Mme de Polignac, who had to abandon her to a servant.]]
* ManipulativeBitch: Jeanne de la Motte.
* UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa: As the Empress of Austria and the mother of...
* UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette: And how.
* MarketBasedTitle: The series was released overseas as ''Lady Oscar'', though the English-language releases retained the original title.
* {{Melodrama}}: If you could bottle and sell it, you'd make a fortune from just a few episodes.
* TheMistress: [=DuBarry=].
* MirrorUniverse[=/=]MagicMirror: Episode 7 from Vol.12 involves this.
* MustNotDieAVirgin:[[spoiler: Oscar and André have sex almost at the end of the manga and anime series, apparently losing their virginities to each other as well. ''Both'' die in the GrandFinale.]]
* NoSenseOfPersonalSpace: Countess Montclair is ''way'' to touchy-feely with Rosalie in the sidestory.
* OhCrap: We get a few, but the most notable are Oscar's when she realized Alain could actually defeat her in a DuelToTheDeath and Louis XVI's when he was told of the Storming of the Bastille.
* OjouRinglets: Marie.
* OnlySixFaces: The real reason Orlean's henchman was able to impersonate Antoinette. Also, Jeanne and [=DuBarry=] have ''exactly'' the same face, only Jeanne is a brunette and Du-Barry is blonde.
* TheOphelia: [[spoiler: Charlotte]], after being broken. ''Maybe'', [[spoiler: Dianne before her suicide.]]
* ParentalAbandonment: André is an orphan raised by his grandmother, who works as the Jarjayes caretaker. UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette is distanced from her mother UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa, who marries her off to young Louis as a pawn in her European politics; Louis Auguste himself is being raised by his grandfather the King and his aunts. Rosalie was abandoned as a baby by her 14-year-old mother and raised by a peasant along with another girl, Jeanne; said peasant, Nicole, dies at the beginning of the story [[spoiler: when run over by the carriage of Madame de Polignac... Rosalie's true mother]]. Bernard's mother dies when he is 5. Robespierre's mother dies when he is young. Averted- and how- by Oscar being outlived by ''both'' her parents. Downplayed by Alain's mother being alive until he is in his mid 20s.
* ParentsAsPeople: Oscar's father, and how.
* PassThePopcorn: When the countess Du Barry (lover of then-reigning king UsefulNotes/LouisXV) and Marie Antoinette engaged in their pissing match, Oscar, upon being asked which side she would take, started laughing and stated she would enjoy watching it (her friendship with the future queen would start only ''after'' the pissing match, and only after witnessing Marie Antoniette's reaction at being forced to surrender).
* PastelChalkedFreezeFrame: Any time anything really dramatic happens, it's even odds that this happens.
* PeekABangs: [[spoiler:André loses the use of one eye roughly halfway through the series, and subsequently covers it up with his hair for the remainder of the series.]] Perhaps unusually, he does experience problems with his sight as a result of this, which becomes a plot point later on.
* PimpedOutCape: Marie had the most, and her most pimped out was the one in the manga with the bejeweled ermine dress, because the cape was also similarly trimmed. But in the anime, it was just trimmed with thick, white fur (still enough to count as this trope of course). There is also the king's royal robes. And in the manga, Oscar even has a fur-trimmed cape she wears once. Rosalie either borrows that cape or has one of her own.
* PimpedOutDress: Plenty, given the setting, but given Marie's position, she gets the grandest dresses, even before she shows up in France (the dress trimmed with jewelry-tipped ermine, as seen on the page for PimpedOutDress.AnimeAndManga). Also nearly as grand are [=DuBarry's=] dresses, Rosalie's dresses, and Oscar's dress.
* PinkMeansFeminine: In the manga, Oscar's dress is a light pink.
* PleaseSpareHimMyLiege: Marie successfully saving André from execution.
* PraetorianGuard: Oscar serves her career in the Maison Militaire du Roi de France (Military Household of the King of France, the collection of regiments guarding the King, including the Musketeers of the Guard), first in the Garde Écossaise (lit. "Scots Guard", a company originally composed of Scots expatriates) company of the Garde du Corps (lit. "bodyguards", the senior cavalry regiment) and later as commander of a grenadier company in the Gardes Françaises (French Guards, the senior infantry regiment).
* PrettyInMink: Marie wears [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/marie_antoinette_rov_episode2_9227.jpg a few other furs in addition to her ermine capes]]. In the manga, Oscar even has a fur she wears once, and Rosalie has a cape, and [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rosalie_love_9787.jpg a jacket and muff]].
* PrincessClassic: ''Deconstructed'' through Marie.
* PrincessForADay: Oscar, the one evening she secretly went to the great ball dressed as a woman to dance with Count von Fersen.
** And darkly subverted in one of the anime filler episodes, when a boy named Jean dressed up and impersonated Marie Antoinette. (It turned out it was all part of one of the Duke of Orléans's elaborate schemes.) When Oscar outed Jean and Orléans feared he would reveal his involvement, he [[AlasPoorVillain coldly killed him]].
* PrivateMilitaryContractors: The regiments Royal Suedois, Royal Allemand, Salis-Samade and Gardes Suisses are composed by foreign mercenaries coming from Sweden (Royal Suedois), Germany (Royal Allemand) and Switzerland (Salis-Samade and Gardes Suisses). They are not the only foreign regiments in the army of the Ancien Régime, but they are the ones featured.
** Among them the Royal Suedois and Gardes Suisses are the most important, due Fersen being the commander of Royal Suedois and the Gardes Suisses being an Household regiment.
** Also, the Garde du Corps (Oscar's initial regiment) was created around the Gardes Écossaise, a unit of Scots soldiers entrusted with the safety of the King. While Scots had long stopped serving in the Garde du Corps, the first company (Oscar's command as a captain) was still known as Compagnie Écossaise due being the original unit around which the Garde du Corps was formed.
* QuiveringEyes: Antoinette.
* RaisedAsTheOppositeGender: Oscar, of course. Oddly for this trope, she is completely open about being female and few make anything of it. But that could be due to the fact that by the time Oscar meets Andre at age 7, she already knows she is a girl.
* ReallyDeadMontage
* RedHeadedStepchild: Madame du Barry consistently refers to Marie Antoinette as a redhead even though the latter is obviously a blonde. It's clearly meant to be an insult.
* RequisiteRoyalRegalia: Only occasionally worn, save for state occasions and particularly dramatic moments, like when Marie flung off her ermine cape when forced to speak to Madame [=DuBarry=], signifying Marie's torment at having to give in to a commoner. Of course she was actually giving in to the King, but that wasn't the point.
* RuleOfDrama
* RuleOfGlamorous
* SayMyName: '''"OSCAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!"'''
* SchoolgirlLesbians: Rosalie, possibly Charlotte.
* SequelHook: UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte shows up to provide one for ''Eikou no Napoleo-Eroica''.
* ShadowArchetype
* ShoujoDemographic
* ShownTheirWork: This manga is ''maniacally'' accurate, to the point of ''beating most history tests'', and the actual errors are extremely rare.
** ArtisticLicenseHistory: That said, Ikeda willingly altered the ages of François Augustin Reynier de Jarjayes, Rosalie and the Countess of Polignac and changed the name of the commander of the French Guards for narrative reasons. To explain: the RealLife de Jarjayes was only ten years older than Marie Antoinette, and the history needed him to have his SIXTH DAUGHTER born a few months after Marie Antoinette; the historical Rosalie was born on 19 March 1768 in Breteuil from a shoemaker, not in 1756 in Fontette (and was ''not'' Jeanne's sister); the historical countess of Polignac was born in 1749, yet the manga age her enough to be 15 and [[spoiler: be Rosalie's mother]] in 1756; and the historical commander of the French Guards in 1789 was the duke of Chatelet, but got his name altered in Boulainville to avoid confusion with original character Bernard Chatelet.
* SpoiledBrat: Little Charlotte, [[spoiler: until she goes mad]]
* StabTheSky: Such as when Oscar is pleading for André's life after Marie's horse accident.
* StandardFemaleGrabArea: [[spoiler:During Oscar and André's arguement, when André becomes very upset at her decision to live her entire life as a man he grabs her there, forcing her down. Justified, as this is less about Oscar going fail-tastic at fighting without reason, and more about Andre almost crossing the DespairEventHorizon when he comes to think she's throwing her life away, and Oscar being throughly shocked when unable to face a truth she has been avoiding for so long.]]
* StarCrossedLovers: Oscar and André. [[spoiler:They do get together, but André dies the day after he and Oscar consummate their relationship.]]
** Marie Antoinette is the Queen, Count Fersen is a diplomatic agent from Sweden.
* StaringThroughTheSword: Done at least three times by Oscar.
* SugarAndIcePersonality: Oscar starts out as being seen as this.
* SweetPollyOliver: Oscar, yet again.
* TomboyAndGirlyGirl: Tomboy career woman Oscar- though most people can tell she is a woman from the very beginning- and Girly Girl Rosalie. Antoinette started off as tomboyish when she was a little girl, but when she became the queen she turned into a very frou frou girly girl.
* TheTragicRose: It's even in the name.
* TrueBlueFemininity: In the anime, Oscar's dress color was changed from pink to blue. See also PinkMeansFeminine.
* {{Tsundere}}: Version of the Type A Tsundere. Oscar is known for her stoicism and fierce LadyOfWar attributes, but she also has a severe crush on Fersen and later falls deeply in love with her childhood friend Andre.
* UglyGuyHotWife: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He's more pudgy and plain-looking than strictly ugly, though; in this series, no one is a {{Gonk}}.
* UnsettlingGenderReveal:
** Marie, when she meets Oscar. Repeated with Rosalie.
** The Duke of Orleans [[InvokedTrope tries to do this]] to the king and the prince in a {{Filler}} storyline in the show. They get a teenage boy to [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/princess_marie_imposter_5162.jpg dress up like Marie and impersonate her]], so that he marries the prince instead, thus creating a huge scandal.
* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom: The Duke of Orleans is this for the aristocracy. He styles himself as a liberal thinker, lets revolutionaries gather at his mansion, and secretly feeds discontent against Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The Duke's goal is to gather enough popular support to become King of France, but the factions he supports go on to entirely abolish the First and Second Estates, destroy the Bourbon dynasty, and found the French Republic.
* UptownGirl: Oscar is a noblewoman, André is a commoner.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: Lots of those, specially Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Bernard before his CharacterDevelopment.
* WhamLine: The line below appears after things have started going to hell and changes the entire relationship between [[spoiler: Oscar]] and [[spoiler: Andre]].
--> [[spoiler: Oscar]]: I love you.
* WheelOFeet: In the manga.
* WhyCouldntYouBeDifferent
* WigDressAccent: In an anime only arc, the Duke of Orleans plots to ruin the marriage by having a boy show up in Marie's place. The boy, Jean, already looks a lot like Marie, so the addition of a wig really isn't much of a stretch.
* WiseBeyondTheirYears: The new Dauphin, Louis Joseph, was a nice and sweet kid. [[spoiler: Too bad he also was TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth]].
* TheXOfY
* YourCheatingHeart: According to the Duchesse de Polignac, this is actually the norm among French nobles, as they marry for convenience and not for love (Austrian nobles, however, are expected to stay loyal to each other). She in fact openly admits that both her and her husband have lovers, and Louis XVI and Oscar's parents are actually considered weird for ''not'' having lovers.
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[[quoteright:306:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rose_of_versailles_cover_art_01.jpg]]
''Berusaiyu no Bara'' (''The Rose of Versailles'') is a historical drama manga by Creator/RiyokoIkeda, depicting France from the last years of the Ancien Régime to the dawn of UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
If you were wondering about the scope of anime, this series places the bar well above your initial guess. Incorporating many French historical figures and the very real political nuances of the period, this series can be read either as a political (leftist ''and/or'' rightist) screed or as a heart-rending love story. Either way, it is more than worth your time.
A {{Takarazuka}} adaptation of this work is one of the most popular. There's also "''Lady Oscar''", an obscure LiveActionAdaptation by French director Creator/JacquesDemy generally considered to be SoOkayItsAverage. It is notable, however, in that it came out before the manga had ever been officially translated, resulting in famed translator Frederik Schodt having to scramble to make one for the production company. He did this by blazing through the manga and writing his translations right on the pages in pencil.
The manga is notable for being highly influential for the {{Shoujo}} category. Elements of it can be seen in shows like ''Anime/RevolutionaryGirlUtena'' and ''Anime/LeChevalierDEon''. In 2009 a live action series called ''Series/HakenNoOscar'' aired in Japan, which constantly references ''Rose of Versailles''.
While the anime and manga saw a wide release in much of the world during the 1980s under the name of ''Lady Oscar'', one notable exception was in English. The first two volumes were released in the early 80s as a teaching tool for Japanese to English, but aside from this release, the manga has never been released in English officially. Similarly, the anime went unlicensed in English for over 30 years before Right Stuf International finally picked it up in late 2012 for a subtitled-only release in Spring 2013. You can watch it legally [[http://www.viki.com/channels/10630-the-rose-of-versailles here]] or [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4U0FQ15BX8BdijOOBnhFsutAWdYEtNLH here.]]
Not to be confused with the Japanese PowerMetal band Music/{{Versailles}}, or {{BaraGenre}}.
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!!This show provides examples of:
* TheAbridgedSeries: ''WebAnimation/RoseOfVersaillesAbridged''
* ActionGirl: Oscar is as capable as any man in royal service, skilled in fencing, riding, and leading troops in combat.
* AdaptationDistillation: A couple of interesting side stories were removed in the anime adaptation and in addition many themes were oversimplified and outright altered such as feminism and Oscar's finding of a balance with it and traditional femininity as well as the complex love triangles around the characters (in particular Allain De Soisson's romances).
* AdaptationExpansion: The anime has more filler in the early series to fill out Oscar's childhood adventures.
* AdaptationNameChange: Perhaps to prevent confusion with her character Bernard Chatelet, Ikeda changed the name of the regimental commander of the French Guards from Duke of Chatelet to De Vouillet (no nobiliar title specified).
* [[AllThereInTheManual All There In The History Book]]: It's surprisingly faithful to actual historical events. Oscar's desertion in particular is based on ''the entire regiment of the French Guard deserting to not attack the people in Paris and showing up just in time to storm the Bastille'', with [[spoiler:[[ChekhovsGunman the minor character mentioned a couple times that take command after Oscar's death]] being the real life leader of the deserters during the storming.]]
* AlternativeForeignThemeSong: It's easier to count the countries that ''didn't'' use a new theme song. This is most likely due to the show receiving [[MarketBasedTitle a new title overseas]], ''Lady Oscar''. What gets funny is that the Japanese theme is suitably dramatic and somber, while many of its dubs chose cheerful and happy theme songs...despite the content of the show still concerning the tragic lives and deaths of people living through the French Revolution. Even more amazing? [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI8ds68C2m0 The actual French dub]] probably has the perkiest song of them all.
* AngryMobSong: The manga has a scene where a group of Jacobins are singing the Revolutionary version of ''Ça Ira'' and one in which soldiers march to the front singing the ''War Song for the Army of the Rhine'', now better known as ''La Marseillaise''. If you don't know why these songs qualify, just know that they are mentioned on this wiki in the AngryMobSong page for a reason.
* AnimationAnatomyAging
* ArrangedMarriage: Madame de Polignac tries to engage her kids ''twice'' to rich noble people, failing spectacularly and dramatically both times. At some point, Oscar's father attempts to engage her to Count Girodelle, but it also fails. Also, the main reason why Antoinette is the Queen of France is because of her arranged marriage to King Louis, staged by her mother.
* BadassArmy: The French Guards. All of the Household Regiments (each as big as a standard brigade of their specialty) are considered elite, but it's only when Oscar's regiment-sized company of French Guards grenatiers utterly [[CurbStompBattle curbstomps]] ''two'' regiments of the regular army (an unidentified infantry regiment and the [[EliteMooks Régiment de Royal-Allemand]]) that we get confirmation.
* TheBeautifulElite: At least when it comes to Versailles, but that was actually the point in the RealLife version.
** The Gards du Corps are considered the elite cavalry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Royal Household, and are universally beautiful. This even gets [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] by many characters whose reaction to find out Oscar is in that regiment is to admit they should have guessed it from her looks (this number includes ''Fersen''), Bernard (who compares them to good-looking dolls), and Girodelle (who flat-out admits that, having been accepted in the regiment, he ''has'' to be beautiful).
* BeautyBrainsAndBrawn: Male version
** Beauty: Hans Axel Von Fersen
** Brains: Bernard Chatelet
** Brawn: Alain de Soissons
** ... And Andre Grandier has all three!
* BetaCouple: Rosalie and Bernard. Jeanne and Nicolas. Louise and Renier.
* {{Bifauxnen}}: Oscar, of course, though she stays slightly more on the female side thanks to the shape of her face and eyes. She provides the page picture for the trope, and she's also very likely the TropeCodifier.
* BigEater: Oscar says André is one of these.
* BishieSparkle: Constantly.
* {{Bishonen}}: Even UsefulNotes/MaximilienRobespierre is drawn as a ''very'' handsome guy in his first apparitions.
** Which is TruthInTelevision, oddly. Robespierre was noted by contemporaries to be well-kept in RealLife.
* BiTheWay: Maybe, Rosalie and Oscar, depending on your interpretation of the feelings going either way.
* BlackAndWhiteMorality: Not Saint-Just himself, but this is certainly his view of the world when it comes to the nobility. To him, they are all inherently corrupt and wicked and have to be destroyed, even the ones supposedly on his side (echoing the sentiments of his historic self late in life). On the other hand, when Bernard points out in a conversation that killing everyone that he disagrees with makes him a hypocrite at best and no better than the nobles he hates at worse, Saint-Just in no way denies this. He said that as long as the revolution succeeds, he doesn't care what history thinks of him.
* BlastingItOutOfTheirHands: Oscar subverts this, because she's actually pissed at the guy, so she ''deliberately'' shoots his hand and cripples him to make sure he'll never get to shoot again. It's not like she didn't have a huge reason: she had seen him shoot a commoner child in the back just for kicks, despite Rosalie begging him to not do so.
* BloodlessCarnage: Used quite frequently, though a few brief instances of bloodshed can be seen early in the anime adaptation.
* BookEnds: The manga starts with showing the births, in the same year, of Fersen, Marie Antoinette and Oscar, and ends with a page-wide panel with Fersen's body and the words "On September 4, 1755, in Sweden, Hans Axel von Fersen was born. The following November 2, in Austria, Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne was born in Austria. The following December 25, in France, Oscar François de Jarjayes was born in France".
* BreakoutCharacter: The manga was originally intended to focus on Marie Antoinette, with Oscar as a supporting cast member, and hence the story arc of the manga begins with Marie's birth and ends with her death. Oscar became so popular with readers that she quickly took over the focus of the story, and other adaptations of the work focus on her as the main character from the start. In particular, the anime begins with the birth of ''Oscar.''
* BreakTheCutie: Oscar, Rosalie, André, Marie Antoinette, Fersen, Charlotte as a particularly tragic example... most of the cast, really.
* BuryYourGays: Averted! [[spoiler:Maybe even inverted, as the at-least-bisexual Rosalie is the only member of the main cast to survive the last few episodes. She's in a relationship with IntrepidReporter Bernard, but there's still some feeling for Oscar.]]
* ChildhoodFriendRomance: Oscar and André.
* ColonelBadass: Oscar, as a captain in the Military Household, is rank equivalent to a Colonel's: while she commanded a company, Household regiments were effectively oversized brigades, with companies actually being regiment-sized and captains being the equivalent of regular army colonels.
** TheBrigadier: At one point, Oscar is promoted to colonel of the Gards du Corps regiment, that, in regular army ranks, translates to brigadier general. She keeps the rank even she moves to the French Guards and commands a company (again, regiment-sized).
* ComeToGawk
* CostumePorn: Which actually borders on ShownTheirWork. Many of the outfits were that elaborate in RealLife.
* CripplingTheCompetition: Oscar shoots a guy's gun hand in a duel, as this is the only way she can punish him for shooting a peasant boy in cold blood.
* {{Crossdresser}}: Oscar
* DanBrowned: In-universe, Cardinal Rohan displaying a letter from 'Marie-Antoinette du France' to the King. By convention, royalty only use first names in signatures and Rohan belonged to a family that should've known this. This one actually happened, too.
** Real examples, however, exist. For example, Marie Antoinette is consistently referred to as Antoinette wherever she goes, even in her homeland of Austria. Problem is her Austrian name is Maria Antonia, and the ''Tricolore'' flag was first created in 1790 by fusing the flag of Paris (two vertical blue and red stripes) with the white from the Royal Standard, yet the anime has it flown ''backwards'' by the citizens of Paris even before the Storming of the Bastille (the manga does this right, and notes its creation in 1790).
* DancesAndBalls
* DarkerAndEdgier: The manga had many moments of slapstick humor, often with traditional manga comedy expressions and symbols, and tended to use chibi drawings and starry eyes in some dramatic moments for added effect. Even late in the story as the Revolution was brewing into more and more violence there were still manga comedy art. The anime removes all this (and pretty much every joke) and what few humorous moments that remains is portrayed with realistic expressions. In addition the anime got a darker and gloomier (but gorgeous) art direction and some extra scenes of violence were thrown in. However averted in that the manga actually manages to be gorier and the anime even removes some open blood splatter in the final days of the Revolution and the ending is more in the lines of bittersweet with Allain being the ending narrator to the tale .
* DeathByDespair: [[spoiler: In the manga, the painter of Oscar's portrait find Oscar's Nanny dead in her bed, a few days after Andre and Oscar passed away. It has been stated often, earlier in the story, that she could not bear the death of her grandson and would die too.]]
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: This is pretty much inevitable when you're writing a historical drama set in the 18th Century.
** Severe homophobia is the norm, rather than the exception, and accusations of lesbianism hurt both Oscar and Marie Antoinette.
** The story doesn't gloss over the fact that upper-class girls were frequently married off as young teenagers -- or even preteens. Marie being lucky to have a husband in her age bracket is also touched upon, since many of these girls were married to much older men.
* DemotedToExtra: Poor Rosalie got this for being [[TheScrappy unpopular]] [[AmericansHateTingle among Japanese readers]].
* DidntSeeThatComing: A lot. For example, Marie Antoinette didn't see Jeanne Valois [[spoiler: successfully convincing the people that Marie was the culprit behind the Affair of the Diamond Necklace]], and was rather shocked by it. She ''could'' have seen it coming, had she not been sheltered by most of the court and madame Polignac had not convinced her to isolate herself from pretty much everyone who wasn't in her inner circle...
** Also, Jeanne and madame Polignac didn't expect to meet Rosalie at Versailles. This time they couldn't have possibly seen it coming: Jeanne knew Rosalie very well and expected her to remain in the slums of Paris as a working woman and had no knowledge of their mother's death, while madame Polignac, [[YouKilledMyFather who had accidentally run over their mother]] and [[TemptingFate told Rosalie to visit at Versailles if she wanted to complain]], couldn't possibly expect that, in the attempt to do just that, Rosalie would have befriended Oscar, who trained her to act as a lady and brought her in Versailles.
** Both Rosalie and madame Polignac didn't expect Rosalie to be [[spoiler: madame Polignac's illegitimate daughter from Jacques de Valois de Saint-Rémy, last descendant of the House of Valois]], and were rather shocked to find out: Rosalie when Andre discovered that [[spoiler: of all the women named Martin Gabrielle in the peerage, Yolande Martine Gabrielle de Polignac, nee de Polastron, was the right one]], madame Polignac when her daughter mentioned Rosalie's full name).
* DidntThinkThisThrough: A lot of characters end victim of this due to arrogance, but the Countess Du Barry takes the cake. Namely, engaging Marie Antoinette in a pissing match without realizing that, once the already 62-years old Louis XV would die, Marie Antoinette would be the queen and capable of dishing whatever revenge she wished. Ironically, her undoing is at the hands of the king's confessor, who convinces the ailing king to throw her out. She lampshades this later to Oscar.
** Cardinal Rohan did it ''big time'' due his attempts at getting in Marie Antoinette's good graces. Between Marie Antoinette being the daughter of Maria Theresa (who had very little tolerance for him and his womanizing ways), Antoinette having a personal grudge against him for both spreading rumours about her and talking bad of her mother, and her answers at his initial attempts he should have realized earlier that the letters given to him by Jeanne were fakes, especially given that they were signed "Marie Antoinette de France" (by convention, royalty only uses their given names when signing, and with the House of Rohan having ''prince étranger'' status he should have known). And yet he not only failed so, but got duped in the infamous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_diamond_necklace Affair of the Diamond Necklace]]. To be fair he ''did'' find strange the difference between the queen's actions and the tone of the letters, but Jeanne had him meet [[IdenticalStranger a perfect lookalike of the queen]] to confirm her story...
** Averted by Oscar: she does make a point of thinking ''everything'' through, and was able to pull a lot of crap (including ''holding the lover of king Louis XV at swordpoint'') and live to tell (not that she was stupid enough to do it) specifically ''because'' she quickly thought it through before pulling it.
*** Best showed by the pissing match between the countess Du Barry and Marie Antoinette (also the only time Oscar has to think it long enough that we immediately see what made her decide that way): at the start Oscar [[PassThePopcorn just wanted to enjoy the show]], and upon being forced to take sides she thought about the Du Barry being more powerful due being the king's lover, Marie Antoniette being the wife of the Dauphin (and thus both the future queen and, with the king's wife being long dead, the highest-ranking woman in the whole France), and the king already being rather old (he would live only two more years) before taking Marie Antoniette's side. After Marie Antoniette was forced to surrender and Du Barry [[RevengeByProxy tried to take revenge on Oscar by framing her mother for murder]], Oscar spelled it out loud to the countess, [[OhCrap causing her to realize she didn't think it though before engaging in a pissing match with the future queen]] and ''[[CrowningMomentOfAwesome getting away with holding her at swordpoint in her own apartments]]''.
* DiedHappilyEverAfter: [[spoiler: When Oscar is fatally shot, she is smiling- because she sees that Andre- who had been fatally shot himself as well the previous day- had come back from above in order to bring her home. After they both die, they go retrieve Andre's grandmother, who also dies smiling]].
* DistantFinale
* DistractedByTheLuxury: Justified, since the ring given to Marie is also meant to be a memento from her mother.
* DoggedNiceGuy: Louis XVI is presented this way, although in RealLife is feelings towards Marie are more ambiguous. The NiceGuy part also denotes his indecisiveness as a ruler.
* DownerEnding: It's a historical drama set within the context of the UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. ''Of course'' it's got one of these! About half of it is a ForegoneConclusion.
* DramaticWind: So much
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Charlotte, Dianne (Alain's sister), Jeanne.]]
** In the manga, [[spoiler: André almost goes through with it, when he poisons Oscar's wine and plans to kill himself afterwards.]]
* DrowningMySorrows: Jeanne takes to drinking vodka by the bottle after the Affair of the Necklace plays out. Oscar is also seen surrounded by empty wine bottles now and then.
* DutchAngle: A highly distinctive element of the directorial style of Creator/OsamuDezaki, who directed from episode 20 onwards. Often used multiple times during a scene. Borders on overuse, depending on your taste.
* ElitesAreMoreGlamorous: Most of the pre-Revolution regiments featured (and all the named ones: Gardes du Corps du Roi, [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Gardes Suisse]], Gardes Françaises, Royal-Allemand, Royal Suédois, Royal-Cravate, [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Salis-Samade]] and La Fere) are considered elite. Goes double for Oscar's units: in the Gardes du Corps Oscar enrolled into (and later commanded the) Compagnie Ecossaise (Scots Company, so called due originally being composed by Scots emigrates), the elite among the Gardes du Corps, while in the Gardes Françaises (''the'' elite infantry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Maison Militaire) Oscar commands a grenatier company (by that time grenatiers had ceased to be grenade-armed infantry and were elite infantry).
** Special mention goes to the [[UsefulNotes/SwissWithArmyKnives Swiss regiment Salis-Samade]]: some of their men, detached to reinforce the Bastille, are those who [[spoiler: [[HeroKiller killed Oscar]]]].
* ErmineCapeEffect: Marie Antoinette's dresses are rarely ever plain, even by royal standards. To be sure, [[JustifiedTrope the pageantry and ritual was half the ''point'' of Versailles and the clothes were a big piece of that]]. Blame Louis XIV.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: considering Robespierre and Saint Just as villains, happens in the manga at Marie's trial: when Hebért accuses her of incest, Robespierre berates him for sullying the Revolution with the charge and Saint Just entertains with the image of executing him (historically, Hebért would give them an excuse, getting executed as a thief).
** In terms of wastefulness, Marie Antoniette compared to the Du Barry: where the Du Barry cared only of showing off her power with loads and loads of jewels and expensive clothes without a care for the expense (doing a lot more than Marie Antoniette to bankrupt France in the process), Marie, even before realizing how much she was wasting, would ''always'' ask the price, and refused to buy the infamous diamond necklace (originally created specifically for Du Barry) because for its price you could build and equip a ''warship''.
* EvenTheGirlsWantHer: Oh, Oscar...
* EverythingsBetterWithPrincesses: Marie is so WrongGenreSavvy that she acts as though this trope applies to her no matter what, which is where a lot of the {{Irony}} in the series comes from.
* EverythingsBetterWithSparkles: BishieSparkle being just one of many types this shows uses.
* EvilMatriarch: Madame de Polignac.
* EyeScream: [[spoiler: André loses vision in his left eye in very messy circumstances. When he died, he had also lost half the sight of his remaining one.]]
* EyepatchOfPower: [[spoiler: André]].
* FacelessMasses: Grayed Colored Masses.
* FlowerMotifs: Even on dresses!
** Some of the female characters are represented by roses: Oscar is the white rose, symbol of purity and innocence, made red at the end of her life by both finding true love and her own blood; Marie Antoinette, dominated by the search for true love, is the red rose; Rosalie is the pink rose, symbol of either gratitude or youth, desire and energy depending on the shade; Madame de Polignac is the yellow rose, expressing both friendship, jealousy, and the deepest of both love and betrayal; her daughter Charlotte, innocent even beyond Oscar herself, is holding a white rose before falling to her death; Jeanne, finally, is the black rose of hate and death.
* ForegoneConclusion: The entire series is based on the life of Marie Antoinette...and takes pains to remind the viewer from time to time about the tragic course of her life.
* {{Foreshadowing}}: Some later events gets warnings. The most important foreshadowings are Marie Antoinette accidentally staining her marriage contract (something that was considered ill omen), foreshadowing the ForegoneConclusion, and Marie Antoinette naming the Salis-Samade and Royal Allemands regiments last when listing the regiments converging on Paris, foreshadowing the status as {{Hero Killer}}s they would aquire by killing [[spoiler: Andre]] (Royal Allemands) and [[spoiler: Oscar]] (Salis-Samade).
* GemEncrusted: The ermine on one of Marie's dresses, her bejeweled headdresses, and all the various dresses trimmed with pearls and jewels.
* GenreShift: Subtly done, and since the anime had two directors (Tadao Nagahama directed the first eighteen episodes, while Creator/OsamuDezaki directed all the episodes after that), the change was when it started; it was a historical type of account about Oscar enduring the endeavors of the court of Versailles and about Marie Antoinette's marriage and trials. Starting around the twentieth episode, the story became more politically charged and introspective and the focus shifted from Versailles to the people of Paris, the French military and, eventually, Oscar and Andre themselves.
* GorgeousPeriodDress: Naturally required in Versailles.
* TheGuardsMustBeCrazy: Surveillance at Versailles is so lax that, [[LampshadeHanging as Jeanne put it]], you only needed a sword and a hat to reach the queen.
** TruthInTelevision: Not only Versailles' guards were ''that'' lazy in RealLife, ''but the historical Jeanne Valois actually did it'' to try and become a friend of Marie Antoinette, who not only had more motivated guards following her but ''knew perfectly who Jeanne was'' and ignored her.
** Hilariously subverted by Oscar's company in the French Guards, who are very good at their job even without Oscar trying to catch lazy guards (and in fact take offense when she shows up by surprise) and ''caught Fersen trying to sneak out of Versailles after a night meeting with Marie Antoinette''. Had Oscar not showed up right as they were arresting him, Fersen would have been thrown in jail without much fanfare.
*** Then DoubleSubverted in the same scene when ''Oscar tells Fersen which gate was guarded by the laziest guards that night''.
* HammyHerald: The guys who announce the guests at Versailles.
* HeroicBSOD: Charlotte spends her last moments in this state, acting like a madwoman [[spoiler: until she kills herself by throwing self off a balcony]]. André also suffers a BSOD of sorts when he realizes [[spoiler: he's going blind, then Oscar tells him she intends to live and die as a man. He absolutely loses it, forcefully kissing her and ripping her shirt; after realizing what he almost did, he tearfully confesses his love and walks away.]]
* HistoricalBeautyUpdate: Everyone.
* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Everyone who actually existed; it might be shorter to list those who do not belong to this category.
* HistoricalFiction
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Since the series is told from the perspective of UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette, many of her political enemies got this treatment, notably Madame du Barry and Louis Phillipe II (Duke d'Orleans).
* IdenticalStranger: Prostitute Nicole d'Oliva resembles Marie Antoinette so closely that the Lamottes are able to use her to impersonate her. This one is supposedly TruthInTelevision, too.
** In an [[{{Filler}} anime-only episode]], Duke Orléans also has a boy named Jean impersonate the Queen in a WigDressAccent disguise, and do it well enough to fool her maids and ladies-in-waiting.
* IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim: [[spoiler: Oscar refuses to kill Bernard "Black Knight" Chatêlet, the one to blame for André's EyeScream situation, because of this.]]
** Bernard says this has long since happened to Saint-Just. Saint-Just however doesn't care.
* IncurableCoughOfDeath: Oscar gets tuberculosis, but unusually for the trope, [[spoiler:she doesn't actually die from the cough (though she is informed that it's terminal) but in a far more suitably dramatic manner while storming the Bastille.]]
* IndecisiveDeconstruction: Of the defictionalized variety which is expected since Ikeda based much of the manga on a biography of Marie Antoinette and other historical sources and was a adorer of European culture. Many popular cliches of the French Revolution and even the Shojo and romance genre. For starters rather than overwhelming armies of the French monarchy, peasants are shown being massacred during the violence and riots of the revolution. Furthermore even in cases where the rebels have been able to defeat French forces on their own, they were armed with musket rifles, explosives, and other gunpowder weaponry-the very same tools that the military of the French nobility were using-rather than charging towards them in a brutal melee with farming tools and other improvised weapons. Also the leaders of the Revolution were from the aristocracy and even when the citizenry took the initiative on their own to fight the corruption of the monarch, they consisted mostly of the middle class (many whom were literate and even educated with degrees including high paying professions such as doctor and lawyer), with the lower class participants coming from a military or police background. In the end elements of the French army and scholarly class were shown as being essential in order to defeat the monarchy's army and reform the government. These are just a few and this is not counting in showing the consequences of court rumors, adulterous relationships, cross-dressing, and other tropes common in Shojo and romance stories.
* InThePastEveryoneWillBeFamous: Oscar, besides working with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, randomly bumps into Robespierre and Louis Saint-Juste on many occasions. The manga is even more egregious, and name-drops Napoleon for zero reason, and for only a few pages, in a later chapter.
** Mozart as a child even shows up in the first chapter of the manga.
** The Napoleon name-dropping is only gratuitous for those who haven't heard of the Napoleon-centric sequel to the manga, ''Eikou no Napoleon,'' which is admittedly obscure compared to this series. To those who do know of it, it is more of a case of ChekhovsGunman.
* IntrepidReporter: Bernard, after his CharacterDevelopment.
* IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy: Girodelle/Gerodere.
* KillEmAll: It's an anime based on the French Revolution that largely used real people. Marie Antoinette and her husband are given by that alone, as is Von Fersen. [[spoiler: Nonetheless, only Alain, Rosalie, and Bernard are left in the epilogue.]]
** Fersen's death is particularly egregious: he ''did'' survive the Revolution, meaning he could have been spared, but the manga took care of detailing his lynching in 1810 and has his mangled body as the very last page.
* KingIncognito: How Marie met Fersen.
* KnightTemplar: Robespierre, in the end. Then again, he's almost always portrayed like this in the media, so...
* KnightTemplarParent: Empress UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa
* KubrickStare: Due to the character design, it happens quite often. Lady Oscar herself is particularly fond of the stare.
* LadyOfWar: Oscar, overlapping with ActionGirl.
* [[LetThemDieHappy Let Them Pretend Happy]]: [[spoiler: André starts losing eyesight on his ''remaining'' eye, and at some point he stands next to Oscar's new portrait and starts giving a flowery false description of it to not let Oscar know his eyesight problems. Oscar then tearfully says the picture is as gorgeous as he says it is, not having the heart to tell André that she knows he's almost blind.]]
* LightFeminineAndDarkFeminine: Sisters Rosalie and Jeanne respectively.
* LimitedWardrobe: Most of the cast, especially commoners, though Oscar does go through three different uniforms.
* LoveDodecahedron: Girodelle->Oscar, Alain->Oscar, André<->Oscar, Rosalie->Oscar, Oscar->Rosalie to a much lesser extent, Oscar->Fersen, Fersen<->Marie Antoinette, Bernard->Rosalie, Rosalie->Bernard to an extent, Louis->Marie Antoinette, and there's ''something'' more than a guard/charge relationship between Oscar and Marie Antoinette as well.
* LoveTriangle: André/Oscar/Fersen/Marie Antoinette.
* LukeIAmYourFather: A gender swapped version, played straight: [[spoiler: Rosalie's adoptive mom died after being crashed by Mme de Polignac vehicle. Rosalie swears she will get revenge. The problem is, the answer to her [[YouKilledMyFather You Killed My Mother]] could be "I am your mother!" Rosalie is really the illegitimate child of Mme de Polignac, who had to abandon her to a servant.]]
* ManipulativeBitch: Jeanne de la Motte.
* UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa: As the Empress of Austria and the mother of...
* UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette: And how.
* MarketBasedTitle: The series was released overseas as ''Lady Oscar'', though the English-language releases retained the original title.
* {{Melodrama}}: If you could bottle and sell it, you'd make a fortune from just a few episodes.
* TheMistress: [=DuBarry=].
* MirrorUniverse[=/=]MagicMirror: Episode 7 from Vol.12 involves this.
* MustNotDieAVirgin:[[spoiler: Oscar and André have sex almost at the end of the manga and anime series, apparently losing their virginities to each other as well. ''Both'' die in the GrandFinale.]]
* NoSenseOfPersonalSpace: Countess Montclair is ''way'' to touchy-feely with Rosalie in the sidestory.
* OhCrap: We get a few, but the most notable are Oscar's when she realized Alain could actually defeat her in a DuelToTheDeath and Louis XVI's when he was told of the Storming of the Bastille.
* OjouRinglets: Marie.
* OnlySixFaces: The real reason Orlean's henchman was able to impersonate Antoinette. Also, Jeanne and [=DuBarry=] have ''exactly'' the same face, only Jeanne is a brunette and Du-Barry is blonde.
* TheOphelia: [[spoiler: Charlotte]], after being broken. ''Maybe'', [[spoiler: Dianne before her suicide.]]
* ParentalAbandonment: André is an orphan raised by his grandmother, who works as the Jarjayes caretaker. UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette is distanced from her mother UsefulNotes/MariaTheresa, who marries her off to young Louis as a pawn in her European politics; Louis Auguste himself is being raised by his grandfather the King and his aunts. Rosalie was abandoned as a baby by her 14-year-old mother and raised by a peasant along with another girl, Jeanne; said peasant, Nicole, dies at the beginning of the story [[spoiler: when run over by the carriage of Madame de Polignac... Rosalie's true mother]]. Bernard's mother dies when he is 5. Robespierre's mother dies when he is young. Averted- and how- by Oscar being outlived by ''both'' her parents. Downplayed by Alain's mother being alive until he is in his mid 20s.
* ParentsAsPeople: Oscar's father, and how.
* PassThePopcorn: When the countess Du Barry (lover of then-reigning king UsefulNotes/LouisXV) and Marie Antoinette engaged in their pissing match, Oscar, upon being asked which side she would take, started laughing and stated she would enjoy watching it (her friendship with the future queen would start only ''after'' the pissing match, and only after witnessing Marie Antoniette's reaction at being forced to surrender).
* PastelChalkedFreezeFrame: Any time anything really dramatic happens, it's even odds that this happens.
* PeekABangs: [[spoiler:André loses the use of one eye roughly halfway through the series, and subsequently covers it up with his hair for the remainder of the series.]] Perhaps unusually, he does experience problems with his sight as a result of this, which becomes a plot point later on.
* PimpedOutCape: Marie had the most, and her most pimped out was the one in the manga with the bejeweled ermine dress, because the cape was also similarly trimmed. But in the anime, it was just trimmed with thick, white fur (still enough to count as this trope of course). There is also the king's royal robes. And in the manga, Oscar even has a fur-trimmed cape she wears once. Rosalie either borrows that cape or has one of her own.
* PimpedOutDress: Plenty, given the setting, but given Marie's position, she gets the grandest dresses, even before she shows up in France (the dress trimmed with jewelry-tipped ermine, as seen on the page for PimpedOutDress.AnimeAndManga). Also nearly as grand are [=DuBarry's=] dresses, Rosalie's dresses, and Oscar's dress.
* PinkMeansFeminine: In the manga, Oscar's dress is a light pink.
* PleaseSpareHimMyLiege: Marie successfully saving André from execution.
* PraetorianGuard: Oscar serves her career in the Maison Militaire du Roi de France (Military Household of the King of France, the collection of regiments guarding the King, including the Musketeers of the Guard), first in the Garde Écossaise (lit. "Scots Guard", a company originally composed of Scots expatriates) company of the Garde du Corps (lit. "bodyguards", the senior cavalry regiment) and later as commander of a grenadier company in the Gardes Françaises (French Guards, the senior infantry regiment).
* PrettyInMink: Marie wears [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/marie_antoinette_rov_episode2_9227.jpg a few other furs in addition to her ermine capes]]. In the manga, Oscar even has a fur she wears once, and Rosalie has a cape, and [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rosalie_love_9787.jpg a jacket and muff]].
* PrincessClassic: ''Deconstructed'' through Marie.
* PrincessForADay: Oscar, the one evening she secretly went to the great ball dressed as a woman to dance with Count von Fersen.
** And darkly subverted in one of the anime filler episodes, when a boy named Jean dressed up and impersonated Marie Antoinette. (It turned out it was all part of one of the Duke of Orléans's elaborate schemes.) When Oscar outed Jean and Orléans feared he would reveal his involvement, he [[AlasPoorVillain coldly killed him]].
* PrivateMilitaryContractors: The regiments Royal Suedois, Royal Allemand, Salis-Samade and Gardes Suisses are composed by foreign mercenaries coming from Sweden (Royal Suedois), Germany (Royal Allemand) and Switzerland (Salis-Samade and Gardes Suisses). They are not the only foreign regiments in the army of the Ancien Régime, but they are the ones featured.
** Among them the Royal Suedois and Gardes Suisses are the most important, due Fersen being the commander of Royal Suedois and the Gardes Suisses being an Household regiment.
** Also, the Garde du Corps (Oscar's initial regiment) was created around the Gardes Écossaise, a unit of Scots soldiers entrusted with the safety of the King. While Scots had long stopped serving in the Garde du Corps, the first company (Oscar's command as a captain) was still known as Compagnie Écossaise due being the original unit around which the Garde du Corps was formed.
* QuiveringEyes: Antoinette.
* RaisedAsTheOppositeGender: Oscar, of course. Oddly for this trope, she is completely open about being female and few make anything of it. But that could be due to the fact that by the time Oscar meets Andre at age 7, she already knows she is a girl.
* ReallyDeadMontage
* RedHeadedStepchild: Madame du Barry consistently refers to Marie Antoinette as a redhead even though the latter is obviously a blonde. It's clearly meant to be an insult.
* RequisiteRoyalRegalia: Only occasionally worn, save for state occasions and particularly dramatic moments, like when Marie flung off her ermine cape when forced to speak to Madame [=DuBarry=], signifying Marie's torment at having to give in to a commoner. Of course she was actually giving in to the King, but that wasn't the point.
* RuleOfDrama
* RuleOfGlamorous
* SayMyName: '''"OSCAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!"'''
* SchoolgirlLesbians: Rosalie, possibly Charlotte.
* SequelHook: UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte shows up to provide one for ''Eikou no Napoleo-Eroica''.
* ShadowArchetype
* ShoujoDemographic
* ShownTheirWork: This manga is ''maniacally'' accurate, to the point of ''beating most history tests'', and the actual errors are extremely rare.
** ArtisticLicenseHistory: That said, Ikeda willingly altered the ages of François Augustin Reynier de Jarjayes, Rosalie and the Countess of Polignac and changed the name of the commander of the French Guards for narrative reasons. To explain: the RealLife de Jarjayes was only ten years older than Marie Antoinette, and the history needed him to have his SIXTH DAUGHTER born a few months after Marie Antoinette; the historical Rosalie was born on 19 March 1768 in Breteuil from a shoemaker, not in 1756 in Fontette (and was ''not'' Jeanne's sister); the historical countess of Polignac was born in 1749, yet the manga age her enough to be 15 and [[spoiler: be Rosalie's mother]] in 1756; and the historical commander of the French Guards in 1789 was the duke of Chatelet, but got his name altered in Boulainville to avoid confusion with original character Bernard Chatelet.
* SpoiledBrat: Little Charlotte, [[spoiler: until she goes mad]]
* StabTheSky: Such as when Oscar is pleading for André's life after Marie's horse accident.
* StandardFemaleGrabArea: [[spoiler:During Oscar and André's arguement, when André becomes very upset at her decision to live her entire life as a man he grabs her there, forcing her down. Justified, as this is less about Oscar going fail-tastic at fighting without reason, and more about Andre almost crossing the DespairEventHorizon when he comes to think she's throwing her life away, and Oscar being throughly shocked when unable to face a truth she has been avoiding for so long.]]
* StarCrossedLovers: Oscar and André. [[spoiler:They do get together, but André dies the day after he and Oscar consummate their relationship.]]
** Marie Antoinette is the Queen, Count Fersen is a diplomatic agent from Sweden.
* StaringThroughTheSword: Done at least three times by Oscar.
* SugarAndIcePersonality: Oscar starts out as being seen as this.
* SweetPollyOliver: Oscar, yet again.
* TomboyAndGirlyGirl: Tomboy career woman Oscar- though most people can tell she is a woman from the very beginning- and Girly Girl Rosalie. Antoinette started off as tomboyish when she was a little girl, but when she became the queen she turned into a very frou frou girly girl.
* TheTragicRose: It's even in the name.
* TrueBlueFemininity: In the anime, Oscar's dress color was changed from pink to blue. See also PinkMeansFeminine.
* {{Tsundere}}: Version of the Type A Tsundere. Oscar is known for her stoicism and fierce LadyOfWar attributes, but she also has a severe crush on Fersen and later falls deeply in love with her childhood friend Andre.
* UglyGuyHotWife: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He's more pudgy and plain-looking than strictly ugly, though; in this series, no one is a {{Gonk}}.
* UnsettlingGenderReveal:
** Marie, when she meets Oscar. Repeated with Rosalie.
** The Duke of Orleans [[InvokedTrope tries to do this]] to the king and the prince in a {{Filler}} storyline in the show. They get a teenage boy to [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/princess_marie_imposter_5162.jpg dress up like Marie and impersonate her]], so that he marries the prince instead, thus creating a huge scandal.
* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom: The Duke of Orleans is this for the aristocracy. He styles himself as a liberal thinker, lets revolutionaries gather at his mansion, and secretly feeds discontent against Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The Duke's goal is to gather enough popular support to become King of France, but the factions he supports go on to entirely abolish the First and Second Estates, destroy the Bourbon dynasty, and found the French Republic.
* UptownGirl: Oscar is a noblewoman, André is a commoner.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: Lots of those, specially Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Bernard before his CharacterDevelopment.
* WhamLine: The line below appears after things have started going to hell and changes the entire relationship between [[spoiler: Oscar]] and [[spoiler: Andre]].
--> [[spoiler: Oscar]]: I love you.
* WheelOFeet: In the manga.
* WhyCouldntYouBeDifferent
* WigDressAccent: In an anime only arc, the Duke of Orleans plots to ruin the marriage by having a boy show up in Marie's place. The boy, Jean, already looks a lot like Marie, so the addition of a wig really isn't much of a stretch.
* WiseBeyondTheirYears: The new Dauphin, Louis Joseph, was a nice and sweet kid. [[spoiler: Too bad he also was TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth]].
* TheXOfY
* YourCheatingHeart: According to the Duchesse de Polignac, this is actually the norm among French nobles, as they marry for convenience and not for love (Austrian nobles, however, are expected to stay loyal to each other). She in fact openly admits that both her and her husband have lovers, and Louis XVI and Oscar's parents are actually considered weird for ''not'' having lovers.
----
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* DeliberateValuesDissonance: This is pretty much inevitable when you're writing a historical drama set in the 18th Century.
** Severe homophobia is the norm, rather than the exception, and accusations of lesbianism hurt both Oscar and Marie Antoinette.
** The story doesn't gloss over the fact that upper-class girls were frequently married off as young teenagers -- or even preteens. Marie being lucky to have a husband in her age bracket is also touched upon, since many of these girls were married to much older men.
** Severe homophobia is the norm, rather than the exception, and accusations of lesbianism hurt both Oscar and Marie Antoinette.
** The story doesn't gloss over the fact that upper-class girls were frequently married off as young teenagers -- or even preteens. Marie being lucky to have a husband in her age bracket is also touched upon, since many of these girls were married to much older men.
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* BookEnds: The manga starts with showing the births, in the same year, of Fersen, Marie Antoinette and Oscar, and ends with a page-wide panel with Fersen's body and the words "On september 4, 1755, in Sweden, Hans Axel von Fersen was born. The following november 2, in Austria, Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne was born in Austria. The following december 25, in France, Oscar François de Jarjayes was born in France".
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* BookEnds: The manga starts with showing the births, in the same year, of Fersen, Marie Antoinette and Oscar, and ends with a page-wide panel with Fersen's body and the words "On september September 4, 1755, in Sweden, Hans Axel von Fersen was born. The following november November 2, in Austria, Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne was born in Austria. The following december December 25, in France, Oscar François de Jarjayes was born in France".
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It's 2018, and that official release is nowhere to be seen.
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While the anime and manga saw a wide release in much of the world during the 1980s under the name of ''Lady Oscar'', one notable exception was in English. The first two volumes were released in the early 80s as a teaching tool for Japanese to English, but aside from this release, the manga has never been released in English officially. Similarly, the anime went unlicensed in English for over 30 years before Right Stuf International finally picked it up in late 2012 for a subtitled-only release in Spring 2013. You can watch it legally [[http://www.viki.com/channels/10630-the-rose-of-versailles here]] or [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4U0FQ15BX8BdijOOBnhFsutAWdYEtNLH here.]] Also, UDON Entertainment has [[http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-07-11/udon-entertainment-adds-rose-of-versailles-manga/.90349 licensed the manga]] in the US, which will see an official release in mid-2016.
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While the anime and manga saw a wide release in much of the world during the 1980s under the name of ''Lady Oscar'', one notable exception was in English. The first two volumes were released in the early 80s as a teaching tool for Japanese to English, but aside from this release, the manga has never been released in English officially. Similarly, the anime went unlicensed in English for over 30 years before Right Stuf International finally picked it up in late 2012 for a subtitled-only release in Spring 2013. You can watch it legally [[http://www.viki.com/channels/10630-the-rose-of-versailles here]] or [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4U0FQ15BX8BdijOOBnhFsutAWdYEtNLH here.]] Also, UDON Entertainment has [[http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-07-11/udon-entertainment-adds-rose-of-versailles-manga/.90349 licensed the manga]] in the US, which will see an official release in mid-2016.
]]
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Has nothing to do with familiarity with in-universe fiction.
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** TruthInTelevision: Not only Versailles' guards were ''that'' lazy in RealLife, ''but the historical Jeanne Valois actually did it'' to try and become a friend of Marie Antoinette, who [[GenreSavvy not only had more motivated guards following her]] but ''knew perfectly who Jeanne was'' and ignored her.
** Hilariously subverted by Oscar's company in the French Guards, who are very good at their job even without [[GenreSavvy Oscar trying to catch lazy guards]] (and in fact take offense when she shows up by surprise) and ''caught Fersen trying to sneak out of Versailles after a night meeting with Marie Antoinette''. Had Oscar not showed up right as they were arresting him, Fersen would have been thrown in jail without much fanfare.
*** Then DoubleSubverted in the same scene when ''[[GenreSavvy Oscar tells Fersen which gate was guarded by the laziest guards that night]]''.
** Hilariously subverted by Oscar's company in the French Guards, who are very good at their job even without [[GenreSavvy Oscar trying to catch lazy guards]] (and in fact take offense when she shows up by surprise) and ''caught Fersen trying to sneak out of Versailles after a night meeting with Marie Antoinette''. Had Oscar not showed up right as they were arresting him, Fersen would have been thrown in jail without much fanfare.
*** Then DoubleSubverted in the same scene when ''[[GenreSavvy Oscar tells Fersen which gate was guarded by the laziest guards that night]]''.
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** TruthInTelevision: Not only Versailles' guards were ''that'' lazy in RealLife, ''but the historical Jeanne Valois actually did it'' to try and become a friend of Marie Antoinette, who [[GenreSavvy not only had more motivated guards following her]] her but ''knew perfectly who Jeanne was'' and ignored her.
** Hilariously subverted by Oscar's company in the French Guards, who are very good at their job even without[[GenreSavvy Oscar trying to catch lazy guards]] guards (and in fact take offense when she shows up by surprise) and ''caught Fersen trying to sneak out of Versailles after a night meeting with Marie Antoinette''. Had Oscar not showed up right as they were arresting him, Fersen would have been thrown in jail without much fanfare.
*** Then DoubleSubverted in the same scene when''[[GenreSavvy Oscar ''Oscar tells Fersen which gate was guarded by the laziest guards that night]]''.night''.
** Hilariously subverted by Oscar's company in the French Guards, who are very good at their job even without
*** Then DoubleSubverted in the same scene when
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* WiseBeyondTheirYears: The Dauphin was a nice and sweet kid. [[spoiler: Too bad he also was TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth]].
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* WiseBeyondTheirYears: The Dauphin new Dauphin, Louis Joseph, was a nice and sweet kid. [[spoiler: Too bad he also was TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth]].
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Rose of Versailles'', is a historical fantasy manga by Creator/RiyokoIkeda which depicts the waning days of Ancien Régime France and the events that sparked UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Bara'' (''The Rose of Versailles'', Versailles'') is a historical fantasy drama manga by Creator/RiyokoIkeda which depicts Creator/RiyokoIkeda, depicting France from the waning days last years of the Ancien Régime France and to the events that sparked dawn of UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
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Lolicon and shotacon have been disambiguated. Links with too little context are being removed - "paedo" is not always a trope, examples where the tropeworthiness is unclear are being removed. Also, please do not use "loli" as a synonym for little girl; see Lolicon And Shotacon as to why not
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* {{Lolicon}}: Even though [[ValuesDissonance it WAS normal for the time period and the high nobility]], Duke Guiche likes his women a ''little'' too young...
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* SweetPollyOliver: Oscar, yet again.
* SweetPollyOliver: Oscar, yet again.
* TrueBlueFemininity: In the anime, Oscar's dress color was changed from pink to blue. See also PinkMeansFeminine.
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* TrueBlueFemininity: In the anime, Oscar's dress color was changed from pink to blue. See also PinkMeansFeminine.
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* SchoolgirlLesbians: Rosalie, possibly Charlotte.
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* SchoolgirlLesbians: Rosalie, possibly Charlotte.
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* MirrorUniverse/MagicMirror: Episode 7 from Vol.12 involves this.
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* MirrorUniverse/MagicMirror: MirrorUniverse[=/=]MagicMirror: Episode 7 from Vol.12 involves this.
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A {{Takarazuka}} adaptation of this work is one of the most popular. There's also "''Lady Oscar''", an obscure LiveActionAdaptation by French director Jacques Demy generally considered to be SoOkayItsAverage. It is notable, however, in that it came out before the manga had ever been officially translated, resulting in famed translator Frederik Schodt having to scramble to make one for the production company. He did this by blazing through the manga and writing his translations right on the pages in pencil.
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A {{Takarazuka}} adaptation of this work is one of the most popular. There's also "''Lady Oscar''", an obscure LiveActionAdaptation by French director Jacques Demy Creator/JacquesDemy generally considered to be SoOkayItsAverage. It is notable, however, in that it came out before the manga had ever been officially translated, resulting in famed translator Frederik Schodt having to scramble to make one for the production company. He did this by blazing through the manga and writing his translations right on the pages in pencil.
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Rose of Versailles'', is a historical fantasy by Creator/RiyokoIkeda, depicting the pre-[[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution French Revolution]] period. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Rose of Versailles'', is a historical fantasy manga by Creator/RiyokoIkeda, depicting Creator/RiyokoIkeda which depicts the pre-[[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution French Revolution]] period.waning days of Ancien Régime France and the events that sparked UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
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* ActionGirl: Oscar.
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* ActionGirl: Oscar.Oscar is as capable as any man in royal service, skilled in fencing, riding, and leading troops in combat.
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* DeathByDespair: [[spoiler: In the manga, the painter of Oscar's portrait find Oscar's Nanny dead in her bed, a few days after Andre and Oscar passed away. It has been stated often, earlier in the story, that she could not bear the death of her grandson and would die too.]]
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Royoko Ikeda is a part of the pre-French Revolution period?
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Rose of Versailles'', is a historical fantasy by Creator/RiyokoIkeda of the pre-[[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution French Revolution]] period. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Rose of Versailles'', is a historical fantasy by Creator/RiyokoIkeda of Creator/RiyokoIkeda, depicting the pre-[[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution French Revolution]] period. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
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* MirrorUniverse/MagicMirror: Episode 7 from Vol.12 involves this.
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* YourCheatingHeart: According to the Duchesse de Polignac, this is actually the norm among nobles, as they marry for convenience and not for love. She in fact openly admits that both her and her husband have lovers, and Louis XVI and Oscar's parents are actually considered weird for ''not'' having lovers.
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* YourCheatingHeart: According to the Duchesse de Polignac, this is actually the norm among French nobles, as they marry for convenience and not for love.love (Austrian nobles, however, are expected to stay loyal to each other). She in fact openly admits that both her and her husband have lovers, and Louis XVI and Oscar's parents are actually considered weird for ''not'' having lovers.
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* WellIntentionedExtremist: Lots of those, specially Robespierre, Saint Juste, and Bernard before his CharacterDevelopment.
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* WellIntentionedExtremist: Lots of those, specially Robespierre, Saint Juste, Saint-Just, and Bernard before his CharacterDevelopment.
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* YourCheatingHeart: According to the Duchesse de Polignac, this is actually the norm among nobles, as they marry for convenience and not for love. She in fact openly admits that both her and her husband have lovers, and Louis XVI and Oscar's parents are actually considered weird for ''not'' having lovers.
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** The Gards du Corps are considered the elite cavalry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Royal Household, and are universally beautiful. This even gets [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] by Bernard (who compares them to good-looking dolls) and Girodelle (who flat-out admits that, having been accepted in the regiment, he ''has'' to be beautiful).
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** The Gards du Corps are considered the elite cavalry regiment of the entire French Army, not just the Royal Household, and are universally beautiful. This even gets [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] by many characters whose reaction to find out Oscar is in that regiment is to admit they should have guessed it from her looks (this number includes ''Fersen''), Bernard (who compares them to good-looking dolls) dolls), and Girodelle (who flat-out admits that, having been accepted in the regiment, he ''has'' to be beautiful).
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While the anime and manga saw a wide release in much of the world during the 1980s under the name of ''Lady Oscar'', one notable exception was in English. The first two volumes were released in the early 80s as a teaching tool for Japanese to English, but aside from this release, the manga has never been released in English officially. Similarly, the anime went unlicensed in English for over 30 years before Right Stuf International finally picked it up in late 2012 for a subtitled-only release in Spring 2013. You can watch it legally [[http://www.viki.com/channels/10630-the-rose-of-versailles here]] or [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4U0FQ15BX8BdijOOBnhFsutAWdYEtNLH here.]]
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While the anime and manga saw a wide release in much of the world during the 1980s under the name of ''Lady Oscar'', one notable exception was in English. The first two volumes were released in the early 80s as a teaching tool for Japanese to English, but aside from this release, the manga has never been released in English officially. Similarly, the anime went unlicensed in English for over 30 years before Right Stuf International finally picked it up in late 2012 for a subtitled-only release in Spring 2013. You can watch it legally [[http://www.viki.com/channels/10630-the-rose-of-versailles here]] or [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4U0FQ15BX8BdijOOBnhFsutAWdYEtNLH here.]]
]] Also, UDON Entertainment has [[http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-07-11/udon-entertainment-adds-rose-of-versailles-manga/.90349 licensed the manga]] in the US, which will see an official release in mid-2016.
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Rose of Versailles'', is a historical fantasy by Creator/RiyokoIkeda of the pre-[[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution French Revolution]] period. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess MarieAntoinette.
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''Berusaiyu no Bara'', or ''The Rose of Versailles'', is a historical fantasy by Creator/RiyokoIkeda of the pre-[[UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution French Revolution]] period. Its central character is Oscar François de Jarjayes, a Parisian noblewoman who has been [[RaisedAsTheOppositeGender raised as a boy]] to provide her father with a "son" and heir. Oscar is made head of the Royal Guards of Versailles, and her first assignment is to protect and chaperon the new Crown Princess MarieAntoinette.
UsefulNotes/MarieAntoinette.
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* DarkerAndEdgier: The manga had many moments of slapstick humor, often with traditional manga comedy expressions and symbols, and tended to use chibi drawings and starry eyes in some dramatic moments for added effect. Even late in the story as the Revolution was brewing into more and more violence there were still manga comedy art. The anime removes all this (and pretty much every joke) and what few humorous moments that remains is portrayed with realistic expressions. In addition the anime got a darker and gloomier (but gorgeous) art direction and some extra scenes of violence were thrown in. However averted in that the manga actually manages to be gorier and the anime even removes some open blood splatter in the final days of the Revolution and the ending is more in the lines of bittersweet with Allain being the ending narrator to the tale .
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* AdaptationDistillation: A couple of interesting side stories were removed in the anime adaptation and in addition many themes were oversimplified and outright altered such as feminism and Oscar's finding of a balance with it and traditional femininity as well as the complex love triangles around the characters (in particular Allain De Soisson's romances).
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* IndecisiveDeconstruction: Of the defictionalized variety which is expected since Ikeda based much of the manga on a biography of Marie Antoinette and other historical sources and was a adorer of European culture. Many popular cliches of the French Revolution and even the Shojo and romance genre. For starters rather than overwhelming armies of the French monarchy, peasants are shown being massacred during the violence and riots of the revolution. Furthermore even in cases where the rebels have been able to defeat French forces on their own, they were armed with musket rifles, explosives, and other gunpowder weaponry-the very same tools that the military of the French nobility were using-rather than charging towards them in a brutal melee with farming tools and other improvised weapons. Also the leaders of the Revolution were from the aristocracy and even when the citizenry took the initiative on their own to fight the corruption of the monarch, they consisted mostly of the middle class (many whom were literate and even educated with degrees including high paying professions such as doctor and lawyer), with the lower class participants coming from a military or police background. In the end elements of the French army and scholarly class were shown as being essential in order to defeat the monarchy's army and reform the government. These are just a few and this is not counting in showing the consequences of court rumors, adulterous relationships, cross-dressing, and other tropes common in Shojo and romance stories.
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* SequelHook: NapoleonBonaparte shows up to provide one for ''Eikou no Napoleo-Eroica''.
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* SequelHook: NapoleonBonaparte UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte shows up to provide one for ''Eikou no Napoleo-Eroica''.
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[[quoteright:161:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/r-v.jpg]]
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%% Please do not replace or remove without starting a new thread.
%%
[[quoteright:306:http://static.tvtropes.
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* TheAbridgedSeries: ''RoseOfVersaillesAbridged''
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* TheAbridgedSeries: ''RoseOfVersaillesAbridged''''WebAnimation/RoseOfVersaillesAbridged''
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*PinkMeansFeminine: In the manga, Oscar's dress is a light pink.
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*TrueBlueFemininity: In the anime, Oscar's dress color was changed from pink to blue. See also PinkMeansFeminine.
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* {{Bifauxnen}}: Oscar, of course, though she stays slightly more on the female side thanks to the shape of her face and eyes.
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* {{Bifauxnen}}: Oscar, of course, though she stays slightly more on the female side thanks to the shape of her face and eyes. She provides the page picture for the trope, and she's also very likely the TropeCodifier.
