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"But ne'er the rose without the thorn."
Robert Herrick, The Rose
In contrast to its strictly romantic usage, roses have long been a symbol representing a duality between beauty and tragedy. The reasons for this are evident in the rose itself. The petals are outwardly very beautiful, making it one of the most famous flowers in the world and perfect for romantic occasions. On the other hand, the stem of the rose is covered with sharp thorns and the petals themselves are most commonly depicted as being a blood red color (or an innocent white). This duality within the rose has led to it being used to symbolize both beauty and tragedy simultaneously.
This trope is for characters and situations where the duality occurs. Frequently, a character with the name Rose is portrayed as being beautiful, yet ends up with a life full of trauma and tragedy. In other cases, roses can be used to symbolize any character or event with this duality. The trope can also be invoked by characters who adopt the rose as a symbol for this very reason. If you see a bunch of red roses in a scene and it doesn't look like anything romantic will be happening, expect tragedy. Gothic Horror uses this trope a lot in all variations. A bloody rose is a very popular and almost iconic image of the Gothic Horror genre.
Cherry Blossoms are used similarly in Japan. For roses used in a romantic setting, see Something about a Rose. Not to be confused with The Poppy, which is a blood-red flower that represents wartime tragedy.
Examples:
Characters with the name Rose:
Anime
- In Fullmetal Alchemist, Rose Thomas becomes a pawn in her first appearance, she was an orphan, and her boyfriend died.
- In addition to this, in the 2003 anime version, Rose was raped off screen by soldiers occupying her town, became a mute and carried the resulting baby to term. She then had to lead her town to exile and merger with the nation due to another invasion of soldiers, was kidnapped by the Big Bad, and was spared by moments from a final Grand Theft Me that might have used her baby as fuel. The guy she finally professes her love to then gets trapped in another dimension.
- Finally, in The Movie, the guy who she professed her love to comes back from that other dimension hitchhiking with an army, never once sees her, then he and his brother, who did see her, go back to that other dimension after beating the army.
- In Bleach a man named Rojuro Otoribayashi is nicknamed Rose. Him and his friends got an horribly raw deal by being forcibly transformed into Hollow/Shinigami hybrids by the Big Bad. It does seem that Rose has earned a happier ending, though: as of manga chapter 481, he has been allowed back home and regained his captain seat.
- Until the Vandereich invasion, that is, since his liutenant Kira and a good part of his division were massacred by the invaders. Understandably, Rose is PISSED.
- Rose of Versailles has it even in the title.
Comic Books
Film
- In Titanic Rose was on the Titanic, her old boyfriend is a Domestic Abuser Yandere and her new boyfriend freezes to death. She lived for almost 90 years afterwards, becoming pretty much a living legend; after telling the people digging in the sea for the Titanic what she witnessed there (which, yanno, makes the plot of the movie, Rose dies at the very end.
- Pretty much the premise of the Bette Midler film (and character) The Rose.
Literature
- Rose Madder left her abusive husband only to have him chase after her and try to tear her new life apart.
Live-Action TV
- In Doctor Who, Rose Tyler is the companion of the last surviving Time Lord, and became trapped on a parallel earth. With no means to get back to him.
- Averted on Golden Girls. Rose is a Cloud Cuckoo Lander who seemed to enjoy her idyllic (if very, very weird) life in St. Olaf.
- On the Cold Case episode "Best Friends", a girl named Rose pledged a lover's suicide with her girlfriend, Billie. (It was 1932, plus Rose is white while Billie was black.) The suicide didn't go over as planned ( Billie was shot to death by Rose's evil brother and her lifeless body was disposed of in the Delaware river) and she spent the rest of her life writing sorrowful poems about her lost love. 60 years later, the now old Rose is approached by the team since Billie's body had been recently retrieved from a truck in the river; after Rose confesses what really happened, Billie's spirit comes for her, all being forgiven.
Theatre
Video Games
- In Fable II your older sister Rose is shot in the face in the first half hour.
- Raiden's girlfriend Rosemary in Metal Gear Solid 2. Apart from the fact that her lover's pretty broken, she was supposed to seduce him as part of a Honey Trap, but fell for him for real. Then in the fourth game (after dealing with the fallout from revealing she was The Mole) she pretty had to Shoo the Dog for the entire game to keep their child safe. They reunite at the end though.
- Rose from the Street Fighter series. Beautiful, level-headed, a powerful Lady of Black Magic, Bison's "other self"... and much every ending she's ever had is a Downer Ending. Save for Street Fighter IV, where Rose finally manages to survive to Bison's influence due to her best friend Guy.
- Rose from The Legend Of Dragoon ends up being the sole survivor of a brutal war, losing her fiance and best friends in the process, and is forced to accept immortality in order to save the world from complete destruction every 108 years. The necessary evils needed in order to accomplish said world-saving has resulted in the entire world hating her as a mythical demon of evil and destruction. By the time the game's storyline rolls around, she can't even remember the last time she smiled.
- While tragedy doesn't exactly hit this girl named Rose Berstein and she's much more of a Rich Bitch than a Broken Bird, in XIII she is a vital part in Those Of The Past's plans... which end with Ash Ret-goning himself in what becomes a massive Tear Jerker. The dress she's wearing in that moment even has rose motifs all over it.
Web Comics
- Rose Lalonde fits this in Homestuck, although actual rose motifs only extend as far as her using a pair of weapons called the Thorns of Oglogoth.
Western Animation
- American Dragon Jake Long: Rose is the love interest of the main character. She was stolen from her family as a baby, is brainwashed, and nearly erased from existence.
- Sleeping Beauty, whose real name is Aurora, but the fairies named her Briar Rose. She got a raw deal with the whole finger-pricking, fall-asleep-until-your-true-love-kisses-you curse-thing put on her at birth by a witch who was pissed about not being invited to her christening by her parents. She gets the True Love's Kiss from her sort-of groom, and then gets better. It doesn't hurt that, as she was laying "asleep", Aurora had a red rose on her chest
 ◊.
- Balto: A girl named Rosy spends the entire movie slowly dying of a disease. Not only does she survive, but she's the Narrator All Along.
- In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, a pony named Rose (along with her sisters Daisy and Lily) panics dramatically over everything in Ponyville that goes wrong. This can be anything from dragon attacks, to plague threat, to a sudden lack of apples. (Granted, that last one was an Imagine Spot.)
Other characters and settings with a thematic link:
Anime and Manga
- Revolutionary Girl Utena mixes the romantic, the tragic, and the downright Freudian in its obsessive use of Roses as symbols.
- Saint Seiya has Aphrodite, the saint of Pisces: a beautiful but Poisonous Person. Guess which flowers he uses as a weapon?
- In Cowboy Bebop, the episode endings feature a rose in a window, then later in the same window, Julia is sitting in front of the window where the rose was (Julia = the rose), then later the rose being dropped to the street. That means something, too.
- Rose of Versailles is a tale of star-crossed lovers on the eve of the French Revolution with pathos and tragedy all 'round, though it doesn't feature roses quite as prominently as Utena.
- Oniisama e..., another work by author Riyoko Ikeda, has Rei "Hana no Saint Juste" Asaka, who at the start throws a rose in the air and it gets caught by main character Nanako. Rei herself is the local Broken Bird, and her Seiran school has quite the luxurious gardens, which obviously include rose bushes. And in the anime, Rei was carrying a bouquet of red roses... at the moment of her fatal accident.
- Fukiko Ichinomiya has red roses as one of her motifs. She sometimes wears a long black skirt with a red rose pattern, often walks through a garden full of roses, and people who want to win her favor try to give her rose bouquets more than once. ( In episode 15, Junko does it and fails when Fukiko gets her expelled from the Sorority, and Mariko tells Nanako to bring her some when Fukiko gets angry over Nanako defending Junko.)
- One of the opening scenes of Umineko no Naku Koro ni takes place in Kinzo's rose garden, with particular emphasis on a rose that his granddaughter Maria claims as hers. Maria is eventually revealed to suffer from an Abusive Parent (in a scene involving the rose). Oh, and everybody dies. Over and over. Beatrice herself wears a rose in her hair. She's The Ophelia.
- In the Fatal Fury anime, when Lily first shows up, she pulls a Rei and tosses a red rose in the air, promising to spend a night with the man who catches it. The guy who does is Terry, The Hero. They never get to spend their night, as right after her High Heel Face Turn she's killed by her boss Geese.
Fairy Tales
- In "Sleeping Beauty", the roses were the source of the tragedy — ninety-nine princes killed themselves on their thorns, trying to get in.
Literature
- In Les Misérables, Eponine is described/alluded to as being a "rose in misery". This girl (at least during her teenage years) doesn't get a break: her family is impoverished and linked to an infamous gang of robbers, she's often starving, is implied to be not right in the head, and has the misfortune to fall in unrequited love with her neighbor.
Live-Action TV
- Used in a fairly effective subversion of the romantic meaning in Buffy, when Giles comes home to a beautiful romantic set-up, complete with roses and champagne... And goes upstairs to find his girlfriend, Jenny's murdered corpse; the whole setup was Angelus's way of torturing Giles that little bit more.
Music
Theater
- The Phantom of the Opera: A red rose shows up in the logo of this show, probably representing Christine; the other graphic part of the logo is a mask, representing the Phantom. In the 2004 movie adaptation of the show, the Phantom regularly gives Christine a single red rose with a black ribbon around it.
- The lovelorn Stage Magician hero of Cirque Du Soleil's Zarkana has images of roses decorating his cape and top hat. At the end of the show, when he's reunited with his lost love, this becomes Something about a Rose instead.
- Shakespeare milks this one for all it's worth in the Henry VI plays — which are largely responsible for the York/Lancaster conflict in the fifteenth century being known as the Wars of the Roses. One of the most famous scenes in these otherwise little-known plays depicts noblemen on both sides of the quarrel picking roses in the Temple Garden to signify their allegiance (an event which was completely Shakespeare's invention). Perhaps most indicative of the tragic symbolism, though, is the title character's lament for his nation, symbolized by a pair of anonymous soldiers in Part III:
O pity, pity, gentle heaven, pity!
The red rose and the white are on his face,
The fatal colours of our striving houses:
The one his purple blood right well resembles;
The other his pale cheeks, methinks, presenteth:
Wither one rose, and let the other flourish;
If you contend, a thousand lives must wither.
Video Games
- Miranda from Legend of Dragoon hates roses because they're linked with her abusive mother, saying that her mother kept them around because they were beautiful but the bouquet was always in sight whenever she was beaten. Incidentally, she doesn't get along with the character Rose.
- Rule of Rose, naturally. The most triumphant example being that The Rose Garden Orphanage falls victim to a massacre with one sole survivor.
- In Ib, the gallery Ib starts out in has a sculpture of a red rose with vicious-looking thorns titled "Embodiment of Spirit" and is described as "beautiful at first glance, but if you get too close, it will induce pain." When Ib is transported to the painting world, she gets a red rose that's described as "almost too beautiful to be real" and gradually wilts away to nothing as she takes damage, and she finds out later on that playing Loves Me, Loves Me Not with another person's rose is a very, very bad thing to do.
- In Yggdra Union, the country of Verlaine (which apparently means "two roses") is home to a pair of young noble mages named Roswell and Rosary (whose names both start with the syllable "rose"), who are the heads of the Branthese (written with the kanji for "Black Rose") and Esmeralda (written with the kanji for "White Rose"). Both are potential party members, but when the protagonist and her army come calling, the two are getting ready to start an extremely destructive civil war and you must kill one of them to put a stop to it. Later it turns out that the civil war itself was partially due to their being manipulated by one of the game's antagonists.
Web Comics
Western Animation
- Beauty and the Beast, which already plays on the duality of beauty and tragedy, uses the wilting rose literally as a time limiting plot device.
Real Life
- Yoshiki Hayashi loves roses and rose motifs, and his life has been an ongoing parade of tragedies.
- Katherine Howard, Henry VII's sixth wife was often referred to as his 'rose without a thorn'. We all know what ended up happening to her.
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