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...and wakes up in Portland, Oregon, in the year 2004, surrounded by oddly dressed strangers. It turns out Richard was successfully retrieved from the past by a research team who substituted a similar-looking already-dead man in the right armor in his place to avoid changing history, and grizzled project leader Evan Hosgrove is eager to get to speak to his favorite historical monarch.
to:
...and wakes up in Portland, Oregon, {{UsefulNotes/Oregon}}, in the year 2004, surrounded by oddly dressed strangers. It turns out Richard was successfully retrieved from the past by a research team who substituted a similar-looking already-dead man in the right armor in his place to avoid changing history, and grizzled project leader Evan Hosgrove is eager to get to speak to his favorite historical monarch.
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* HeroesWantRedheads: Richard, toward Sarah.
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** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having sent both Princes in the Tower into exile, to Ireland and Portugal. The recent project by The Richard III Society has asserted that the princes survived, to spend time in Ireland and Portugal, among other locations. If confirmed, then this trilogy is one one of the few works of Ricardian fiction that actually got it right.
to:
** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having sent both Princes in the Tower into exile, to Ireland and Portugal. The recent project by The Richard III Society has asserted that the princes survived, to spend time in Ireland and Portugal, among other locations. If confirmed, then this trilogy is one one of the few works of Ricardian fiction that actually got it right.
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** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having sent both Princes in the Tower into exile, to Ireland and Portugal. The recent project by The Richard III Society had asserted that the princes survived, to spend time in Ireland and Portugual, among other locations.
to:
** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having sent both Princes in the Tower into exile, to Ireland and Portugal. The recent project by The Richard III Society had has asserted that the princes survived, to spend time in Ireland and Portugual, Portugal, among other locations.locations. If confirmed, then this trilogy is one one of the few works of Ricardian fiction that actually got it right.
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* DatedHistory:
** Richard's body is portrayed as having been swapped out for a look alike, but the discovery of his remains proved through DNA that it was him.
** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having scoliosis, which was confirmed.
** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having sent both Princes in the Tower into exile, to Ireland and Portugal. The recent project by The Richard III Society had asserted that the princes survived, to spend time in Ireland and Portugual, among other locations.
** Richard's body is portrayed as having been swapped out for a look alike, but the discovery of his remains proved through DNA that it was him.
** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having scoliosis, which was confirmed.
** Averted. Richard is portrayed as having sent both Princes in the Tower into exile, to Ireland and Portugal. The recent project by The Richard III Society had asserted that the princes survived, to spend time in Ireland and Portugual, among other locations.
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* TimeTravelEscape: Richard escapes his fate at Bosworth this way, and he arranges to save his son the same way.
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* TheFateOfThePrincesInTheTower: Richard is surprised to learn that the fate of the princes is even a mystery, since he made no secret of the fact that he sent them away, Edward V to Ireland and Richard of York to Portugal.
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The third book sees Richard's BestFriend from the past, Francis Lovell, brought into the future by mistake, but in order to preserve the past Richard must send his friend back to face a possibly grim fate. Meanwhile, Adrian Strange finds himself trapped in the past and must learn to survive.
to:
The third book ''Strange Times'' sees Richard's BestFriend from the past, Francis Lovell, brought into the future by mistake, but in order to preserve the past Richard must send his friend back to face a possibly grim fate. Meanwhile, Adrian Strange finds himself trapped in the past and must learn to survive.
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The third book sees Richard's BestFriend from the past, Francis Lovell, brought into the future by mistake, but in order to preserve the past he has to go back and face a possibly grim fate.
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The third book sees Richard's BestFriend from the past, Francis Lovell, brought into the future by mistake, but in order to preserve the past he has to go Richard must send his friend back and to face a possibly grim fate.
fate. Meanwhile, Adrian Strange finds himself trapped in the past and must learn to survive.
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* The third book sees Richard's BestFriend from the past, Francis Lovell, brought into the future by mistake, but in order to preserve the past he has to go back and face a possibly grim fate.
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* The third book sees Richard's BestFriend from the past, Francis Lovell, brought into the future by mistake, but in order to preserve the past he has to go back and face a possibly grim fate.
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* MatzoFever: Richard is seriously thrown once he discovers Sarah is Jewish. While he's not violently anti-Semitic, he was raised with bad attitudes about Jews, and it takes quite a lot of effort for him to accept that these views were wrong. His love for Sarah and her little daughters eventually trumps them, and by ''Loyalty Binds Me'' he's not bothered by it at all.
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''Richard III in the 21st Century'' is a series of historical science-fiction novels by Joan Szechtman, about... well, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin guess]]. The series consists of:
# ''This Time'' (2009)
# ''Loyalty Binds Me'' (2011)
# ''Strange Times'' (2017)
The first book, ''This Time'', begins with UsefulNotes/RichardIII making his final charge at Bosworth Field. He is felled by his own treasonous forces, succumbs to death...
...and wakes up in Portland, Oregon, in the year 2004, surrounded by oddly dressed strangers. It turns out Richard was successfully retrieved from the past by a research team who substituted a similar-looking already-dead man in the right armor in his place to avoid changing history, and grizzled project leader Evan Hosgrove is eager to get to speak to his favorite historical monarch.
When an increasingly complicated series of events traps Richard in this unfamiliar time, he is forced to adapt to this new world. He soon discovers that while there is no way to rescue his beloved wife Anne from the past as well without changing history, he ''can'' bring his late son Edward to safety and becomes obsessed with figuring out how to do so. Along the way, he befriends the researchers who brought him there, learns to outgrow some of his old beliefs, and finds himself falling for a beautiful single mom, Sarah Levine.
The second book, ''Loyalty Binds Me'', picks up a year after the conclusion of ''This Time'' and finds Richard contending with the head of [=MI5=], who wants Sarah's time-travel invention and is willing to legally entrap Richard in order to obtain it.
Has no relation to ''Series/BuckRogersInTheTwentyFifthCentury''. Or ''WesternAnimation/DuckDodgersInTheTwentyFourthAndAHalfCentury''. Or ''WesternAnimation/SherlockHolmesInTheTwentySecondCentury''.
Probably.
----
!!''Richard III in the 21st Century'' provides examples of the following tropes:
* ActionizedSequel: While ''This Time'' has a couple of action scenes, it's primarily a drama about Richard settling in to 2004. ''Loyalty Binds Me'' escalates into a full-blown political thriller.
* AliensInCardiff: All this time-traveling-medieval-monarch business centers around laid-back, folksy Portland, Oregon, with a foray into Rochester, New York for good measure. The plot also stops by the BigApplesauce, but not nearly for as long as it spends in lesser-known spots.
* AndThatLittleGirlWasMe: Richard tells Sarah's daughters, Emma and Mary, the story of how he and Anne met and married using nicknames and third-person narration. They're delighted to later find out he was the man in the story.
* AuthorAppeal: Not only is Richard the main character, but the Richard III Society (and the Ricardian school of historical revisionism in general) is an actual part of the story, with Evan Hosgrove and Henry Stafford as members of the society. [[spoiler:However, Richard is actually greatly assisted by some Tudor enthusiasts- at a reenactment of the Battle of Bosworth!- toward the end of ''Loyalty Binds Me'', and he agrees to put in a good word for them to his Ricardian friends.]]
* BabiesEverAfter: [[spoiler:Sarah is expecting again by the end of ''Loyalty Binds Me''.]]
* BetterAsFriends: Richard has rather desperate sex with Katarina Parvic only a few days into his time in 2004, mostly out of missing his wife and being extremely disoriented by this new time period. They quickly realize they fit this trope instead.
* BigApplesauce: The location of part of the latter half of the first book, with some excellent accuracy regarding the UsefulNotes/NewYorkCitySubway.
* BloodKnight: Richard would "rather be fighting than talking about fighting."
* BrickJoke: After [[spoiler:being shot]], Richard is ''extremely'' freaked out by waking up in a hospital with a catheter. [[spoiler:Toward the end of the book, Edward has the same reaction.]]
-->"I AM OKAY."
%% * BritishFoodAndDrink: Inverted from its usual portrayal. Richard finds modern American food almost uniformly bland (though he does discover he likes pizza) and misses medieval English cooking. This is a bit of a GeniusBonus - medieval food was often seasoned to a point that modern taste buds would find repellently overpowering to hide any potential bad flavors from food starting to go bad.
* BroughtDownToBadass: Without his royal title and class privilege to fall back on in confrontational situations, Richard becomes quite the brawler if pressed hard enough.
* CharacterTics:
** Richard pinches the bridge of his nose when frustrated. (He's frustrated ''a lot''.) When Sarah calls him out on it, he mentions that he used to fiddle with a dagger instead.
** Sarah herself bites her nails.
* ClearMyName: Richard's main goal in ''Loyalty Binds Me''.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Used in quite a bit of Richard's initial inner monologue, in ways ranging from his classification of Katarina Parvic as a "heretic" for wearing trousers and a black man as a Saracen, to his internal agony over whether or not he can consider marrying an unconverted Jew, to even mild things like initially considering his own initially collarbone-length hair short already. He proves willing to learn about and accept the viewpoints of his new time, though.
* DisappearedDad: Emma and Mary's father. [[spoiler:This makes their later acceptance of Richard as their new daddy that much sweeter.]]
* EquivalentExchange
* {{Facepalm}}: A gesture Richard rapidly acquires and uses with amusing frequency.
* FailedFutureForecast: The series itself becomes AlternateHistory to the 2000s as well in ''Loyalty Binds Me''- large parts of the exposition are devoted to discussing John Ashdown-Hill's research into Richard III's genes, including mention of a female relative living in Canada in 2004, and this genetic information's importance to proving Richard ''is'' Richard. This was the same information used in the real world to identify Richard's remains in 2012- remains which, in the book, aren't Richard's at all, but a predeceased IdenticalStranger's.
* FakeAmerican: Richard, after two years in 2004.
* FishOutOfTemporalWater: Richard, of course. He eventually adapts magnificently.
* FourthDateMarriage: [[spoiler:What Richard intends to do with Sarah. The nearly universal reaction from his modern friends is "''slooooow doooooown''".]]
* TheFutureIsShocking: Though in more mundane ways than the trope usually involves.
* HappilyAdopted: [[spoiler:Richard adopts Emma and Mary as his own daughters. Sarah returns the favor by adopting Edward as her son.]]
* HappilyMarried: Richard and Anne were. [[spoiler:And Richard and Sarah, later on.]]
* HeroesWantRedheads: Richard, toward Sarah.
* HiddenDepths: ''Loyalty Binds Me'' shows Sarah to be more than just Richard's SecondLove.
* ImportantHaircut: A necessary component in passing Richard off as a guy from 2004. He doesn't give it much thought once he gets used to how it feels.
* InspectorJavert: [=MI5=] agent Adrian Strange.
* {{Irony}}: Richard ends up concealing himself from the by-now crazed Strange at a reenactment of the Battle of Bosworth. In the armor of one of Henry Tudor's archers.
* {{Jerkass}}: John Fortas. Overlaps with TheNeidermeyer.
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: Evan Hosgrove.
* KickTheDog: John Fortas sends plenty of puppies flying as he goes about his daily routine.
* LampshadeHanging: Fiona Gray's articles for the ''Star'' point out, in-universe, the absurdity of an American tourist in his mid-thirties in 2006 being arrested on suspicion of being King Richard III, with [=MI5=] and the FBI throwing their support into the effort. (Not that they're ''wrong'' about his identity, but still.)
* TheLostLenore: Anne, somewhat. Realizing that he can't bring her to 2004 as well feels like losing her all over again to Richard. [[spoiler:While he and Sarah eventually marry, he never fully gets over Anne. Sarah doesn't pressure him to.]]
* MatzoFever: Richard is seriously thrown once he discovers Sarah is Jewish. While he's not violently anti-Semitic, he was raised with bad attitudes about Jews, and it takes quite a lot of effort for him to accept that these views were wrong. His love for Sarah and her little daughters eventually trumps them, and by ''Loyalty Binds Me'' he's not bothered by it at all.
* McGuffin: Sarah's time machine in ''Loyalty Binds Me''.
* NeverTheSelvesShallMeet: No one can use the Q Trip technology for over 30 seconds without disintegrating due to this trope. [[spoiler:Michael Fairchild suffers fatal neurological damage in ensuring Edward's safe transfer to 2004 thanks to staying for 63 seconds.]]
* OneSteveLimit: Averted. In ''This Time'', Elaine Parvic names her robot after herself simply to confuse people. In ''Loyalty Binds Me'', Richard is discomfited to discover his solicitor is named Henry Stafford, the same as his traitorous onetime friend the Duke of Buckingham. [[spoiler:This turns out to be a NonindicativeName, thankfully.]]
* PapaWolf:
** Don't mess with Edward, Mary, or Emma on Richard's watch.
** Ira Levine is still this way about his adult daughter Sarah.
* ParentalAbandonment: A common theme; Richard's father died when Richard was 8, and he only occasionally saw his mother until he was an adult. Elaine and Emma and Mary's fathers are nowhere in sight, either. Richard also realizes, rather ruefully, that he accidentally favored his legitimate son Edward over his bastards John and Katherine.
* PostHistoricalTrauma: Richard is ''horrified'' by discovering the Holocaust, and while his own attitude toward Jews is fair for the time period he just left, this is a huge step toward his complete reevaluation of what he was taught.
* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: Richard, in comparison to his modern companions.
* Really700YearsOld: Richard. Sort of.
* RealNameAsAnAlias: Richard claims to be "Eric Wilde", after finding a plausible birth certificate with that name to appropriate as his own, but has his documentation legally changed to "Richard Gloucestre" as soon as the Wilde alias is accepted. (The real-life Richard signed his letters as "R. Gloucestre" or "Richard Gloucestre" in life, as "Richard Plantagenet" wasn't a distinctive enough name to indicate which one he was.)
* RedHerring: In ''Loyalty Binds Me'', there are claims that the murder case against Richard will be backed up by DNA testing on the child skeletons found in the Tower. Richard reveals that the skeletons couldn't be the princes -- he secretly sent them out of England and substituted two boys who resembled them to take their place in the Tower. But those boys resembled them so much because they were a result of their father's philandering... [[spoiler:They never get to test the skeletons]].
* SecondLove: Sarah, for Richard.
* SequelGoesForeign: In a manner of speaking- while England is Richard's original country, he's come to consider America home, and finds England as foreign now as he first found America.
* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong:
** How Katarina views rescuing Richard from his doom.
** [[spoiler:This is also why [=MI5=] wants Sarah's time machine.]]
* SanDimasTime: Used to extraordinarily tense effect when it comes to fetching Edward out of 1484.
* SharpDressedMan: Richard eventually becomes one of these in 2004 and beyond.
* ShoutOut:
** Richard is delighted by ''Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail''. Once he gets over his shock at realizing he was ''laughing at the Plague'', anyway.
** Elaine's friends, the Califanis, work for a "creature shop", and Elaine introduces Richard to this concept by showing him ''Film/JurassicPark'' on DVD.
** "You've already experienced [[Film/PlanesTrainsAndAutomobiles planes, trains, and automobiles...]]"
* ShownTheirWork: Szechtman clearly did a great deal of research.
* TimeAndRelativeDimensionsInSpace: Discussed; it takes a great deal of practice to safely get to the exact right spot in the past.
* TimeMachine: Sarah invented one. In ''high school''.
* TookALevelInBadass: Richard, already a WarriorPrince in his own time, takes on outright action hero traits in ''Loyalty Binds Me''.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: "Gray-Beard". [[spoiler:He has nothing against Richard personally, he just sees him as a means of snaring Sarah's support in building a time machine for various Western governments.]]
* WhatTheHellIsThatAccent: The general reaction most people have toward Richard's. It's described as sounding vaguely Appalachian, mixed with a vague Scottish lilt. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in that this is a decent approximation of an early modern English accent.
* WorldOfSnark
* WorthyOpponent: Richard regards Hosgrove this way as he gets to know him. He has no doubt that Hosgrove merely wants to pump him for information and then send him back to Bosworth to die, but he has the utmost respect for his history as a soldier and his advanced age. [[spoiler:Their relationship grows more friendly, bizarrely enough, after Hosgrove ''shoots'' Richard, and the extent to which he regrets this convinces Richard that Hosgrove isn't as utterly merciless as he thought.]]
----
# ''This Time'' (2009)
# ''Loyalty Binds Me'' (2011)
# ''Strange Times'' (2017)
The first book, ''This Time'', begins with UsefulNotes/RichardIII making his final charge at Bosworth Field. He is felled by his own treasonous forces, succumbs to death...
...and wakes up in Portland, Oregon, in the year 2004, surrounded by oddly dressed strangers. It turns out Richard was successfully retrieved from the past by a research team who substituted a similar-looking already-dead man in the right armor in his place to avoid changing history, and grizzled project leader Evan Hosgrove is eager to get to speak to his favorite historical monarch.
When an increasingly complicated series of events traps Richard in this unfamiliar time, he is forced to adapt to this new world. He soon discovers that while there is no way to rescue his beloved wife Anne from the past as well without changing history, he ''can'' bring his late son Edward to safety and becomes obsessed with figuring out how to do so. Along the way, he befriends the researchers who brought him there, learns to outgrow some of his old beliefs, and finds himself falling for a beautiful single mom, Sarah Levine.
The second book, ''Loyalty Binds Me'', picks up a year after the conclusion of ''This Time'' and finds Richard contending with the head of [=MI5=], who wants Sarah's time-travel invention and is willing to legally entrap Richard in order to obtain it.
Has no relation to ''Series/BuckRogersInTheTwentyFifthCentury''. Or ''WesternAnimation/DuckDodgersInTheTwentyFourthAndAHalfCentury''. Or ''WesternAnimation/SherlockHolmesInTheTwentySecondCentury''.
Probably.
----
!!''Richard III in the 21st Century'' provides examples of the following tropes:
* ActionizedSequel: While ''This Time'' has a couple of action scenes, it's primarily a drama about Richard settling in to 2004. ''Loyalty Binds Me'' escalates into a full-blown political thriller.
* AliensInCardiff: All this time-traveling-medieval-monarch business centers around laid-back, folksy Portland, Oregon, with a foray into Rochester, New York for good measure. The plot also stops by the BigApplesauce, but not nearly for as long as it spends in lesser-known spots.
* AndThatLittleGirlWasMe: Richard tells Sarah's daughters, Emma and Mary, the story of how he and Anne met and married using nicknames and third-person narration. They're delighted to later find out he was the man in the story.
* AuthorAppeal: Not only is Richard the main character, but the Richard III Society (and the Ricardian school of historical revisionism in general) is an actual part of the story, with Evan Hosgrove and Henry Stafford as members of the society. [[spoiler:However, Richard is actually greatly assisted by some Tudor enthusiasts- at a reenactment of the Battle of Bosworth!- toward the end of ''Loyalty Binds Me'', and he agrees to put in a good word for them to his Ricardian friends.]]
* BabiesEverAfter: [[spoiler:Sarah is expecting again by the end of ''Loyalty Binds Me''.]]
* BetterAsFriends: Richard has rather desperate sex with Katarina Parvic only a few days into his time in 2004, mostly out of missing his wife and being extremely disoriented by this new time period. They quickly realize they fit this trope instead.
* BigApplesauce: The location of part of the latter half of the first book, with some excellent accuracy regarding the UsefulNotes/NewYorkCitySubway.
* BloodKnight: Richard would "rather be fighting than talking about fighting."
* BrickJoke: After [[spoiler:being shot]], Richard is ''extremely'' freaked out by waking up in a hospital with a catheter. [[spoiler:Toward the end of the book, Edward has the same reaction.]]
-->"I AM OKAY."
%% * BritishFoodAndDrink: Inverted from its usual portrayal. Richard finds modern American food almost uniformly bland (though he does discover he likes pizza) and misses medieval English cooking. This is a bit of a GeniusBonus - medieval food was often seasoned to a point that modern taste buds would find repellently overpowering to hide any potential bad flavors from food starting to go bad.
* BroughtDownToBadass: Without his royal title and class privilege to fall back on in confrontational situations, Richard becomes quite the brawler if pressed hard enough.
* CharacterTics:
** Richard pinches the bridge of his nose when frustrated. (He's frustrated ''a lot''.) When Sarah calls him out on it, he mentions that he used to fiddle with a dagger instead.
** Sarah herself bites her nails.
* ClearMyName: Richard's main goal in ''Loyalty Binds Me''.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Used in quite a bit of Richard's initial inner monologue, in ways ranging from his classification of Katarina Parvic as a "heretic" for wearing trousers and a black man as a Saracen, to his internal agony over whether or not he can consider marrying an unconverted Jew, to even mild things like initially considering his own initially collarbone-length hair short already. He proves willing to learn about and accept the viewpoints of his new time, though.
* DisappearedDad: Emma and Mary's father. [[spoiler:This makes their later acceptance of Richard as their new daddy that much sweeter.]]
* EquivalentExchange
* {{Facepalm}}: A gesture Richard rapidly acquires and uses with amusing frequency.
* FailedFutureForecast: The series itself becomes AlternateHistory to the 2000s as well in ''Loyalty Binds Me''- large parts of the exposition are devoted to discussing John Ashdown-Hill's research into Richard III's genes, including mention of a female relative living in Canada in 2004, and this genetic information's importance to proving Richard ''is'' Richard. This was the same information used in the real world to identify Richard's remains in 2012- remains which, in the book, aren't Richard's at all, but a predeceased IdenticalStranger's.
* FakeAmerican: Richard, after two years in 2004.
* FishOutOfTemporalWater: Richard, of course. He eventually adapts magnificently.
* FourthDateMarriage: [[spoiler:What Richard intends to do with Sarah. The nearly universal reaction from his modern friends is "''slooooow doooooown''".]]
* TheFutureIsShocking: Though in more mundane ways than the trope usually involves.
* HappilyAdopted: [[spoiler:Richard adopts Emma and Mary as his own daughters. Sarah returns the favor by adopting Edward as her son.]]
* HappilyMarried: Richard and Anne were. [[spoiler:And Richard and Sarah, later on.]]
* HeroesWantRedheads: Richard, toward Sarah.
* HiddenDepths: ''Loyalty Binds Me'' shows Sarah to be more than just Richard's SecondLove.
* ImportantHaircut: A necessary component in passing Richard off as a guy from 2004. He doesn't give it much thought once he gets used to how it feels.
* InspectorJavert: [=MI5=] agent Adrian Strange.
* {{Irony}}: Richard ends up concealing himself from the by-now crazed Strange at a reenactment of the Battle of Bosworth. In the armor of one of Henry Tudor's archers.
* {{Jerkass}}: John Fortas. Overlaps with TheNeidermeyer.
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: Evan Hosgrove.
* KickTheDog: John Fortas sends plenty of puppies flying as he goes about his daily routine.
* LampshadeHanging: Fiona Gray's articles for the ''Star'' point out, in-universe, the absurdity of an American tourist in his mid-thirties in 2006 being arrested on suspicion of being King Richard III, with [=MI5=] and the FBI throwing their support into the effort. (Not that they're ''wrong'' about his identity, but still.)
* TheLostLenore: Anne, somewhat. Realizing that he can't bring her to 2004 as well feels like losing her all over again to Richard. [[spoiler:While he and Sarah eventually marry, he never fully gets over Anne. Sarah doesn't pressure him to.]]
* MatzoFever: Richard is seriously thrown once he discovers Sarah is Jewish. While he's not violently anti-Semitic, he was raised with bad attitudes about Jews, and it takes quite a lot of effort for him to accept that these views were wrong. His love for Sarah and her little daughters eventually trumps them, and by ''Loyalty Binds Me'' he's not bothered by it at all.
* McGuffin: Sarah's time machine in ''Loyalty Binds Me''.
* NeverTheSelvesShallMeet: No one can use the Q Trip technology for over 30 seconds without disintegrating due to this trope. [[spoiler:Michael Fairchild suffers fatal neurological damage in ensuring Edward's safe transfer to 2004 thanks to staying for 63 seconds.]]
* OneSteveLimit: Averted. In ''This Time'', Elaine Parvic names her robot after herself simply to confuse people. In ''Loyalty Binds Me'', Richard is discomfited to discover his solicitor is named Henry Stafford, the same as his traitorous onetime friend the Duke of Buckingham. [[spoiler:This turns out to be a NonindicativeName, thankfully.]]
* PapaWolf:
** Don't mess with Edward, Mary, or Emma on Richard's watch.
** Ira Levine is still this way about his adult daughter Sarah.
* ParentalAbandonment: A common theme; Richard's father died when Richard was 8, and he only occasionally saw his mother until he was an adult. Elaine and Emma and Mary's fathers are nowhere in sight, either. Richard also realizes, rather ruefully, that he accidentally favored his legitimate son Edward over his bastards John and Katherine.
* PostHistoricalTrauma: Richard is ''horrified'' by discovering the Holocaust, and while his own attitude toward Jews is fair for the time period he just left, this is a huge step toward his complete reevaluation of what he was taught.
* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: Richard, in comparison to his modern companions.
* Really700YearsOld: Richard. Sort of.
* RealNameAsAnAlias: Richard claims to be "Eric Wilde", after finding a plausible birth certificate with that name to appropriate as his own, but has his documentation legally changed to "Richard Gloucestre" as soon as the Wilde alias is accepted. (The real-life Richard signed his letters as "R. Gloucestre" or "Richard Gloucestre" in life, as "Richard Plantagenet" wasn't a distinctive enough name to indicate which one he was.)
* RedHerring: In ''Loyalty Binds Me'', there are claims that the murder case against Richard will be backed up by DNA testing on the child skeletons found in the Tower. Richard reveals that the skeletons couldn't be the princes -- he secretly sent them out of England and substituted two boys who resembled them to take their place in the Tower. But those boys resembled them so much because they were a result of their father's philandering... [[spoiler:They never get to test the skeletons]].
* SecondLove: Sarah, for Richard.
* SequelGoesForeign: In a manner of speaking- while England is Richard's original country, he's come to consider America home, and finds England as foreign now as he first found America.
* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong:
** How Katarina views rescuing Richard from his doom.
** [[spoiler:This is also why [=MI5=] wants Sarah's time machine.]]
* SanDimasTime: Used to extraordinarily tense effect when it comes to fetching Edward out of 1484.
* SharpDressedMan: Richard eventually becomes one of these in 2004 and beyond.
* ShoutOut:
** Richard is delighted by ''Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail''. Once he gets over his shock at realizing he was ''laughing at the Plague'', anyway.
** Elaine's friends, the Califanis, work for a "creature shop", and Elaine introduces Richard to this concept by showing him ''Film/JurassicPark'' on DVD.
** "You've already experienced [[Film/PlanesTrainsAndAutomobiles planes, trains, and automobiles...]]"
* ShownTheirWork: Szechtman clearly did a great deal of research.
* TimeAndRelativeDimensionsInSpace: Discussed; it takes a great deal of practice to safely get to the exact right spot in the past.
* TimeMachine: Sarah invented one. In ''high school''.
* TookALevelInBadass: Richard, already a WarriorPrince in his own time, takes on outright action hero traits in ''Loyalty Binds Me''.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: "Gray-Beard". [[spoiler:He has nothing against Richard personally, he just sees him as a means of snaring Sarah's support in building a time machine for various Western governments.]]
* WhatTheHellIsThatAccent: The general reaction most people have toward Richard's. It's described as sounding vaguely Appalachian, mixed with a vague Scottish lilt. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in that this is a decent approximation of an early modern English accent.
* WorldOfSnark
* WorthyOpponent: Richard regards Hosgrove this way as he gets to know him. He has no doubt that Hosgrove merely wants to pump him for information and then send him back to Bosworth to die, but he has the utmost respect for his history as a soldier and his advanced age. [[spoiler:Their relationship grows more friendly, bizarrely enough, after Hosgrove ''shoots'' Richard, and the extent to which he regrets this convinces Richard that Hosgrove isn't as utterly merciless as he thought.]]
----
