As the lives of the characters continue to unfold, such as Rosalie realizing that the owner of the couch that killed her mother is in fact her biological mother, the world continues to move forward as well. Marie Antoinette becomes a mother, the common people of France become more antsy, and Oscar struggles with how she’ll never be with Fersen, her first love.
In the previous review, I mentioned that I was surprised at how little André, Oscar’s devoted manservant/best friend appeared in volume 1 (compared to what I remembered of the anime) and suddenly he’s got much more of a presence here in volume 2! A lot of his moments are still on the comedic side, especially as Oscar makes André impersonate the Black Knight (a thief who has been robbing nobles blind lately) strictly because of same face syndrome, but that’s not surprising considering how many comedic moments are throughout this series overall, something I don’t remember from the anime. Some moments are humorous from a meta context, such as Oscar fuming at the idea of being considered a lesbian, but there are still plenty of visual and verbal gags to help lighten the atmosphere, especially when every reader knows that the French Revolution is right on the horizon.
One of my biggest complaints about the first volume — that it’s rather difficult to tell the passage of time — is an issue again here, as blink and you’ll miss that six months or more pass between two pages for example. Since Riyoko Ikeda is tying even the fictional events so closely to French history it would have been nice if there were more dates listed in the story, but at this point I don’t think I’ll get my wish in future volumes. I do continue to find it fascinating that even though this story is more “fiction” than “historical,” I’d argue that the lives of Oscar, Rosalie, and extrapolations about historical figures like Fersen make up a far larger part of the story so far than the life of Marie Antoinette, that the work remains rather grounded in real history.
Ikeda’s take on Marie, someone who may never have been fit to rule being in a position of power but also someone whose age was a far larger factor in their misdoings than deliberate ill intent, rings true to my general understanding of the historical Marie, especially during parts of the story when she’s still in her early 20s. Ikeda has played with the order and timing of historical events a bit however: in The Rose of Versailles the affair of the diamond necklace starts in volume 1 and concludes in this one, seemingly over a period of quite a few years (not true to life) and earlier in Marie’s life than what actually happened (Marie would have been around 30 when the event actually happened, close to the end of her 37 year life).
The Rose of Versailles has never been about super-strict historical accuracy — see both how some of Oscar’s fashions seem more 1970s than 1770s and how Rosalie is a completely fictional daughter of the real Duchess of Polignac — so I don’t mind that Ikeda has played around with history for the sake of the story, although that does make it even more difficult to try and figure out when in the historical timeline any given event is. I also recalled that “the affair of the diamond necklace” happened later in the anime than it seemed to here and when I went to check I realized that this second volume of the manga covers up to episode 29 of the anime’s 40 episode run; we’re only just at the halfway point of the manga and I’m wondering if the anime greatly reduced future events or if we’ll get events the anime didn’t have!
The more I read RoV the more invested I become in it, admittedly even more than I was in the anime, and I really can’t wait to see what’s coming up next. Rosalie, who I will insist is the true queer icon of the series (where there are multiple instances of Oscar saying that it’s a shame she isn’t a man, since so many of the women she knows would make lovely wives, Rosalie is interested in marrying Oscar just the way both of them are) seems to have exited the stage, André has been permanently injured, and Oscar has, successfully, begged for a demotion to oversee a company of lower ranked soldiers. I find myself thinking “with Oscar’s ideals, you could create a fascinating ‘what-if’ fic about her being on the side of the revolutionaries,” only to remember that Oscar wasn’t even a real person, I’m that invested in a fiction character! Ikeda has made me invested in these characters and the soap-opera era of history that they live in and I’m already ready for more.