Wait, what? WHAT?

I have just finished watching The Rose of Versailles anime series, which I mentioned in this post.

I was very excited by it, as you well know. Lilian sent me a lovely Marie Antoinette wig to adorn my Webkinz panda (now known as Marie Pandoinette). Never mind that Oreo is actually a boy. He's comfortable in his own sexuality, darn it. I have also started the construction of my own Webkinz Versailles.

After having finished the anime, I am...torn. It was watchable enough and I did laugh at the streams of tears that sparkle like a million diamond fragments and the soap opera-like melodrama of it all. But is that not the point of shoujo? I even managed to overlook the portrayal of Duc d'Orléans as some mustache-twirling villain in a big black cape (well, without the mustache). That is not what bothers me.

The whole series is composed of 40 episodes and even though one starts to sense the unrest that leads to the French Revolution around episode 25, it takes quite awhile for it to move. I waited and waited and around episode 36, I started to get very antsy, because I knew exactly how much of the story is left and started to doubt if everything would be told satisfactorily in the remaining time.

I will now present a short summary of events that occur in the last few volumes of the manga:
Oscar (main character, female commander of the French Guards) decides to join the revolutionaries with her troops. Meanwhile, her best friend, André has been slowly going blind due to injuries that happened some years ago, but Oscar doesn't know about this. Oscar and André fall in love. Oscar takes her troops to support the citizens of Paris and André is wounded during battle. Oscar finds out that André is blind and he dies. The next day, Oscar leads the attack on Bastille and dies just as the prison falls into the hands of the revolutionaries. Then we shift focus to Marie Antoinette and everything that happened to her during the Revolution.

Oscar and André.
Even though they're both as pretty as daisies, you can tell André is the guy because he has a square jaw.

Now, here are MY feelings while watching the final 5 episodes of Rose of Versailles.
Episode 36:
Shouldn't this move along? Come on, there's a whole whack of stuff left to tell! Surely they're not thinking of ending the series right after Oscar's death!

Episode 37:
Wait, the battle's not even started yet and Oscar knows about André's eyes? That makes no sense! Aw, Oscar and André are together. Took them long enough, stoopid Oscar and her idiotic waffling. It's André! WHEE! ^O^

Episode 38: Oscar decides to join the revolutionaries with her troops.
"I resign as your commander. Because the man I love and trust won't fire at the people, just like all of you. I'll follow what he says. If he fights with the people, I'll fight with them. I've become André's wife. I'd like to walk the same path as my husband."

Wait. WHAT? That's your reason for joining the revolution? Because you're in love with André? Okay, I know André is hot. I've been screaming at you for the last 20 episodes to stop mooning after Fersen and get together with André already. But the Oscar *I* know joined the Revolution because she believed in it, not some pansy reason that her lover wants her to. Where was this subservient nature for the past 37 episodes? This is wrong. I'm totally not gonna cry when you die, you twit.

Episode 39:
Why are you taking André with you into battle? Have you gone insane? He's going BLIND, you idiot! At least the Oscar in the manga didn't KNOW André was blind before she decided to let him handle a freaking rifle on a horse!
Oh great, he's dead now. Are you happy? You killed him with your stupidity, dumbass! Yes, cry. Like crying is going to make up for getting him killed. I have no sympathy! Poor André. He deserved better than the blonde idiot who snubbed him for 36 episodes. T_T *sniff, sniff*
Great. Now Oscar's dead and it was completely anticlimactic.

Episode 40: Finale
It takes 10 minutes for Oscar's death and the montage of illustrations. There's no denying that the portraits of Oscar and André are beautiful, but how are they going to tell Marie Antoinette's story in 10 minutes?
Oh I can't believe this. It's minor characters meeting 5 years later to discuss the events of the French Revolution, because one of them's writing a book about it. How serendipitous. -_-;;
It's a goddamn clip show. They made a clip show of the attack on Versailles, the escape to Varennes, Louis XVI's trial, Louis Charles' abduction, Marie Antoinette's imprisonment in the Conciergerie and her execution.

Rosalie: [holding a white paper rose] Her Majesty gave me this on the morning of her last day. She made it with cosmetic papers in the cell, remembering Lady Oscar.

[Ah, so she indulged in origami during her imprisonment, did she? How elegant!]

Rosalie: And she said, "Rosalie, please colour this rose. The colour that Oscar liked." Then I suddenly realized I never asked Lady Oscar what colour rose she liked.

[That would be because it's not a common conversation topic. I don't care how bored people were in the 18th century. And I never knew Oscar to be an avid gardener, being so busy with soldiering and whatnot.]

Alain: I don't know about Oscar, but André would probably say he likes white.
Rosalie: Then I should keep it as it is.
Alain: Yeah, that's better.

And...that was it. Fersen's fate was described in two sentences by the narrator and that's how it ended. Le sigh. I shall stick to the originals from now on. They can't dissapoint me. *cough*Gankutsuou!*cough*

Oscar and Marie Antoinette as I would like to remember them.