World Enough and Time

Last night, thanks to encouragement from monsieureden and maaboroshi, I had a wonderful time wandering through numerous websites and YouTube looking at pictures and clips from The Rose of Versailles - the manga, anime, the old movie Lady Oscar, the trailer for the upcoming movie (yay!), the Takarazuka musical - oh, what I would give to see that on stage! what costuming! - and all sorts of fannish music vids. I even discovered a lovely stauette of Oscar. (Oooh! I want!) And a lovely doll version of her lover André.

I'd never even thought to look for Rose of Versailles material beyond the anime and the manga - as far as I know, only two volumes were ever published in English, and they're long out of print. I managed to buy the manga I have at a booth at San Diego Comic Con back in the 1980s: and from the first, I was smitten by its dashing French female hero, Oscar.



This falls into a small genre of fiction that I adore: romantic stories about cross-dressing pansexual young women with swords, set in colourfully baroque historical periods. Well, actually, I can only think of one other example of the genre,¹ and that is Ellen Kushner's wonderful novel, The Privilege of the Sword. I'd like to see that as a movie - oh, I wish!

Or a book illustrated by Charles Vess.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

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¹ Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings shares many of the aspects I love with both Oscar and Katheine, but doesn't quite push the same emotional buttons. Maybe because Eowyn is unequivocably heterosexual. Maybe because the story, whatever it is, isn't the least bit baroque. Maybe becasue Eowyn is only a part of a much longer, larger work, only fragments of which touch on the genre I'm thinking of.

It tempts me to write such a thing myself, it really does.