Reception
Rose of Versailles is currently 14th on the list of all-time best-selling shōjo manga, having sold a grand total of 15 million volumes worldwide and 12 million in Japan only, a "nation-wide best seller". In terms of circulation per volume, it is in fourth place with an average of 1,500,000 sales per volume. It is not well known in North America (except in Quebec) due to its age and lack of publicity, but remains a treasured classic in Japanese manga. The anime was ranked in the top 50 of a list of favourite anime series in 2005. So far, the manga and anime have been translated into Arabic, Turkish, Korean, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Indonesian and Chinese. The "immense popularity" of the 1974 Takarazuka musical gained widespread attention, including academic attention, for not only Rose of Versailles, but for the field of shōjo manga. The research that went into the setting of Rose of Versailles led some teachers to use it in their classrooms and purchase it for their school libraries, which was a "Japanese educational first". The popularity of the manga also created a boom in the study of the French language and made France, particularly Versailles a popular tourist destination for Japanese travellers.
Moto Hagio believes the popularity of The Rose of Versailles influenced publishers to routinely collect serialized manga in paperback format.
Susan J. Napier has described the court of The Rose of Versailles as being "a particularly good example of idealized Western Otherness". Tierney says that the aesthetics of The Rose of Versailles cannot be described as purely Japanese or Western. Deborah Shamoon says that Rose of Versailles can be used to track the development of shōjo manga from being "a genre for children to being one for older readers". The bloody end of the main characters, while shocking, also whet the audience's appetite for more serious stories. Shamoon sees the Oscar-Andre relationship as very different from the Cinderella-Prince Charming stories which "dominated" shōjo manga in the 1960s, where the female protagonist would lose her identity to her boyfriend. Shamoon considers that the Oscar-Andre relationship follows the pattern of pre-war douseiai shōjo novels, which featured same-sex love between girls. Kazuko Suzuki says that after RoV, "several works" were created with "nonsexual" female protagonists like Oscar, who realize their "womanness" upon falling in love.
Rose of Versailles is famous for having the first "bed scene" in manga, which has had a "profound impact" on female readers, including fan criticism of the adaptation of this scene to the anime. Yukari Fujimoto has said that "for us junior and senior high school girls at that time, our concept of sex was fixed by that manga."
Read more about this topic: The Rose Of Versailles
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)