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Fireside Dreams | Rose of Versailles
Fandom: Rose of Versailles
Words: 5,176
Summary: Oscar was in love.
Pairing/Character: Oscar/André
Extra Info: This was originally posted on Fanfiction.net back in 2008. It is a full rewrite.
Rating: I’d say T bordering on M, but it’s rated M on AO3 just to be safe. :)
Genre: Romance and Friendship with a dash of Angst. Kind of character-study-ish, too.
Notes, if anyone’s interested in them.
All right, so...if you read the original version of this story, you’ll notice the rewrite is...very different.
A few little things:
I use the French manga as my usual reference, so you’ll see a lot of lines quoted that might not match up perfectly with the Japanese-to-English translations that many people are used to. There is one line I did pull from the Japanese though, I believe it was: “One eye isn’t too much to sacrifice for you, Oscar.”
The French version says, instead, “I’ll always be ready to sacrifice an eye for you, Oscar.” I like this too, but I don’t think it really conveys that deep emotional impact that the scene was supposed to have on the reader. Rather, it almost sounds goofy (since he only has one other eye to sacrifice)!
I do believe the intent of the original line is supposed to convey: 1) I’d do it again, 2) No regrets, and 3) harken back to André’s promise to put his life on the line for Oscar some day...even though the eye thing was a complete accident in the manga.
The lines for the lips I know are my creative translation of the French manga.
I feel like I shouldn’t HAVE to put translations for the French in here, but...I dunno. Why did I put them in the story like some kind of ouiaboo? Because there are some words that just don’t have a perfect English equivalent.
- Mon Dieu = My God!
- d’accord = okay, yes, [agreement]; whenever Oscar tells André to do anything, in the French manga, this is how he responds. I could have just written “okay,” but I can’t help but feel that it’s too informal/not respectful enough, and “yes ma’am” just feels too formal. It's basically casual deference.
- Je t’aime = I love you. André shouts it over and over in The Incident Scene, which is what I’m referring to by using it.
I actually hate the title (“Fireside Dreams”) but I’ve known it as this for so long I couldn’t change it.
I changed the ending A LOT for reasons I’ll talk about below, but...I kept the cheesy last line. Well, I rewrote it, but I kept the general feeling of corniness that existed in the original!
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Goals when writing this were as follows:
- Try for a tone that felt as if it could have been part of the manga.
- Eliminate André’s POV (more on this later).
- Deep-dive into Oscar’s POV.
- Treat the story like a fanficcified Character Study piece.
The manga tone thing was frustrating, because the manga lends itself to this really flowery, romantic language that I don’t actually think Oscar would use very often (mostly because the entire series tells us that she is Not That Kind of Person and I don’t appreciate her suddenly Becoming That Person Because Love). A lot of the fandom will disagree with me on this point, and that’s okay. I tried to strike more of a balance where Oscar thinks some of these types of things, but says Logical Oscar Things.
André’s POV originally came in when he did: at Oscar’s door. It also transitioned suddenly into third person omniscient from third person limited, aaaaand when I reread it...I didn’t like it. I felt like it made it harder to follow! The original was supposed to be more of Oscar’s story anyway, so I just committed to it in the rewrite. Overall I do feel this was better for the story, but I lost some lines I really liked from the original that were in André’s POV! Who knows, though, maybe they’ll make an appearance in another story, someday!
Regarding this story as a character study, though... Okay, I’ll try not to let this get long, because I haven’t eaten all day and it’s already getting late here, but I want to address this.
Something that always stuck with me about the manga was how Oscar confessed her love to André quite early on compared to the anime, and how it felt to have their relationship evolve before the end of the series (when she asks André to marry her).
1. I am always ALWAYS ALWAYS a sucker for the woman to ask the man to marry them, ESPECIALLY in period dramas, and
2. Feels good, feels organic, thank you.
Oscar as a character has always interested me greatly, and been highly #relatable, but on my last rewatch I feel like I understand her better than I ever did as an early 20-something.
Despite being in a relationship with André when she asks him to make her his wife, she’s still afraid of actually following through with the act! That’s not something we get to see in the media very often, so I enjoyed getting a peek at it in Rose of Versailles.
Additionally, I felt that Oscar’s whole romance arc was kind of its own character study for her in the canon. She spends most of her life being efficient and logical. Love confuses her. Feelings are difficult to navigate and express. She would not have defended André so passionately I think if she did not love him, but when faced with those feelings she doesn’t even tell him she cares. If the author wanted to make Oscar astute/in tune with her own feelings, she could have written that scene a hundred different ways, but instead we get “I didn’t do it for you, I did it for Nanny! Hahaha!” Part of Oscar’s issue is most assuredly due to the way she was raised, but I feel it didn’t create that character trait so much as it expanded upon it.
Anyway, something difficult to put into words is Oscar’s wondering in the story about being “broken.” I’m writing this from a very specific perspective, but I feel like Oscar’s feeling is relatable to many different types of people. I mean, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt like you were broken, if there was something deeply wrong with you. Now raise it higher if you feel that way and yet...you’re also pretty satisfied with yourself and like who you are, and you don’t really wish to change.
Oscar’s in an interesting position. She’s a woman who identifies as a woman, but she lives as a man. She wears men’s clothes, she does men’s work, she has men’s hobbies, and she’s expected to publicly Act Like a Man. She’s good at these things. She enjoys these things. She delights in her own skill, and has a lot of fun springing the fact that she’s a woman on poor unsuspecting people (like Rosalie, lol) while also shooting down things typically associated with being a woman (like when she glared at André for suggesting she had an understanding of something because of women’s intuition). It’s easy to understand Oscar’s POV: she wants to be free to be herself, and that means picking and choosing from gender stereotypes as she sees fit, identifying herself as what she is and what she is not.
At the end of the day, Oscar is...Oscar...which is how I imagine André feels about it.
I’m sure if you read the story, and you went out of your way to read this far, you probably have a personally complex view of Oscar yourself, so please don’t feel as if my view of her has to match yours. Everyone will read her a little differently!
I wanted to explore the confusion that Oscar feels. The confusion that makes her put on a dress even though she isn’t comfortable in one, the confusion of falling for someone you already knew from the beginning was unattainable (though I didn’t go into detail on this particular point), the difficulty in expressing feelings when you’ve been raised to not do that, and the understanding that different does not mean broken.
Oscar is not broken. You are not broken. I am not broken.
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One last note about this story, and it’s related to The Incident Scene. I’m choosing to interpret it in my own way, so if it’s different than yours, I hope my interpretation wasn’t too jarring!
I look at the scene, particularly in the manga, to be kind of a Domino Effect of less-than-stellar choices. Oscar tries to communicate her feelings but does a very poor job of it, and in the process hurts the person she’s trying to communicate with. As a result, he makes a bad choice and hurts her in turn. I don’t feel that any of the hurt was intentional (these two people love each other, after all), but circumstances have put them into positions where some kind of hurt was inevitable.
André undoubtedly would have been rejected by Oscar no matter when he confessed (just because she wouldn’t be mentally capable of processing it quickly enough to spare him), but he chose to confess to an Oscar 1) as part of an emotional outburst/explosion, and 2) physically.
Oscar is not used to Intimate physical contact, and understandably freaks out. She’s also not used to André as a Passionate Person. He’s always been so mellow! It’s frightening to her on multiple levels.
NOTHING EXCUSES ANDRE, BY THE WAY! Taking his frustration and sorrow and fear and emotion out on Oscar was terrible.
But context is important, I think, to understand how manga!Oscar forgives him before he even leaves her rooms. André’s outburst was never about him being horny, or him wanting to be intimate with Oscar. If you look closely I think it’s clear that it’s a chain of André trying to communicate to her in turn, and failing repeatedly until he rips her shirt (that he’s already holding onto)—something I don’t believe he meant to do, or he wouldn’t feel such immediate shame for it.
It was an outburst of fear that she was abandoning him. It was an explosion of all the love he legally wasn’t allowed to feel for years of his life. It was frustration and sorrow over seeing the person he loves best denying Who She Is in the face of an unrequited crush.
I never felt that André was insisting she was a woman instead of the man she wanted to be so much as he was insisting that Oscar Is Oscar, and she cannot change that, and shouldn’t change it out of fear or embarrassment AS WELL AS SAYING, “You are who you are and I LOVE YOU FOR THAT! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!! PLEASE HEAR ME AND DON’T HURT YOURSELF BY TRYING TO BE SOMEONE YOU’RE NOT!”
Unfortunately André fails to speak plainly enough and the whole thing Backfires. (Now you can consider how he was raised to speak to his betters.)
I know all of the above wasn’t necessary to read the story (or even afterward), but I thought it would assist if anyone read my ‘fic and came away from it wondering if they’d read/watched a completely different version of The Incident.