requiem of the rose king

Requiem of the rose king is a manga series by Aya Kanno.

This story is a gothic twist on the war of the roses and also Richard and Henry by William Shakesphere.

It focuses on Richard the 3rd and their war for the throne and Richard is something of an outcast especially considering the fact Richard is an intersex something which at those times would be seen as monstrous especially among family members.

In the original play Richard was a ugly hunchback but here they still manage to make him “monsterous” in someways still keeping things faithful to the original story.

Richard does start to accept more of their body as time goes by so character development here is pretty compelling to look at.

The artstyle is really incredible and I really like the gothic stylizations for it and I also really liked how it mixed shakesphere tragedy and goth stuff together.

I liked the character designs too.

It’s a fairly long manga too with about 78 chapters. The story is not exactly the most easiest to follow and its certainly not for the faint of heart either given how much touchy subject matter is in it. It starts off kind of rough but it does pick up on pretty quickly.

The manga does get pretty violent too from time to time so the action here is going to be interesting if you’re into that kind of stuff.

Romance in it is also pretty compelling and controversial as its not afraid to go both ways with romance.

The pacing here is obviously much better than in the anime which was admitedly off key from being too fast or slow inconsistently.

The plotwists here were not something you can easily predict and it was well executed I found personally.

Overall the story was a pretty interesting take on Shakesphere’s stuff.

It gets 4 out of 5 stars.