Warning: This Review Contains Spoilers

As the wise Prospero once said, “Our revels now are ended. These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits and/Are melted into air, into thin air.” It's fitting that so many Shakespearean quotations can be used to describe Requiem of the Rose King, because while original creator Aya Kanno took many liberties with her source materials, she always remained true to the spirit of Shakespearean tragedy, and no where is that more apparent than in the final episodes of this show. From the over-the-top, explicit theatricality of Henry Tudor to the quiet pain of Buckingham's death, the series hits a lot of true notes. It may not have been the best series ever animated, but it's hard to deny that its intentions were in the right place and that it did, in the end, manage to touch on the emotional core of Richard's story.

While the entirety of Requiem of the Rose King is a tragedy, the second half is what truly brings that home. Beginning with the death of Prince Edward of Westminster, Henry VI's son, the story begins to dole out deaths with more of a sense of weighty loss, culminating (in terms of tragedy) with Queen Anne's death from consumption (tuberculosis). Both Anne's and Buckingham's deaths are effective because they carry the weight of what might have been: had Richard been a man, he might have been happy with Anne. Had Richard been a woman, he might have been happy with Buckingham. And had Richard been able to love himself, he might have been happy in general. His relationships with his wife and lover emphasize the fact that Richard has always been searching for a place to belong and to call his own, and that in that pursuit, he repeatedly ignored or was unable to see himself as worthy of those possibilities that presented themselves. The shine of the crown, his father's dream that he took on, blinded him to the more mundane options for joy before him, something that he does seem to realize in the end when he has nothing and no one left. In this light, the greatest thing that he does as king is to send his son Edward away: in denying him the crown, we can see Richard as giving the boy a chance to have the happiness that he denied himself.

That that happiness was always within reach is perhaps the greatest tragedy of this tale. The blame can, if we are so inclined, be laid at Cecily's feet, as it was her denial of Richard as her son that drove him to seek love elsewhere. That does add a note of horrible irony to her final confrontation with him in the forest, because it implies that he was hanging his dreams on a star that was never really there in the first place, which in turn could say that tragedy was inevitable the moment he set his sights on the throne. That in turn makes Joan of Arc's return towards the end of the series so interesting – in a recent interview with ANN, Kanno said that she included Joan in the story because of her final lines in Henry VI Part One, where she curses the entire Plantagenet line, but also because she embodies the way that the Medieval world could only see gender as binary – her actions were unfeminine by their understanding. Joan therefore represents the part of Richard that he sees as female but unfeminine, his rejected female half brought to life by Joan's dying words; his father's ghost is his masculine half that he struggles to embrace but feels unworthy of – a black-winged angel showing how he feels tainted. That Richard never fully accepted himself as a nonbinary person, that he couldn't reconcile his body with his feelings and ambitions, becomes his downfall, and the only person who ever truly accepted all of him, Catesby, is the one companion who remains to him in the end.

That any of this is effective with the rushed pacing and lackluster visuals is a triumph of both the writing and the voice acting. Akira Ishida gives a stand-out performance as a scenery-chewing Henry Tudor that's easily on par with Aya Hisakawa's Cecily and Sayaka Ōhara's Queen Margaret, and the pain that Richard and Buckingham specifically feel during the Buckingham's Rebellion episodes comes across clearly. There's a real sense that every tragedy that happens could have been avoided, that at every turn, the characters made the wrong choices, and that works impressively well as the series careens towards its finale. It also has a surprisingly light hand with some of the more fraught historical moments, most specifically the whole Princes in the Tower debacle, a case that still fascinates people today. (It features in the first episode of Lucy Worsley's Lucy Worsley Investigates TV documentary series, which is worth watching.) While there are many competing theories about what happened to the boys, Requiem of the Rose King puts Henry Tudor behind the plot, and leaves the question of their deaths ambiguous, which plays into the fact that later two young men challenged his reign, claiming to be the lost princes. Laying the blame at Henry Tudor's feet, rather than the more typical Richard or Buckingham, is an interesting choice and backs the series' central conceit that Richard was a victim of his own low self-esteem rather than an out-and-out villain, while also acknowledging that Henry's young brothers-in-law (as they would later have been) were perhaps a greater threat to the Tudor dynasty than the Plantagenet.

Requiem of the Rose King does play fast and loose with both history and Shakespeare. It takes a few too many odd convenient outs, with James Tyrell dying disguised at Richard III on Bosworth Field, Prince Edward being sent away instead of dying, and completely glossing over Beth's marriage to Henry Tudor, which is unfortunate since Beth was a more central character earlier in the series. But at its heart it maintains the air of a Shakespearean tragedy and I don't hate the idea that, in the end, Richard rides away with the one person who has always loved him and seen him for who he is. And so perhaps the best way to think about this show belong once again to Shakespeare, put in the mouth of Puck in Act V, Scene i of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream.

It was an interesting dream, if nothing else.