The Characters That Inspired Charlotte from Samurai Shodown

A sort of period piece Street Fighter with swords, Samurai Shodown is a fighting game series with characters drawn from a variety of real-life sources. Some of the inspirations make perfect sense for a series set in Edo-era Japan. For example, Jubei Yagyu, a swordsman sporting an eyepatch, is based on the seventeenth-century samurai of the same name, and Hattori Hanzo, a ninja, is based on the sixteenth-century ninja leader of the same name.

Of course, countless video games mine Japanese history for inspiration, and there was actually another fighting game released around the same time — World Heroes, released for the Neo Geo system, just like Samurai Shodown was — that not only did this but also featured a playable character named Hattori Hanzo. This got ten-year-old me thinking about what video games might be based on, where creators might be finding ideas and how similar, presumably related things might end up in two different titles. What you’re reading now is the result of that kid trying to figure all this out, decades later.

In the same way that Samurai Shodown plays fast and loose with time periods, it also brings in non-Japanese characters. Among those in the inaugural 1993 game are Galford, a blue-eyed, English-speaking American ninja who hails from a version of San Francisco that didn’t really exist in 1788, the year the first game takes place; Earthquake, a gargantuan bandit from Texas, which at this point in time was a province of New Spain; and Charlotte, a French fencer whose stage is the palace at Versailles.

My first reaction to Charlotte, other than that she looked cool as hell, was that she reminded me of another World Heroes character: Janne, another blond Frenchwoman who wears a suit of armor.

Even without a last name showing onscreen in World Heroes, it was clear that Janne was based on Joan of Arc. Charlotte wasn’t. She seemed to be something else altogether, however, and I still couldn’t make anything of it even after devouring Samurai Shodown-related media eventually led me to learn her full name: Charlotte Christine de Colde.

Years later, I made the connection when I learned of a female assassin who, during the French Revolution, fatally stabbed the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat: Charlotte Corday. A member of the more moderate Girondin group, the 24-year-old Corday found Marat’s ideas radical and dangerous. On July 9, 1793, she killed him while he was taking a bath. Four days later, she was sent to the guillotine. The aftermath of the murder is the subject of the Jacques-Louis David painting The Death of Marat, painted the year the murder happened, but Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baundry’s 1860 painting Charlotte Corday actually captures her stepping away from the scene. Subsequently nicknamed l'ange de l'assassinat (“the angel of assassination”), Corday and her story are referenced in works as dissimilar as Les Misérables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Assassin’s Creed Unity — and, of course, Samurai Shodown.

The connection to Corday can be hard to spot, however, at least in the English version of Samurai Shodown, because her name was localized as de Colde, which many Anglophones would read as “de cold” — two syllables, as if the “e” were silent. Written in katakana, however, her name would be シャルロット＝クリスティーヌ＝ド＝コルデ (Sharurotto Kurisutīnu do Korude), with the final vowel sound being a short “e.” Charlotte Corday’s name would be written with a different final vowel sound: シャルロット・コルデー or Sharurotto Korudē, with a long “e.” I should point out that I don’t think SNK, the company that makes Samurai Shodown, was intentionally obscuring the inspiration in the way Capcom did with M. Bison in Street Fighter II. It was probably unintentional, especially considering how Corday had been long guillotined and therefore unlikely to sue.

It would be wrong to say that Charlotte the Samurai Shodown character was inspired only by Charlotte Corday, however. Stabbing one guy in a non-duel setting is not exactly the same thing as being a world-class fencer, after all, and even Charlotte’s backstory of being a noble who sympathizes with commoners and who joins the French Revolution could actually come from a second source: The Rose of Versailles, a manga by Riyoko Ikeda that initially ran from 1972 to 1973, with the anime adaptation running from 1979 to 1980 and many subsequent adaptations following. The manga initially centered on Marie Antoinette but shifted focus to Oscar François de Jarjayes, a fictional character but, in the universe of the manga, the child of a real historical commander of the French royal guards, François Augustin Regnier de Jarjayes.

The physical resemblance between Oscar and Charlotte seems obvious, even just watching the opening sequence to the Rose of Versailles anime.

There is a major difference between Oscar and Charlotte, however. In all adaptations of The Rose of Versailles, Oscar is an androgynous character and one that could be read as outright trans — assigned female at birth but raised male because her father wants someone to succeed his position with the royal guards. Posts like this one make it seem like Oscar’s gender is presented in a way that’s given fans a lot to write about, years after the fact. None of this, of course, is reflected in Charlotte, but the fact that Charlotte’s stage is always set at Versailles and the fact that she’s given a rose motif makes the connection obvious.

What is especially interesting about this chain of homages, re-creations, callbacks and inspirations is another historical figure known as either the Chevalier d’Éon or the Chevalière d’Éon, depending on who’s doing the writing, chevalier being the French word for “knight” and chevalière being the feminine form of that word. (Because this person is most commonly referred to as the Chevalier d’Éon, I will be using that title, but referring to her otherwise with female pronouns.) Born in 1728, she served as a diplomat, spy and soldier for France, and she eventually declared that she had been assigned female at birth despite having presented as male until the age of 49. In a beat that somewhat parallels the story of Rose of Versailles, this fact enabled the chevalier’s father to claim an inheritance that stipulated that he must produce a male heir. A key difference between the fictional character and the real-life one is that in the manga, Oscar is widely understood by other characters to be a woman who was raised as male and dresses and acts like a man; the Chevalier d’Éon, however, was publicly perceived as a man until 1777, although rumors about her being a woman were commonplace enough that the London Stock Exchange had a betting pool about the true nature of her gender.

Some writers discussing the Chevalier d’Éon note that her claims about her gender could have been made as part of a larger political strategy. In his 2001 book Monsieur d’Éon Is a Woman, Gary Kates argues that it may have been the chevalier herself who fostered these rumors. It’s a fascinating story that you should enjoy at length, and I’d recommend this Art UK write up, this Atlas Obscura article and the “Double Agent” episode of the podcast Noble Blood as places to begin your research into this person’s life. But the gist of it is d’Éon ending political exile in London and returning to France to live there as a woman. Hugh Ryan notes in a piece on Them.us that this was an audacious thing to try and it’s remarkable that it was done successfully.

This was the perfect way to effect a public gender transition without losing her status or popularity: by claiming to have been a woman pretending to be a man all along. Taking it one step further, d’Éon wedded her public transition to her pious, religious nature, effectively arguing that because she was at heart a good, honest, Christian woman, she could no longer live a lie. To a large degree, both the British and the French embraced her for it.

The chevalier ultimately returned to England to live out her life, where she earned money by performing fencing demonstrations.

I couldn’t find an interview where Rose of Versailles creator Riyoko Ikeda definitively says, “Yes, the Chevalier d’Éon inspired me to create my most famous character.” In fact, she credits the inspiration to Björn Andrésen, the Swedish actor who appeared in the 1971 film Death in Venice as not only inspiring Oscar but also the concept of the bishōnen. In fact, she appears in the 2021 documentary about Andrésen, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, to say as much.

Left: Björn Andrésen in Death in Venice. Right: Oscar in Rose of Versailles.

Coincidences do happen — and the next post I’m writing, about another Samurai Shodown character, asks you to consider a rather remarkable one — but story convergences and an overlap in time periods suggest to me that the chevalier could have played a role in Ikeda crafting this character, even if she credits Oscar’s physical appearance to Andrésen. In 1985, Ikeda published Women of the French Revolution, the first chapter of which tells the chevalier’s story, but that is also more than a decade after she launched Rose of Versailles, and it’s entirely possible that the manga’s popularity led to fans pointing out the parallels with the chevalier. For what it’s worth, in 1978, Ikeda also published Claudine, a manga about a trans man seeking love and acceptance in early-twentieth-century France. It is considered one of the first manga with an explicitly trans protagonist, and he looks a lot like Oscar — which is to say that he also looks a lot like Andrésen.

Today, most discussions of the Chevalier d’Éon and anime focus on 2005’s Le Chevalier D’Eon, which is loosely inspired by d’Éon’s story — very loosely, though a central plot point is D’Eon de Beaumont, the lead character, sharing their body with the spirit of their deceased sister, Lia, and Lia de Beaumont being a pseudonym that the real-life d’Eon used while infiltrating the court of Russia’s Empress Elizabeth while posing as a maid. This anime is sometimes discussed as being a spiritual successor to Rose of Versailles, both in terms of setting and its focus on gender.

I bring all this up because I like to stand back and look at the way two or more inspirations collide and recombine into a new thing, often marrying the fictional and the nonfictional in a way I’m not sure anyone ever would have expected. It’s a dynamic I wrote about again and again in my piece on the history of Street Fighter characters, and it’s something I expect to explore more as I write on this site.

Charlotte from Samurai Shodown is a collision of Charlotte Corday, a real person, and Oscar from Rose of Versailles, who in turn is a fictional character but one who is situated among historical personages and who shares some remarkable parallels with the Chevalier d’Éon. Corday and d’Éon would have been alive and in France around the same time, but it doesn’t seem likely they would have met. However, I feel like both would be surprised by… well, a lot of things, the least of which being a ghost communicating with humans living in the year 2022, but if you could explain to them computers and video games and all that, they would also probably be confused by being yoked together in the form of a character who fights against samurai.

Personally, I enjoy how much is contained in or adjacent to Charlotte, a character I once just presumed was supposed to be another Joan of Arc-type like the one in World Heroes, when it turns out she’s so much more complex than that. However, it’s also remarkable that all these pop culture permutations of the Chevalier d’Éon draw on her story to enliven fictional worlds, often ones where magic and the supernatural exist, yet somehow none of them are as wild or wondrous as her real life was. Even considering notes from historians that she may have embellished her tales of adventure here and there, this woman has an amazing story, which is why it gets told and re-told, again and again.

In the final scene of her ending in Samurai Shodown II, Charlotte is about to attend to Hoahmaru, the game’s hero, for whom she is implied to have romantic feelings. When Haohmaru’s lover Oshizu arrives on the scene, however, Charlotte flees. Standing on the cliff, she says, “Love makes me uneasy. I have to… train myself more. Then she cuts off her long hair, depriving herself of one of the signifiers of her femininity. There’s… a lot here.

Miscellaneous Notes

In most installments of the series, Charlotte’s theme song is titled on some variation of “Foreign Woman” or “Foreign Girl” — something that states her gender fairly straightforwardly. Her Samurai Shodown II theme, “続舶来女,” translates to “Continuation: Foreign Woman.”

I was surprised to learn that a live-action adaptation of Rose of Versailles exists — English language, though a co-production between France and Japan, and titled Lady Oscar in English-speaking territories. It features the film debut of Catriona MacColl, an actress I know from the “Gates of Hell” trilogy by Italian horror director Lucio Fulci, in particular 1981’s The Beyond. Outside of Clock Tower, I don’t get to connect video games and Italian horror very often, so I’m as surprised as anyone to be name-dropping The Beyond in a post about Samurai Shodown, yet here I am.

The fact that I got to bring up Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Beyond in the same post? That’s the cross-genre cherry on top of this fancy French dessert.

While Charlotte did not inherit any of the interesting gender politics of Rose of Versailles, there is a character who appears as a sub-boss in Samurai Shodown V who lacks a canonical gender: Yumeji Kurokouchi. They speak in a gender-neutral version of Japanese, and while the English translation of Samurai Shodown VI gives the character male pronouns, some storylines have Yumeji ultimately deciding to enter a nunnery.

Yumeji serves this game’s big bad, Gaoh, who is inspired in part by the historical figure Oda Nobunaga. Based on that connection, it seems probably that Yumeji is a nod to Mori Ranmaru, a young page who served Nobunaga and, according to some accounts, engaged in a sexual relationship with him in the style of the shudō practice common among samurai at the time. As a result of this, versions of Ranmaru in popular culture and characters inspired by him are usually depicted as effeminate, androgynous or otherwise off the gender binary — Samurai Warriors especially, but the Sengoku Basara version of the character is more boyish. A character named Ranmaru in Ninja Master’s is an effeminate, beautiful male, but the Randmaru in the Super Famicom fighting game Battle Master: Kyuukyoku no Senshitachi seems to just be a woman.

Finally, I cannot imagine a better context to mention that there exists a fighting game inspired by Les Miserables. Independently produced and released in 1998, the game is titled Arm Joe, which Kotaku speculates could be a permutation of the Japanese word 無情, mujō, meaning “heartlessness, hardness, cruelty.” And in addition to characters from Les Miserables itself, it also allows you to play as a cyborg version of Jean Valjean, Robojean. Of course.

The Real-Life Revolutionaries Behind Charlotte from Samurai Shodown

Miscellaneous Notes

Is Samurai Shodown II Referencing a Real-Life 16th-Century Cyborg?

Why Is Super Mario Bros. 2 Missing a Level?