~fanlisting/shrine
A fanlisting is... pretty much what it sounds like, an online listing of fans of a particular subject; in this case, the adorable Rosalie from Rose of Versailles. (You can find about a million of them at thefanlistings.org and animefanlistings.org.) It's similar to a web clique (there are cute little buttons to display on your site, if you want them) except that you don't have to have a site to join; just a name and an email address.
A shrine is... well, it's another name for a fansite. Just a little online place for me to store my Rosalie-fangirl stuff (icons, screencaps, fic, etc) and share it with others.
~Rose of Versailles
Rose of Versailles! A classic, swashbuckling, tragic tale from a time when men were real men (and wore kneesocks), women were real women (and wore army boots) and royalty were real royalty (and built toy farms, slept with Swedish counts and ended up with their heads cut off).
The series - also known as Lady Oscar and Versailles no Bara/Beresaiyu no Bara - began as a shoujo (meaning "girl") manga written by Riyoko Ikeda and first published in Japan in the 1970s. It rapidly gained a huge following there, and since then has been adapted into an anime, a live-action film and a Takurazuka opera, and translated into a whole bunch of different languages (although not, annoyingly, English). It's set before and during the French Revolution and largely follows the life of Oscar François de Jarjayes, a fictional noblewoman born in 1755 and raised as a boy in order to become her father's "son and heir" and eventually follow in his footsteps to become France's finest general. (Without getting into too many spoilers, let's just say it... doesn't quite work out that way.) Oscar works for the French queen Marie Antoinette, with whom she forms a close friendship, and the series also tells the story of the queen and her friend/lover Count Axel von Fersen - both of whom, of course, are real historical figures, if slightly fictionalised for the story's purposes.
~Rosalie
Rosalie Lamorlière is a comparatively minor (but to my mind considerably important) character within this story. Having grown up in poverty with a loving mother and, er, a slightly psychotic older sister, she is taken in and semi-adopted by Oscar's family after her previous family life, well... collapses, for reasons I won't go into as they are spoilers. In fact that's a bit of a spoiler itself. Ah, well. She first meets Oscar during a distinctly unsuccessful attempt at becoming a prostitute (Oscar has to inform her "Er, look, sweetheart, I'm a woman. It's not gonna work."), which is one of the first events in the series to bring Oscar's attention to the terrible poverty suffered by many Parisians at the time.
Rosalie's character often seems to represent hope and innocence and purity throughout the series, and, despite having had a rather hard life and
(... Did I mention she falls in love with Oscar and is adorably and heartbreakingly sad and unrequited? She does that, too. There's a lot of "Oh, Lady Oscar, why were you born a woman?" and similar lines.)
Unlike Oscar, Rosalie is not entirely fictional - there was a real-life Rosalie Lamorlière who was employed to look after Marie Antoinette during her final days in prison. Unlike Antoinette and Fersen, however, she's not exactly "real" either - very little is known about the real Rosalie's life other than that she appears to have been very kind and devoted to Antoinette, and the character and events shown in Rose of Versailles are pretty much completely fictional.
~why?
Oh, because she's adorable, sweet, and sadly neglected.