Black rose (symbolism)
Black roses are often featured in fiction with many different meanings and titles such as black magic, barkarole, black beauty Tuscany superb, black jade, and baccara varieties of roses. The flowers commonly called black roses are actually a very dark shade of red, purple, or maroon. The color of a rose may be deepened by placing a dark rose in a vase of water mixed with black ink. Other black roses may be blackened by other methods such as burning.
Political
Irish Nationalism
The Black Rose was sometimes used as a code word for Ireland, when English laws prohibited direct references to Ireland as a sovereign nation.
Anarchism
The black rose is a rarely used symbol of the anarchist movement.
Black Rose Books is the name of the Montreal anarchist publisher and small press imprint headed by the libertarian-municipalist/anarchist Dimitrios Roussopoulos. One of the two anarchist bookshops in Sydney is Black Rose Books which has existed in various guises since 1982.
Black Rose was the title of a respected journal of anarchist ideas published in the Boston area during the 1970s, as well as the name of an anarchist lecture series addressed by notable anarchist and libertarian socialists (including Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky) into the 1990s.
Anime
In the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is heavily concerned with the symbolism of roses, the black rose represents the dark side of a person's soul. The Black Rose Duelists are the friends of the series' protagonists who have been turned against them by their ignorance, selfish desires and passions that were carefully amplified by a mastermind psychologist, a student named Souji Mikage.
In the anime series Ranma ½, Kodachi Kuno, sister of Tatewaki Kuno, is nicknamed 'Black Rose'. She is an arrogant, childish, cunning, and occasionally psychotic young girl who often has black rose petals trailing behind her as she leaps.
In the anime/manga series .Hack, one of the female characters is named BlackRose. She is a video game avatar (visual representation) of a human girl (Akira Hayami) in the game The World.
Books and Other Media
In the Vampire Diaries, the black rose is referred to black magic, the only human drink and wine accessible for vampires to drink. It's taste is the same as the taste of blood. Many of the main characters use this to survive. It also has the same effects as any drug.
In the Night World series, the black rose is the symbol for made vampires, as opposed to the black iris for lamia (or born vampires).
In Revenge (Season 2, Episode 18), black roses are a symbol for dying love.
According to the soundtrack released by Nintendo Power, "The Black Rose" is the title for the background music in the 5th level of Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.
References
- Wilkins, Eithne. The rose-garden game; a tradition of beads and flowers, [New York] Herder and Herder, 1969.