Ayashi no Ceres
Ceres: Celestial Legend

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Another Classic from Yu Watase! This manga is from the mid-1990s right after Fushigi Yugi. With manga fans, it's either a love it or hate it manga but what's not to like about Ceres: The Celestial Legend? It has a great story, excellent artwork and developed characters. It's not the newest manga on the shelves, but mentioned before it's a classic.

The art is very Yu Watase: detailed eyes and whispy hair. The hair is perfected in very strained making it realistic. The eyes have the most detail and the most enjoyed feature in the artwork. Border line between realistic and exaggerated, Ceres has shojo ... artwork. The backgrounds are also detailed, almost as much as the characters. Yu Watase's biggest flaw in creating manga is her repetitive cast of characters. Everyone has seen her style before, and some characters look exactly the same as previous ones from her other manga. (Knight from Absolte Boyfriend and Limdo from Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden is ONE example) At least, the characters in one series aren't the same, which would be too confusing. Those who like her artwork and/or new to Watase's work would love the art to this manga. Despite using the characters over again (it doesn't bother some) the artwork is beautiful. (It's not a big flaw since her artwork is wonderful)

There are a lot of strong characters in this series. They are developed as the story goes along, which makes the story and characters more enjoyable. Watase is big on having love triangles (which is present in Ceres) but this love story ends up more like a dodecagon. It sounds like something from Springer but it actually adds to the story. As the story goes along, bits and pieces of characters are added. One of the best manga series that deals with character development.

The story is very unique and raises a lot of questions and hooks. The great thing about the story is, like the characters, information is added as the story goes along. This technique captures the reader into making them what to read more. It's a fantasy story but with a modern day twist. It's also a horror story that adds suspense and drama, but has some comic jokes here and there-- it's a mix of genres rolled into an interesting story. Unlike the anime, it has more detail and information. For 14 volumes of manga, there are 26 anime episodes.

Ceres is under the shojo category and is meant for a teen audience. Men may not enjoy this as much as women, as well as younger fans may not enjoy this as much as older fans. Ceres one of Watase's best storylines, which most manga fans can enjoy. For more to the story they can check out volume six to Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden. (written 10 years later)

Ceres is one of Watase's most popular works and, in my opinion, her best. It's a much more mature story than her others, dealing with themes of sexuality and violence (often a mixture of the two), but as my mother would say, it is tastefully done. Probably 16+ should read this, not because of content, but because the themes are very complex and require a more mature understanding of sex and violence. Besides the 'parental disclaimers,' Ceres is a beautiful love story and a sci-fi/horror thriller with social commentary and humor. The main storyline is that Aya, on her sixteenth birthday, is possessed by ... a spirit named Ceres. To make matters worse, her family wants to kill her to keep Ceres from being unleashed. So Aya must find a way to rid herself of Ceres...or at least that's how the story starts. There are fourteen volumes in all, so the story has time to become really complex (but not like Pirates of the Carribean 3-I-have-no-idea-what-is-going-on-complex). It's a long series, but it's worth the time (and money if you buy all the volumes like me).

Being old enough to have read Fushigi Yuugi back when it was originally serialized, I can safely say I am the audience for whom Ceres aimed. I mention this so you understand I am writing this as someone who was there. I shared the world that Yuu Watase’s characters inhabited in Ceres, and can remember the way talk of genomes, cloning and other ‘modern’ tech took the world by storm in the late 90s. And because I was there, I can safely say now, in 2022, that I am glad that most of the modern world has left behind so many of the attitudes present ... in Ceres regarding tech, interpersonal relationships and what it means to grow up.

That is to say, few things in Ceres have aged well. Starting with the heroine, whose story takes place during a whole year in canon, during which she went from a brainless, bratty, run-of-the-mill teen, one who found comfort in just being part of the crowd, to a mature, responsible young mother.

If you believe the narration in the book, I mean. Anyone who stops and thinks realizes that Aya is a 17yo who dropped out of high school to go work two jobs and live with her much older, undocumented boyfriend in a small apartment where she proceeded to accidentally become teen pregnant. And because I lived back in the late 90s, I can tell you even back then this entire situation would be considered a ridiculous mess. Now, in her defense, Watase was approached about the teen pregnancy angle and replied with what can be summarized as ‘it is fiction, not real life’, something I generally tend to agree with. My issue with Aya is less the teen pregnancy and more with the absurd pretense that she is now a mature woman ready to take on the world.

Thing is, the whole of Ceres’ story is filled with these absurd stretches of logic that make it impossible for the story to ever really hit any meaningful note with the readers. Of these, my favorite has to be Aya’s mom – who believing her husband died at the hands of their daughter, decided to kill said daughter. I loved this scene, originally. Seeing Aya escape from the shitshow that was the family reunion, finding her mother at their home and try and pretend, if only for a bit, that all was well… it was a heartbreaking and poignant way to show a woman’s sanity being shattered so thoroughly she thought killing her own child would be the only way to find peace, while making the reader realize just how alone Aya now is.

It is all completely ruined the moment Aya announced, after deciding to shack up with Touya, that she now understood why her own mother tried to kill her. After all, if her mother loved her father the way she loves Touya, trying to kill her own child makes perfect sense!

Holy fuck, really?

Then there’s the rape. It is an integral part of the Ceres –the character’s-- story, one we learn that has taken place all over the world, in different ways. Yet it only ever is treated with respect when it is convenient for the author, which is not often enough. The gang-rape attempt is treated as serious, which you’d think would be a given, but since the times Yuuhi and Shuro put her in similar situations were waved away with ‘sorry, I didn’t really mean to rape you’, it is all a bit of a crapshoot. And then there’s the school library scene where the guy possessing her twin brother’s body molests her, keeping her quiet with threats of ‘people will think you’re a slut’.

Part of the problem behind this manga’s approach to rape is cultural (the need to keep quiet while being assaulted to avoid stigmatization, the idea of ‘I couldn’t actually rape you, since I am a woman’) but all of it is outdated, creepy and outright sad. Even the “joke” of Aya threatening Yuuhi with bodily harm if he enters her room at night, Mrs. Q jokily saying he likes to peep – None of it is funny, because it paints a world where the threat of sexual assault is always hanging over you, so long as a man is nearby.

Then again, there are few “good” men in this manga – closest I can remember being the one who lost his wife and child because of emotional neglect. Yuuhi tried to force himself on Aya (“Because I love you and want to be with you as close as possible” being his excuse), Kei somehow managed to be Shuro’s inspiration despite the fact that during all his onscreen time he was not just a dick, but a murderous one, the one girl who was being statutorily raped by her teacher was meant to be some sort of martyr because, despite the fact that he outed himself as a manipulative dick by the end of it all, he was still the only one who showed her a moment of kindness – by her own admission, Yuu Watase meant this manga to be dark, and she managed it, just not in the way she meant to. This is a horrible world not because of the exploding bodies and collapsed buildings full of innocents, but because the ones we have to look to for salvation are all different variations of horrible dicks.

It could all be tolerable, perhaps, if the characters had personalities that went beyond the shallow end of the pool. The manga makes a huge deal of Touya’s missing memories and how important it is for someone to know where they came from in order to truly understand them. Yet, when we look at any character, we know little more than a handful of fun facts, most of which come from side notes from the author. Just look at Aki for a perfect example of this: he is a key player in the plot. But exactly who was Aki, besides ‘a good guy’? We know he liked listening to CDs and had pierced earlobes, but that is far from being an entire personality. Did he have friends? Was he good at school? Did he dream of going to college? Did he have a goddamn hobby? By the time he inevitably died in the final volume, I could only snort at the giant splash page meant to inspire sadness at his sacrifice because I could not find it in me to care about the loss of such an empty shell of a human.

Fuck, Aya herself barely has little more going for her. She was so quick to shed the friends she had on the manga’s opening scene, at the karaoke bar. I keep thinking about them, how worried they must have been when they found out the friends they were with the previous day suddenly disappeared, leaving behind an empty house. More thoughts than Watase ever gave them, anyway.

I could keep going but by now I think I have made my point clear: Ayashi no Ceres is not good. I would say it has aged like milk but that would imply it was ever good, and it simply has never been. The weird attitude towards IVF being a loveless way for a human to be born would have been idiotic even back in the late 90s, and I will never forgive this manga for having a woman drag another into an isolated cave and make her think she was going to be assaulted and then just go ‘Nah, don’t worry, I didn’t really meant to do anything’. If I were to put it in a modern context, I would compare it to the trashiest, most self-insert-y bit of original fiction in Wattpad, those where a subtly-beautiful girl is sold by her parents to the hottest boy band of the moment. But where those are writing experiments by girls trying to learn about themselves, this was a ‘serious’ story published professionally to an audience in the millions.

It's not all a loss. Yuu Watase is a great artist, and anyone who enjoys sequential art will find something to love in this. And the story does touch on some interesting ideas, such as the celestial maiden’s robes not being what we may think they are, as well as the possibility that, because the story can be found in different variations all over the world, the mystical entity that came to humans actually came from space. Problem is, it tackles these themes with the same grace it tackled everything else, so it feels like so much wasted potential.

In summary: Ayashi no Ceres, while nicely illustrated, has been terribly outdated for decades now. It is melodramatic, naïve and shallow, and its themes have been covered elsewhere by more talented writers. A disposable story that does not last in the heart of the reader because of good reasons. A waste of time.