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This was shockingly boring, for a taboo story.

When media has incest as its main theme, there is an expectation of conflict. It is, after all, not only against the social contract, it is also literally against the law. The fact that this story stars minors also adds to the expectation of drama, since it means they don’t have the advantages of adult life, such as economic independence. Ritsu and Uta have a happy, healthy relationship with their friends and parents, which makes their secret all the heavier because if it gets out, it could destroy everything.

Except it never does! When the rival heroine finds out ... the big secret, there’s never even a threat of putting it all out there. She just agrees to keep it, and goes on to support the happy, incestuous couple. When the friend group finds out, they’re upset for less than 24 hours, after which they even apologize for their reaction. Hell, when the parents find out, they only one actually mad about it is the father, who still puts his son through school and apparently college, too? Just, what the hell.

It’s not that I want these characters to suffer, particularly. I just want stuff to matter, to feel as if actions have consequences. But the biggest one in this story is the father giving Ritsu the cold shoulder. He didn’t kick Ritsu out of the house, discuss separating him from Uta by sending one away, or even try to involve the law. He just ignored his son for the rest of the time it took for the kid to graduate, after which he even congratulated him on it. It’s all so boring.

Even the approach to the relationship feels like this. The characters’ ages mean the story cannot rely on fanservice to fill the time, so it instead abuses the most overused romance tropes found in fiction. Making Valentine’s chocolate, saving up to buy a birthday present, going ice-skating. These tropes are popular for a reason – good writing can make any scenario feel fresh with the right approach, and they can be great as character studies. But in this manga the biggest character exploration happens toward the end, when Ritsu is forced to figure out what to do after school. The rest of the time, the whole story is carried by Uta looking cute and blushing at her brother, who does the same but is visually boring in comparison to her.

Hell, even the basic premise of “only acting like lovers when outside the house” is thrown out of the window quickly enough, since they sure kiss a lot in Ritsu’s room, particularly. It could have worked, if it laid the ground for the parents to start suspecting them before the big reveal. But no, their rooms are clearly safe space, which makes the final part feels even cheaper, since Ritsu and Uta could have just gone there and avoid being caught humping by their parents, but again – overused, boring tropes.

I wasn’t expecting this manga to be good, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this boring. Even the art – which is not bad, not exactly, but it is not memorable either. The most remarkable thing about it is how it was clearly made with Clip Studio, since the default “Frills” brush is used a lot. Besides that, there weren’t really any panels that stood out to me, scenes that I will be thinking about years down the line. For visual media, this isn’t good.

Honestly, to me, the only memorable part of this story was Ami, whose dedication to her studies in order to be allowed her dye and accessories struck me as genuinely interesting, and someone I would love to see more of. Hell, even the flashy guy and Hotaru were more engaging, and they’re basically a joke couple. But they had so much more going on than Uta and Ritsu.

So… Don’t bother with this story. Even badly-aged anime like “Maze: The Megaburst Space” had an infinitely more interesting approach to this kind of taboo, and it was a comparatively minor part of that story. Meanwhile, this manga had multiple volumes to make me care, and only succeeded in inspiring minor apathy. There’s just better stuff to read out there than this insipid pile of nothing.

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.