Aug 17, 2025
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta Movebo!
A critical descent into the poetic failure of Centuria.
It is no easy thing to watch a work plummet from promise into pastiche. Centuria, with its haunting opening pages: a boy, a baby, the sea, the scent of blood and salt, cast the illusion of depth. A child protecting another, 100 souls sacrificed for one, and an entity of the abyss granting life not as gift, but as curse. The signs were all there: myth, moral weight, and a world bound not by good and evil, but by consequence.
But such illusions are brittle. Centuria is a descent from Flegetonte to
...
the absolute void(or should I say trash can?), with no return. Beneath its aesthetic gloom and eldritch iconography, Centuria is a most ordinary beast, it speaks with the tongue of the most puerile of battle-shonens. Julian, our damned protagonist, drifts like a doll caught between infernos and lullabies. He makes a pact with an ancient sea-thing born of the blackest waters, an entity who should have reshaped his very soul, but later plays house in a village as though nothing lingers behind his gaze but the innocence of a playground. Centuria certainly does not know how to proper articulate tragedy and hope.
Therein lies the incoherence. The work does not know if it has entered Hell or is merely camping by its borders. Its narrative breathes in soot, but exhales cotton. It invokes horror like a child might draw skulls on their school notebook margins: with enthusiasm, but no understanding.
But nowhere is the failure of Centuria’s poetic imagination more evident than in its handling of combat. Battles are not trials of character, nor meditations on will, sacrifice, or conviction. They are, rather, grotesque pageants in which victory belongs to whomever manages to summon the louder, larger, more infernal monstrosity. Centuria offers only a grotesque arms race of hellspawn. Power is not earned, it is conjured. Resolve is not tested, it is drowned beneath the screech of yet another demon wreaking havoc across the battlefield.
I feel like the influence of Berserk, Lovecraft, Dark Souls, etc, has wrought an unintended devastation upon lesser artists (and a massive damage in the imaginary of a whole generation of readers as well). These works, with their bleak grandeur, introduced to the cultural bloodstream a fascination with the tragic, the cosmic, and the cruel. But this aesthetic is now worn like a mask, one that Centuria cannot animate.
And what of the art? The creatures are drawn with disturbing vitality, it was the portrayal of one of these strange creatures that first drew me to Centuria. There is some craft in their form, a sense of something vast, old and cruel. But the humans? The humans are grotesque, and not in the way one hopes. There is only 2~3 templates that separetes them: young, adult/old. All men, from the same age group, are indistinguishable from each other, women too, each as uninspired as the last. To be fair there is a bit more variety in women, there is the standard kawai waifu and the voluptuous yandere, that's it. The faces are crude, the proportions skewed, it is as though the artist's fidelity to his monsters drained his ability to draw mortals.
There was a moment, early in the series, where one could imagine Centuria becoming something rare, a tale of moral weight wrapped in mythic dressing. A journey not of conquest, but of consequence. The image of Julian holding Diana evoked a sacred bond, a glimmer of life in a world that had forgotten the concept. Yet the moment passed, Diana now grows with unnatural haste, perhaps in an effort to move the clunky plot along...
It is not only cynicism that kills this work, nor despair. Great literature thrives in darkness when darkness has meaning. What kills Centuria is mimicry, unthinking, unfeeling, unearned. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta Movebo, said Juno in fury. If I cannot bend the heavens, I shall move Hell. Centuria moves nothing, not heaven nor hell, not even the reader.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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