Ayashi no Ceres - Fraternal twins Aya and Aki Mikage are normal, carefree high school students. The day before their sixteenth birthday, their friends take them out to karaoke (can't remember if that happens in the anime but it does in the manga, so bare with). On their way home, a purse snatcher runs past the group. Aya decides she can take him, and snatches the purse from the purse snatcher. Unfortunately, in doing so, she falls off of an overpass and onto a street with heavy traffic. But instead of falling all the way, she floats down. When she lands in the street unscathed, she's really surprised, and even more so when she finds herself in the path of an oncoming car! But! A handsome stranger comes from nowhere and pushes Aya out of the way. Of course, when she looks around to thank him, he's disappeared.
For their birthday, Aya and Aki's parents have dragged them to their grandfather's mansion. And, for whatever reason, the entire Mikage clan has gathered for this special event. Aya and Aki wonder why... they've never been anything special in their family before. They also wonder why everyone's dressed for a wake rather than for a birthday celebration.... Grampa Mikage presents Aya and Aki with their gift, which turns out to be a mummified hand, brought out by the handsome stranger from yesterday's incident! At the sight of the hand, Aya starts seeing all sorts of strange things... and deep wounds and gashes spring up all over Aki's body. Of course, Aya freaks out because her brother is in terrible pain, but no one's helping him. Instead, her family reassures her that he'll be just fine, but Aya won't be. She's got to die.
So... how does Grampa Mikage know Handsome Stranger? What was with that mummified hand? Will Aya live long enough to find answers to those questions (hint: she's the heroine, lol)? And what's all this hagoromo business? One more thing: have a couple of tissues ready. This one made me cry. Twenty-six episodes.
Summary for InuYasha (sorry if it's a little -- okay, VERY -- long):
A young man clad in red breaks into a shrine and steals a shining jewel. He mutters something about becoming a full demon. A young woman calls his name, "InuYasha!", before shooting him in the chest with an arrow. The arrow binds him to a tree, and he drops his precious cargo. The woman approaches, and she's badly injured; a trail of blood shows where she's been. She picks up the jewel and turns to a young girl, her sister, and instructs her to burn the jewel with her body when she dies, which she does two seconds after her speech.
Kagome Higurashi is also a normal, carefree (junior) high school student. Aren't they all.... lol. She lives in a house on shrine-land with her mother, grandfather, younger brother Souta, and their cat Buyo. Kagome's grandfather, who tends the shrine, has always tried to stress the origins of everything. Kagome never really paid much attention to it until her fifteenth birthday. She was all set to leave for school when she found Souta standing outside of a small building that housed an old well. He meant to feed the cat, but Buyo had gone down near the well's opening, and Souta was hesitant to follow because he thinks it's creepy (Souta's like, nine or something, so he's allowed to be a little scared). Kagome went down there for him instead and retrieved the cat, assuring her brother that there's absolutely nothing to be scared of.
Suddenly, some ARMS pop out of the well, grab Kagome and pull her in. The arms belong to some weird six-armed woman, who claims Kagome has the Shikon no Tama (or the Jewel of Four Souls), whatever that is. Kagome struggles to be set free, and she eventually wins, thanks to some weird magic light from her hand. When she lands, it's at the bottom of the well, so naturally, she calls up to Souta to get their grandfather for help. When she doesn't get an answer, she decides to climb out on her own. But where she comes out is VASTLY different from where she went in. But she sees a familiar looking tree that means she's somewhere near home. And when she runs to it, she finds not home, but a boy... clad in red and stuck to the tree (from the opening scene, we know that he's InuYasha, and how he got stuck there). He'd been shot through the chest with an arrow. When she investigates, some nearby villagers find her, and hold her prisoner.
Apparently, the forest Kagome climbed into was very much off limits. After explaining that she was lost and very far away from home (though TERRIBLY confused as to why she seemed to be in Feudal Japan), the villagers, lead by Kaede, a priestess, decide that Kagome is harmless, but that she looks a heck of a lot like Kaede's older sister Kikyou, who died fifty years ago, protecting the Shikon no Tama. Later that evening, the six-armed monster woman returns for Kagome, and the Shikon no Tama. Kagome takes off running, and straight for the forest. She finds herself at that tree again, with the boy stuck to it, but this time, he's awake, and calling her.... Kikyou? When he sees that she can't defeat the monster, and after the Shikon no Tama was pulled from Kagome's body (how did it get THERE?!), InuYasha asks Kagome to pull the arrow from his chest. Kagome, not wanting to die, agrees.
InuYasha defeats the centipede monster with his very sharp claws, then turns them on Kagome. She's confused, but manages to gain control over InuYasha, thanks very much to Kaede. We learn that the Shikon no Tama can increase a demon's power, and now that demons can sense it's nearby, a lot of them will come after it. When a crow demon snatches and swallows the Shikon no Tama, Kagome figures she can shoot it down with an arrow. And she's right. She shoots down the bird no problem, but the arrow shatters the Shikon no Tama into lots of teeny fragments. InuYasha and Kagome must now combine their strengths -- no matter how much they don't like each other -- to find all of the pieces of the Shikon no Tama, and keep it out of evil hands. Of course, some of those pieces landed in evil hands, so they must do their best to get them back. And they meet lots of friends (and enemies) along the way. And what's this nonsense about InuYasha being a half-demon.....?
(Have I seen the first episode way too many times? Yeah. I think so. Summary includes the first AND second episodes, by the way.)
This one will take a LONG while, so go to the bathroom and get a snack. There are almost 170 episodes and three movies. The only reason InuYasha stopped is because it caught up to the manga, which is still going, of course. The basic formula is pretty simple: defeat a demon, get a Shikon no Tama shard, but as time goes on and more pieces are collected -- they have a bunch by episode 13! -- we get more into the story, like a lot of InuYasha's past, and understand why he's stubborn and rude and... InuYasha. We get to see what exactly happened that caused Kikyou's mortal injury, and why she chased InuYasha, and it gets really cool and complicated.
I'd summarize some more, but it's nearly five in the morning..... @_@
