October means Halloween and boy do I have a scary story to
share. Now get your sweet, sugary anime schoolgirl flavor on with a pink wig,
your favorite kitchen knife, and heaps and heaps of traumatic experiences
because this time around we’re going totally yandere within Happy Sugar
Life.
don't let the titles fool you
Real quick: what’s yandere?
The word yandere (ヤンデレ)
is a combination of the words yanderu
(病んでる) and the onomatopoeic word deredere (でれでれ). Yanderu
is an inflection of yamu (病む), meaning to fall ill or to feel unwell. Deredere sounds like something thick and viscous slowly dripping
around and so the word is used to describe laziness, or in the context a flirty
couple, a sappy romance. With that, the essence of the yandere genre becomes
clear. The yandere character is defined by a set of antisocial behaviors that
points to a mental illness of sorts, manifesting from a zealous devotion to a targeted
lover. The yandere character will oftentimes resort to manipulation, violence,
and abuse outside of public view to safeguard and express their warped notions
of love. What typically results is a horror stemming from dramatic irony where
the audience is privy to the yandere character’s concealed psychotic capacity
whereas other characters in the show only see a façade of an innocent person.
It’s a kind of sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing story that points to the seemingly
well-mannered people in the world and emphasizes the dark potential for evil
within all of them.
Now, one important
aspect to keep in mind is that yandere characters don’t act out of a senseless
desire for evil or destruction of lives. The immoral acts that they commit in
these stories are horrific to the audience, but from the yandere’s perspective
they are all done out of a calculated necessity to preserve their ideas of
love. Successful yandere characters are Machiavellian in nature as they
constantly negotiate between their front stage social self and their backstage
hidden self. Yandere characters are cunning, calculating, and strategic, until,
of course, their actions catch up to them and they find themselves in a
position with no escape as the people around them learn of their hidden aspect.
—
All of this brings us
to the opening scene in Happy Sugar Life
where we find ourselves atop a burning building. Two girls, one high school
aged, another elementary aged, maybe, affirm their love for each other and
jump. It’s a well executed in media res,
combined with the show’s eyebrow raising OP,
that invites us to speculate about who the two girls are and how they got
to where they are.
Happy Sugar Life is a self-labeled psychological horror with
driving themes related to different ideas or models of what love really means.
Satou Matsuzaka, our pink-haired yandere protagonist, regularly muses about
love. Orphaned at a young age and raised by a deranged aunt, Satou grew up
surrounded by her aunt’s masochism. Although her aunt never physically hurt
her, Satou watched on as her aunt took in man after man, listening to the sounds
of beatings and more from the room down the hall. Later, sitting on the floor
of a small, dark, sparse apartment and eating from a jar of colorful candies,
Satou meets her aunt’s distant, glassy gaze. Her bandaged and bruised aunt
explains to her in a disturbed, singsong voice, “This is love too~”
Satou rejects her
aunt’s notions of love as she grows older, but this leaves her with a void as
to what love is. Satou’s aunt is more neglectful than abusive and so Satou
never had a chance to experience motherly love or any other kind of love for
that matter. Ironically, this rejection lead to Satou becoming similar to her
aunt as she garnered a reputation for being easy to get, dating many boys
during high school in an effort to try to discover what love means, only to
break up soon after being dissatisfied with each new date’s shallow ideas of
love. In an early scene in the first episode, several guys talk about Satou,
commenting, “She’ll do anything if you just ask her.” It’s a love-seeking
behavior that’s also reflected in her job at a maid café where she tirelessly
acts out the maid service fantasies of the faceless patrons. Each encounter, be
it with a new boyfriend or café customer, is marred by a short-lived,
artificial, plastic love that could never satisfy Satou’s search for true love.
However, that was all
before Shio, the other girl atop the burning building in the opening sequence,
came into Satou’s life. The Satou that we see now has stopped dating around,
much to the disappointment of Shouko Hida, her best friend who she used to
share dating adventures with. “I’ve fallen in love… we’ve even started living
together!” Satou tells Shouko, who just thinks Satou has finally settled down
on someone. It’s the sort of half-truths that Satou is so adept at spinning to
hide her true nature. Little does Shouko know, Satou is of course talking about
Shio. While we don’t know what kind of relation Satou has with this seven,
eight-year-old looking girl, the nature of their bond becomes a powerful
mystery and key plot point that drives the show’s intrigue. Just how did Satou
come across Shio? We’re in the yandere club after all, so thoughts of kidnapping
or worse naturally float around Shio’s blissfully naïve, sickly-sweet character.
These thoughts are quickly justified after we see someone putting up missing
child posters with Shio’s face on them.
The show nudges us to
anchor ourselves to Satou, albeit in an apprehensive manner, because the other
characters we initially meet are despicable people. For example, Satou’s
manager is envious of Satou’s charm and frustrated that everyone loves Satou
instead of her. The manager’s had her eyes on an underage worker named
Mitsuboshi for a while, but it pains her to see Mitsuboshi fawn after Satou
instead. When Satou rejects Mitsuboshi’s advances, the manager decides to rape
Mitsuboshi in a bid to show him what her idea of love is. Then there’s one of
Satou’s high school teachers who turns out to be a stalker and dangerously
obsessive man. He’s had his sights on Satou since the day she walked into the
school. Despite having a loving wife and daughter, the teacher explains that he
lusts after women no matter what and can’t sate himself, implying he’s targeted
other students before.
Although we might be
quick to interpret Satou’s stance against people like her manager or her
teacher as her standing with righteousness, Satou really couldn’t care less
about what’s actually right or wrong. We’re talking about a yandere-chan who
may have kidnapped a little girl, never mind the fact she’s already murdered
someone prior to the first episode. Satou sees the world in two flavors: the love
exemplified in Shio as sweet, anything else that detracts from that as bitter.
Satou’s morality is defined purely by her idea of what love is and that makes
her a dangerous antisocial person. She has no qualms or hesitations with
outright killing people if they stand in her way and if she deems it a
necessary action. So we’re put in a tailspin as we applaud Satou as she
confronts the corrupt and perverted, but she’s only marginally any better
herself.
To Satou, love is a
jar that one puts little sweets in to hold onto forever. In her case, Shio is
the little pieces of candy in the jar that is her heart. But that imagery alone
already puts her next to people like her manager or her teacher. The one thing
all of them have in common is that they each view love as a kind of zero-sum
currency to be quantified and distributed in some kind of warped economy of
affection. To the manager, love is an exchange, or equivalent, for sexual
services (“If I have sex with him, he has to love me!”). To the teacher, love
is something to greedily pursue, like money (“I lust after so many people, look
how rich I can be!”). We can even look at Satou’s aunt, who accepted any kind
of distorted desires from anyone as something to hoard and bottle up. To Satou,
love is finite, but she only hoards all the best parts of it by concentrating
it from Shio, concealing her to the outside world out of fear of losing her.
She isn’t interested in Shio’s childlike innocence; she only cares about the
unconditional nature of her love. So now we have to go back and revise our understanding
of Satou’s relationship with Shio and I repeat it here for emphasis: Satou
wasn’t in love with Shio’s purity or innocence, she was only in love with the
unconditional nature of a love outside of the economy of affection that she
sought to selfishly transform into a commodity for herself.
Now, I’m not saying
Shio isn’t happy or that her happiness with Satou is wrong. However, just
because the two are seemingly happy together doesn’t mean we are supposed to
accept Satou’s selfish idea of love without at least sucking some air between
our teeth. Remember, Satou will do anything to preserve Shio’s unconditional
love by stripping her freedoms, controlling and stemming her growth to keep her
as she is, forever. Forever. Satou
will commit any evil to continue to indulge in Shio’s unsoiled virtue. This
quest for eternal, immutable, unconditional affection is ultimately immoral and
self-destructive, as we’ve seen from the introductory sequence to the show.
I want to back up a
bit now and return to Shouko, Satou’s best friend from work and at school. She
is the only sense of normalcy in this entire show filled with dark and perverse
outlooks on people. When Satou asks Shouko if she still wants to be her friend
even after learning about how she was raised by a mentally disturbed aunt,
Shouko wanted nothing more than to say “Of course, you silly!” but she knows
it's a lie. Satou feels a sense of judgment by association to her aunt. In the
end, Shouko’s hesitation gives her away, leaving Satou with a sense of betrayal
and a deepened justification that any kind of love outside of Shio’s is false.
Shouko is heartbroken at losing her friend, reflecting on her inability to
fully love Shouko unconditionally and blames herself for not having the
strength to pursue love the same way Satou does.
When Shouko discovers
that Satou’s lover is indeed the girl from all the posters around town, she
resolves to learn from her earlier mistake of rejecting Satou and decides to
confront her in an attempt to change Satou’s heart. Still, this is yandere-chan
we’re talking about. The flip inside Satou’s head has already switched Shouko
from sweet to bitter and she deems it necessary to kill Shouko to prevent her
from going to the police. Despite the outpouring of emotions from Shouko, who
longer holds anything back out of shame or embarrassment, Satou is unconvinced
and unable to empathize with her. Forgiveness is outside of Satou’s perspective
and Shouko’s death by kitchen knife underscores how emotionally stunted and
lost Satou truly is underneath her cool and unfeeling exterior. Shouko’s death
isn’t horribly vulgar but it’s probably the most horrific moment of the show
for its build-up and final execution. The sequence also marks a hard transition
for the plot into something that squanders all of the potential directions the
show could’ve taken.
Beyond Shouko’s death,
the show struggles to wrap its horror story up nicely. The worst offender here
is actually Shio. The way she mentally matures ten years ahead of her curve in
the span of ten minutes is full of whiplash. Shio doesn’t repeat the mistake
that Shouko made. Even after facing all the horrible things pinko has
committed, Shio immediately accepts Satou in her entirety, even going as far as
wanting to be her “partner in crime” if the police ever apprehend them. This is
crazy because just not long ago Shio was starting to express some
self-awareness when she becomes angry about all the secrets Satou was keeping
from her, claiming she was no better than a doll to Satou in her current
situation. This leap in development for Shio is absolutely unreal, even for the
show’s standards. It’s jarring to hear someone Shio’s age suggesting suicide in
order to be together eternally. All the depth of emotions the show sets up is
tossed out in favor for a hastened ending. It’s a move that dehumanizes Shio
and sets her up to be exactly this object for Satou’s search for pure,
unhindered love. Shio represents this object of unquestioning love, but it just
happens so quickly and without any further reflection on her part because at
this point she’s so far from being a believable person. Long story short, Satou
makes uncharacteristic mistake after uncharacteristic mistake. What results is an ending with very little payoff as Satou is simply
absolved of her crimes through suicide.
In the twist ending,
Shio is revealed to have survived the fall because Satou covered her up to take
the brunt of the force. This poses some unanswerable questions that can
dramatically change the interpretation of Satou’s actions. In the arc of a
lover’s suicide, this is perhaps the most selfish thing Satou could’ve done,
denying the death that they both sought so they could be together in the next
life. So was Satou actually in love with Shio or was she, for lack of better
words, simply in love with being in love, selfishly to the end? Did she maybe
have a change of heart mid-fall and realized that it was wrong for Shio’s
tender life to be cut so short? There’s nothing in the show that really
support either view and so we’re simply left with the question. At the very
end, we see a grown up and possibly institutionalized Shio, awake but with the
thousand yard stare, muttering to herself about how she’ll always love
Satou-chan.
—
And that’s the wrap on
Happy Sugar Life, which aired as part
of the summer 2018 season. To be honest, I was quite pleasantly surprised at
the show’s imagined depths, even if they didn’t stick the landing towards the
end. It’s a show that combines the cutesy with the grotesque and it all
culminates in a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of visual techniques and storytelling
methods that manage to maintain the integrity of the show’s identity.
I’m also a bit
surprised that the show labels itself for the shounen demographic, though I
also increasingly believe that the seinen and shounen distinction is becoming
more and more meaningless in the amount of information that they actually
provide. Happy Sugar Life is
decidedly mature in its themes but it does manage to keep one foot in the
bubbly world of easy-going fantasy in spite of it all. It’s the kind of
disconnect that makes it difficult to pin the show down exactly, not that
that’s a bad thing.
Happy Sugar Life left enough of an impression on me to write for
as long as I did. It’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s absolutely solid, only
hindered by its weak ending. I appreciated the show’s dedication to building
upon its themes, adding layer after layer, even if the story does waste almost
all of it in the end. Happy Sugar Life is
a horror story steeped in a delusional, idealized romance that earns its place among other titles of the psychological horror genre.