Happy Sugar Life

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.

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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.

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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.