Happy Sugar Life

What Gakkougurashi did great was its presentation. The way the main character’s perspective turned out not to reflect the actual reality. I loved that because it caught me off guard, and I love it when anime does that to me. I love it when I realize they tricked me into thinking something and my whole understanding or assumptions on the story up until that point get turned on its head.

And I guess I wanted some more of that when I started watching Happy Sugar Life. Still as a relative noob to the horror scene, I picked this anime thinking it would be another one with the element I already know and love so much, aka cute girls, but with mixed in despair and perhaps gore. Did it actually turn out that way? Just slightly. I’ll go into big spoilers in this post so just in case, this is your warning.

Bitter sugar

The thing with the main two characters of Happy Sugar Life is that there is a big age gap, and seeing that I kinda just decided to think of their relationship as caretaker and caregiver, rather than anything else. Still, the way Satou talked about Shio actually sounded like a different kind of relationship, and this was fueled with the things they did together, like exchanging vows. I felt it was kinda weird. Add to that the other events and after the first two episodes I was wondering what the hell did I got myself into. But that was just the start of weird things (to say the least).

Basically everyone in Happy Sugar Life is gross, disgusting or broken in their own way. Even Shouko who never did things at the level of the other characters, is broken in her own way, having issues facing things. But her issues are basically nothing when compared to the other characters in this anime. There’s a killer of multiple people, a masochistic pervert (who works at a school at all places), a pedophile, a stalker, a sexual abuser, an abused boy. So definitely, “happy sugar life” is just a big illusion that the main character(s) created for themselves. Satou was brilliant at hiding her true nature, acting like the perfect maid at her job and always being smiley in school. No one had any reason to suspect a thing.

Misled

Going back to how Gakkougurashi caught me off guard – well Happy Sugar Life did something similar with the police scene.

An intense smell was coming out of Satou’s apartment. We were led to believe Satou killed her aunt and her truth was about to be revealed. It was a reasonable assumption – her aunt wasn’t answering phone calls, wasn’t opening the door and the pervert teacher had to get rid of a mysterious trash bag given to him by Satou. I genuinely felt scared thinking how will this scene unfold and how will Satou handle it.

Until, against all odds, the aunt opens the door and it turned out Satou was in a different apartment with Shio all this time. Well played, studio Ezola.

Although, Shouko still found out something she didn’t know about Satou. Her aunt was… Let’s just say a crazy individual. Shouko understandably thought the aunt was weird, but she also probably felt sorry for Satou for having to be around someone like that. If only she actually said it to Satou…

Canaria

There’s an interesting coincidence about… Those Shouko scenes. A few days ago, I listened to ReoNa’s brilliant SAO songs on Spotify and thought I’d let shuffle play me one of her non-SAO songs. Shuffle picked Canaria. I liked the song and had no idea I’d be watching Happy Sugar Life soon, and even less, I never imagined the next time I’d be hearing this song would be in such a sad, tragic and scary context. The worst part was when Shouko started resisting and left scratches on Satou’s hand. Sorry that I reminded you of that scene.

Conclusion

At least Satou seemingly felt some kind of remorse in front of Shouko’s body in that final episode scene. It’s a scene that kinda got “overriden” too quickly by everything happening afterwards. But I think the ending was relatively fair. Asahi deserved better, obviously Shouko too. But Satou staying alive would’ve probably felt wrong. And I hope Shio could get better mentally after all this.

Also, this was my first anime with a main character you could clearly call a “yandere”. Following Satou was really interesting because of her extraordinary ability to hide the truth. It wasn’t always easy though because she had to hold herself back. The lengths she went to protect her “happy sugar life” illusion and her cold way of doing brutal things were both scary and fascinating in a way. It seemed like she always had things under control until she started showing weaknesses in the final episodes.

Happy Sugar Life was gross at times. But something about it made me interested enough to see where would a story with all these broken characters go. I actually binge watched 7 episodes of it so definitely something about it did work. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to the average person though.