User blog:AustinDR/Happy Sugar Life (Review)

So what anime is there that is probably more fucked up than Citrus? Well, a recent anime that had come out is named Happy Sugar Life, which is anything but. I swear, out of a lot of the shows I had watched thus far this year, this show is without any doubt the most disturbing thing I had ever watched. Based on a psychological horror manga, Happy Sugar Life is about a high schooler named Satō Matsuzaka who puts on a façade of politeness when it comes to her work. Initially she was believed to have been pretty easy-going, claiming that she had relationships with millions of boys that she would often leave within a time frame of three days. So she didn't have a firm understanding on what true love really was. At least until she met someone who she immediately fell in love with and decided to live together with. Except that is not what you may think.

The first episode was something, I'll give it that. In it, Satō tries to find more work to support herself and her lover, so she comes upon a restaurant and meets a young man there named Mitsuboshi whom she rejected when he was asking her out. Things get even more weird when Satō is made to clean up at later hours, and Mitsuboshi seemingly vanishes, apparently still saddened by his rejection. At this point, it's not too hard to get the notion that the show has something sinister underneath the hood. Satō seems pretty normal at first glance, but then you get those moments where you can easily tell that something's going on up there. However, what the show actually ended up doing caught me off guard. As you may have guessed, Mitsuboshi actually didn't simply "disappear" because of him being heartbroken. No...the manager reveals that she had kidnapped him after hearing him profess his love for Satō, and so she keeps him in that cabinet of hers so she could do whatever she wanted with him to try to force him to love her. Satō becomes critical of the manager for doing something like that....except she isn't as innocent as she is trying to make herself out to be.

So, with that being said, who was the love of her life that she met one day and decided to live with? Surely he must be some tall, dark, and handsome mystery man. Except you'd be wrong to assume that as well. No, the person that Satō had met and fallen in love with is...a young girl appearing to be no less than 7. If you had vomited at that point, that's the natural response to learning something like this. As for how she ended up meeting this little girl named Shio...she kidnapped her. Yup, that's right ladies and gentlemen. Our protagonist is a blackmailer and a kidnapper (and potential pedophile), but that doesn't even begin to describe the ending where she opens a door revealing a bloodied weapon, and three bags indicating that she had not only kidnapped this young girl, but she also murdered the original person who owned that apartment. Worse, the first impression of both characters are them wearing what looks to be wedding rings whilst standing on a burning building....at the very least, there doesn't seem to be anything sexual regarding Satō's relationship with Shio, the way that she would describe her innocence really rubs one the wrong way.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the anime does try to make it clear that Satō has a couple of screws loose due to her experiences in her life growing up. In the manga, you know that her mother slept around, so maybe some of that served to drastically warp what Satō conceives as true love. Even though it is hypocritical in a way because she gets onto the manager for kidnapping someone to get them to love her, when she herself kidnapped Shio, and while she may not be forceful with trying to make her love her, she is grooming her in a way to make her dependent on only her. But again it could be that the simple reason as to why Satō believes that she is in love with Shio is most likely because she never got to grow up normally. Satō looks very cute in the way her hair is styled and her mannerisms are sometimes cute, but because of her upbringing, she never left that way of thinking.

I do admit that I find the premise of the anime disgusting because it reeks of smut just for the sake of shocking readers of the manga. With Citrus at least it was the sexual assault and pseudo-incest, here, you get kidnapping, implied pedophilia, molestation, and all other inappropriate subject matter. I would not recommend seeing the anime due to the content, not even if you are innocently curious about it, but I won't take away the experience for you if you decide to watch it anyway despite my statements.