What is the work?[]
Happy Sugar Life is a psychological horror manga series that came out back in 2018. Despite the title, the manga is about a psychopathic young woman named Satou Matsuzaka who tries to protect her "happy sugar life" with her "lover" Shio Kobe (from what the show and manga have on the relationship, Shio seemed to be attracted to Satou later in life after the events of the manga and her death, but throughout the manga overall, Satou never expresses any sexual attraction towards Shio and seemed to be in love with the idea of love but mixed being a mother into the equation).
Who is she? What has she done?[]
The Manager is the owner of a restaurant that Satou would work at to make more money for herself and Shio. While she appears to be normal at first, it is gradually revealed that she is a narcissistic psychopath who believes that all her adolescent employees should focus only on her. Which is why when Mitsuboshi Taiyou asks Satou out on a date is where the manager snaps. As she was leaving work, Satou notices the manager lure Mitsuboshi into her office...
After that, Mitsuboshi stopped coming to work. But during that time, Satou is forced to do more work that keeps her overtime.
At the end of the week, the manager hands out the paychecks to her employees... but Satou's comes up short despite working those extra grueling hours. When she confronts the manager on it, the manager reveals that she kidnapped Mitsuboshi and spent a week "teaching" him to love her... unfortunately for her, Satou had caught it all on her phone and threatens to call the police.
Afterwards, the manager is never seen again, but there is the implication that she is still grooming employees into loving her. As for her victim, Mitsiboshi becomes psychologically broken and gains a fear of older women.
Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?[]
No. She is a self-absorbed woman who thinks everyone should worship the ground she walks on and when Mitsuboshi falls out of line, she does the most unspeakable on him. She never expresses remorse for what she had done only giving Satou her due because her livelihood was threatened.
Heinous standard[]
The series exists in a morally grey world where there are characters who are crazy on different spectrums. You have Satou herself who kills two thugs when they tried to use Shio as a means of getting money for her safe return; kills her best friend Shouko, and has her aunt set the room on fire which causes a fire to spread across the upper floor. With that being said, the show only discusses her and Shouko as the two fatalities recovered amongst casualties which could either mean other dead bodies or injuries. The show only points out the casualties in a news bulletin rather than focus on it, so it is otherwise offscreen villainy. But of course, Satou does not qualify for a myriad of reasons.
Now for the others. The manager is a rapist who kidnaps and makes Mitsuboshi into a sex slave, raping him repeatedly for a week until he became a psychological mess around older women and came to the conclusion that he needed Shio to cleanse him. That being said, the series gives indication that Mitsuboshi was far from the first one she had done this to. Her employees follow her every whim having been conditioned to do so. It is not really fridge horror to say that she was predatory with these minors as well.
Her competition is Satou's aunt and the father of Shio and Asahi Kobe. Asahi's dad rapes Yuuna when she accidentally bumped into her years back and when he was forced to marry her, he continued to heavily abuse her and then their son Asahi. When he returns from having used up all the inheritance money his father left for him, he continues to rape Yuuna leading to her having to use a clothes hanger to conceive Shio. Besides that, he also tortures Asahi for 5 years one instance being ripping out his fingernails.
Then there is "Auntie." Satou's Aunt is the one responsible for warping Satou's mind and tainting her definition of love by bringing men in to beat her since Auntie was a sadomasochist. She later agrees to assist her niece in getting rid of Shouko's body and sets the room on fire which leads to the spread putting several lives at risk. She also rapes Mitsuboshi as well. But she has different reasons for why she does not count such as genuinely believing that she was helping Mitsuboshi by SA-ing him and sending him even further into the depths of insanity. There are a few other characters like Daichi, Satou's teacher who tries to rape her when she was alone, but that is just one act of attempted rape, plus any other instances of that are offscreen. That, and he wouldn't count anyway because he apparently did love his wife and daughter.