In the introduction to Piero Camporesi's The Juice of Life, Umberto Eco talks about the kind of disgust elicited by the carnal morbidity of the former author's scholarship on the medieval conception of the body; he compares binging on Camporesi to swimming in a pool full of human waste, or a pool full of cake batter, both of which, after a time, would be equally repulsive. If Happy Sugar Life has any unique contribution as a piece of media, it's in the way it can elicit that latter kind of disgust, of being overwhelmed to the point of nausea by something cloyingly sweet.

Approaching the show as a standalone piece, the criticism comes pretty easily. It takes the now-trite image from Nabokov of the solipsistic pedophile constructing a fantasy which does immeasurable harm when it intersects with the real world and applies the least challenging anime plot formula to it: the main character encounters rival solipsistic pedophiles and battles against them to keep her status quo. There's no real attempt at character exploration, no psychology, no engagement with the idea it implicitly raises that categories of sex object and objectifier are porous. Satou is at once predatory and predated-upon, but this is primarily present to have a good range of shounen battle dynamics between the cast and, perhaps, to explain her stock Madonna-whore complex. It's pure exploitation, and the best one can say for it on that front is that the appeal is largely in the exaggerated menhera personalities of the cast and not really in vicarious access to the younger of the two principal characters.

As an adaptation of a preexisting manga, though, I can't think of any better approach to doing Happy Sugar Life. There's a focus on keeping things light and fast-moving, on maintaining a tone of high-energy absurdity. It's pop where it could have been overwrought, and my only really complaint is that it doesn't go quite pop enough, isn't that free of an adaptation, when it really could've supported something along the tonal lines of Re: Cutie Honey or Gainax's other work of that era. There are some good moments of truly unsubtle irony, like the flash-forward scene of the two of them getting married in Hokkaido, but the show almost wants to be taken seriously as tragedy, and this sinks a lot of the enjoyment one might otherwise get out of it.

The best way to experience Happy Sugar Life, though, isn't really watching the show or reading the manga, it's watching the OP: pretty much everything you might get out of the full package is there. Shock value isn't without merit, but it needs to be appropriate to its medium. Bringing a cheeky mug to the office that says "This Anime Could've Been a Vocaloid MV".

Also the Kool-Aid logo is in like, 10 seconds of this show? I can't imagine this was on purpose and I've never seen another soul remark upon it.