Happy Sugar Life

I won't let anyone stand in the way of my love. Even if it sends me to Hell - Satou Matsuzaka

Happy Sugar Life is not for everyone. If you have problems watching pedophilia, sexual harassment, murder and psycho characters searching for love in their own concept, this is not for you. However, if you're tired of happy predictable stuff, and you want to feel real tension, fear, while thinking about how much love can challenge your principles and moral, I suggest you give it a try.

The Story focus on Satou Matsuzaka, an empty girl who is seeking love to fulfill her soul. Although she can't find it in the boys she hang out, she finds it in an abandoned little girl, named Shio Koube, that she keeps ilegally in her apartment. You can wrongly think she is a pedophile, but there is no sexual content between these two. It is just pure, unlabelled and reciprocal love. Satou's craziness is in counter-position of her love for Shio.

Most of characters are not normal. In contrast, we have Asahi Koube, a sympathetic guy who is looking desperately for his little sister. His dream is pretty simple: to have a normal life with his mom and sister. And besides we have Shouko Hida, who loves Satou and want to be closer to her.

What I most like in this work of art is the emotional conflict. We will see very cute scenes of love between Satou and Shio while feeling sorry for Asahi. Personally, I couldn't ignore Asahi's fight for finding his sister and make his dream come true. My principles says Shio has to go with her brother. However, I wanted Shio and Satou to be together, after seeing how much they suffered before and how much they love each other now. The fact of Shio being a child is irrelevant, since there is no sexual content. But of course, each person will have a different point of view.

Plus, we'll want to know how far would Satou go to protect her happy sugar life with Shio. We don't know how much violent she can be or with whom. We only know she is a psycho who is willing to eliminate anyone who interferes in their precious love relationship. Each episode leaves a mystery, that will be explained later, and it is so unpredictable and full of tension...

And so we have a story which involves a series of domestic abuse, violence, sexual harassment, child abandoning, etc. Each of these twists the mind of the characters pushing them to do stuff. But this is where it becomes beautiful. What these crazy people search for is LOVE, the innocent love they were denied from their parents who beat them or the innocent love that is taken away by a slutty abusive woman. And the desire for love can have consequences, dark and disturbing consequences.

Happy sugar life is not gore. The director wisely chose to focus on what happens instead of gushing blood everywhere. It is psychological horror, afterall

This anime reminds us that bad things can happen in the world. Unfortunately, for some people, the bad things happen in their own homes. It reminds us of all those taboo subjects we are aware of, but we're afraid to talk about.