Course of Perversion - Happy Sugar Life

Happy Sugar Life is about a girl called Satou with pink hair, she has this adorable loli called Shio who is her world and will do anything to protect her. Satou does school and then work to provide for herself, she gets home and opens a door in the secret room there’s bags of mysterious meat and blood on the wall, it is revealed that she murdered her family for Shio the loli. Shio was abducted by Satou to protect her and care for her, she does anything for Shio even if it means murdering people who stop her from seeing her or to save her. Satou is a crazy yandere on the surface she acts sweet and normal but she lowkey fucked up. This anime is like Scum’s wish but with more perversion the characters even sweet innocent Shio are perverted, when I say perverted you probably think of something abnormal sexually well for some characters both meanings work for them but I mean perverted as in corrupt or fucked up basically. Mostly very character that has a quite a bit of screen time has a secret side of being extreme perversion.

Perversion is the corruption of something that is not intended to be corrupt or isn’t ethically considered right, in Happy Sugar Life the story is not slice of life anime but a perversion of it, as at first it may seem like an innocent kawaii show and you go into expecting it to be a wholesome usual moe blob anime but oh boy oh boy, are you wrong as after a while it becomes apparent that the visual representation of this slice of life is actually a slice of morally depraved individuals. The anime is so interesting for some bizarre reason as the anime tells a story of characters that society is deemed to form in the mind of people that it isn’t acceptable to act this way so showing these taboos to the audience is interesting as not everyone can act like this or isn’t allowed to but they don’t get me wrong the people who find it interesting don’t actually (I hope) want to do these things.

I don’t get how great Japan is at making the weirdest, perverted and absurdly over the top things, Japan or anime is the most recognised as being most inventive when it comes to pretty much anything but most importunately there animation is the most inventive when it comes to giving a reaction of a wtf moment and Happy Sugar Life is a prime example of that. This wasn’t really my cup of tea as I’m not that messed in the head to enjoy these types of things, but another anime called Watamote was an exception as I could relate all the time to Watamote as I’m socially awkward as well so if I was a psychopath or insane in the head I could probably enjoy this anime. Now you may think it is immoral to have such an anime be so depraved that it goes into borderline illicit but having this is just fictional is shown as an art form because people may have these intentions and having this as outlet that they can express such actions from this and stop it from actually happening, which they wouldn’t do anyway unless this type of disgusting visuals wasn’t around. Now I will be talking about a big part of the show which is the characterisation in Happy Sugar Life as this is a psychological anime after all.

Satou acts as the catalyst in this whole show; everything is all rainbows until she interacts with the side characters, everyone around her is cursed at being surrounded by deviants as this should be tagged as slice of antilife because the show tries to make everything just flipped on its head, “you want a cutesy moe show? Nah you are getting the exact opposite, the vilest things that could possibly happen” is what I think the creator(s) were thinking when they made this show. I feel like Happy Sugar Life tries too hard to be overly edgy to the point that it’s uncomfortable to sit through the whole thing. The title of the anime “Happy Sugar Life” may seem like a misdirection by the show which is a little clever as if it had some grotesque title half the people and me included would have not seen it but the title is actually a reference to Satou’s delusion of wanting/craving a perfect happy and “sweet” life with Shio but life isn’t as it always seems because in reality Satou is surrounded by sourness making her taste of her world “bitter” I find the symbolism of this to be quite interesting as I knew that show is completely and utterly degenerate but it was like a horrific car accident because I just couldn’t bring myself to stop watching.

“The feeling of love? What is it? How come I can't find it? Does it even exist?” In this world, selfish intentions are shown the most the need to find a meaning to exist is what Satou is searching for, the small chubby cheeked little bundle of joy is that temporary answer that she has been looking for. She found her happiness when she has Shio, she’ll do anything for her; it shows her being ecstatic using her selfishness to not care about what Shio wants or where she belongs. Satou being the most well-made character in the entire program it’s shocking to realise that the side characters are extremely poor; all of them except a few are one dimensional in my opinion, as they just fill in the disgusting labels like child predator or irl lolicon and that’s all they are. If I was talking about how realistic this anime is I would be here all day because every aspect of the show is unrealistic, to the police to the side characters but that would take some of the fun out of the show even the absence of realism also makes the show unenjoyable to watch after the first 5 episodes. In conclusion, the idea of corrupt perversion is an interesting topic to watch about in anime it hasn’t really been done an awfully lot but as much as I wanted to like this show it fails in execution for me at least. I would give this show a low 7 to high 6 out of 10.

Thanks for Reading!