Sep 29, 2018
So where to start?
Happy Sugar Life (HSL) fails as a psychological horror.
That is fine.
Don't go in thinking this is going to be a psychological horror, instead look at this more as a mystery drama.
It's not a standard "Problem = Mystery" style mystery, but instead it's got that sort of Another style mystery where you have a problem, but then the interest is figuring out who the characters are, what's happened leading up to here, etc.
It's a drama because everything is a drama. Drama is that blanket term for "things happen, they're not neccesarily fighting, they're not always romance, they're not always [Blank], but they are
...
sometimes".
This Anime is about our main protagonist Satou, and our macguffin/second-protagonist Shio. By some means our MP has found Shio and is currently living with her despite the fact that she is an actively sought-after missing person. Satou's main drive then obviously is keeping her as a missing person while they have a romantic relationship.
Yes, The lesbian pedophile has a girl locked in her appartment, but the girl doesn't seem to mind.
That's literally as much plot as I can go into without spoiling this, so let's talk actual meat and potatoes.
This is a modern-day japan with normal life, but populated entirely by morally wrong people. Everyone's hiding something, everyone's an asshole. Our macguffin, in one way or another, seems to bring these assholes together and, as they do, they end up having confrontations. All the while you're going to be fed crumbs of information into the actual story, either through flashback, literal digging, or just someone's psychotic episode that leads to them no longer repressing some memories.
All these crumbs of plot start filling in the blanks for the mystery, but then just add more questions ontop of that and bring in more morally questionable situations for you to judge. All up until a breaking point where the current story kicks into high-gear and the mystery is essentially finished so you can wrap up the series and characters that you've spent the past episodes learning about and either loving or hating all with the final drama.
Yeah, I'm vague. That review is boring. Just watch this anime, as much shit as it sounds like I've given it, it's amazing. You're going into an anime where the writers dive into a psychopathic main protagonist and I know how much we all love those when they're not written as high-school vampire scene girls. You're not force-fed psychology 101, you're not shown a murder then beaten over the head with how wrong it is. You're just shown a bunch of relatable human characters who're pushed past relatable at times because you don't want to relate to their fucked psychology.
And just ignore these dudes who watched 3 episodes and started screaming "IT'S EDGY, WHY IS THERE A LOLI, THIS IS GROSS, I'M OFFENDED" because they wanted to voice their opinions on an unfinished anime they decided to immediately wall themselves away from. Watch it and make your own call. It's not like we don't all sit around for 6-12 hours straight binging whole anime series on the weekends anyways.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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