Happy Sugar Life

Episode 10

Happy Sugar Life has, on the whole, been a pretty good series with occasional flashes of stronger content. For it to ascend to the next level, though, it needed both to follow up last episode's potent finish with something equally strong and to plug two crucial storytelling gaps: how Shio got separated from her mother and Shio's full perspective on the situation that she's in. That episode 10 accomplishes all three tasks and more, and does it in a mostly credible fashion, is quite an impressive feat.

Any greater consequences for Shoko's murder will have to wait, as except for the brief epilogue featuring Asahi, the entirety of the present-time part of this episode takes place within the “castle” the Satou has fashioned for Shio. Given the way this episode plays out, I'm totally fine with that, as the writing shows quite acutely that the impact of killing Shoko on Satou is far from trivial. In fact, she's outright traumatized by the incident, as we can see her struggling with her internal logic over it. As well-handled as that part was (again, some great voice acting work there), that young Shio rebelled against just being Satou's doll when Satou was reaching out for reassurance was the critical turning point in their relationship. So far, Shio has mostly been portrayed as the angel who can purify the souls of those she encounters, but here we see that she's her own ball of insecurities and has finally had enough with her elders treating her more as a thing than as a person. Her brief rebellion has every hallmark of a classic childish tantrum, but it also allows her to her to assert quite firmly that the Satou/Shio relationship isn't one-sided; she needs emotional fulfillment, too, and that has to result from being a full partner in the relationship rather than just the subject of it. While this kind of approach has been done in anime numerous times before, I don't recall it ever being tried with a character so young.

The flashback showing the circumstances with her mother and how the two parted beautifully sets up where Shio was coming from. Although her mother did a bad thing in both abandoning and rejecting Shio, she wasn't a monster; she was just a woman broken down by desperate circumstances, one who had apparently cut ties with her family for a marriage that turned out to be abusive and thus was left isolated when she had to fend for herself after escaping her husband. The little-kid logic that Shio reasons through about her responsibility for it was heartbreaking, but it also completely explains why Shio became every bit as attached to Satou as Satou became to her: Satou was an emotional replacement for her mother.

As an added treat, this episode also vastly expands on the “jar of candy” analogy used in the opener. I had always interpreted that as a symbol for sanity, but Shio's viewpoint makes it clearer that it's intended to be symbolic of a person's emotional state. Satou's jar was empty when she encountered Shio, whereas her mother's was cracking due to the stress of her situation. That's far from the only visual cue in an episode that's loaded with potent little visuals, including one suggesting that Satou has just tossed Shoko's body in the room that she was keeping the dismembered artist in. The chilling, jarring way that Asahi whispers in Shio's ear just as all the emotional turmoil had been settled was a strong touch, too, and the final scene of Asahi dragging the bat suggests the nature of the upcoming climactic conflict. All of this is handled so well that it's easy to ignore the fact that Satou is in her underwear for almost the entire episode.

In other words, this is easily the most complete episode of the series to date. Can the series hold this peak going into its final episodes?

Rating: A

Happy Sugar Life is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.