Hoo boy, this one is complicated.

Okay, so this one is definitely not gonna be “quick” (and I’m thinking of renaming this column in the future as I’ve had a lot more to say lately), so if it’s tl;dr, I completely understand. This show is not gonna sit well with everyone who doesn’t go into it with full context, and that involves a really heavy introduction.

I’ll start with something you’re probably all familiar with, the concept of “moe”. An exact definition has never really existed, but in recent years the term has essentially come to mean something cute that should be protected. It isn’t inherently sexual but can become so depending on the person experiencing it, and quite often the target of this concept is a young girl, since they’re depicted fairly often in anime in normal circumstances (see Kanna from Maid Dragon, Tsumugi from Sweetness & Lightning, etc.)

Last year, we saw the airing of a show by the name of Angel’s 3Piece!, which spent its first episode setting up a charming plot about a music producer who gets approached by an elementary-aged band of girls wanting his help producing a song for them, until the final minute of the episode where it takes a heavy swerve from “playful innocence” to overtly sexualizing six year old girls by having them offer their bodies to the protagonist in exchange for his help. The important thing to keep in mind here was the framing of this moment. It might have been a little uncomfortable but ultimately salvageable if it had been played as a joke, but instead, it crosses the line by being played completely seriously. Even if the protagonist refuses (which I don’t know the answer to, because there was no way I was going back to find out), the tone has been irreversibly set as a show that is absolutely going to pander to men who are explicitly attracted to little girls, and there is no possible way to change that.

The other problem was perhaps a little more clear to people who don’t overanalyze things the way that I do, and that’s context. In this scene, the protagonist is not really active in the crucial moment. All on their own, these three actual children have decided (somehow) that offering sex with no prompting whatsoever is the best way to get what they want. Rather than the protagonist sexualizing these girls, it’s themselves, followed by the camera (very deliberately, just so we know this is meant to be taken seriously) and by extension the viewer.

This is sort of an inversion or deconstruction of moe, but since the project pretty clearly had no intention of following through on that idea (which is fine, we got Made in Abyss to do that pretty thoroughly), I washed my hands of it, called it a waste of time, and gave it a 1/10.

Now, finally, let’s talk about Happy Sugar Life.

Over this pretty excellent slow burn of a premiere, we learn a few things, and this one I have to spoil in order to talk about, but lucky for me the dark turn is clearly going to happen from the start, so I feel I can discuss in-depth what’s happening.

We have our protagonist, Satou, who looks like a high-schooler (and is the correct age) but we don’t see her in school, only ever at home or at work (a maid cafe), despite the fact that she almost always is seen wearing what looks like a school uniform. She rejects a boy’s advances (who then immediately insults and objectifies her to his friends, not that she seems to care at all), and tells him her heart belongs to someone else. We very quickly learn whom – a girl named Shio, who looks to be about half her age.

Woah. Slam on the brakes, because if you don’t really get it, this is gonna instantly make you never wanna touch this one again, like how I feel about 3Piece.

We see the two of them interact a lot in this episode, but there are important things to take note of, the first being that at no point in this premiere does it directly paint Satou as a good person who is making good decisions. From the very beginning, we see the creeping shadow of coldness in her heart that only dissipates when she is around Shio, and this girl is pretty much the only thing she thinks about, ever. This is framed correctly as a red flag in-universe.

The second thing is that we don’t see Satou sexualizing Shio, at all. (There is a scene of them in the bath together, but this is a much more common thing for families to do together in Japan to begin with than it is in the States.) Indeed, her entire outlook on love seems to paint it as almost completely nonsexual. She isn’t innocent by a long shot, but more along the lines of a complete separation of the ideas of love and sex where the two never, ever mix.

My point boils down to the fact that this is one of the most intentional deconstructions of moe I have ever seen.

Because make no mistake, this is indeed what she’s feeling for Shio, with the caveat that it’s being projected onto a real girl and not an anime waifu, and that she has taken things way, way too far. We never ever see Shio leave the apartment they share, and at the end of the episode, we see why: Satou has kidnapped her from her parents.

Just that one in-universe justification for this story premise tells me that what we’re seeing is indeed supposed to be a poor situation, despite the apparent bliss of the two involved people. I assume we’ll find out why Shio is so attached to her kidnapper, what her parents are like, and why Satou decided to do this in the first place, but the other important justification is one you might not even think about until the end of the episode – if Satou is so desperate for money so she can take care of Shio, how does she afford their nice apartment?

At some point in the recent past, she murdered the owners and chopped them up to fit in trash bags, Dahmer-style.

Happy Sugar Life, in its creepy slow burn, is a way more effective horror story than Angels of Death. This is the kind of idea you’d see in a Stephen King novel, and I’m really excited to watch it play out. I really hope the show can keep this tightrope act of craziness going, and I really hope I’m correct that Satou doesn’t see Shio sexually, because this is one of the best premieres I’ve seen in a long, long time.