Happy Sugar Life

TLDR: good at making you feel bad (in a good way? probably) just trust and watch past the first few episodes

Calling this show bittersweet would be similar to calling an apple a fruit. perhaps, its more similar to calling a tomato a fruit because, after finishing, i feel much more bitter. If you wish to watch a show that definitively will cause you to stare at the blank screen, after the last episode, contemplating suffering like the Buddha (very much so the mood i was in), stop reading reviews and just watch it ( its okay to finish mine though ( •̯́ ^ •̯̀) ). ... Its doomed yuri Romeo & Juliet but with way more drama and much less lovable characters ; this Japanese Shakespeare really needs a therapist (or a search warrant), check it out, and if you don`t want to? Check it out anyway. All good roller coasters need some danger... this one could do with a few less pedophiles... but its more fun that way. Surprisingly wholesome at times... if you don't think about the pedos... or the... other stuff.

In all seriousness, it differs from the majority of Tragedy or Doomed Yuri or Psychological horror shows, mainly because i cant put it under any of those category. Its truly a unique show in its home fields and, in all honesty, it'll probably make you feel depressed and not even in a cry cry type of way but more so you'll just feel emotionally drained AS the author intended (probs), which is a testament to its quality (probs). Maybe I'm a media masochist, but either way its quality in the majority of anime-tickboxes™ is astounding, especially for this strange co-studio that made it. There isn't much i can say about the story without spoiling as most aspects are so closely related but i can say it is grimy and genuinely jaw shatteingly surprising - of which most surprises are quite hard to predict and not very cliche.

The problem is... I`m saying this from a perspective of somebody who has finished and mentally processed the show. What I`m getting at is, at the start, the show is utter shit... of course not in the completely irrevesable way but mostly because the characters are terrible (or so it seems). main girl Matsuzaka is an above averagely written yandere in comparison to others in a similar genre cough-yuno-cough, whose motives are a vague medley of "love" and "trauma" (or so it seems). Perfect good girl shio is exactly that, "perfect", annoyingly so and a clear attempt from the author to get us to like her (or so it seems). everyone else is relatively normal and disinteresting (or so it s- ... I`ll stop) they mostly just fit plot points, hida = friend, koube = flyer guy, etc, etc.

It seems that this plot therefore is just about the two mains, while this isn't true, due to some "questionable" event that end up happening in the first few episodes, the "weak" viewers get weeded out. this leaves mostly an audience of weirdos from this hyper specific niche of gross psychological yuri horror (also anyone who gets hooked). as you can imagine this is horrible for the shows ratings as it effectively makes a large amount of people hate it from the get go. This isn't very good.

But as you can imagine, the story needs this rough start to be effective, it tells you they die, gives you a mystery and then drip feeds you clues until the very last moment, therefore its exceedingly hard to give good explenation at the start in a show such as this and (most) the bad character writing is purposeful (some pointless fat here and there). what I`m trying to say is stick with it, scooby doo wouldn't be good if they unmasked and told you who the villain was at the start, and when it comes to more complex mystery than "here the bad guy" it is quite hard to give background. the characters get twisted and your opinions of them too until both are thoroughly rung out and you`ll definitely "rung" at the end.

happy watching (probably not very happy)

i need to wash his taste out my mouth... so bitter

So uhh, I pulled this up from my backlog to watch since it's Pride Month, and I'm including everything with either the GL, BL, or Crossdressing tags that I had in my PTW... this was one hell of a pull, though I'm pretty sure I initially added this from a horror/Halloween list, not for the yuri aspect.

And for the most part, it was very engaging. Some murder and kidnapping shenanigans, about what I expected from a more grounded horror, though I would probably want something more supernatural and maybe campy for Halloween. The trademark here is that most of the characters focused on here, though, ... are pedophilic to some degree, wanting either of these underage girls, the teenager or the 8-year-old. And the teenager herself thinks that she's in love with the 8yr old too, so that's another pedo, pretty much, even if nothing hints at sexual acts yet, and she's still a minor too.

But I can normally take shows that have nothing but bad characters, so long as we acknowledge and work with that. I had a good time with Redo of Healer, for example. Because MC is bad, and everyone he's getting revenge on is bad. I can revel in the violence, depravity, and the trash nature of it all.

But here... it feels like they actually want you to walk away with the feeling of the 8yr old and her pedophilic kidnapper having a true soulmate-like connection, that supercedes even the family trying to find her after being separated for so long, which is really the only thing that keeps this anime from having an actual "happy" ending imo.

I can't say it was average or trash because it kept me engaged for so long, and seeing one of the sexual abuse victims break and become a young man seeking out younger girls for himself is a tragedy that speaks to the truth of this pattern in the world (even if his obsession is a little overplayed), but it's just hard to look past that this, at the end of it all, is played as a twisted romance between kidnapper and elementary-school-age victim.

It succeeds in disturbing me, as a good horror should, but not all horror can be easily read as seemingly supporting this weird-ass dynamic. I could be wrong - the ending isn't perfectly happy, so this could be written as a tragedy, *but* it feels like it was unfittingly going for a Romeo & Juliet-style tragedy.

This anime isn't just trash, it's ass. It isn't just ass, it's shit. It isn't just shit, I want my time back.
This is the story of a teen who kidnapped an elementary school girl, and for the next 12 episodes you will see that portraid as a very good thing, and some comically evil idiots will be sprinkled on top in order to make sure your viewing experience is as miserable as possible.
It's not a deep story like it likes to pretend it is, it's written like shit, the characters are shit, and the animation is ABYSMAL. The animation is one of the ugliest I've ... ever seen. The characters move like they're stones being moved on a table. The character designs are boring and the most basic shit that I've seen 10000 times before. The art style is ugly as hell, it looks right out of the sketchbook of an 11-year-old who only knows how to draw girls.
And the story is just the juice at the bottom of the trash bag that leaks out and ruins your shoes and makes you stare in hatred and disgust at what's being shown to you. When the time for the "climactic and emotional" ending came, I was just furiously staring at the shit that was unfolding before my eyes, realizing that this show truly just wants me to like the pedophile kidnapper. It doesn't try to present anything as morally gray or whataver people say. They WANT you to cheer for the pedophile who stockholmed a little girl and murders people. They WANT you to think the best future for this girl is in fact to live in isolation with the pedophile who kidnapped her. They WANT you to think that this little girl knows what she's talking about and that she can decide things for herself, when she's clearly just emotional, traumatized, brainwahsed, and 8 years old. This is bullshit. I know anime aren't strangers to loli and all that, but this story isn't portrayed like a silly world where this type of thing is acceptable or just not that serious (for example a world like MIss Kobayashi). This is portrayed in a grounded universe where everyone knows this shit is bad, evident by how the main character makes sure no one knows about it or tells the police.
It's just garbage. Everyone is a pedophile rapist idiot. There were only 2 characters that I didn't fucking despise, because they felt like normal humans who have the ability to think and be normal. What a shitty waste of time. It's not even a funny so-bad-it's-good anime to watch with friends. It's an anime you should only watch if you fucking hate yourself and want to suffer and waste your time in the worst way possible. Seriously, use that time to call your mother, to learn a hobby, to take a walk, to read about birds, to weave a mongolian basket. Anything would be a more worthwhile use of your time than watching this sewege.