Manga / Happy Sugar Life

Sweetness and Bitterness are two sides of the same coin.

High-schooler Satou Matsuzaka has a reputation for being easy, but one day her lifestyle of sleeping with one boy after another comes to an end. She comes upon a lost child named Shio Kobe, who awakens feelings in her that she has never felt before. Believing that this emotion must be true love, Satou is determined to hold Shio close and never let her go. No matter who or what stands in her way.

But from where did she acquire the girl, and how long can their "Happy Sugar Life" together last?

Happy Sugar Life is a manga written by Tomiyaki Kagisora, which ran in Gangan Joker from 2015 to 2019. An anime adaptation by Ezo'la aired during the summer 2018 season. In July 22, 2022, volume 11, also titled "Extra Life" has been released to commemorate the release of Tomiyaki's new manga, Romancing Apoptosis Doll: Sartain in Love.

---

This manga provides examples of:

• Abduction Is Love:
  • Satou picks Shio up off the street and whisks her off home with her, then proceeds to isolate her in an apartment by telling her the outside world is dangerous and later physically locking her in. She knows full well that there are missing person posters everywhere for her, and knows who's looking for her, but she refuses to even consider letting her go.
  • Attempted by the manager of the Princess Imperal that Satou works at for a time, when she kidnaps Satou's coworker Mitsuboshi and molests him in an attempt to make him love only her. It doesn't go according to plan.
• Absurdly Youthful Mother: When Yuuna's mom comes to check on her some time after the incident, she still looks quite young. Granted, Yuuna was still a teenager. Considering she was already pregnant with Asahi, that'd make her mother an absurdly youthful grandmother.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Asahi's dad once tore off his son's fingernails just to see how long he could endure it. And then made him get liquor afterwards. It's only fortunate that the asshole died of alcohol poisoning later, but it took five years after his sister and his mom left. It's later revealed he didn't die of alcohol poisoning, but that his sake was poisoned by Asahi's mother.
  • Although there's no indication that Satou's aunt has ever harmed her in any way, she is very clearly not a good role model nor stable enough to be trusted with caring for a child. Satou growing up with her aunt likely damaged her to a far greater extent than losing her parents.
• Adults Are Useless: A prevailing theme in the manga. Many of the young characters recognize the failures of the adults in their life, whether it be Taiyou getting molested by his former boss, the Kobe siblings' abusive household, Yuuna's parents consenting to her marriage with the boy who raped her, and Satou's upbringing with her aunt. To an extent, they all grow up hating them and wanting to rely on themselves.
• Anti-Villain: Yes, Satou is a murderer and an abductor with practically zero morals, but she still cares for the girl she abducted in her own weird way, and there are worse monsters out there.
• Art-Style Dissonance: Big time. While the look of the series has character designs that wouldn't be out of place in a fluffy Yuri-hime serial, the subject matter and personalities of the characters are anything but cute.
• Bait-and-Switch: Chapters 16 and 17 give us an incredible build-up of tension. Satou's teacher called the police in order to get them to investigate her apartment, Shouko is with Satou intent on meeting her aunt, they're right in front of the apartment door and those around her look on in suspicion as Satou unlocks the tiny lock near the foot of the door that she installed on her and Shio's apartment door to keep Shio trapped inside and it looks as though Satou is about to be caught red-handed. Only for the person to greet them at the opened door be not Shio, but Satou's very much alive aunt, and all questionable smells from the apartment simply being the garbage that said aunt keeps there. And the apartment where Shio and Satou actually live is on a different floor.
  • When Mitsuboshi witnesses Satou intending to take Shouko home with her, he becomes clearly distressed and it really looks like he's worried that Satou may hurt or even murder Shouko. At the end of chapter 17 it is revealed, that the true reason was that Shouko may become a "competition" for him after also getting infatuated with Shio.
• Be Careful What You Say: In Chapter 20, Asahi finds Shouko bawling her eyes out about how she hurt her friend Satou and would be better off dead. Satou grants her wish two chapters later.
• Blind Obedience: Shio displays this time and time again to Satou, believing her entirely with no room for doubt in her mind that she has anything but her best interests at heart. Her age may have a lot to do with it.
• Book Ends: The manga's first chapter ends with (and the anime begins with) Satou in an Imagine Spot fondly thinking of her future life with Shio, and the twelfth episode (as well as the final chapter) concludes with Shio having one a few days after the events of the episode. Both end with the obligatory Title Drop.
• Brutal Honesty: In Chapter 13, Shouko bluntly asks Satou "why does she fuck so many guys".
• Butt-Monkey: Taiyou Mitsuboshi never gets the end of it. He gets rejected by Satou, then kidnapped and raped for a week by his depraved boss. This causes him to be mortified of older women so he becomes entranced by Shio and tries to get close to her, constantly making himself bare as a target for misfortune, as well as blackmail and extortion from Satou, and once, even from Asahi. In the end he ends up raped again by Satou's deranged aunt and unceremoniously vanishes after the main story's ending.
• Cast Full of Crazy: And how! Every single character connected to the main plot has a very twisted mind, went through a horribly traumatizing experience, or both. The only exception to the rule is Shouko.
• Central Theme: "Children need to experience love while growing up, for they will crave it when they don't receive it". Pretty much every underage character in the series has a different problem, but they all have a common source: they want to love and be loved. Thanks to useless or flat-out abusive parental figures, most of the cast feels lonely and neglected, and plot mostly consists of their (usually unhealthy) attempts to cope with this clashing with each other. While some of them, including Satou, are pretty deranged or creepy, the series still gives them some level of sympathy due to their Freudian Excuse, implying they could have lived better lives if the adults around them were actually capable of raising them right.
• The Chain of Harm: A fair bunch of the characters have a Freudian Excuse to explain their behavior, but their suffering abuse leads them to pass that abuse on, intentionally or no.
• Childhood Marriage Promise: More on Shio's side, but it's part of the daily ritual for her and Satou. She puts a blanket on Satou's head, says her marriage vows, and pinky promises with her. Eventually, she and Satou decide that they really want to get married, and the latter buys rings for them and plans to escape to a tropical area for their "honeymoon" and to escape suspicion.
• Crapsack World:
  • How Satou views the world outside of the apartment she and Shio reside in. She repeatedly describes the outside world as "filthy" and "dirty", and views the apartment as a "castle" or a gilded cage of sorts to keep themselves bundled up in away from all of that, even going as far as to describe her leaving to go to work or school as expeditions where she's acquiring provisions for them to survive.
  • The world itself is really not that great. People can seemingly commit crimes arranging from blackmail to kidnapping to rape or murder and remain virtually unaccountable as long as they can cover it up or nobody reports them to the police. Law enforcement is also somehow incompetent enough to be easily neutralized by tricking the informant into telling them to swat an insane woman. It's telling that the most sympathetic antagonist in the manga by a significant degree is Satou, the actual Big Bad and the Villain Protagonist. Complex and shrewd as she is, she never goes to the level of low that some side characters do.
• Deceptively Silly Title: This is a psychological horror series starring a Villain Protagonist who kidnaps a child out of "love", and it is called "Happy Sugar Life". It does have an In-Universe meaning, but that doesn't change the fact that the title is seriously misleading.
• Deconstruction: Of the Yuri and Shoujo romance genre, namely because the heroine has a seriously screwed-up idea of love and does morally reprehensible things to keep that love, and the girl-girl relationship is both toxic and illegal.
• Devoted to You: Shio, despite being a young child, has a positively uncanny ability to cause several people to become intensely devoted to finding, acquiring, or just being near her, doing anything possible to keep her close and make her happy.
• Depraved Bisexual:
  • Despite Satou having had mindless sex with quite a few boys beforehand, her obsession with Shio is romantic (though likely not sexual) and she's quite willing to seduce other girls as a means to an end, as she does to her coworker.
  • Implied for The Princess Imperial Manager. She raped Mitsuboshi for a week and traumatized him, but she also calls Satou "cute" when she confronts the girl, suggesting that she's not far from seducing other women.
• Dies Wide Open: Shouko dies with her eyes wide open when Satou slits her in the neck.
• Disguised Horror Story: Do not for a second be fooled by the seemingly innocent title and the cute, pastel-colored Shoujo manga artstyle. This is a Psychological Horror story with a surprisingly screwed-up setting where people can commit atrocities for little or no reason and there's not much stopping them. The girl-on-girl relationship between Satou and Shio also has extremely creepy undertones not only because of the jarring age gap between the girls, but Satou largely treats Shio like a Human Pet to be locked inside her apartment instead of a free human being.
• Domestic Abuse:
  • Asahi and Shio's father was shown to be incredibly abusive towards his family, being an alcoholic and incredibly ruthless in his treatment of his wife and young children. Especially after Shio and their mother ran away from him, when we see him physically abusing Asahi and forcing him to get him alcohol to feed his habit. It's really no wonder that Asahi is so overjoyed when he finally died.
  • In a more emotional abuse-based version of this, it is abundantly clear that Satou did NOT grow up in a good household while living with her aunt. Living in a disgustingly filthy apartment constantly filled with trash, and presumably people walking in and out to have sex with and abuse her aunt. She most likely cared about Satou in her own weird way, but it was so twisted that it is no better than abuse. It's little wonder Satou grew up the way she did.
• Downer Ending: Asahi Kobe and Taiyou Mitsuboshi take the full brunt of this — in Asahi's case, Satou sacrificed her life to protect Shio, and there's no obstacles left for Asahi to have a timely sibling reunion, right? Wrong! Shio rejects him in favor of Satou and decides to live for herself, cementing him as the loser who lost everyone who cared about him, since Satou already killed Shouko beforehand. 8 years later, he's a traumatized wreck wandering the streets. Mitsuboshi's fate is even worse, since being raped a second time was the final straw that degenerated him into a wreck beyond saving. Ostensibly though, Satou and Shio still get a Bittersweet Ending — Satou gets the last laugh by staving Shio out of Asahi's hands and proves herself to be genuinely capable of giving Shio a happy, independent life, though if Satou's death didn't make her mentally unstable, being forced to live like the possession of a mentally unstable groomer in all-but-name definitely did her in.
• Edible Theme Naming: Though Satou and Shio's names are written in hiragana and thus have no inherent meaning, they can respectively mean "sugar" and "salt". Their surnames (and Shouko's) are also based on brands of wagyu beef.
• Evil Versus Evil: Some people the Villain Protagonist Satou had to deal with had minds just as twisted as her own, if not more, such as the rapist Princess Imperial Manager and the painter she killed and claimed his apartment from.
• Eye Scream: Satou gouges out the eyes of two thugs who saw Shio and were discussing bringing her to the police or using her as bait for Asahi.
• Family of Choice: No matter how questionable the circumstances were that drew them together, ultimately Satou and Shio's relationship falls into this. Together, they'd never had as much genuine unconditional affection as they did with their blood relatives.
• Fauxshadow: The reader spends the first several chapters of the manga believing that Satou had murdered her aunt before bringing Shio to live with her in her apartment. However, come chapter 16 we learn that her aunt is perfectly alive (if very mentally unwell) and continues living in their apartment to her heart's content.
• First-Episode Twist: After seeing Satou talk so much about how she's found her beloved, and how she's working so hard for them to give them a good life together, she returns home and greets her beloved waiting for her. Then we see that her "beloved" is a small girl. After the reveal that Satou's "beloved" is Shio, a child, we see her walking by a lamp post. With a missing person flyer posted on it with Shio's face.
• Gilded Cage: This imagery appears a lot in regards to Shio and Satou's apartment. Satou does her best to earn money so that they have the ability to live in her dead neighbor's old apartment, with plenty of food, running water, and even television, along with other treats. Shio has no problems living there aside from occasional boredom, though this is likely because she's too innocent to understand Satou's true intentions for always keeping her inside.
• Hate Sink: In a series full of psychotic characters, these two make even the Villain Protagonist and the actual Big Bad Satou look like a saint in comparison despite being side characters with relatively minor roles.
  • The Manager of the Princess Imperial, the antagonist of the first episode, initially seems to be Satou's Benevolent Boss. In truth, she is a narcissistic Attention Whore who becomes envious of Satou for being well-received by her co-workers. When Taiyou Mitsuboshi, a teen boy under her employ, asks Satou out, the manager's ego is so bruised that she proceeds to kidnap him, lock in in a closet for a whole week, and rape him repeatedly throughout, directly leading to Taiyou's Sanity Slippage and turn to darkness. She also orders her employees to sabotage Satou's work to get back at her for daring to catch Taiyou's attention. Even after Satou's tragic death, the Manager seemingly vanishes from view with no closure whatsoever. A Bad Boss and remorseless child molester, the Manager irreversibly ruins the life of a young boy in a feeble attempt to maintain power.
  • Shio and Asahi's father is the Greater-Scope Villain and a truly nightmarish parental abuser. An alcoholic, he spares no love for his wife Yuuna and children, beating them frequently and using them to fuel his unhealthy habits. A flashback would later reveal that he also raped his future wife because she accidentally pushed him, celebrated the death of his own father because it left him with a big inheritance, left his wife and son, and only came back after spending all his money. It is no wonder that Yuuna ran away with Shio, and Asahi rejoiced when he died. He deserves being called a demon by Asahi and the only redeeming quality he has is nobody has to deal with him in the present day.
• How We Got Here: The first scene of the anime adaptation is where Satou was moments away from falling off the burning apartment and dying before it transitions to the events of Chapter 1 where Satou confronts the Princess Imperial Manager.
• Hope Spot: When Shouko confronted Satou, there was still a chance Satou would trust her and let her live. The manga intentionally frames the encounter to make it look like she could really reach the little humanity Satou still had. And then came the knife...
• If Only You Knew:
  • After Satou beat the two deliniquents to a bloody pulp becauae they were messing with Shio, Shouko mentions a news report of two guys having their eyes gouged out with Satou during a casual conversation, not having a slightest idea that the person who did it is standing next to her.
  • At one point, Asahi comes across Satou and lends her a missing person poster with a picture of Shio on it. He doesn't know she was Shio's abductor back then.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Often how Shio is portrayed, and how she is viewed by other characters. It gets tainted at the end of the series because living with Satou made her a bit nutty. You can't keep your innocence while being groomed like a Human Pet for a good amount of time, after all.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Satou's last boyfriend in his Inner Monologue refers to Shio as "this" when declaring her an obstacle for his relationship with Satou.
• Jump Scare:
  • Happens in-universe when Mitsuboshi is out at night and some women startle him. He gets scared shitless due to his mental trauma from Princess Imperial's manager's abuse.
  • Shortly after that, he's seen obsessing about a missing person poster of Shio still in the dead of the night when suddenly Satou creeps up on him from behind with a disturbing look in her eyes and the intent to blackmail and silence him.
  • Another happens in the penultimate episode when Mitsuboshi barges into Satou's aunt's home believing that's where Shio is. When opening the inner door a dark shadowy figure is visible looming behind him. He instinctively turns around only to come face to face with Satou's aunt displaying a nighmarish smile. This sight is enough to send him plummeting on his butt in panic.
• Kill the Ones You Love: When Satou murders Shouko for catching her with Shio and snapping a photo of her, since she doesn't trust her not to go to the cops or Shio's brother. However, Satou admits in Shouko's final moments that she cares as little about her as she does any random stranger on the street. Zigzagged as the death seems to have caused her greater emotional upset than that.
• The Kindnapper: Satou gives this excuse to Mitsuboshi, claiming that she feels that only she can make Shio happy, as there's no telling if being with her family would actually be good for her. It's unknown how much she actually believes this as opposed to her justifying her kidnapping of Shio. Later revelations have it played straight after all; since Yuuna had abandoned Shio just prior to Satou finding her, Satou has some justification in taking her off the streets and caring for her.
• Kiss of Death: One of the last things we see Shouko doing before going to confront Satou and finding the truth about Shio with deadly consequences is giving Asahi a goodbye kiss as he leaves to continue his search for Shio.
• Love Makes You Evil: Satou's violent tendencies emerged after encountering Shio and falling in "love" with her.
• Meaningful Name: Certain characters' names have contrasting meanings when paired with another:
  • Satou's given name means "sugar", while Shio's given name means "salt".
  • Taiyou's given name means "sun", whereas Asahi means "morning sun".
• Minor Living Alone: Satou (and clearly Shio) is a minor, yet lives in an apartment all on her own, which she apparently pays for all on her own, along with the groceries and water and such.
• Missed Him by That Much: The Kobe siblings in episode 3. At one point they are both walking in the same street, but in different directions and not looking around, so they don't see each other.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: The characters from this series operate on many different levels of morality and sanity. The main character is a Villain Protagonist Yandere, but also an Anti-Villain with a sympathetic motive. The other major character is a child that is portrayed as the epitome of innocence, but suffers from an ambiguous disorder that may be the reason why she is still innocent. Other characters include people who are just flat out monsters, a boy who becomes just as mentally unstable as the protagonist herself but remains self-aware enough to try (and fail) to change, and another boy that is fundamentally a Nice Guy but is seriously traumatized by a monstrous woman, and a Nice Girl that serves as the Only Sane Man of the series.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: When Satou brings unconscious Shio to the boyfriend's apartment, he designates the kid an obstacle for his relationship with Satou and tries to strangle her.
• No-Dialogue Episode: The majority of Chapter 23 (the final part of Episode 9 in the anime) while Shouko confronts Satou about Shio. Subverted in the last few pages when they do exchange a few on panel words, and all of their dialogue is squished in together on a single page after the whole of the conversation took place.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Both of Satou's parents are stated to have died when she was very young, and she was left to live with her aunt who turns out to be extremely unhinged herself. The aunt is a manic masochist obsessed with allowing men and women to abuse her physically and degrade her sexually, which she claims is the utmost expression of love, and has a filth-strewn room ("for trash") in her apartment where she indulges in her habits. It goes without saying that this wasn't be a healthy environment for Satou to grow up in.
  • Later chapters and hints indicate that Shio was abandoned in the street by her mother, where she was subsequently found by Satou.
• Perverted Sniffing:
  • Done by Daichi when he was alone sniffing Satou's jacket.
  • Satou bribes Mitsuboshi into becoming her henchman by giving him one of Shio's socks to sniff.

• Pilot: The one-shot that this series is based on, titled White Sugar Garden, Black Salt Cage, carries a few differences:
  • Satou had a stalker ex-boyfriend, who she kills in his own apartment in a face-to-face encounter, and chops his body to pieces (albeit he first had his lips bitten by her in a kiss and got scared stiff as a result); whose design later became Mitsuboshi.
  • Satou herself was more willing to kill here without turning to it as a last resort.
  • Satou is also much more emotionally manipulative toward Shio, shown when Shio tries to leave the house and Satou begins to guilt-trip her until Shio starts crying. In the full story, while Satou is a master manipulator she never consciously manipulates Shio.
• Police Are Useless: To society as a whole, not just to the main characters. Characters can seemingly commit rape, abductions, blackmail and assault and easily get away with it. Not only that, the male policeman who almost got seduced by Satou's aunt never reported Shio or the things he found in her apartment, and going by a chapter cover with her sitting beside the cop's hat, he's implied to make regular visits to her.
• P.O.V. Cam: During the chapter/episode where we learn where Satou got her apartment, we spend the majority of the chapter looking through the point of view of her neighbor who she murdered to get it.
• Psycho Pink: Satou's hair is of a bright pink that would otherwise not look too far-off on a Rose-Haired Sweetie, but she's the Big Bad for good reason. She's an insane and cunning Yandere who will not hesitate to coerce, blackmail or rarely, outright murder people who get in the way of her Happy Sugar Life as long as she could cover it up.
• Rape Discretion Shot: Both the original manga and the anime adaptation gleefully use Rape as Drama, with no less than three cases of rape and one case of Attempted Rape, all played for horror. Thankfully, they hold back showing full rape scenes — sometimes the act itself is never shown, other times it just shows the assailant from the victim's view without being too explicit over it.
• Rape as Drama: Mitsuboshi's psyche suffered a huge hit after he got raped in the first chapter, but he eventually realized that his newfound obsession with Shio is damaging his life, so he decided to give up on her and go back to being a normal person. A happy ending for him, right? Nope, a trauma isn't something that disappears so easily, and neither is an obsession. A little push from Satou is all it needs for his resolve to crumble into dust.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Though the act itself is never openly portrayed onscreen or on panel, the aftermath for the victim is often shown openly and brutally.
  • Mitsuboshi, after being found by Satou after what is assumed to be a full week of molestation and rape, is shown stuffed in a closet, naked, bound and gagged, and with a dead/terrified look in his eyes. Even Satou displays some disgust over all of this, and from then on Mitsuboshi's reactions to the event are seen in a negative light. From his fear of older women, to his temporarily becoming a shut-in, and his later obsession with Shio, nothing he does to cope with the event is portrayed as healthy. To say nothing of his second bout of rape at the hands of Satou's aunt, all throughout which he flashed back to his previous kidnapper/rapist.
  • Shio and Asahi's mother, Yuuna, was raped by her future husband, which is how Asahi was conceived (the same can be assumed of Shio). Though it's at least one in a series of atrocious acts that Mr. Kobe commits, it is that first rape that causes Yuuna's life to start spiraling out of control, to the point where she lives a miserable existence at present.
• Really Gets Around: Satou used to sleep around with lots of different boys before she met Shio, earning her a reputation for it to the point they say that she changes partners every three days. By her own admission, Satou even says that she's been with millions of boys before. Her best friend Shouko indicates that they used to go out and hunt down different guys together, though it's never hinted if Shouko has the same type of reputation as her friend.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In contrast to her bubblegum pink hair, Satou's eyes are an ominous blood red, hinting at her true, more dangerous nature.
• Red Herring: Given the giant bloodstains in one of the rooms of the apartment, her spending the majority of early chapters getting rid of bags with questionable contents at best, and the fact that not one of her friends or teachers has ever met or even seen her aunt who's supposed to be her guardian, the reader might have presumed that Satou murdered her aunt in order to keep Shio in her apartment. However, come later chapters, we learn that her aunt is alive. Their neighbor whose apartment Satou and Shio currently live in isn't, though.

• The Shut-In: Shio is often left alone for most of the day because of Satou having to go out of the apartment to attend school and go to work so she can earn money to support them. She is perfectly capable of leaving the apartment, but does not do so due to Satou telling her that the outside world is dangerous. It's to the point where she's asked not to open the balcony door and step outside, likely due to Satou wanting to prevent Shio from being seen by anyone, since she knows someone is looking for Shio. Shio later loses the ability to leave the apartment due to Satou installing a lock on the outside of the door to prevent her from leaving under her own power.
• "Shut Up" Kiss: Satou kisses Suu to get peace of mind from her proclaiming her twisted love for her.
• Single-Target Sexuality: There's never any indication that Satou experiences any sort of sexual feelings for Shio, but she is clearly obsessed with her and believes she is completely in love with Shio and only Shio.
• Social Services Does Not Exist:
  • Satou was allowed to live with her aunt since early childhood after the deaths of her parents, despite said aunt displaying signs of being neglectful, keeping a positively filthy house, and exposing her from a young age to her sexual deviancy in the form of her insane masochism, among other things. Satou's exposure to this state of affairs for years on end while growing up severely warped her view of love, causing her to mindlessly sleep around since she saw love and sex as one in the same. When the police eventually come to visit the apartment, they're just there because they received a complaint of a bad smell, and tell her to clean out her room full of garbage. They do nothing about the wellbeing of the teenage girl who lives there with her.
  • Mitsuboshi's trauma was not dealt with, as he simply holed himself up in his house, and later became obsessed with a little girl who he believed could "purify" him with her touch.
  • Asahi and Shio were forced to suffer a home life of abuse by their father, and both suffer from repressed memories long after said father's death.
• The Sociopath:
  • The Manager of the Princess Imperial has a bloated sense of self-importance, so much so, when Mitsuboshi asked Satou out on a date, she responded by kidnapping and raping him for a week as a way of rectifying that.
  • Asahi's father is a low functioning example of a sociopath who wastes no time with wasting the money he received from his inheritance to spend it on his hedonism. He lacks empathy for anyone he hurts, having raped his wife when they first met after she accidentally bumped into him.
  • The two thugs that nearly beat Asahi to death for no other reason than For the Evulz. After beating Mitsuboshi up, they decide to use Shio as bait to lure Asahi to the park so that they could resume beating him up.
• Spit Take: In the Missing Link 3 bonus chapter Shouko sprays a mouthful of her drink, when Satou catches her musing about how she wants a prince for a boyfriend.
• Stalker with a Crush: Even before the start of series, Satou has been mentioned to have dealt with several of these already, many due to her spurning the affections of many of the boys that she has slept with. The most current of her stalkers being one of her teachers, and a fellow coworker.
• Title Drop: Satou calls her life with Shio a "Happy Sugar Life", because she feels like her body is filled with sweetness when she is with Shio. It is also the name of the final episode of the anime.
• Too Kinky to Torture:
  • Satou's aunt openly invites a police officer to slap and abuse her without care, because she simply sees such things as part of her twisted version of "love".
  • Satou's teacher, Daichi Kitaumekawa, openly gets aroused when Satou corners him, stamps on his crotch, and threatens to expose his true perverted nature - though he is seemingly more of a sadomasochist, as is later shown when he is brought to the point of climax by the thought of having exposing Satou's concealed murder in her apartment.
• Villain Protagonist: The main character of this story is holding a child captive in her apartment, and is willing to resort to threats, bribery and even murder to keep her there. Many other characters who oppose her are even more twisted in morality. Despite Satou's madness, she's the only character introduced thus far who has demonstrated they can adequately care for Shio, including Shio's brother Asahi.
• Weak, but Skilled: Despite Satou being a small teenage girl with no fighting experience or training, she is able to defeat bigger people in physical confrontations, such as her grabbing an adult woman by the collar, repelling two thugs in a park at night using her swiftness and weapons, and killing an adult man by bashing his head in with an easel.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 23, where Shouko is killed by Satou for discovering she kidnapped Shio. With this, Satou not only kills a major character for the first time, but she also personally destroys the last and perhaps only real link she still had with her previous, normal life.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Most of Volume 11 deals with the aftermath of Satou's death, taking place after an 8-year timeskip. However, Mitsuboshi's fate remains unknown.
  • Asahi is still wandering the streets alone, and he bumps into a cat. He sees the cat on the missing poster and was reminded of his lost sister, causing him to go on a freak-out. After he gives the cat back to its owner, it's revealed that he also keeps his Shio missing person posters as a Tragic Keepsake.
  • Shio is now a sufficiently independent 16-year old girl who is still fond of her memories of her time with Satou. When taken in a Hostage Situation by a robber on her way buying stuffed animals as a memorial for her deceased caretaker, she manages to freak him out by daring him to cut her. In another chapter, Shio revisits the apartment Satou burnt and plays with a teddy bear that she brought to represent Satou and recollects the memories she had with her.
• Yandere: Not only is Satou perfectly willing to do almost anything, up to murdering people in order to keep Shio to herself, she's also heavily possessive and controlling towards Shio akin to a child groomer.

---