Alright, I already blasted past the whole 12 Days of Anime thing, but I'm still going to be doing this either way. I'm gonna skip anime's depiction of Japanese exceptionalism and just dive into my series on the meaning of love. Maybe it's a bit conceited to call it that, because everybody does have to explore the meaning of love to themselves, so I'll refer to mine as a personal exploration of what love means uniquely to me, someone who has no idea what love is. It sounds dumb, since it's typically a definition taken as a given and while not usually easy to put in words, we should be able to intuitively triangulate it. I suppose there is a descriptive idea of what love means to me, which I could obtain by triangulating my behaviors with my partners, and a prescriptive idea of what love means to me, triangulating what I think the ideal love ought to look like. Happy Sugar Life deals more with the former.
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault. Also I'm absolutely terrible at getting series of images to work so you can zoom in on panels if the text is too small to read.
Matsuzaka Satou does some absolutely terrible shit.
This much is not extremely controversial. Happy Sugar Life is a show about terrible, terrible people and how their lives orbit around a relationship between Satou and a child, Koube Shio. People can't seem to properly make up their mind on whether this show scares the bejeezus out of them or makes them feel really sad. That Satou is a terrible, terrible person has been established and covered at length by one of my favorite Anitubers, Explanation Points (I would want his style if I went YouTube!), in his video titled "Happy Sugar Life: A Study in Sympathy" analyzing the subconscious psychological biases which the writers of the show plays on in order to induce the audience's sympathy for Satou - sympathy which is, again, completely unfounded if you actually sit down and think. With a compelling case like this, it was easy for me to play off the weird connection I had to Happy Sugar Life when I first watched it. That is, until two things happened. Firstly, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), finally giving me an answer to why I behave in the often strange ways that I've realized that I do. Secondly, I came across a piece by Anime Rants looking at the anime characters who best exemplify the 9 diagnostic criteria of BPD (part 1, part 2).
Seeing so many of my most beloved characters represented in this piece hit me hard. Ikari Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion is extremely relatable as somebody with daddy abandonment issues, although in particular I would say that I felt a much stronger connection to Asuka Langley because the details of her history are much clearer than Shinji's, and her behavior as a result hits much closer to my experience (people also tend to agree she's borderline too). Gasai Yuuno from Mirai Nikki rings much closer to the typical interaction people imagine happening with those suffering from BPD - the crazy ex-girlfriend - taken to an extreme. In fact, there's a rather popular TV show that gives a fair shake to those suffering from BPD titled Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, that I may eventually talk about someday once I finish season 4 and if there's something to ask about it. The persistence of the trope, after all, is predicated on the real-world recognition that most of those who suffer from BPD tend to be female, especially when mixed with the air of mystique and incomprehensibility typically ascribed to women in our male-gazey media. However, what really hit me was the last character noted: Matsuzaka Satou, representing intense, unstable relationships.
Under the DSM-V, BPD is classified as a cluster B personality disorder, also known as the "dramatic" cluster. It's a good characterization, in a darkly funny way. In order to be diagnosed with BPD, one must exhibit 5 or more in a set of 9 characteristics, listed below.
Am I saying that Satou is a perfect representation of BPD? No - it's difficult to say whether fictional characters actually fit a set of criterion, especially in a world that's meant to be as twisted as Happy Sugar Life where everyone becomes deranged on some level. Also, if Satou were a real person, I wouldn't be making such a commentary on her behavior, because I'm not a trained psychiatrist. I'm someone who suffers from BPD and I will aggressively read my condition into whoever I like. Of course, I'm going to have to convince you, dear reader, that this aggressive reading makes sense. It shouldn't be that important whether or not a psychiatrist would actually diagnose Satou with BPD or not, in any case. This is not a piece about BPD per se. What I'm trying to do is to comment on my personal experience of loving on the borderline, and how I see it reflected in a show I weirdly connect with.
There are many great ways which have been used to describe what it feels like to have BPD. Curio, one of my faves on red box app, described it in their video as either feeling nothing, or feeling everything. My psychiatrist, while telling me I didn't need medication, told me that "you can't medicate neediness". My personal favorite so far takes a metaphor and runs with it. I don't remember exactly where I heard this from, but people with BPD are compared to people with malfunctioning platelets: whereas when regular people are (emotionally) cut, their wounds with seal up on their own, someone with BPD can't seal an emotional wound, so they emotionally bleed to death. If this sounds exhausting, that's because it is. I can be brought to the sheer heights of ecstasy to the point of total brain fog by the mere touch of my favorite person, or even by a simple video of a singing coqui frog (required viewing); I can be rendered utterly catatonically depressed by the slightest emotional stimulus; my rage when it comes to genuinely insignificant things can feel second only to Achilles'.
For those who haven't had the pleasure of reading or watching Happy Sugar Life, here's a short summary. Matsuzaka Satou is not a normal high school girl. The first time we see her, it's a bunch of boys talking about how she'll sleep with just about anyone, only for a boy who tries to hit on her to be flatly rejected. She has someone she loves now, she says. As it turns out, the person she loves is a (missing) elementary school girl, Koube Shio, who she keeps tucked safe at home every day, a situation that immediately raises red flags about who exactly Satou is. We find out that Satou has been looking for love for a long time, and that boys have been taking advantage of her desire for companionship. She hasn't felt anything with any of them. With Shio, however, every single day is sweet. Every night, in a special ritual, Shio drapes Satou with a bedsheet, and they repeat wedding vows to each other before they sleep. Honestly, as far as storylines involving dubiously held elementary school girls go, this is the most confusingly wholesome one probably on the market. In fact, the only time we see Satou kiss Shio on the lips is in Shio's dreams, when Satou's already dead (spoilers!!).
The main driving narrative force of the story is Satou's continuous attempts to defend the life she has with Shio against external intrusions. Her male co-worker is r*ped by their boss, and develops extreme traumatic gynophobia which can only be dispelled, at least momentarily, by Shio's pure touch. Her teacher stalks her in an attempt to make her a sexual conquest. Shio's brother, looking for his missing sister, comes under suspicion by Satou. Her best friend spots Shio somewhere and informs the brother, enraging Satou.
Given that Happy Sugar Life falls under the genre of psychological horror, Satou has a choice pattern of dealing with these issues. She manipulates her co-worker into trying to deal with Shio's brother in exchange for being able to meet Shio once in a while, she blackmails her teacher into disposing of the garbage bags that held the dismembered body parts of the original tenant of her apartment, she impulsively tries and fails to bash the brother's head in with a crowbar on her first meeting with him, and she slits her best friend's throat out of paranoia. I really mean it when I say that every single individual in Happy Sugar Life is profoundly messed up. Grounding these actions is the constant, dreadful fear Satou experiences that Shio will leave her or be taken away from her, because but for Shio, her entire life would be empty and monochrome. She needs her jar of candy to be hers alone, and she will do anything to make sure that it continues to be the case.
I'm going to use the manga for screenshots (don't forget that you can slide the panels I selected!), but I'm going to borrow this motif which the anime uses for the show. Satou's happiness is visually represented within the anime by a jar full of sweet, colorful candies. This is briefly used within the manga to explain how the aunt views love. Satou's jar is filled, precious, and protected; she takes nothing out of it, because to her to love is to treasure to the extreme. This is the only jar there ever will be for Satou, and any threat to it is like a crack in this utterly perfect work, which will be gone for good if it breaks. Satou's aunt takes a different view of the jar: she exhausts all the candies in the jar with passion, and when it's empty she refills it again. Satou is extremely clingy, while her aunt is the complete opposite.
For me, a defining factor of loving on the borderline has been the conflict between a purely selfless love and a purely selfish love. The place of the self in love has obviously played a great role in most meditations on what love means, but even extended into a practical sense I am constantly torn between these two extremes. Satou's aunt is completely self-effacing in her love; she offers herself up to whomever wants her, and will change herself to fit the form of whatever that person desires. Whether they be murderers, abusers, masochists, it doesn't matter to Aunt Matsuzaka; she will let herself be beaten up by anyone, and beat up anyone, so long as they desire it from her. The love which she taught to Satou was one in which the self is nothing but a malleable object. It is in search of this love, the only one she was taught as a child, that Satou goes out and sleeps with countless boys to no avail.
Let me let you in on something really embarrassing about me personally, because if we want to talk about how I personally experience and interpret love I'm going to have to talk about the skeletons in my closet eventually. My biological father was physically abusive, and my mother is constantly trying to hold herself together in order to protect her children, but when it comes to properly demonstrating love she's not very good at it because she had her own abusive parents growing up. In this cycle of abuse, I saw a great deal more human suffering when I was a child than I could properly comprehend at the time, and it was in this confused and gestational state that I was first brought into a fundamentalist church at the age of 10. Before that, my mom had told me stories about the Bible, and one notable memory I have from my pre-church days is of her singing me a lullaby about the end of the world a la Revelations. Receiving a formal Biblical education was a totally different matter entirely, and small me decided that what it meant to be more like Jesus was to take onto myself all the pain and suffering of the world, just like he symbolically did on the cross. To me, it made sense, because I'd already recognized that the nature of things my friends complained about and were concerned about were magnitudes different from the kinds of things I worried about, so I figured that if I could handle the pain that they probably would never be able to imagine, then I had a moral duty to shoulder all of it. I don't really literally believe any of this anymore, but it's left its mark on how I behaved and related to people since, and it's a very difficult mental habit to shake. Some days, when I'm in a mood, I'll exposit at length about the Biblical concept of agape, the sort of purely selfless love only Jesus could demonstrate. When I'm lucid, though, I'll recognize that this is because I've grown up being taught to endure things to the extent that the sight of people suffering often hurts more than my own.
On the other side of the coin exists Satou's completely selfish love. At the midpoint of the story, as she's trying desperately to patch everything together, Satou tells Shio explicitly that she needs to do nothing except be there and smile. In the perfect tapestry of sweet happiness that Satou has woven, Shio has become nothing more than the canvas upon which it is drawn. Sure, Satou's perfect happiness cannot exist without Shio, but it is a love that completely removes the agency of Shio. It is a pivotal moment in Happy Sugar Life, because it has been taken as an article of faith the entire time that Satou loves Shio to the point of obsession. This is the most explicit instance where we are forced to ask the question, is this obsessive love truly love?
Like I previously said, any negative feelings that I experience can be completely dispelled by the mere touch of whoever is my partner or my favorite person at the time, and this is mostly because touch is my love language. Reading reports of other people who suffer from BPD, they also demand different sorts of things from their partners to soothe them: grand gestures of love for those who enjoy acts of service, continuous affirmations of love for those who prefer words of affirmation, and so on. Relied upon too much, this creates a mental dependency on the target individual, because they are quite often literally the only ones you can obtain the good feelies from. Mentally, I have to feel the touch of my loved one, or I will spiral into a mental breakdown and do something stupid like cause drama on some social media platform for emotional catharsis. Obviously, this is never a fair deal for the person in question. I mean, can you imagine the emotional weight of having someone completely break down to the point of dysfunction if you leave them alone for even a little bit? Nobody should have to be my personal teddy bear, least of all the person I love.
The audience is very clear that neither Satou's nor Aunt Matsuzaka's approach to love are in any way healthy. They represent polar opposites on one of the axes by which we can understand love, and obviously the healthy answer lies somewhere in the middle: to love other people we must necessarily be self-effacing up to a point, but at the same time we also have to have sufficient self-love to not totally obsess over our partners. This is analytically quite obvious, and you're probably all screaming at me, and I get it, but the problem with loving on the borderline is and has always never been whether one is capable of analytically deducing this. The problem is that it doesn't matter whether someone knows this or not, because when it comes to personality disorders it's often said that you can never tell where the disorder stops and the personality begins.
This brings up a curious question. What will Satou do if Shio one day decides to leave on her own? Throughout the plot, she's been able to react with complete impunity to these external threats because they have nothing to do, fundamentally, with the special relationship Satou and Shio have. What would she do, what can she do, if Shio just goes away on her own? When Satou tells Shio that all she needs her to do is to be there and smile, Satou has a complete mental breakdown. It's probably at this point of Happy Sugar Life that I feel the strongest connection, because the feelings Satou has in these pages are the most emotionally distressing part of loving on the borderline. I can't count the number of times I've found myself curled up on the bed, completely dissociating and crying from the absolutely paralyzing fear of being abandoned.
When you have borderline personality disorder and are in love, oftentimes the closest person to you is the only factor that can bring you up high. When I'm single, everything just feels bland and without succor. There isn't as much emotional instability because it's just dull and painful all the time, and it's easy to get used to that. When I first get attached, the honeymoon brings me to unimaginable emotional highs, and eventually because my stupid brain lacks object permanence if I'm not around my partner for an extended period of time it crashes back to that emotional default, which has now become an absolute hell by comparison. Honestly, I don't think there's a lot to be said about this. The mere suggestion that my partner might abandon me reduces me to a sniveling mess, willing to do anything to pacify them and make them stay so I don't get emotionally banished to the shadow realm again. The visuals of Happy Sugar Life depict the spiral of despair and desolation from what are literally the words of a child so well that I don't think anything I could say helps furnish a better explanation of what it feels like.
I haven't talked about the other half of this romantic relationship. Koube Shio's life is beset with arguably even more pure human tragedy than Matsuzaka Satou's. Shio's mother is r*ped by a random man in the middle of her high school years and accidentally carries his baby. She is forced to carry the child to term and to marry him, and lands in an abusive marriage. Her firstborn child is Koube Asahi, Shio's older brother, and most of Asahi's early childhood years were peaceful because his deadbeat dad was never home. When dad ran out of money, he came home and abused his family again, creating Koube Shio in the process. Asahi attempts to arrange with his mother for all three of them to escape together, but in the end he sacrifices himself in order for his mother and Shio to escape.
While Asahi is busy keeping dad busy so he doesn't go looking for the other two, mom and Shio are trying to eke out a life together. Mom is constantly paranoid that dad will come home, so she refuses to let Shio out of the house. At some point, Shio tries to go out, which angers mom to the point she hits Shio. Realizing that this is exactly what her husband did to her, mom breaks down. Unable to bear the weight of her actions, she brings Shio to a random alley and leaves her out in the rain.
It's important to talk about Shio's experiences because she is not the doll that Satou treats her as. She is someone who has been abused just as much, if not more, than Satou has, and her reaction to Satou shouldering all the burdens of their relationship is founded principally on the stated reason her mother abandoned her: there was no longer any need for her. Just as much as Satou fears Shio abandoning her, Shio fears Satou abandoning her because there she's useless. With me and my previous partner, people used to say that we seemed to need each other in ways that we would probably never be able to fathom, and I find this description perfectly apt when applied to the relationship between Satou and Shio.
On a theoretical basis, borderline personality disorder has a strong connection to John Bowlby's attachment theory. Attachment theory asserts that the way individuals relate to others along two axes in adulthood - avoidance and anxiety - is founded on their relationship with their primary caregiver in childhood, usually the mother (Benoit, 2004). A more avoidant attachment style, wherein the individual does not reach out for comfort, is usually a result of being unable to obtain comfort from their caregiver, and as a result becoming more independent. A more anxious attachment style, in which the individual needs more assurance of comfort, is usually a result of strong emotional needs developing from that neglect. Naturally, what is being implied is that someone develops borderline personality disorder as a result of any of the 3 forms of maladaptive attachment, and the most extreme of these is disorganized attachment.
In disorganized attachment, the individual has an extremely chaotic relationship with their primary caregiver, because of their total unpredictability. At any point the child approaches their mother for comfort, the mother could provide it, be unresponsive, or even become an additional threat to the child. People with disorganized attachment grow up to be incredibly erratic and inconsistent with their comfort-seeking behaviors, and usually develop some level of trauma and borderline personality disorder (Milijkovitch et. al., 2018). Shio has completely excised as much memory of her mother as she could, as they were too painful to acknowledge to the point of being traumatic (de Zulueta, 2006).
Happy Sugar Life ends on an extremely sombre note. Satou is dead. She burned down her apartment to rid it of evidence, and tried to escape with Shio. She was chased to a rooftop and leapt off it, but protected Shio from death by using her body to cushion the fall. Satou is gone, but for Shio there is no going back. Shio rejects her brother's attempt to reach out to her, and the attempt to rebuild their profoundly warped family that that represented. She grew up in an extremely abusive, absent, broken family just like Satou did, and the one place she could find solace was gone forever. Our last image of Koube Shio has her wearing Satou's red ribbon and promise ring, now grown up, moving (presumably) into the apartment they once inhabited together. Shio appears happy with the memory of Satou, yet I can't help but feel sad that the show implies she'll never find the sort of happy sugar life that she once had with Satou. I can't tell if it's better that she stays that way or she repeats Satou's actions, to be honest.
Up until now, I've painted an extremely bleak picture of trying to live with BPD, and for the most part it's true of people with active BPD. People suffering from BPD have a higher probability of ending up with abusive partners or being the abusive partner themselves, or seesawing between those two states, because it tends to replicate what they're used to (Howell, 2008). It's hard to try and establish a healthy, loving relationship when you don't have the same intuitive understanding of what that means as compared to the vast majority of people. I mean, that's the whole reason why, as an adult, I do so much meditation on what love is in the first place - I didn't grow up with that intuition. What makes this situation worse is that people with personality disorders tend to have no idea they have no personality disorders, because it's so innate that it's hard to tell whether it's something wrong with you or it's just a quirk of personality. If you don't know what's wrong, or that there even is something wrong to begin with, you can't fix it, and you'll keep blundering from mistake to mistake wondering what went wrong. This is what I've done for most of my dating life.
Typically, the method by which an individual comes to realize they have something as significant as a personality disorder is when multiple people tell them that there's something wrong with them, and they try and figure out what exactly is wrong. Often, people with personality disorders ping-pong from therapist to therapist, each offering different diagnoses of their problems that don't work. Borderline personality disorder is most commonly misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder (Ruggero et. al., 2009), likely because of the chronic emptiness and impulsivity, and this is actually how I was first typed by my social worker. It was especially difficult for me because I don't tend to open up about my innermost thoughts to anyone but my partners at the time, and so none of my close friends were privy to the weird things happening in my head until it all exploded and they saw my life crumbling down every so often.
Let me get to the point. It is possible to deal with BPD, and even to love properly with it, despite all the challenges that it places upon the person who's suffering from it. That's not to say it's easy; you're trying to learn things that other people have known forever. It's like if you didn't have legs, and I suddenly stuck a pair on you and expected you to immediately know how to walk. You have to unlearn a way of relating to people that's just the most intuitive, natural thing to you, and learn a different way of relating to them. It's not the kind of thing that you can learn from a book, either, you can only learn it through trial and error. Right now, it feels like a process of trying to fumble for a light that I can barely see, and that sometimes disappears from sight at all. I'll do you one better - it feels like Sisyphus rolling that boulder up that hill daily, only for it to roll back down each time. Sometimes one wonders if Sisyphus would be happier just sitting down and not doing anything, because change seems so impossible. When the choice is between wallowing in one's own unhealthy internalized understanding of relationships and the aspiration to something better, no matter how out of reach it seems, though, one must imagine Sisyphus happy to struggle continuously. After all, the alternative is gathering a few ephemeral morsels of sweetness in an endless void and calling that your Happy Sugar Life. Is that happiness not tragic?
References so you know I'm not making shit up
Benoit, D. (2004). Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome. Paediatrics & Child Health, 9(8), 541–545.
de Zulueta, F. (1999). Borderline personality disorder as seen from an attachment perspective: A review. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 9(3), 237–253. https://doi.org/10.1002/cbm.316
Howell, E. F. (2002). Back to the “States” Victim and Abuser States in Borderline Personality Disorder. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(6), 921–957. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481881209348713
Miljkovitch, R., Deborde, A.-S., Bernier, A., Corcos, M., Speranza, M., & Pham-Scottez, A. (2018). Borderline Personality Disorder in Adolescence as a Generalization of Disorganized Attachment. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1962. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01962
Ruggero, C. J., Zimmerman, M., Chelminski, I., & Young, D. (2010). Borderline Personality Disorder and the Misdiagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 44(6), 405–408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2009.09.011
