We all knew, I think, that there was never going to be a happy ending to this story. From its first volume, Happy Sugar Life has dealt with the sort of mental health crises that scream for interventions that never came, and in its later volumes delved into the idea that when the people with those issues grow up with them unresolved, the children in their care are ultimately betrayed and twisted to the breaking point. That point comes in these three volumes that mark the end of Tomiyaki Kagisora's psychological horror story, and if the ending isn't one that's entirely comfortable, well, at least it's also one that we can't say we didn't see coming.

One of the interesting elements that these final volumes cover is the nature of the relationship between Sato and Shio. While it has been easy to armchair-diagnose Sato with some variety of Lima Syndrome (in the simplest possible terms, this is the opposite of Stockholm Syndrome, where the captor falls for the captive), we didn't necessarily see that Shio was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome herself; her behavior could very easily have been the reaction of a child getting proper care for the first time in her life. But as we approach the final pages, we're forced to revise that thought: Shio's repressed memories of her mother and brother begin to look a bit less “forgotten” and her devotion to Sato takes on a much more serious edge. This idea, driven home by her reunion with older brother Asahi, is an important counterpoint to the idea of Shio somehow existing as a “pure” being. Based on notions of childhood innocence and purity, it was easy to be lulled into the thought that Shio was unaware of her past and simply imprinting on Sato. But that implies that she was unmarked by her abandonment by her mother and the miserable conditions of her pre-Sato life, and that's not really possible. Shio was never new-fallen snow; that's just how readers and characters were primed to see her by antiquated notions of what little girls are like.

But Shio herself is perfectly aware of who she is. Again, this isn't something we really see until volume nine, when Taiyou begs her to heal him. Taiyou, who has just suffered his second rape by an adult woman, is desperate for something good to save him, to bring him back to himself, as he puts it. But Shio is largely unmoved by his pain, simply telling him, “But I'm not pure…I've done lots of bad things.” This moment of self-awareness is shocking to Taiyou, and in hindsight it lets us know that Shio has been at least partially cognizant of her past, and perhaps what Sato has been doing, all along. Sweet Shio isn't necessarily an act to keep Sato with her, but it does imply a certain amount of performance on her part, an urge to be who people want her to as a measure of self-preservation. Taiyou, when she met him, needed her to be a sweet angel child, so that's who she was. But now she's certain of Sato's devotion, so she doesn't need to appeal to Taiyou anymore. Similarly, when Asahi finally catches up with her, she doesn't need to be his good little sister, because she's got Sato. Is she really in love with the older girl? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? We don't really get an answer (although there are implications that either could be true in the final pages of volume ten), but what is clear is that she's made her choice and will only be appealing to one person from now on.

It perhaps goes without saying that these three volumes come with some hefty content warnings, perhaps even more than previous entries. There's sexual assault, self-harm, and suicide, and honestly, I think Sato's aunt deserves her very own special brand of content warning as a walking disaster for other people. She is, in many ways, the scariest person in this entire series, the root cause of many of Sato's issues. Her obsession with love is what drove her to become the serial abuser that she is, her apparent sex addiction and conviction that everything she does is in the name of love allowing her to continue to wreak havoc across the board. Sato may have been emotionally damaged when she was given into her aunt's custody in the first place, but she received the opposite of help, and that ultimately allowed her to reach the point where we find her in these volumes: desperately trying to hold onto the fake normal that she's managed to create with a kidnapped child.

In some ways, Happy Sugar Life is about the what ifs. What if Sato had never been placed with her aunt? What if Asahi and Shio's mother's parents had prosecuted or protected her instead of forcing her to marry her rapist? What if someone had helped Taiyou after his ordeal? It'd be almost too pat to say that part of the point here is to demonstrate the failure of social support systems, but it does feel like the books have a lot to say about how children can fall through the cracks. Even more than that, volumes nine and ten specifically do a lot to remind readers that the idea of “purity” that Shio represents for most of the cast is one that's not based in any reality. Almost no one is seen for who they really are in this series, and Shio's confusion over Sato's actions at the end of volume ten seem to suggest that she didn't really understand the other girl any more than most people understood her. Sato's act is one of the clearest demonstrations of love that we get in the series (for a given value thereof, perhaps), and Shio's inability to understand it is reflective of both her age and her inability to understand the consequences of their actions. But then again, Shio has been the target of everyone's created, personalized realities from the start. Why should we deny her the ability to do the same to someone else?

The ending of this series isn't totally satisfying. There are still unresolved issues for Asahi, and very likely for Taiyou, and we don't know if Shio will ever be okay, whatever that may mean. But as I said earlier, this was never going to be a story with a happy ending. Like a windowpane made of melted sugar, everything looks a little warped when you peer through it, and it can shatter with the casual flick of a finger, leaving only shards of sweetness behind.