The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Sugar Apple Fairy Tale

Anne Halford is a candy crafter determined to follow in her mother's footsteps and become a Silver Sugar Master, a title bestowed only by royalty. To travel to the capital and realize her dream, she purchases Shall, a handsome but foul-mouthed fairy, as her bodyguard. Anne wishes to befriend her new companion, but Shall wants nothing to do with humans in this kingdom where fairies are treated as property.

Sugar Apple Fairy Tale is based on Miri Mikawa and aki's light novel series and streams on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

It's funny, I don't dislike this show as much as I dislike the heroine, Ann. She is, simply put, a Hypocrite of the highest order. In this world where fairies are slaves (slaves that, if they disobey, feel pain akin to having their hearts literally crushed), she was raised to believe that fairies and humans could be friends—that they were only slaves due to having lost the war with humans and not any kind of intrinsic human superiority. So with that, you'd think she'd be about as abolitionist as they come. And she is—right up until the point where her ideals conflict with her personal wants.

Ann wants to make a name for herself in a sweets-making competition in the city of Lewiston. Unfortunately, the road there is dangerous, so in her eyes she has “no choice” but to buy a slave to protect her. Of course, she justifies this to herself by believing if she frees her new slave upon completion of her journey, then she's doing nothing morally wrong. She is unable to see that her vaunted morals only last as long as it's convenient for her.

Even after being called out on this by Chall, her slave, she is unable to see just how evil she is. She spouts about being friends and asking for his help rather than ordering him, and gets upset when he treats her like the slave master she is. But when her life is in danger, she still orders him to fight.

The thing is, while I hate her, I don't think she is a poorly-written character. Quite the opposite, really. Her naivety isn't that she believes that humans and fairies can be equals and friends—it's that she thinks her participation in the institution of slavery is somehow more benign than everyone else's.

So in general, I like the message on display here—that being generally nice and taking a moral stance means little if you don't back up your words with actions. The real problem for me is the romance angle. The power dynamic in their relationship is so skewed that it feels disgusting when the show fetishizes him (by making him do and say things common in a shojo romance story), and the fact that he seems magically attracted to her despite his justified hate substantially lowers the quality of the episode to me.

All in all, I feel no connection to Ann's story and thus have no impetus to continue watching.

Hoo boy, is this one fraught.

You might be looking at the rating and say, “Caitlin, for years you've harshly criticized anime like Rising of the Shield Hero and Harem Labyrinth in Another World as slavery apologia. Now that it's a slave anime for girls, you're willing to look past it just like that? Female supremacy at work!” But wait, listen! The reason I've given Sugar Apple Fairy Tale a mildly positive rating is because it stands to actually do something interesting with slavery in its narrative.

Anne knows slavery is wrong. She was raised to believe that fairies, as sentient beings, are just as deserving of dignity and respect as humans. She respects them as the progenitors of her art form, sugar art, and wants to end their enslavement and heal the rift between the two races so that they can be friends. She even performs some direct action, freeing a fairy who is being abused by his master while everyone else just watches! But when push comes to shove, she still goes out and buys a warrior fairy for protection on the road, and is very confused when he is not impressed by the modicum of decency she shows him and refuses to be her friend.

It not only clears the low, low bar of understanding that slavery is wrong, but also shows some degree of understanding that people can know a system is unjust but still be active participants in it. There are some very true-to-life dynamics to Anne and Shan Fell Shan's oppressor-oppressed relationship in that she's desperate to be seen as one of the good ones, and perturbed when she doesn't get accolades for things like asking the man she has purchased for his name. She claims to think of him as an equal, but still gets angry when he's disobedient and talks back to him, showing that she has internalized human supremacy to a degree. Furthermore, Shan's anger is never presented as anything but justified. He's right to hate Anne and has zero reason whatsoever to trust her, and the narrative understands it.

But then some power play kink comes into play at the end of the episode and things get… tricky, to say the least. As he refuses to defend them from bandits until she threatens him, he grips her wrists and leans in close, implicitly threatening to physically overpower her if she doesn't wield her own. It's jarring after the episode up until that point had shown a minorly nuanced understanding of institutional oppression, and all of sudden it was leaning into how this man is scary and sexy and if she doesn't wield control over him then he might be a sexual menace.

I want to believe that Sugar Apple Fairy Tale can continue to depict its themes in a sensitive way, but that last scene makes me think it wants to do something else entirely. It's beautifully animated and the writing is engaging, but will it satisfy its themes satisfyingly? Or will turn out rancid?

Well, everyone, we've done it. After years of slavery anime only letting men be the enslavers, finally, a plucky gal has broken the glass ceiling and bought a love interest/servant of her own. That's what we call progress.

Jokes aside, I've been plenty vocal about how the current trend in anime to craft apologia for – or in some cases lionize – the “good slave owner” myth sucks ass, and I'm not about to stop just because the usual genders are flipped here. If this show tried to craft reasons why it's not that big a deal that Anne literally purchases another sentient being, I'd be more than happy to call it out. But at least in the first episode, Sugar Apple Fairy Tale seems to be aware and critical of the actual power dynamics in play here – even if it's clumsy with articulating those ideas at times.

See, Anne may want to be friends with her newly bought bodyguard, but Shall makes it crystal clear that the very nature of their current relationship makes that impossible. Anne may not want to punish or harm him, but she still holds his life in her hands, literally. That makes an equal partnership based on mutual trust impossible, no matter how nice or respectful she tries to be. She might be earnest about freeing him once their journey is over, but he's been in this losing game long enough not to trust her and is plenty ready to snatch his stolen wing and bolt the second he has the chance. There are still a lot of loaded, potentially problematic power dynamics at play, but at the very least, Sugar Apple clears the bar of not excusing slavery for now. It feels like that power imbalance is meant to be the catalyst for exploring both characters, not to romanticize the fantasy of wielding unethical power in a theoretically ethical way.

There's some genuine appeal to it outside of that, too. Anne and Shall's combative rapport is rather fun. Shall himself would come off as an ass in most other scenarios, but here you can sympathize with why he's constantly prodding and mocking Anne. If handled well, there's room here for a genuinely interesting story about two people trying to untangle their own damage and the systems that caused that damage to build a trusting relationship. There are, of course, some romance hooks, like Shall constantly catching the scent of silver sugar off of Anne and reminding him of his past love. Complemented by the nice art design and fantastic color work, there are many reasons to stick around, so long as the central relationship doesn't turn noxious.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

There is an elephant in the room with this show, and that elephant's name is slavery. Yes, in the world of Sugar Apple Fairy Tale, humans buy and sell fairies as slaves. This is done by removing one of their wings, which are the source of fairies' lives in the world's lore. The owner then holds on to the fairy's second wing to control them because by destroying the wing, they kill the fairy. The previews I saw for this show very carefully translated what the fairy Shall Fell Shall says to heroine Anne as “you should hire me;” having read the first of the light novels this is based on, I knew that that was either a mistranslation or an attempt to fudge the details of what he tells her, which is that she should buy him. This creates a problematic situation wherein the heroine purchases the hero, even though she is morally opposed to doing so. Understandably, this may be a deal breaker for some people, and I think that's fair. It is, however, worth mentioning that the story seems to understand how wrong slavery is. To a degree, it uses this understanding to showcase how naive Anne is in the face of the society she lives in, her statements to Shall that she wants them to be friends when she literally owns him and has his life in a pouch around her neck may be well-intentioned, but he understandably receives it badly. She hasn't yet figured out how to live true to her ideals and survive in a world where she is outside the norms, and if she can become an abolitionist in truth as the story goes on, this show may go down a lot easier.

It's quite challenging to discuss this episode without digging into the whole slavery issue because that is the focus here. Yes, we get the back story that Anne's mother was a confectioner specializing in sugar sculptures made from something called silver sugar, which comes from the eponymous sugar apples. She recently died, and Anne is determined to carry on her mother's work and earn the title of silver sugar master herself. To this end, she is set on entering a specific competition in faraway Lewiston, which is why she needs the protection of a warrior of some kind: the road to Lewiston is fraught with peril. Why she decides to buy a warrior fairy instead of hiring a mercenary is unclear and feels a bit orchestrated so that the story can tackle the issue of fairy enslavement head-on. Anne does try to do what she believes is right; we see her rescue a tiny fairy who is being abused by his owner and help him to run away. This is undercut by the fact that she then asks the way to the fairy markets and purchases Shall, and it is presumably meant to show that her heart is in the right place, even if her actions seem to contradict that at times.

When this anime was announced, I wondered why these were the novels by Miri Mikawa that were chosen to be adapted rather than her Chinese court drama Culinary Chronicles of the Court Flower. This episode hasn't done much to alleviate my concerns on that front. Still, if Anne does emancipate Shall when they reach Lewiston and works both towards becoming a silver sugar master and helping to end the scourge of fairy slavery, this could have a solid through line. At the very least, it doesn't treat slavery like a convenient plot device, and there's much room for Anne to grow as a character and grow up in general.