THE UNOFFICIAL SAE THE TENTH ANALYSIS

(I'm gonna be honest I... HOPE this is a temporary layout but I can't guarantee anything sorry)

Okay hi. Trigger warning for EXTREME PRETENTIOUSNESS and AWFUL IDEAS AND WRITING. This will be incoherent and insane (because, as I'm sure I've already said before, overanalyzing is my love language.)
I'm sorry IT'S NOT MY FAULT that Sae the tenth is such an enigmatic and cool character what the fuck!!! Up until volume 9 nobody knew who she even was. Up until volume 13 nobody had the means to even begin to understand why she acts the way she does. We go from the comfortably simple, irrationally violent, cave(wo)man-ish behaviour of Sae the ninth to this freakshow: mature and way too childlike at the same time, extremely fickle, conniving and manipulative. A total outsider to the Nazo corporation and to Misao's life, yet she still shoves herself in there. Her covert, seemingly infallible villainous schemes and her overt dumbassery. Every character goes on and on about how she's the most dangerous of the Saes - and she's clearly unlike any one of them we've seen before. What motivates her to act like this? What made her this way? This will be the dumbass attempt (first and last of its kind probably, I think it's unlikely that someone else cares enough about Sae-ism to sit and waste time overanalyzing it) to make sense of the most cryptically written character of a terrible manga, so bear with me. Also, for a fun drinking game, take a shot everytime I say "stagnant", "stagnation", " codependent" or "codependency".

We can begin with a pretty simple question: who is she? Unfortunately this is a bit difficult to answer because one time in chapter 99 she got so horny that her ego split in half. The most puzzling thing about the new Sae is probably the abyssal difference between her current self - the twisted fucking cycle path we all know - and her past self, the ugly, asocial, apathetic, harmless kid called Maki. It can be difficult to determine which one is her real self, her real personality: Sae herself, at the beginning of her obsession, has a moment of uncertainty (aforementioned gooning-induced identity crisis). Almost everyone believes that Sae the madwoman is her real personality. Kai still holds onto the belief that Maki the ugly duckling is her real personality.
Well, everyone is wrong!!!!! At least in my opinion. I think it's clear that Sae's real personality was repressed by the people around her since birth, and that as a result, at the very core of her being, she is null and void.

"Maki" and "Sae" are the two personalities that seem to inhabit her. However, neither of them is the "true" one, because they are both artificial, constructed and manipulated from the outside: neither of them is the expression of her true self.
"Maki", the quiet kid, is a result of her father stunting her regular development, physically, psychologically and socially. I think that any sheltered, isolated and understimulated kid would act like Maki. This personality was created by her father, who prevented her from forming relationships with other people, from standing out in any way, even from developing her own thoughts and an independence from him ("If dad wants it that way, I'll do as I'm told" she tells herself in chapter 93, even after she starts to realize that he's manipulating her): in short, he prevented her from forming an authentic personality, and substituted it with... the absolute shell of a being that is Maki. In conclusion, Maki aka her past self aka the quiet kid can't be her true self.

Sae the "super lunatic" isn't her true authentic self, either. She is literally just the carbon copy of Sae the ninth. Tazuru wants the new Sae to act like her, and she only accepts because she wants to blend in the Maki family in order to avenge her father one day. This personality seems to prevail only because the new Sae develops a strong obsession with Misao, and she can only get in contact with her by impersonating Sae the ninth. She wasn't interested in impersonating Sae the ninth at all before seeing Misao. She DOES share some characteristics with her (like associating love with control - I'll expand on this later) but for different reasons. She has utilitarian reasons to have adopted this personality. It isn't spontaneous.

So, who is she?? Answer: no one. Her father suppressed her psychological growth for all her formative years, and as a result, she could never develop a true personality. She is filled from the outside with these two artificial, manufactured personalities, which are so different from each other that they effectively cancel each other out: she is nothing. She is hollow inside. She is null and void. (Does that ring a bell??? Yeah, I'll talk about her relationship with Misao later.)

The difference between who she was back then and who she is now is staggering - physically and psychologically. Maki was ugly, lonely, apathetic, harmless and manipulated; Sae is beautiful, popular, obsessive, dangerous and manipulating. If this change is confusing to us onlookers, why wouldn't it be even more confusing to her, since she lives it in first person? The switch from "Maki" to "Sae" probably made her feel very disoriented, especially since it was imposed on her immediately after her father's death. My theory is that impersonating Sae the lunatic makes her feel disoriented in general. In the three months where she underwent her "transformation" from Maki to Sae, before seeing Misao she does not show any enthusiasm for the process that's happening, nor any affinity for the previous Saes, including Sae the ninth. She only takes on her personality for the utilitarian purpose of being close to Misao (and of avenging her father, but this objective takes second place after her obsession begins). Once her "transformation" is complete, the life she leads couldn't be more different than her previous one: she goes around plotting and scheming and shooting out of her car window and chasing people and going on dates with Misao and torturing Misao and almost killing Misao's parents and fucking Misao's friends and- you get the gist. Overall she, yknow, actually DOES things and takes the lead. For years and years, when she lived as Maki, she stayed holed up in her father's house and talked only with him and Kai. Overall she had no life and almost never did anything that her father didn't tell her to do. Why wouldn't she feel disoriented living a life totally unlike the one she led for so many years?
In fact it's implied that she misses that life somewhat. She still has dreams where she's with her father, she harbors a feeling of revenge towards Tazuru for years and ultimately kills her, she even feels affection for Kai, that unlovable stupid ugly ass bowl cut homophobic RAT. After all, why shouldn't she miss her past life? She was with her father, whom she saw as the first person to ever love her, and the only person to do so for many, many years. She lived comfortably in his shadow, without interacting with the outside world, without having to do anything he didn't explicitly say ("If dad says so..." was her motto). Neither did he have any contact with the outside world: he was hated by everyone for what he had done, and he completely disregarded any advice on how to raise Maki in a better way. They had no relationships outside of their own (Kai is an exception, and just because he was "approved" by Maki's dad). They lived only in relation to each other, they were not people on their own: Maki didn't actually know anything about her father, apart from the fact that he was dad and he loved her. She didn't know his past. I mean, she heard about it from the other townspeople when she was very small. I don't know if she could comprehend it at that age, but even if she did, for her whole life she chose to ignore it, to bury it, to forget it, to pay it no attention. He was nothing but "dad" to her, an ever-present, towering, all-seeing, all-controlling, love-dispensing indistinct figure. Her dad, obviously, didn't let her develop a personality or independent thought; she put her in a room and pushed her away from all her peers. He didn't want her to become an actual person. She was just Maki to him, his beloved daughter, and most importantly his second chance, his shot at redeeming himself after what he did to Akane. They only had each other. He needed her, because he was haunted by regret for what he did to Akane and desperately latched onto their daughter, whom he saw as a "second chance" for him to redeem himself. She needed him, because he was not only her sole parental figure, but the only person in her life in general apart from Kai, and the first person to love and care for her. They lived in that stagnant codependent bliss for years. That was the first form of love Sae ever experienced, and the only one she experienced for so many years.

Again, they didn't see each other or themselves as actual people. They defined themselves only in relation to the other person. Maki was just his daughter. Her dad (idk how the fuck he's called) was just her dad. They were two voids orbiting each other. They lived in total symbiosis. TOTAL. The completeness of this symbiosis becomes clear in chapter 97: when Sae's father dies, she comes undone. She doesn't exit the house (that was normal for her because she's always been neetcore, but if I've understood correctly, she even stopped going to school), she doesn't even leave her room, she doesn't talk at all, she doesn't respond to gestures from others, she doesn't brush her hair, she doesn't change her clothes, she barely sleeps, she barely drinks, she doesn't eat- SHE DOESN'T EAT!!!!! At all!!! She goes from being obese to being fucking papyrus undertale with her ribs and cheekbones visibly (very visibly) sticking out in like, a few weeks??? Two-three months at max??? This is not just grief. This is straight up passive suicide. It's an extreme reaction, but it's explainable if you consider how utter their symbiosis was. Maki was nothing but her father's daughter. She was defined by him, and nothing else. They were part of each other. It would make sense, then, that they should die together. He dies, she dies. And she would have succeeded in that if Tazuru hadn't showed up, giving her a new purpose. And of course, she expects such a demonstration of devotion from Misao, too:

This is just one aspect in which Sae is shown to have been influenced by her father on love, even romantic love. She has never outgrown him or grown in general. In fact, probably the weirdest, most creepy thing about Sae the tenth is that she acts so fucking... childish. She's capable of putting up a normal or intimidating facade at times, but any time she lets her defenses down, any time she's really being her void disgusting self, she acts like a child, and it's very jarring. It happens when she's in a comfortable situation where she feels like she can let her guard down, aka every time she's with Misao, even when she's putting her in the goddamn torture chair??? She also does this with the other members of the main cast, when she's confident and she feels like she can play around, though it mostly happens with Misao, of course.
The thing that comes to mind most often when looking at this behaviour of hers is.... ma ci è o ci fa? Is she genuine or is she acting? Because it's so outlandish and ridiculous that it's easy to think that she does it simply as a way to take the piss out of people, or to creep them out. But no, ci è, she's genuine. When Ran and Kokai rescue Misao from the mega torture mansion in volume 10, Sae starts genuinely, bitterly CRYING because she "just wants to be alone with Misao". She's crying. They rescued Misao from the mega torture mansion and she's crying. This time there's no one to put up an act for, there's nothing to demonstrate, it's just Sae alone with herself, no one's watching. She's genuine. Ci è. She's really like this. That scene gave me chills to be honest, but I digress.
But then again, of course she's genuine. It makes much more sense for her to be genuinely impaired in her development, rather than just pretending to be; because we know she IS deeply impaired in her development as we saw earlier. Nobody ever helped her to grow in any meaningful way, nor was she ever even ALLOWED to grow: of course she's stuck with permanent (wo)manchild syndrome, the fact that she has a crossbow collection and can surgically insert bombs into people's bodies now doesn't change anything about that underlying truth.
Not only were there never the conditions for her to grow up in the first place, she also just straight up doesn't wanna fucking do that, at least in my view. Sorry for the spoiler, but as I'll say later on ↓↓↓, I think that all she wants to do is relive the kind of life she had with her father. One other major thing I'll expand upon (sorray for anticipating everything) (I don't even think anyone will ever read this I'm just apologizing to myself for my terrible text-structuring skills) is that she tends to equate Misao to herself: she needs someone else to depend on, someone that'll live that kind of shitty empty life with her, someone as void as her, and she thinks of Misao as her equal in that regard. She either genuinely believes it, or at least REALLY HOPES it, but I think that the former is more likely due to her still having the empathy levels of a child. So she tends to treat her like a child often, too - again, like in the torture chair situation, which is a very interesting example to analyze. I already wrote that she's different from Sae the ninth in this regard because she only uses violence for "educational" purposes in what she thinks are the appropriate contexts, and the key word here is EDUCATIONAL. Sae believes that Misao is like her: someone lost, confused, defenseless, incapable of navigating the world on her own, but luckily guided by someone far more knowledgeable and trustworthy than her, who will love her unconditionally, take care of her and always set her on the right path. It's... debatable whether Sae really loves Misao or not, the characters themselves question this and to many readers, too, it doesn't really look like it - but I think she does, genuinely. She loves her in the only way she knows, with this despotic, morbid dynamic. And in her own way, she doesn't want Misao to stray from what is right and good for her - the same as her father wanted for her, in her time. So, like him, she strives to prevent it in any way possible. Safety comes at the expense of anything else. Safety, comfort, domesticity, stagnation are the things that Sae values the most, as I'll soon talk about better: freedom and self-agency carry the seed of danger. Sae doesn't want them for herself in the first place, and she can't comprehend why anyone else would, much less Misao who's supposed to be exactly like her (↓↓↓). Sae doesn't understand people because she wasn't raised as a person, with free will and shit. She genuinely doesn't believe that there's anything to strive towards in life other than "being protected". When Misao is (understandably, to us) unhappy about the conditions she's kept in, Sae genuinely asks herself: what the fuck is her problem? I'm doing everything right, I'm giving her everything, what is she complaining about? She's stupid, just like I would have been stupid if I'd wanted to run away from my father when I was little. If I had done that, it would've ended very badly, so I have to really drill it into her head that she shouldn't do it.

I wanna get back for a second to the "true love" thing. Misao at one point had this weird unfounded belief that Sae the tenth only loves her because it's unrequited right now, and if she eventually starts reciprocating, she'll get bored of her and act like she never existed. I don't know whose crack pipe she hit before conceiving this theory, because there's literally no basis for it and it makes no actual sense. I think she's confusing her with Sae the ninth. SHE was always fucking around literally and metaphorically, jumping from one girl to the next and then using her furry army to kill them and their families and then rinse and repeat. We know that Misao was only one of them. Sae the ninth is actually normal in comparison to Sae the tenth and this is a big deal. She had a lot of things: wealth, popularity, furry army, etc etc... and she knew it, she knew about the power she held in many aspects of her life and liked to be reminded of it, she was a bully who got what she wanted. So yes, she was a rich girl toying with Misao for kicks. But Sae the tenth has nothing. She never had a life, she never had anything aside from her father. When he died, when she was left with absolute nothing - not even a sense of self that she was never allowed to develop - she spends a few months of her life completely adrift showing hardly any signs of life and being pulled along by whoever the fuck for the purpose of whatever the fuck, she doesn't even want to know, it all means NOTHING to her. Until she sees Misao and latches onto her for literal dear fucking life. She doesn't have a single solitary reason to live apart from Misao. She barely has, and doesn't even value, anything else in her life apart from Misao. Her entire current sense of self is built on Misao. She doesn't appreciate a single human being in any conceivable way apart from Misao; her only hope of loving and being loved back again lies in Misao. Yes she acts like a psychopath, yes she treats her very badly, you can say anything you want about her and you'd be right, but you canNOT walk up to me and say to my face that she doesn't LOVE her, oh no you can't. When Misao is the only thing that stands between her and the edge of the abyss, yes I'm getting emotional here fuck you SHE WOULD BE LITERALLY FUCKING DEAD BY NOW IF IT WEREN'T FOR MISAO'S MERE EXISTENCE, SHE'S KILLED TAZURU, THE OTHER MAIN GOAL OF HER LIFE IS ACHIEVED, IF SHE DIDN'T KNOW MISAO SHE WOULD HAVE KILLED. HER. SELF. BY NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND DO YOU GET WHAT I'M SAYING SHE WOULD'VE ALLOWED HERSELF TO FUCKING DIE WITHERING AWAY WITHOUT A SINGLE STIMULI WITHOUT A SINGLE THING REACHING HER ON AN EMOTIONAL LEVEL APART FROM MISAO. THERE IS NOTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD SHE CARES ABOUT OTHER THAN MISAO. OKAY??!?!??!?!? OF COURSE SHE FUCKING LOVES HER, SHE OWES HER HER LIFE HER WILL TO LIVE HER DRIVE HER HOPES HER DREAMS HER GOALS EVERYTHING... Even though how she puts it into practice is certainly questionable, her feeling of LOVE in and of itself is genuine as can be, I think.

Anyways. Another thing in which she is similar to her father is her fixation on dressing Misao up. This sounds ridiculous but it's... actually something that's often focused upon? See volume 7 for example. Not just the cover; when Misao moves in with her, the volume ends with a full-page shot of her gigantic fucking closet full of clothes she wants Misao to wear. And she's just always dressing her up whenever they're together, in volume 8, 9, 14, you name it. She's obsessed, seriously. She probably jacks off to those dressing-up makeover mobile games. Apart from the obvious fact that she wants to control her, it could also be a remnant from her life with her father, who chose all of her (ugly) clothes, and whom she thinks loved her. So she wants to show Misao love in the same way. Again this sounds ridiculous but there's a really big emphasis on Sae's father manipulating her appearance, comparable to the emphasis on Sae manipulating Misao's appearance.
Moreover, Sae really, really needs to be ABSOLUTELY SURE that Misao can't physically get away from her. Remember volume 9? And the fucking BOMB she put inside her body??? The weird thing is that she did that, while they were alone on an island in the middle of the motherfucking sea!!! Was the bomb really necessary??? Effectively it wasn't, but I think that's also something she learnt from her father, and of course took to new heights. He was morbidly attached to her, telling her she shouldn't get out of the house too much, refusing to send her to preschool, begrudgingly sending her to elementary school etc etc. In a flashback in volume 13 he tells himself: "If only that girl could stay close to me always..." (God help her!)
Sae effectively borrows most of her opinions on love and sex from her dad. Misao can truly thank him for implanting in Sae the view of sex as a violent act of dominance and consumption, and of love as control and exclusive dependence of one person on the other! All Saes think of sex as THE act of total consumption, because they die if they give birth, so to them sex is a dangerous, violent act.
But wait since Sae the tenth has grown up outside of the Maki family and all, she can't possibly have such a fucked up concept of sex, right? YES SHE DOES because of her dad's constant fearmongering about it. Sae having sex is precisely what he wanted to avoid, because that fucking pig knew from experience that the women in the Maki family die if they give birth; so instead of teaching her sex ed or something he enforced an unhealthy diet and ugly ass outfits to make her unattractive, and pushed her away from all potential friends in fear that she would get into a romantic relationship. This got to her, at least subconsciously. Of course her father wasn't crazy enough to directly voice his fear of her having romantic/sexual relationships, but the point is: Maki was an exceptionally smart kid. In chapter 95 she correctly guesses that he was afraid of the possibility of her dating Kai. She is capable of reading right through him. She must have understood, and assimilated, his view of sex as a dangerous, final act of consumption, thus just ending up where all the other Saes stood mentally about this subject.
Of course she takes this out on Misao. The sexual aspect of her obsession is very emphasized. Sae the ninth was horny too but... Not like this... Sae the tenth's obsession with Misao BEGINS as a sexual thing. She breaks a public bathroom sink over how bad she wants to fuck Misao. She bursts into tears over how bad she wants to fuck Misao (in volume 10, remember?). These are silly examples but still. Most importantly, sex with Misao for her is not a want, but the CRUCIAL first step in their life together. This is not a theory or some shit I made up, it's literally her thought process. In volume 9 she tells Misao "your wounds will heal completely soon, then let's officially start our life together". For the rest of the volume she keeps telling her how hard she will fuck her when she's back in perfect shape (of course not with these exact words, but the meaning remains the same). Again, I'm not making this up. In this volume Misao realizes that Sae won't fuck her when she's injured or her body is otherwise "imperfect", hence why she breaks her own leg. So, what Sae meant with "let's officially start our life together" in that sentence from volume 9, is "let's fuck". She equates these two things. To her, sex will mark the beginning of their life together, her dream come true. She gives it a weirdly big, almost ceremonial importance. Why? Probably because her sexual awakening after seeing Misao was the first POSITIVE strong emotion she had ever felt in her life (I'll expand on this later); it makes sense that sex is such a big deal for her. But also probably because of her father's view of sex as an act of consumption, a view which she inherited: to her, having sex with Misao would mean definitively assimilating her: again, her dream come true, and the prerequisite to living her ideal life. What exactly is this "ideal life", though?

Her ideal life is the one she's living right now in the castle. As I said before, she has gotten what she wanted. Which imho is a bit weird. If, while I was reading volume 6, someone told me that the super active, intelligent, conniving, hot-blooded Sae would be content with holing herself and Misao up in an old boring castle surrounded only by trees without an entrance or an exit and getting everything doordashed by Tendo on a helicopter and never stepping out again, I'd find it hard to believe. It just sounds fucking boring. I mean, she has more than enough money to be Misao's sugar mommy and pamper her and bring her to some cool places and live the good life together like in that Tony Effe song MIU MIU COURCHEVEL... Ferrari rossa lo facciamo in macchina... You get the gist. Also, Sae KNOWS she has one year left to live. What the fuck are you doing, you should take her to a penthouse and do coke off each other's ass!! Instead, she wants nothing more than rotting together in the castle, eating toast and fucking all day (nvm that sounds great, I'm rooting for her). (Maybe only wanting to do boring stuff is a remnant from being friends with KAI, he was boring as fuck. His idea of opening a secondhand bookstore?????? That's so fucking lame)
And it's not even the first time she does something like this. So far she has taken Misao to live with her in isolated places THRICE - the villa in volume 7, the island torture mansion in volume 9, and finally the castle. And TWICE she has physically hindered Misao from escaping - and only because the first time she was brainwashed so it wasn't needed.
Sooooo... It seems that she really wants to live alone with Misao in bumfuck nowhere, isolated from everything and everyone, with the physical impossibility to get out for both of them, doing absolutely fucking nothing. That's puzzling. It certainly clashes with the kind of lifestyle she had before. But, as we've seen before, that life was not what she wanted, she likely felt uncomfortable leading it, and she's nostalgic for her previous, comfortably empty life as Maki.
The life she wants and gets in volumes 14-15-(whatever it's still going on right now), is a domestic, uneventful, stagnant life of morbid codependency, with both people giving up on their past, their relationships, their identities and their personhood and living only in relation to and for the other person, while being isolated from the outside world and ignoring everyone else's rightful displeasure. Does that remind you of something? It sounds really like the life she lived with her father, only modified to be applied to a romantic relationship. We've already seen that this was the first and only form of love she's ever experienced: it makes sense that she wants to replicate it. She misses love, and she needs it in the only form she knows. Even if it creates a stagnant, empty life. It's no problem for her, she's nostalgic for it: she misses being Maki, she misses the comfort of that kind of life. She wants to revert to that state of nothingness. She does all that stuff in the previous volumes only to finally revert to that state of nothingness. She marries Tendo, whom she despises, to revert to that state of nothingness. She tries to go back to it at all costs because it's comforting to her, and she equates it with love.
I have to say that this desire could very well be on a subconscious level, or at least she represses it, because she still fiercely defences her indentity as Sae, is annoyed when people call her Maki, tries to cut off Kai and things like that. However, as much as she tries to bury her past, it would make no sense to say that it doesn't affect her anymore, no: that it doesn't affect the very core of her being and her base human need to be loved and to love, considering her extreme isolation and dependency on her father that had been going on NONSTOP for YEARS from the moment she was fucking BORN, and THAT being her WHOLE CHILDHOOD, yknow just the period in our lives when we are most vulnerable and receptive and we develop complexes and traumas that we carry with us our whole lives.
Anyways, for that dream to be accomplished, she needs another person with her: she's used to depending entirely on another person, as she did with her father. So she chooses Misao to be with her in this state of nothingness. She wants to not-live with her, she wants to be void with her. To surrender to inertia's sweet embrace, to self-destruct, to erase themselves, to lose themselves. Together.

That's so fucking hot I MEAN why Misao? Why is Sae obsessed with her specifically? Okay first of all Sae herself is pretty dumb about this. When her obsession first started, she rationalized it with "Oh well, I am related to Sae the ninth, Sae the ninth was horny for Misao, I am horny for Misao, we must both have the "horny for Misao" gene!" No joke she literally says "Perhaps... it was lingering faintly in my blood..." This is clearly an incorrect explanation, and also the new Sae is the most unreliable person ever. Misao is also dumb about this. After the torture chair she tells herself "oh I get it, Sae doesn't like ME, she only likes it when I'm scared, and I can only get rid of her by reciprocating her love". However, this is... Simply not true? Of course Sae is a sadist, it's in the fucking title, but she sincerely expresses various times the desire that she and Misao will get along, cares for her wellbeing in the castle, wishes to live a quiet normal (for her standards, as we've seen) life with her, threatens her in order to keep her quiet and make her act contented; in general she wants to keep her quiet and apparently contented, NOT scared. Sure she gets off to the latter, but it's not the only or even primary thing she wants Misao for. So, no sweetie. I have a few explanations that might be a bit better than theirs, even though it doesn't take much.
First. The new Sae strongly associates love with control, just like Sae the ninth, but EVEN MORE than her because she was never allowed any freedom by those she trusted (her dad). At least Sae the ninth could dress however she wanted and hang out with whoever she wanted and do whatever stupid shit she wanted - she had control not over her fate, but over these little things, which are at least something. The new Sae couldn't even decide these things, her father controlled EVERYTHING she did, and she was conditioned to only listen to him and to not develop independent thought. That's partly the reason why she's even BADDER than Sae the ninth. This could even be a way to interpret the "Sae/Maki" split in her personality: they could be the two sides of this equation, with Maki being the need to be loved (=controlled) and Sae being the need to love (=control).
But anyways. She needs someone to share her life with, because she has never been used to being alone. In other words, she needs someone whom she thinks will accept her love, which of course includes control. She chooses Misao specifically because she seems easy to control. She fell in love with the past version of her - which she saw through videos - that was in fact easy to control; sadly for her, this has begun to change.
Second. Okay. Sae is null and void. Who else is null and void??? Exactly, Misao! It could be said that Sae recognizes herself in Misao, because of this characteristic that they share. Since Misao is void like her, she must have looked like a perfect candidate for her ideal life of stagnant codependent love. Because you have to be void, or at least hollow yourself out, to accept (or enforce) something like that - her father did hollow himself out for that kind of life. He lost all connections with everyone near him (they all hated him - rightfully so), and he wanted nothing more than to forget his past and his mistakes through Maki. He and Maki were both void - this allowed maximum relatability between the two, thus maximum symbiosis, thus maximum codependency. Sae needs another void person to live her ideal life, and she chooses Misao, who effectively was void during the events of season one.

Obviously she also needs her to KEEP being void. She falls in love with the past version of Misao, who was empty BEFORE; but the problem is that, when Sae comes into her life, she's in the process of becoming someone: she has friends, a job, an actual life etc etc. Sae tries to isolate and brainwash her in order to make her go back to nothingness - even though this does not work.
Third. We can see, throughout the series and particularly in chapter 99, that Sae the tenth's obsession with Misao has always been, since the very beginning, markedly sexual. She has had her sexual instincts repressed for her whole life - what her father wanted to avoid most was her having romantic/sexual relationships - and shortly after seeing Misao for the first time they awaken very, uh, violently. That's the point. Sae was extremely apathetic in the past. 99% of her life was, again, void and her most spectacular displays of emotion were some slight smiles (if we can even trust Kai's storytelling, like I said in volume 11). Okay she wasn't numb and apathetic ALL the time but did she ever do this???

Before seeing Misao, she had almost never, in her whole life, felt any intense emotions. The first strong emotion she ever feels is grief after her father's death. This is clearly unpleasant. The second strong emotion she ever feels is anger at Tazuru for killing her dad. This is clearly unpleasant. The third strong emotion she ever feels is sexual obsession with Misao. This is clearly pleasant. It is the first POSITIVE, STRONG emotion she has ever felt in her life, and she strongly associates it with Misao: it's very possible that she latches onto her, at least partly, for this reason.
Honestly I don't know why she's a sadist too; it could be for the same reason as Sae the ninth: she identifies with Misao (since they are both void), so she sees her pain as her own, so she sexualizes it to anesthetize herself. This makes sense because she was still grieving her father, so she needed a strong "painkiller".

With all of this it becomes clear how Sae NEEDS Misao TO LIVE like I ranted about previously. Not just to live her ideal life, but TO LIVE, IN GENERAL, in the meantime. Misao fuels her entire existence, she is her only reason to live. Her reason to live prior was taking revenge on Tazuru, which is kinda shitty tbh, and also let's be real, once she would have done that, she would have probably finished the job and killed herself. She doesn't care about becoming Sae, she doesn't care about the inheritance, she doesn't care that she's gonna be able to sit on her ass without working a day in her entire life, and let's not forget that she knows about the whole premature death forced marriage forced birth etc etc bullshit that the Saes have to go through. She probably would have killed Tazuru and then herself.

After having adopted this point of view, it becomes interesting to consider Sae and Misao's whole dynamic since the beginning of the series - they started off the same way, and throughout the whole series they seem to be following opposite, parabolic trajectories. In the beginning they were very similar to each other,like, it's startling to just compare the look in their eyes.

They were both empty, mindless shells, beaten down by fate and unable to react. Then the new Sae, after her father's death, finds a new strong identity and purpose through Misao; at the same time Misao is also building a life and a social network for herself, having started from the whole Sae the ninth stuff. From this same starting point, they then go opposite directions, from the moment they meet each other (it's weird - they're in harmony only when they're apart): first, Sae grows ever more confident and powerful as she brings down Misao and demolishes her self and the life she's built. Oppositely, now we're seeing Sae more and more vulnerable, with her past coming back to haunt her through Kai and the depiction of her tragic backstory, while Misao is bolder and more resolute than ever because of her burning hatred for Sae. It's strange: in the beginning they were the same, they were in harmony, it could be said that they were soulmates, before having met each other. When they meet, they instantly start going different directions; and as Sae tries to get closer to Misao, she only pushes her away further and further each time - and pushes herself closer to demise. It sounds like a giant cosmic joke at Sae's expense, the universe mocking her and denying her the only thing she wants.

To me one of the most compelling aspects of the series is seeing how the Saes from different generations react in different ways to their shared fate. Sae the sixth stays IN the moment, inside her current life, accepting the pain and sharing her burden with a kindred soul, in a mutually beneficial and loving relationship. Sae the ninth tries to get OUT of herself, literally out of her self and into Ena's, Madoka's, Misao's, in order to not have to deal with her reality anymore. The new Sae, on the contrary, propels herself INWARDS and BACKWARDS, back to the earliest version of herself she can remember, and back to the earliest form of love she's known: stagnant codependency, or even (as if I wasn't being pretentious enough) a state of fetus-like dependence and immobility. Sae the sixth chooses Tazuru as her companion because they're similar, and she simply appreciates her as someone who can understand her. Sae the ninth chooses Misao as her companion because Misao is empty and a perfect vessel to control and inhabit. The new Sae chooses Misao as her companion because she fell in love with the past version of her, who was empty just like herself, and thus able to accept - even enthusiastically, perhaps - the life of codependency and stagnation that Sae longed to return to; unable to accept the fact that Misao is growing and slowly becoming NOT void, she pushes her away from all the people around her and reacts in physically violent ways when Misao tries to escape - hoping to push her back into the hole of nothingness she was in before.

None of the Saes get what they truly want. Sae the sixth's plight is that she won't escape her fate - she has accepted this burden, however, and sharing it with Tazuru makes it less heavy. Sae the ninth's and the new Sae's plight is that they both want Misao to be void, and they want to be together with this void Misao, but they can never attain that because their mere presence makes her not-void (aka terrified, and motivated to get as far away from Sae as possible). They are both unable to accept this and get very violent when Misao is not who they want her to be.

It really looks like all the Saes are destined to suffer, in one way or another. Tohru has recently sort of hinted at this? At the end of chapter 93 a "comment" on the side (yknow, those dumbass comments made by the author about what happened in the chapter that are put on the last panel, I've seen them elsewhere), referring to the new Sae's father sheltering her and isolating her from the outside world to "protect" her, says "Escaping destiny, trapped in a birdcage". So... The Saes' destiny is to suffer? And it can't be avoided even with extreme effort like her father tries to do?? Confirmed??? I bet my polycystic ovaries that someone put a curse on the first Sae and her bloodline centuries ago. There already are supernatural elements in this manga (Shibako's powers, sleepyhead Sae, fucking Sae in general) so it wouldn't be out of place. It's the most probable explanation. So yeah, her bloodline is cursed. And the curse makes her GAY!!!!!!! And attracted to girls with fucking ugly pigtails. I'm curious about how Tohru will handle it, like, what's the reason etc etc and I honestly hope he does it in good taste because you never know with him lately!!!.........

And then of course if I'm talking about Sae the tenth in the post-volume 10 wasteland I can't not mention the, uh. Look. I'm very pretentious, I've been pretentious for the entirety of this page and in my whole site in general, but I don't think I have it in me to talk extensively and 10000% seriously about the ancient roman cursed double strap-on. Look, it's Sae-ism. You're supposed to turn your brain off sometimes. But I DO think it's significant, I just think that I don't have the ovaries to talk about it deadass, it'd be ridiculous. One day maybe I'll find it within me to do that, but for now I'll just say autoandrophilia patriarchy internalized misogyny trust me guys!!!!

So this was my beautiful marvelous beloved girl, or at least my interpretation of her. I'm not sure if it's evident by the fact that I've written a 8000-word long schizopost about her, but: I love her. She's a tragedy. She's a nutter. At first you're deceived into thinking she's cool and powerful and mysterious, like you'd think the average Sae would be, but at the end of it all you think: I'd kill myself if I was her. The way she learns about Misao's existence and spends days stalking her is giving neet incel in his basement watching stolen camera footage of his crush. Hiding behind the initial facade is genuinely the biggest loser you could think of, and the patheticness of everything she does, everything she believes, starts to seep into your bones. But at the same time, the depiction of her psyche; of the forces writhing deep in her subconscious; of the desperation with which she acts upon her basic human need to love and be loved; of her deep, all-encompassing, hidden, sorrowful nostalgia for a time where she was treated terribly; of her desire to sink, to plunge, to dive back into the stillness, the inertia, the immobility, the apathy, the stasis which are all so familiar and comforting to her, a desire so heartfelt that she decides to spend the last year of her life in that same familiar emptiness that characterized her earliest years; of her former passive, silent, uncomplaining suicidality, and her also passive, silent, uncomplaining acceptance of a forced recovery; of the lengths she will go to in order to replicate a familiar environment and the feeling of love... it's incredibly powerful. I had a blast piercing together this analysis, I'll always have a blast rereading past volumes to notice things I'd missed and reading new chapters to try and interpret anything new that happens. I find her such a great character right now, words can't even explain... but, regardless, one can try. This was my love letter to Sae the tenth from Sae-ism, girl you're fucked up, I love you.

I have another theory, though it might be a little far-fetched. I think that Sae might be homosexual. I know, I know, it's a really outlandish claim and there is no supporting evidence for it right now, so I think we're gonna have to wait a little more to see it confirmed or denied.