The Quintessential Quintuplets was my favorite new anime from this past season. It gave me plenty of laughs but it also packed a punch with cute and adorable moments that tugged at the heartstrings as well.
However, the anime left us off with one very significant cliffhanger. One that was always there. Who does Fuutarou marry?
From the very beginning of this anime, we are set up a promise that Fuutarou will marry one of the quintuplets. We are continually reminded of this and it seems like everything will come together and we will get a solid conclusion with a concrete answer.
But I think that was the wrong assumption to make. I think the beauty this series will leave behind, both as an anime and even when the manga ends, is that the answer won’t ever be explicitly revealed.
It’s easy to see how this would be the case. After all, the series plays with the fact that all five of the quintuplets are supposed to be on even ground and giving one preferential treatment over the others in this case would be counter-productive to that. In addition to this, I think it’d be a bad move for the people creating this series to pick one of these five to marry Fuutarou. It wouldn’t feel very fair after tossing the bait for all five for this long. It would cause very divisive fan opinion as well, which would cause some problems.
But besides the practicality of it all, there are symbolic reasons as to why one won’t be picked over the others. One such reason is that I think the series wants to keep the ambiguity in there purposefully in order to let the person following along to use their own imagination to draw their own conclusion based on what they think will happen. The creators build a base to go off of and then after it’s over, the person watching/reading can fill in the blanks after that to build the conclusion they see fit.
Another reason is that there is a constant message within this anime that puts all the quintuplets on level ground and that them together are one. This deeper concept cannot be held if one goes off to marry Fuutarou and the other four are left behind.
Branching off of this a bit, it’s possible the marriage isn’t a real thing. It’s very possible the marriage is only meant to be a symbolic representation of the relationship Fuutarou and the quintuplets share. And since we are given this idea that all the quintuplets together are one, it’s also possible the symbolic marriage is of Fuutarou and all the quintuplets manifested as one being. That’s why when we are actually shown the girl Fuutarou marries in the finale of the anime, we can’t even really begin to try to guess who it is because she has traits pulled from all the sisters. That might be the very point.
So I think it’s very likely that we won’t know who he marries either way or if the marriage is real or symbolic. But I think this series, to this point, has done an amazing job keeping it open ended, so whatever a person believes is actually the case, there is room to believe that and they won’t technically be right or wrong. I think this truly is what they were getting at with this series. They wanted to create a charming and funny light-hearted story that keeps the people following on their toes and keep things so ambiguous that people can draw their own conclusions as to what’s going to happen after it’s all over canonically. And that is the hidden beauty that I think gets lost in a series that looks rather shallow at first glance.
Though, for anime fans wanting a season 2 of this one, like me, this idea might soil those desires. The way the season and possibly the part of series the anime will adapt ended, is just the way it needed to end to keep that ambiguity and wonder on the table. The anime ends in such a way that doesn’t give too much away to sway towards one of the sisters winning Fuutarou’s heart but it keeps them all in the game. And at the same time, it doesn’t rule out the idea that Fuutarou’s marriage is just a symbolic representation of something bigger. It gives the watcher room to draw their own conclusions as to what happens next, whether they go on to read the manga or not. And if that, in essence, is just what the series is trying to do like I think, then there’s no better way to end the anime adaptation than the way they did and making a season two wouldn’t add anything drastically different to the series. Season 2 would hold very little value.
Overall, I think this series leads with a promise they were expected to fulfill, even though they knew they weren’t going to fulfill it. Instead, they are placing the task on each individual fan of the series to choose what the ending is. They have no reason to make an ending that is not going to appeal to an overwhelming majority of fans, and with the way they set up this series, that task is near impossible anyways. And they had to know that going in, so they know this task of reaching an ideal conclusion is going to simply be up to each fan.
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