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PAIR_OF_QUINTUPLETS

                                                                March 26, 2021

The anime with the US title, "Quientessential Quintuplets"
had a remarkably unpromising smell to it-- a high school
"harem" scenario with *quintuplets*?  Uh...

But when a *second season* came out for this
I started to wonder-- how did it rate even     SECONDS_EXIST
that much?

    (And I see in a ranking of popular manga, the orignal
    manga is in the lower half of the top 100, so they
    must've got *something* right.)

As it happens, the series-- the first season of it anyway--
has a nice look to the artwork, and handles its unpromising
premise with a nice touch: a high school boy is recruited as
a tutor to a group of pretty but academically unpromising
quintuplets, and there's a cute touch where they give us a
flash-foward that shows the male lead getting married to one
of the girls, but being quintuplets it's impossible to tell
which one of the five is dressed-up as a bride.  That's the
tension that's supposed to hold your interest: which one of
the five is it going to be?

As you might expect, in anime-land they found it a bit
challenging to come up with characters for that many girls.
The way I'd sum-up the five:

  o  a food-obsessed non-entity with blue stars in her hair
  o  an annoyingly infantile Moe ditz
  o  a quiet, shy girl with headphones
  o  a short-haired young actress with a touch of maturity and wisdom
  o  a complete horror of a "tsundere" that needs to be thrown in jail

                             (She renders the mail lead
                             unconscious with spiked
                             drinks on *two* occasions).

As I'm sure you can tell, I think the
leading candidate should clearly be
the short-haired actress.
                                                      SPOILERS
As for the question of the *actual* pick-- like
SPOILERS jack-- not that this spoilers warning
matters that much because really I have no clue who
the final pick was supposed to be.  I sorted trough
the clues in the anime and spent a little time
reviewing previous episodes, and I think they add
up to zilch: right at the end of the second season,
they show us a brief flash of the winner in a brief
flash-back, but through-out the series the girls
play tricks where they dress like each other, and I
don't think there's enough context to know who was
dressed that way at that moment.

Then there's some extra-"textual" clues based on author
interviews that I think are coy hints that are essentially
meaningless.

And there's also the conclusion in the manga version, which
I've read about, and which I gather is handled even worse
than the anime-- but myself, I see no reason presented *in
the anime* to think it ends the same way as the manga.

   In retrospect, I think this is the central flaw,
   built-in to the nature of the story:

   The male lead is supposed to be falling in love with
   *just one* of these characters, there's supposed to be
   some developing feelings for her-- but the guessing game
   aspect of the story interferes with any such character
   evolution: anything that might show progress in one
   direction has to be taken back almost immediately.


   So there's no clear "chemistry" between any one
   pairing of the characters, and we're not allowed to
   see inside the nominal main character's head because
   they way he feels *is* how the story is going
   resolve: as expected from a harem premise, every one
   of the girls is interested in the male lead, so
   their feelings don't count at all as far as the
   story's resolution is concerned.


   And if you ask yourself which one he *should*
   pick, the answer would be that they all have
   their problems.  The one I'd call the best--
   the short-hair-- develops some problems in       Fans of the short-hair
   the second season (making her seem like a        evidently show a
   different character-- perhaps another flaw).     tendency to try to
   Whichever one he picks is going to be            contrive justifications
   *somewhat* unsatisfying...  it could be the      for her later somewhat
   right answer is none-of-the-above.               under-handed behavior.

   Ultimately this is an ill-conceived
   story without a satisfactory ending
   in the deck, and they didn't even do
   a good job of faking one.

       It's remarkable they get you going as well
       as they do, but they can't get you anywhere.




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