In harems not everyone’s favorite is always going to win. As a Yotsuba fan, I wouldn’t have agreed with the decision of the author if it ended up being someone else. Besides being a character who’s a little more important than people let on. But it’s no point in everyone getting asshurt over it.
See, this is where the problem lies. People say they don't understand and you get upset and attack them, calling them "asshurt because their waifu didn't win". It's on the author to write this convincingly and he simply failed to do so. And this doesn't even go into the multitude of issues with the ending unrelated to who got chosen. Some poeple just want to read a good, well thought out story (which this was about halfway through) and don't care about waifu wars.
I just don't get why Yotsuba was chosen. She had the least importance and showed the least interest.
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Ch. 91 establishes that Yotsuba was the first quint to have met Fuutarou when they were kids and thus always had feelings for him, but upon meeting him again in high school and thus seeing all her sisters start interacting with him, she decided to suppress them, though there were times when they'd leak out anyway, such as in Ch. 22 when she tells him that she likes him but then says just kidding - clues that, when you read back on the manga, were meant to serve as clues as to the real nature of their relationship. So sure, she may have technically shown the least interest, but that's because she was doing it on purpose.
Which leads into the concern of least importance: during the time when Fuutarou and Yotsuba met as kids while on vacation, Fuutarou accidentally confused Yotsuba with one of the other quints (I believe it was Ichika) since at the time the quints largely acted and behaved like each other still (depicted in Ch. 89). Yotsuba saw Fuutarou interacting with Ichika, not realizing that Ichika had gotten to him first while she was away and that Fuutarou didn't know any better, which prompted her to start behaving differently to the point of wearing a ribbon on her head to physically differentiate herself from her sisters so that she wouldn't ever be confused for one of them again. But not only did she also realize that her sisters were also slowly starting to do the same, just not intentionally like she was, but their mom died soon after, and her death catalyzed Yotsuba's disillusionment into believing that separation was the inevitable fate that waited for her family, because if the most important member of their family (their mom) was gone, who else was going to stop them from all drifting apart and going their own ways? It didn't help that in the immediate aftermath of Rena's death, before Maruo (the doctor and the quints' foster father) showed up to claim custody of the girls, they didn't know what would become of them and that they could end up getting separated and sent to different foster families. But even with Maruo stepping in to take care of them, that clearly didn't stop Yotsuba from continuing to foster her own belief that the quints would socially and mentally go their separate ways anyway.
Yotsuba's separatist brainrot would worsen to the point where when they entered middle school, she wanted to become the "best" out of her sisters, stemming from her original desire to differentiate herself from her sisters as a result of meeting Fuutarou as kids but also absorbing the negative influences of her social trauma (Fuutarou meeting with Ichika and her mom's death). She tried excelling at academics, but when that didn't work, she turned to athletics, which she found she was much better at, and so mentally she clung to that as proof of her being better than all of her other sisters - until she got vibe checked by a straight-up expulsion from Black Rose High because her grades got so bad. That, and seeing her sisters also go so far as to flunk themselves out of the same school just so that Yotsuba wouldn't have to go to a new school alone, made her finally realize what their mom was talking about before she died about the whole staying together as a family thing, so she decided to never have a selfish mindset ever again, or at least suppress them as much as possible.
Yotsuba reunited with Fuutarou after this mindset shift at Asahiyama, after the quints' transfer. She instantly recognized him since she'd always kept her feelings for him, in no small part due to the promise they'd made together when they met as kids, but Fuutarou didn't recognize her. She could have immediately revealed to him who she was but chose not to because she saw his test scores and study notes on him and realized that not only did he keep their promise of studying hard to become successful in the future, but unlike her, he'd actually pulled it off, so the shame she felt as a result, especially with the context of her own middle school career and the shit she'd pulled during then, kept her from doing so. Ch. 91, which illustrates this, goes on to also backtrack through all the times that Yotsuba'd been involved with the plot, specifically to show how her sisters, too, were starting to show interest in Fuutarou. And each time, her shame and reservedness holds her back and pins her down, preventing her from just being honest with both herself and Fuutarou and tell him about herself, which admittedly would have prevented a lot of the problems and infighting that would happen in the manga. It gets to the point where Yotsuba deludes herself into thinking that there's no way he'd ever choose her out of her sisters (sound familiar?) when it came down to it and actively removes herself from the competition so that Fuutarou would have more of a reason to go for her sisters rather than her.
TLDR: Yotsuba seemingly has the least importance out of the quints because she intentionally showed the least interest; she has her moments but they were mainly to serve as foreshadowing to set up for her side of the story as depicted in Ch. 89 - 91, the flashback chapters. But in reality, had she still kept her original middle school mindset post-transfer, she would have more aggressively pursued her relationship with Fuutarou, even if it might have come out as more passive-aggression than actual directness, and that would have greatly impacted how the rest of the manga would unfold. The fact that she had already changed her attitude post-transfer meant that she was giving her sisters room to develop their own relationships with Fuutarou, unknowingly at first but then later realizing and even actively encouraging it at the clear expense of her own feelings. So it's a little strange to consider at first, but Yotsuba having the least direct impact had the most significant indirect impact on the story.
As for why Yotsuba was the one who won in the end, that's up for individual determination. Some may say that since Yotsuba was in fact the the first quint to ever meet Fuutarou and thus the first one to fall in love with him, her victory was more or less assured from the moment that was revealed; it could also be that allegedly, Haruba Negi (the author & artist) based Yotsuba on his own wife, so take that as you will. Personally, I take two things away from Yotsuba's win at the end: the first is that there's a message of no matter how hard you might try at succeeding, sometimes you just don't come out of it as a clear winner. Both Nino and Miku, the two most popular girls (and my own two favorites as well, admittedly), showed the most motivation to improve themselves for Fuutarou's sake and took the most steps and actions to prove it, so logically, one of them should have been the winner. But Fuutarou's his own person too; as rational, logical, and emotionally insensitive as he is, that doesn't mean that he must choose between the aforementioned two. And given his own clear commitment to finding the quint whom he'd met as a kid, you could argue that Yotsuba was always going to be the winner in the end anyway, even if we were to ignore the other theories, because it was only a matter of time before Fuutarou would be able to successfully identify Yotsuba as the one he'd met at Osaka. And so because of this possible foregone conclusion, nothing that any of the other quints did would matter; they could try their hardest in winning Fuutarou's affection but would ultimately fail in the end. And so the message may have been that despite suffering from a heartbreaking failure like this, the important thing is to learn how to move on from, learn from, and live with this kind of experience, as we see the quints all do in last few chapters of the manga.
The second thing is that Yotsuba, from an emotional and mental perspective, may have actually NEEDED to be the winner. Recall the events I mentioned above while explaining the issues of "least importance" and "least concern": imo Yotsuba suffered from not just one but two mental collapses: the first during middle school when she was increasingly convincing herself that she needed to be the best out of her sisters, culminating in her expulsion, and the second after reuniting with Fuutarou and increasingly convincing herself that she didn't deserve him. The manga establishes pretty well that Yotsuba is heavily affected by emotional and social trauma, and unlike her sisters, who are depicted to have varying degrees of resilience to emotional and social events, Yotsuba shows very little if any of the emotional resilience that her sisters seem to have - perhaps because none of them experienced quite the traumatic events that she did. The one exception is of course their mom's death, but even then, they didn't derive quite the same messages and implications that Yotsuba did. She is the only one to have suffered from major personality shifts - not just once, but twice - and while Ichika may have shown one of her own in her own scheme to claim Fuutarou for her own, that was at least a product of her actions in the present, while Yotsuba's were clearly products of past events and trauma that she hasn't been able to let go. She was able to snap out of her first downward spiral thanks to her sisters, who inadvertently saved her from it by flunking out with her from their first high school, but they wouldn't have been able to save her from her second downward spiral because they were the ones unknowingly perpetuating it themselves by pursuing their own relationships with the same guy Yotsuba loves, with only Itsuki being aware at all that this was the case. If someone else had won, maybe Yotsuba could have learned to move on from her feelings for Fuutarou eventually, but my fear is that in the worse case scenarios, she would fail to do so and her past regrets, mistakes, and trauma would keep haunting her for the foreseeable future. The only one who could ensure that these worse case scenarios wouldn't happen is Fuutarou, who, by choosing to continue his relationship with Yotsuba and demonstrate to her that her own feelings are still worth something in spite of all that she'd done, saves her from her second downward spiral in a way that her sisters can't.
Of course, all this could very well be meaningless because I'm reading too damn deep into what should just be a harem romcom manga. It's just that, as we'll all agree, the manga ended like shit and that it could have at least ended better had the implications been more thoroughly explored. Personally, I'd blame whatever shitty editor was in charge of the manga who probably told Negi to hurry and wrap it up for whatever reason - probably so they could start milking the IP for all that it's worth with how many goddamn collabs have come out in Japan, and not to mention the anime and movie, too. But we'll never know for sure unless Negi himself comes out and explains what the hell happened, and even then I'm afraid many Quints fans who got pissed off by the ending won't believe him anyway.
You could use [expand][/expand] instead of [spoiler][/spoiler] so your (admittedly deep insight about Yotsuba) wall of texts would be contained neatly.
You could use [expand][/expand] instead of [spoiler][/spoiler] so your (admittedly deep insight about Yotsuba) wall of texts would be contained neatly.
Thanks, not the best with formatting comments like these.