The Quintessential Quintuplets – 03 – In Good Faith

When Fuutarou arrives at the sisters’ apartment building for the next tutoring session, he’s determined not to slip up, yet is flummoxed by the auto-lock door and intercom. Fortunately, Miku is not only forgiving, but welcoming.

So far I’m thoroughly  enjoying the variety of the sisters’ greetings, and what those say about them:

Episode 2
Itsuki: “Wh-What? Stop staring. It’s rude.”
Yotsuba: “Good Morning!”
Nino: “You again?”
Ichika: “Hey, Fuutarou-kun.”
Miku: “…”

Episode 3
Miku: [Cheerfully] “You’re going to tutor us, aren’t you?”
Itsuki: “So you had to come.”
Yotsuba: “Welcome, Uesugi-san!”
Nino: [Glares, slams door]
Ichika: [Still in bed]

Fun details like this help up the sense of chaos and the difficulty level of Fuutarou’s task. When he has four of the five gathered for the session, he takes a moment to admire the progress he’s made. But in fairness, Yotsuba’s friendliness was pre-loaded into the equation. The only real progress he made has been with Miku.

While Ichika is sleepy and disinterested and Itsuki passively abstains from his tutoring, Nino is by far the most hostile, and proceeds to actively sabotage Fuutarou’s efforts by clearing out the room one sister at a time. Yotsuba has to sub in for the basketball team. Ichika has to get to work. Itsuki will have more quiet at the library.

That just leaves Miku, who genuinely wants Fuutarou to teach her history. Nino takes a different tack with her, suggesting her interest in Fuutarou is romantic and insulting her taste in men. When Miku stands up for herself, Nino challenges her to a cooking contest to determine who’s more homely.

Under ideal circumstances Nino would win this one running away. But since Fuutarou is poor, frugal, and has an underdeveloped palate, he judges both their dishes to taste good, resulting in a tie. Then again, Miku’s omerice may just look awful but taste great; inner beauty and all that.

A telling sign of Nino’s true beef with Fuutarou comes when Miku blushes with pride when Fuutarou’s praise for a dish she had no confidence in. Nino can see the effect Fuutarou has on her sister, and she hates it. Still, Nino wins the day, because thanks to all her stalling tactics there was never any actual tutoring.

Not only that, Fuutarou’s own confidence has taken a hit, as he no longer believes it’s possible to get along with Nino in this world. Miku disagrees, assuring him if he approaches her in good faith she’ll come around…but it’s up to him to determine how to do that. Fuutarou then takes off, but forgets his flash cards, and Miku buzzes him back in before taking a shower.

He returns to find Miku is already out of the shower and is drying her hair. But wait, that’s not Miku, it’s Nino! I’m not sure if Fuutarou is colorblind, but one thing’s for sure: Nino is almost blind full stop. She mistakes Fuutarou for Miku, apologizes for how she acted, but blames Fuutarou for inciting the enmity between them.

When Nino asks “Miku” to grab her contacts, Fuutarou can’t find the appropriate shelf, so Nino comes to help look and gets very close to him. When he withdraws, she assumes Miku is still mad and has a mini-tantrum, bumping her arm on the cabinet and shifting some books. Fuutarou dives onto her to shield her, and she finally realizes there’s an intruder in the house.

Fuutarou tries to explain but is interrupted by Itsuki, who snaps a compromising photo that, if taken out of context, could ruin Fuutarou’s chances of ever setting foot in their apartment again. This is, of course, what Nino has been lobbying for from the get-go.

An impromptu tribunal of the quintuplets is then enjoined, with Ichika presiding as judge (you better call her “Your Honor”!), Itsuki as the prosecution, and Miku as the defense. When Miku clarifies that she let Fuutarou back in to get (not take) his flash cards, Nino again accuses her of having feelings for the guy.

When Nino and Miku’s bickering intensifies, Itsuki tries to restore calm, but is brusquely dismissed by both of them (she is the youngest after all). Ichika then recalls how well they all used to—past tense—get along as sisters, which is the last straw for Nino, who runs right out of the apartment. Miku tells Fuutarou to let her be, and Raiha informs him dinner is ready, so Fuutarou takes his leave.

On his way out he encounters Nino skulking outside, and takes a seat opposite the door with the excuse that he doesn’t want to go home until he’s “solved a problem” on one of his flash cards. In reality, he wants to once again approach Nino in good faith. He’s realized now that she considers the apartment to be their place (as in her sisters’), and that an outsider like Fuutarou has no place there.

Fuutarou can relate, having a sister himself whom he loves more than anyone else, and would never want her to hate him. But rather than come to a breakthrough in his favor, Nino resolves to not accept him as her tutor, even if it makes all her sisters hate her. Thus Nino cements her role as the toughest nut to crack so far. But if anything is worth doing…

Taketatsu Ayana, veteran sister seiyu, is really the ideal voice for Nino: with a sharp confrontational edge by default balanced by a tender vulnerability under the right conditions. The question is, will Fuutarou ever learn what those conditions are? Based on this weeks events, not anytime soon! Fortunately, he has other fish to fry (i.e. quintuplets to recruit) who may not be quite as obstinate as Nino.

The Quintessential Quintuplets – 02 – Matcha Soda

While there are a couple of friendly voices among them (namely Ichika and Yotsuba), as a group the Nakano quints are adamantly opposed to being tutored by Fuutarou. When he challenges them to score at least a 50 in a test he provides, they manage to score 100…combined. They then physically run away from him, but they underestimate how bad he needs the money, not to mention not shirking from this challenge is a matter of personal pride.

Fuutarou knows the sisters hate studying—and him, Yotsuba and Ichika aside—but he’s determined to find a way to get to them, even if it’s one sister at a time. This week his focus is on the third sister Miku, the only one to score a certain question correctly. When he approaches her about it he’s interrupted by Yotsuba and then Ichika, the latter of which thinks they should be more focused on falling in love than studying.

Little does Ichika know that Miku has already fallen in love…with Sengoku period warlords. She slips what looks like a love letter in Fuutarou’s desk and meets him on the rooftop to confess that love, which he thought for a minute was love for him. She dismisses her encyclopedic knowledge of them to be something weird, but he encourages her to have faith in what she likes, finally seeing a path to get her excited about studying.

Miku initially agrees to let him tutor her, but when she offers him a can of her favorite matcha soda and mentions it doesn’t have snot in it, Fuutarou fails to identify the reference, and she recinds her offer to cooperate, labeling him as “all talk.” This irks him, so he checks every Sengoku book in the library, and the next day challenges her to a trivia game. Because it’s a subject near and dear to her heart, he knows she won’t back down.

However, she not only backs down, but runs away, forcing Fuutarou to chase after her as they play a game of warlord shiritori, until they both collapse from exhaustion. Miku removes her stockings and shoes and relaxes on a bench as Fuutarou gets her a matcha soda and tells her he figured out the snot reference—but only after Yotsuba googled it for him. Miku reiterates her lack of confidence in herself, telling him she’s the “biggest loser” of the group, and that her four sisters can do anything she can.

Fuutarou counters by showing her the sisters’ test answers, which show that no sisters got the same answers right. That means it goes both ways: Miku can do anything her sisters can, if she applies herself. Fuutarou can see light at the end of the tunnel; if each quintuplet has a specialty that will help make being tutored acceptable, than he can pool their collective knowledge to help them all succeed.

But while he seeks to be the grand uniter of the quintuplets, for now it’s just Yotsuba and Miku who have stopped running away from studying, and from him. Complicating matters is Yotsuba’s suspicion that Miku is in love with Fuutarou, which Miku neither confirms nor denies but blushes an awful lot when pressed. This proves to be a fascinating journey!

The Quintessential Quintuplets – 01 (First Impressions) – Five Times the Tutoring Trouble

Uesugi Fuutarou is a studious loner from a poor family trying to have his frugal lunch when an unfamiliar redhead in the uniform of another school tries to take a seat at the same spot with a 1000-yen megafeast. When he starts rudely studying in front of her, she spots the 100-scored exam he blatantly left out in the open, and she gets an idea: this guy could help her study! Instead, he storms off, telling her she’ll gain weight if she keeps over-ordering lunch. Wrong answer, pal!

Fuutarou later realizes the error of his ways, especially when his sister Raiha informs him that a lucrative tutoring job is available, and the redhead is the client. It turns out this girl, one Nakano Itsuki, is one of five quintuplets who have transferred to the school, all of them in need of tutoring. His other initial interactions include the flirty, teasing Ichika and the friendly Yotsuba. The quiet Miku and hostile Nino round out the quintet.

When Fuutarou arrives at the sisters’ opulent penthouse apartment, he’s met with resistance at nearly every turn, with the exception of the kind Yotsuba, who tries to help him wrangle her skeptical sisters in a harrowing room-by-room gauntlet. Even when they’re drawn together at the coffee table, it’s only because of the promise of cookies—no one ends up doing any actual studying during his first tutoring session.

Nino even manages to get Fuutarou out of the house by drugging his water, but Itsuki accompanies him on a taxi ride home. That’s when Fuutarou’s secret weapon imouto Raiha comes into play, using her cuteness to get Itsuki to join them for dinner. That’s when Itsuki learns that Fuutarou’s family is depending on the five-fold tutoring fee he stands to gain to pay off debts.

In light of the fact she’d be hurting more than him if she refused, Itsuki agrees to let him continue his tutoring sessions, with the caveat that she won’t accept “tutelage” from him, but will seek to improve her scores without his help. That’s good enough for Fuutarou, but he has yet to realize the gravity of the task before him: all five of the quintuplets are failing, which is why all five transferred to his less prestigious school.

The Quintessential Quintuplets (lets call it QQ) aired back in Winter 2019, but I neither watched nor reviewed, and it seems I missed out. I figured “5/5” would be the appropriate time to correct that error, but unfortunately I’m a couple days off. No matter: QQ is a ton of fun right off the bat. The premise couldn’t be simpler or more obvious and familiar, but the execution is solid.

Production values are high, the character designs and personalities are distinct, diverse, and well-balanced, and the all-star voice cast is pitch-perfect. Everyone comes off as likable despite their flaws, and the comedy works more often than not.

Sometimes you just need a good high school harem rom-com (this episode is intriguingly book-ended by marriage scenes), and there’s no harm in looking back to the recent past for a shining example, which is what we seem to have here.