(L) 5-Toubun no Hanayome

[Tactics]

Originally Posted by MK-95-

2. There's also the possibility of editor interference influencing Negi to change the winner and personally, I hope that's not the case. But we'll never know because Negi would never come out and say that since he's employed by the publisher and wouldn't want to jeopardize his relationship with them. Notice how much he deflects and gives vague answers when asked about Go-Toubun's ending? He's either being a very unfunny troll or simply can't say that he wasn't entirely in control of his own work.

I doubt this.

When Yotsuba won, wasn't he talking about how good it is for:
Rooting for underdog, childhood friend able to win, connection between Yotsuba and his wife.
If he planned the ending for someone else, he wouldn't talk like that and can easily use post S1 anime material to spin narrative. However what happened is anime staffs have to do extra works on telling why Yotsuba is sensible choice, which means he doesn't care anymore; Yotsuba win, that's all he need and its final, the rest can go to game or somewhere else which understandable because surely someone else can cover for him assuming he have no interest working on other quints.

[Lex79]

I have read manga when the heroine changed due to external meddling but that was due to cash on the unexpected popularity of a character. Doesn't seem the case with Yotsuba, unless we want to assume that Negi's editor simply forced his ship on him.
I'm still on the opinion that Negi pushed too hard on the "Fuutarou is stoic and doesn't give away his feelings " and "I'm keeping the winner a mystery until the very end" and that resulted in the heroine winning out of nowhere even if she was the destined one from the beginning.

[WingedAccelerator]

Stoic is okay, but pretending that the three times Fuutarou was perfectly fine with telling in front of Yotsuba's presence that they are not a couple and it's stupid to assume they would be by others, then choosing her anyways later is not. What a convenient excuse to say he was tsundere all along.

Yotsuba's love story feeds from their past, but Negi insists through Fuutarou that the present is more important, yet doesn't deliver with the present. Fuutarou just goes "Ah, all the time those stoic scenes happened with the gilr who caused me the biggest troubles, I was actually in love with her".

The manga really would have benefitted from Fuutarou talking with the losers about why not them. But the more I think about this, there wouldn't be a satisfying answer as Yotsuba is not above them in a single way.