As much as i feel like Amphibia might have benefitted greatly from a full on Sashanne or Marcanne ending, i do very much think the current one has it’s merits.
As the creator said, it does leave it very much open, not only on the shipping front, but also in the details of how Sasha and Anne began drifting away after middleschool, yet apparently remained on great terms as adults, which has a lot of implications that you can read into if you wish, or you can take it at face value if you so desire.
And i really like that.
My personal reading from what both Anne and Sasha says, is that they drifted apart in high-school, then seems to have begun reaching back together in their current years after both got their careers off the ground.
And that is part of growing up. Sometimes you do lose contact with the people around you because you NEED to focus on your job, your future, only to reforge a new and different relationship later in life.
As Anne said, they both had to learn to let go of what they had, but that didn’t mean that nothing good came out of it in the end.
The way Sasha speaks of it, she has some regrets about it, maybe things she wish she did differently, but in the end, that’s okay. As anne said, No one is perfect.
Just to take one example of a way(A sashanne reading) you can read it, maybe Sasha’s regrets is that she could have confessed her feelings for Anne in high-school, and maybe that would have made them stick together and forged a strong, and lasting bond that would have remained strong until this day.
But for whatever reason, she chose not to(maybe the fear of rejection, or that Anne wasn’t into girls was too strong, and in the end she didn’t dare try for fear of her friendship breaking), and she in hindsight regrets that fact.
And that might be the case. Or maybe them going straight into a romantic relationship in their teens when their careers and educations took them so far apart would have killed it dead in the long run.
She does not know what could have happened, and she definitely has regrets about that.
And again, this is just one take on the whole thing. The beauty of this ending is that you can definitely see how things went the way it did, it’s not an time-skip epilogue where the show asks you to buy that one of the girls became an astronaut and became the first human to set foot at mars or something equally ludicrous.
Each end point makes logical sense.
Instead it tells you where each girl ended up, while leaving it to the reader to read their own interpretation of how they got there, and where they go from here
That’s how to write an open ending.
Even after Amphibia, there were mistakes, regrets, roads taken and not taken, and the characters still wishing things could have been different.
That is life.
The important thing, is that you don’t cling to the past at the expense of your future. The past is important. The worst things you can do is cling so hard to it that you break what you have now, or you are so bitter about how things went that you try and kill it out of spite.
