What’s more interesting to me is the community’s need for a romantic resolution to the question of who Rimuru ends up with. The question itself is boring – a story needs a ‘who’ to be against? Why can’t the protagonist’s fulfillment be a communal one? Rimuru’s whole ethos has been about building a society in which everyone can belong, and his personal end point, the society he has built, is all the more poetically consistent because it is not a romantic couple, but rather a single person at the heart of a vast web of connections with countless others, none of more importance than the others. Our dissatisfaction with this answer is a comment on our deeply ingrained narrative expectations, not on the quality of the story itself.