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In the OP6, Kogarashi Sentiment (木枯らしセンティメント), of Monogatari Series: Second Season, there are a red crab and a white snake. Since:

  1. The male mc has a red car (the same color of the crab), and the female mc wears a white dress (the same color of the snake). The colours of the animals in effect remind audiences of the MCs. enter image description here

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  2. At about 0:57 of the OP, there is a shot where the snake wraps around the crab, which seems to be a metaphor of the intimacy between the two MCs and may even indicates that she's more aggressive in their romantic relationship. enter image description here (ready to eat/bite the crab?) enter image description here

It's obvious that then crab is a metaphor for the male MC and the snake is a metaphor for the female MC. (Of course, there are more witnesses of this, but a complete list would make the post tedious.)

In the spirit of this interpretation, let's see what are in the last 2 scenes. In the 2nd last, the female is falling down when she explodes into some snake-like threads. In the last scene, the white hat of the female MC falls by the side of the red crab. These seem to indicate that in the end of the story, the female MC left the male MC (maybe due to death or something like a doomed fate), and he becomes lonely again, missing her. enter image description here

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A few questions about the story induced by the interpretation:

  1. Are the two MCs separated in the end of the story? What separates them?
  2. Is the female MC the first to make a move in their relationship?
  3. Are they by any chance nonhuman, maybe actually a crab and a snake?
Michael
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    i haven't seen this far into the series but the guy looks like Deishuu and the girl looks like Nadeko, more so given the Snake generally being a reference to the oddity related to her. i don't think they were ever in a relationship when Nadeko is in her teens and Deishuu is in his 30's and last i remember Deishuu's connection to Nadeko was being the one responsible for the Snake Curse that afflicted her in Nadeko Snake – Memor-X Oct 01 '22 at 13:19
  • @Memor-X It's Senjougahara. She got a haircut. (Also, do watch the rest of the series some time!) – 鬼いちゃん Oct 01 '22 at 19:36

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The "female MC" and "male MC" in question are, of course, none other than Senjougahara Hitagi and Kaiki Deishuu. Koimonogatari spoilers follow:

Your interpretation of the snake and crab as standing for them is, however, most likely wrong. The crab is Senjougahara, as she was once afflicted by a crab, and the white snake is most straightforwardly Sengoku Nadeko, who has at this point become a white snake god. Seeing as the arc's plot revolves around Sengoku's intention to kill Senjougahara (and Araragi) on their graduating high school, I can only conclude that the snake wrapping around the crab symbolizes this impending doom. It's not impossible that the matching colors are something more than coincidental (they seem like logical choices from a purely stylistic perspective), but this is the most obvious interpretation.

However, your conclusion about a broken-off romance is correct. As Senjougahara states in Nisemonogatari, Kaiki was the first of the five con men hired to cure her mysterious illness, and over the course of Koimonogatari he progressively reveals that they developed feelings for each other, until he decided to end whatever relationship they had for her sake, as he "weakened" her, on top of the obvious problems with that large an age gap. (Although the viewer is welcome to doubt that this is true, coming a self-professed unreliable narrator, it's most expedient to treat as literal truth for the purposes of the arc.) Also, I doubt this is directly related to the symbolism of the OP (except maybe the choice to involve a car, but that seems like a stretch), but Kaiki's prior romantic entanglement--a one-sided crush on Kanbaru's mother, Gaen Tooe--did end with the latter's death in a car accident which he still hasn't quite gotten over.

鬼いちゃん
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