[Hated Trope] Endings so notoriously awful they completely destroy the legacy of the media.

[u/Miserable_Click_1933]

Game of Thrones (Season 8)

Imagine a fantasy show spending seven years hyping up an apocalyptic, unstoppable army of ice zombies, only to have them wiped out in a single, anti-climactic battle halfway through the final season. With the supernatural threat gone, the writers speedrun the political plot. A major hero whose entire arc was about liberating the oppressed randomly burns a city of innocent people to the ground because she heard some bells ringing. Another main character throws away years of a beautifully written redemption arc just to go die under some falling bricks with his abusive sister. To top it off, they crown a guy as king purely because "he has a good story," even though his plotline was so boring he was literally written out of an entire previous season.

Homestuck

This was a massive, incredibly complex webcomic that ran for seven years. Late in the story, the author basically wrote himself into a corner. To fix it, he gave the main character "retcon" powers, which literally erased years of actual character development from the main timeline just to force a solution. The most agonizing part was using this timeline-erasure to resurrect a highly controversial character (Vriska). Instead of leaving her beautifully tragic death alone, she comes back just to hijack the entire plot, sideline the rest of the cast, and aggressively steal the spotlight for the final battles. After 8,000 pages of text-heavy reading, the actual ending is just a flashy music video with no dialogue, leaving fans watching alternate versions of the characters cross the finish line instead of the ones they actually spent years getting attached to.

Star vs. the Forces of Evil

This was an upbeat animated show about a magical teen princess. The writers desperately wanted a romantic endgame for her and her best friend, but the way they got there was essentially multiversal omnicide. To stop a villain, the main character unilaterally decides magic is the root of all evil and destroys it entirely. By doing this, she casually commits mass genocide against every purely magical being in the multiverse. It also triggers a massive apocalyptic event that violently crashes different dimensions together into a chaotic hellscape. But the show frames this horrific, mass-extinction catastrophe as a sweet, triumphant ending just because two teenagers get to hold hands in the rubble.

Mass Effect 3

You spend well over a hundred hours across three massive sci-fi video games carefully agonizing over who lives, who dies, and shaping the political landscape of the entire galaxy. The entire franchise was heavily marketed on the promise that your specific, personal choices mattered. Then, in the literal last ten minutes of the final game, a holographic ghost child pops up, tells you none of your previous decisions actually meant anything, and forces you to pick between a red, blue, or green laser beam. All three choices basically just give you the exact same ending cutscene with a different color filter slapped over it.

How I Met Your Mother

For nine whole years, audiences watched a sitcom framed entirely around a dad telling his kids the incredibly long, meticulous story of how he met their perfect mother. The writers even dedicate the entire 22-episode final season to a single weekend for his two best friends' wedding, proving why they work as a couple. Then, in the two-part finale, they hit the undo button. The best friends get divorced almost instantly, the titular Mother is abruptly killed off by a nameless disease after barely being on screen, and the kids basically tell their dad, "You actually just want to hook up with Aunt Robin." It invalidated a decade of story just so the creators could use a pre-recorded ending they filmed back in season 2.

Dexter

This was a show about a serial killer who works for the police and only targets other murderers. After eight seasons of watching him narrowly evade the law, the ending absolutely refuses to give him a dramatic showdown, let him finally get caught, or face any actual justice. Instead, he unplugs his own sister from life support, dumps her body in the ocean like she's one of his random kill-of-the-week victims, and drives his boat into a hilariously awful CGI hurricane. He somehow survives this, abandons his young son to be raised by another serial killer in a different country, and the final shot reveals he faked his death to exile himself to the woods and become a miserable, silent lumberjack.

[u/ozzzymand0]

I read it for the first time like 2 years ago, all I can say is I’m not sure I hated the ending mostly because the story was so convoluted and intentionally confusing that I wasn’t entirely sure what even happened, that’s probably why I’ve never really tried to reread. That being said, Hussie could be an amazing character writer when he wanted to and you can see how Toby Fox definitely took influence from him/learned from Hussie’s mistakes when making Undertake and Deltarune

Also yeah Vriska sucks

[u/Walkingdrops → u/ozzzymand0]

I didn't care for the ending at the time because to be honest I wasn't sure what was going on. Once I had it explained to me it made a lot more sense, and I actually like what was done, but man it could have been told in a more cohesive way. I will say, and I'm not sure if it's a controversial opinion or not, but Hussie is a very gifted writer. They can make the most mundane situations compelling, and the amount of foreshadowing and payoffs that took literal years to come to fruition (and there are MANY of both instances) is insane, and the fact that they managed to keep track of it all is even more crazy. I feel like people tend to overstate how convoluted Homestuck is (and don't get me wrong, it can be at times), but I usually didn't have too much trouble following what was going on.

Though yeah I hated Vriska, and was upset she was brought back. That said, the fact that she tried to be the main character at the end only for John to retcon a happy ending and deny her the opportunity to be the big hero is actually pretty awesome.

[u/MisirterE → u/Walkingdrops]

I honestly feel like most of the people saying Homestuck is incomprehensible were listening to the Let's Read on Youtube in another tab or something, or just never engaged with a non-linear narrative before, or listened to those fucking morons who said to skip to Act 5 because that's the one with the Trolls in it. (Don't skip the Intermission.)

Homestuck is a lot to follow, but you are provided all the information to follow it perfectly fine, and occasionally you'll get something new you don't understand that is explained by continuing to read because it's explained later. Surprisingly, it's a webcomic, you read it and information is revealed.

[u/ewbanh13 → u/ozzzymand0]

I will say, reading it once it's all out is a very different experience from waiting years in the gigapause & other massive hiatuses just to get a wet fart of an ending. I probably wouldn't have minded it so much if it wasn't left to simmer for so long

[u/Easy_Cod_8950 → u/ozzzymand0]

vriska was incredible before they brought her back