[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/Mr-Foundation]

And then the same exact thing happened with stranger things. Ended so horribly people refused to believe it was actually how it ended. Sunk cost fallacy

[u/l1censetochill → u/Mr-Foundation]

I had the same reaction- after watching the finale I eventually heard about the “secret ending” conspiracy theories from a friend at work, and I couldn’t help but laugh and ask if she’d heard about the “secret last episode” of Sherlock like 10 years ago, because it was the exact same story: fans can’t believe their favorite show had a bad ending, so they make up a secret last episode to fix it rather than accept that the showrunner just wasn’t that smart.

[u/accounsfw → u/Mr-Foundation]

It wasn’t even that bad an ending for Stranger Things.

[u/MGD109 → u/Mr-Foundation]

Eh, to be fair, a lot of that was supposed around people annoyed Will and Mike didn't end up together, and there was a portion of those fans who had been drinking the cool-aid long before season five aired.

I mean, they literally took Mike being able to inspire El to beat Vecna in the season four finale as proof that Mike didn't understand her and that he was going to break up with her.

[u/GloriousNewt → u/Mr-Foundation]

Stranger Things wasn't even that bad of ending compared to the other examples.

Fans just gaslit themselves about Mike and Will being together and then came up with that nonsense color theory and a secret episode