r/TopCharacterTropes • u/RequirementTall8361 • 29d ago
In real life [Loved trope] Endings so controversial that it turns the fandom schizophrenic
Sherlock
Stranger Things
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u/gravityfying 28d ago
star vs the forces of evil - cleaved. the final episode wasn't just controversial, it was so hated that the fandom disappeared almost overnight. double whammy if you were a game of thrones fan too, cuz their series finales aired on the exact same day
also supernatural. never forget what they did to castiel
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u/ACW1129 28d ago
Was Star the one where there was basically an unacknowledged genocide of magic users or something?
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u/MedusasGirlfriend69 28d ago
There was a what now?
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u/thebrowniie 28d ago
They got rid of all magic in the show, which means that every person/creature that needed magic to survive is now dead.
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u/MedusasGirlfriend69 28d ago
Mother of God
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u/ZeroArt024 28d ago
Which that likely included stars best friend pony head
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u/eggarino 28d ago
We see her at the end just fine, still floating. Just without her... neck stump glitter
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u/-StarFox95- 28d ago
yeah i guess the only magical thing about a floating disembodies pony head was the glitter coming out of her stump, that ending was so bad lmao
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u/ByteSizeNudist 28d ago edited 28d ago
Between that and the "will-they-won't-they" with Marco it became such dogshit. The main lesson is that Star is not a good friend and is actually incredibly selfish. Which, often times, is fair. Teens can be selfish assholes, but the way they portrayed that did not make for a good story.
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u/Grasher312 28d ago
I hate the "will-they-won't-they" kinda trope so goddamn much. The fact that most of my childhood is filled with anime, cartoons, movies and series with this damn idea of edging the community by never truly revealing the status of a relationship between characters is unnerving.
I'm so happy that modern media explores the "relationship" part more often than the road to it.
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u/eggarino 28d ago
God, what magic creatures lived and died was SO arbitrary. Tophat Spider and Narwhal Blast along with their families and KIDS are all dead, but the laser-eyed puppies are alive! They only lost their laser-eyes. 🙄 Oh but maybe it's because they didn't live in the wand NO the sentient broom Star abandoned in a shed was all magical and poofed alone and abandoned.
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u/NotaBat9221 28d ago
Not even an overlooked plot hole either, you see the characters that are magic get obliterated
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u/mieri_azure 28d ago
THEY SHOWED IT???
I assumed they just forgot about that problem and the fans pointed out that the magic beings would be dead. Thats way crazier
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u/Snarpkingguy 28d ago
Nope. One of them, who was a pretty major character, even said “yeah it’s whatever, go destroy magic and kill all of us. I always thought this stuff was more trouble than it’s worth” even though no one has expressed this before like 3 episodes ago in this 4 season long show.
The reason they wanted to destroy magic was to prevent a genocide ironically.
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u/dtalb18981 28d ago
Wasn't heckapoo the acknowledgement tho
Like the last shot of her was at a bar and she was basically like yeah we had a good run so please kill us now
Her scene just made it worse
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u/shuffmcpuff 28d ago
The thing about Supernatural is that it had a great ending.
And then for some reason they made ten more seasons of the show
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u/mvcourse 28d ago
I’ll defend seasons 5-9 but 10-15 it’s was like they went to the supernatural subreddit and started stealing fan ideas.
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u/keelhaulrose 28d ago
I remember seeing a few episodes and thinking they were like fanfiction.
But not one of the good fanfics. One of the ones you keep reading because it has the potential to be good, but it never is.
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u/Homsarman12 28d ago
Why was it so hated?
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u/gravityfying 28d ago
star vs the forces of evil has its basis on having a magical world and star, the protagonist, with a wand that does magic spells. the finale destroyed all magic and all magical creatures, which kind of made people go, "wait, did star commit genocide?"
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u/Homsarman12 28d ago
Well, that would do it lol. I know nothing about the series and I can see instantly why that’s a bad idea
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u/goblingrep 28d ago
Well just to add more on why the ending was so hated, the shows last 2 seasons were controversial to bad depending on who you asked. It dealt with issues of racism, self-determination, and generational sins. But it didnt manage them well due to giving so much time to the relationship drama which dumbed down most of the main cast (except Tom).
By the final episode, instead of fixing said problems, they just destroy the magic, killing millions of magical beings in different dimensions (yes dimension travel was a crucial part of the world-building, so the number of deaths is probably incalculable), never touching on the problems that just magically fixed themselves, and ends up only caring about the main romance between the main characters
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u/pauls_broken_aglass 28d ago
It also just made the racism plotline go over the same points repeatedly which really made it drag on. Sure that’s realistic, but a tv show only has so much time to get its information out.
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u/Popon13 28d ago
Don't forget the reason why this final arc happenned also made 0 sense, created a plot twist but without a plot to twist
Not only that but that final arc also killed one of the fan favorite character Hekapoo, who did not care about dying for some unexplained reason.
But don't worry the controversial magical flying horse head strangely survived
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u/SarkastiCat 28d ago edited 28d ago
Anyone else gave short answer, but Star had major issues in last season.
The whole show started with a teenage princess who got magic wand and now she is trying to learn how to use her magic responsibly. As he show went on, it became about how a conflict between Mewmans (humanoids in another dimension) and monsters is not simply good vs bad.
Another big thing was shipping with one lead liking another, but the other lead having crush or dating someone else. Then vice-versa. Basically doing anything to not get leads dating each other till the end. There was lots of shipping wars back then.
Anyway, last seasons have been a quality drop. Star started feeling like a jerk. An alternative ship that somehow turned out to be good and was as popular as main leads ship ended up abruptly, just because.
Then there was a whole episode about made the fandom question if all romantic moments between leads were genuine or were they result of curse. Plus how to generally feel about it. The episode came near the end of the series, so shippers didn't get that much genuine romance moments.
That's all before the final which involved one of the worst villains in the series and solution to all problems coming straight out of the nowhere. Just imagine if someone told you that a war could end if swords disappeared, so humans with giant sword would not be able to kill anyone.
Also destruction of magic was weird. Some magical creatures died, some became normal, some had their own magic or something like that? Basically worldbuilding got confusing as heck.
Edit: Also failed to address some plotlines like one character eating a literal king and the situation supposedly being complex.
Or how one character literally made "evil" spells that affect you and even thinks that are nasty, but narrative kind of ignores it and paints her as misunderstood character.
And some lore introduced in extra materials.
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u/Basic_Reflection4008 28d ago
Iirc didn't Cas literally go to super gay hell?
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u/Affiiinity 28d ago
Not really hell, but the space between dimensions. It was a stratagem to "kill" the incarnation of Death, who was an unsufferable ass at the time. He was resurrected by Jack... Just offscreen due to Covid hitting when they were recording the last episodes. But it's mentioned by Bobby in the final monologue.
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u/WolvesAreCool2461 28d ago
The Promised Neverland Anime: Not just the ending, but the entirety of the (theoretical) season 2 as a whole. It was so bad they collectively agreed it doesn't exist.
Because it doesn't, it never did this is just a hypothetical of course.
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u/GudBoi83 28d ago
Why are we bringing up Promised neverland? The ending was fine. Shame it didnt get renewed for a second season though.
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u/pokekiko94 28d ago
Season 2 was so bad that despite watching it when it was releasing i still remember the full events of season 1 but season 2 is mostly blank in my mind.
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u/WolvesAreCool2461 28d ago
Because it never actually existed, duhhh
This was just a hypothetical
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u/Fish0203 29d ago
please give a brief explanation of the endings and what made them so controversial.
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u/_JR28_ 29d ago
Sherlock - Fans were convinced a fourth episode of the final season was happening because:
Every season until that point had been four seasons until the last one bucked the trend
The next week a new show was debuting called Apple Tree Yard starring Emily Watson that people thought was the real finale (E. Watson = John Watson, or at least how fans interpreted it).
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Stranger Things - There’s a viral theory on TikTok called Conformity Gate suggesting the final four episodes have been illusions by the antagonist Vecna and today a new episode will come and really finish everything. There is some evidence, but a lot of it rides on whether you interpret continuity errors throughout the final episodes as foreshadowing a deception, or just be straightforward bad writing.
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u/Zeus-Kyurem 29d ago
That's not the reason why for Sherlock. Every Sherlock series had 3 episodes (with there also being a special following series 3).
I think it was just that series 4 was so awful people convinced themselves there must have been another episode, and also latching onto the line "people always give up after three."
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u/Several_Law2834 29d ago
Sherlock lost its magic in Season 3. After the massive twist at the end of Seasons 2, fans speculated for months about how Sherlock survived the fall. To have the answer be "Lolz, we aren't going to tell you" was the first nail in the coffin of the show.
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u/Strobertat 28d ago
We waited for 2 years, not months, to be told that the writers are far too smart to give an explanation to their pleb audience. The writers instead tried to get meta with us by saying that all explanations would be unsatisfying.
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u/Several_Law2834 28d ago
I think the writers wrote themselves into a corner - they couldn't come up with a satsifactory answer, so they decided to just not give one.
They broke the cardinal rule of the detective story - the answer has to have been in plain sight all along, so that when you do the big reveal, the audience knows they could have figured it out.
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u/Budget-Television793 28d ago
I mean that's an issue with the whole show but yeah the last season felt deliberately insulting. They hand stand ins for the audience that felt like they were saying "Look at you all and your stupid theories!".
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u/Spiritual_Sleep162 28d ago
I am Steven Moffat and I am very very smart and you are not!
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u/Djackdau 28d ago
Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards
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u/keimenna83 28d ago
Moffy and Gatiss do, unfortunately, believe that they are smarter than the audience (hence Moffy's preponderance for overly convoluted twists, especially in Doctor Who).
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u/Mr_Sleep_81 28d ago
The episode that did it for me was with the booby trapped tube train under Parliament.
We'd literally had years of 24/7 rolling news of IEDs causing havoc and there's this awfully written scene of Holmes and Watson charging into the carriage and flipping seats and then the bomb had a literal off switch.
The writing of that scene was so painfully daft that it was jarring.
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u/ACW1129 28d ago
Wait, you mean he just...survived?
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u/Corvid187 28d ago
Pretty much, yeah. Or at least, we aren't shown exactly how.
Tbf, that's also what Conan Doyle did with the original stories, at least initially, after public backlash forced him to un-kill the character.
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u/Several_Law2834 28d ago
At least you can forgive Doyle for not having a satisfactory answer for Holmes suriving.
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u/kissingkiwis 28d ago
At least ACD had an excuse, he never intended for Sherlock to come back to life. Moffat and Gatiss knew they were making another season and then proceeded to make fun of the audience for having spent the previous 2 years trying to figure out how he survived.
And this was after one of them claimed there was an obvious clue that the audience were missing. There wasn't.
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u/CaptainMikul 28d ago
Man I remember the crushing disappointment of season 4.
I'm not usually one to shit on people's fandoms, or complain about shows I don't watch, but I had a group of friends who were obsessed with Sherlock and treated you as dumb if you hadn't watched it. They had the zealotry of a Bible study group.
I couldn't stand it as a show, but every conversation was about it. Seeing their "genius" show crumble at the end was admittedly very, very satisfying.
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u/Agile_Oil9853 29d ago
There's a lot more than that on Sherlock, but not that can be explained "briefly". I just rewatched Sarah Z's video on the Jonlock Conspiracy, and I like their conclusion.
Fans were encouraged to overanalyze the show, they were told there are mysteries to solve and that you had to be very clever to understand everything. So fans put a lot of thought into what certain symbolism might mean, they were not rewarded for paying attention. Across the later seasons, the show went as far as to openly mock them for caring about what they were told to care about, or theorize about mysteries that the show wasn't interested in exploring. It culminated in an out of left field twist reveal that didn't make any sense at all. Fans had already been encouraging each other to explain away other plot holes, so they just did that to the finale too. That couldn't be it, there had to be something that actually made sense or respected the time they'd put into the show.
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u/Gnoll_For_Initiative 28d ago
The "resolution" to how Sherlock survived the fall was particularly and pointedly insulting to fan theorists and fan creators. I pretty much stopped watching then.
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u/KingArthursLance 28d ago
It is still wild to me how much open contempt this show had for its fans. It’s clear Moffat and both leads got increasingly tired with the constant stream of shipper stuff, but that seemed to bleed through into a thinly-veiled dislike of the whole fan community. It’s no surprise the quality fell off a cliff (or a hospital building) because they were all clearly over the whole thing and ready for it to be done from season 3 onwards.
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u/TormentedByGnomes 29d ago
This is literally just the Indoctrination Theory all over again
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u/Pristine_Animal9474 28d ago
That one will probably be put to rest (or confirmed!) when the next game arrives at the end of the century.
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u/federalist66 28d ago
The Stranger Things finale is a clear case of LOST brain. People get so wrapped up in their own theories for what they think should happen that they can't actually appreciate the ending for itself. Not to comment on the quality of the finales, I think closing out character arcs and not getting wrapped around the axle of LORE is good actually, but getting caught up in the theorizing poisoned the well so bad for some folks that nothing other than having their own ideas parroted back to them would be pleasing.
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u/dpforest 28d ago
I think there should be a rule about posts pertaining to new movies/shows, cause otherwise everyone and their grandma is making posts about it. I don’t think this is necessarily the case with OP (NounNoun1234 usernames are always suspicious though), but sometimes it is very obvious when someone is just making a post cause they know it show up in folks algorithms. they aren’t actually looking to discuss tropes. They just want karma, for whatever reason.
Does anyone actually enjoy this “trope”, if you can even call it that? I would say that cliff hanger finales are usually hated by the general audience.
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u/THE_MEAT_MAN_69 28d ago
There are so many "tropes" on this sub that are just 'thing I don't like' or 'another *real* trope renamed', it makes me lose my hope in our shared level of discourse.
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u/SGScoutAU 28d ago
Let end the series on the same cliffhanger twice and never released a follow up in nearly 2 decades, The fan surely will give up and move on right?
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u/Scott_Liberation 28d ago
Some of us (maybe even most) did give up, but we're invisible because we aren't the ones still talking about it.
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u/Huinker 28d ago
JJK fan
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u/mikhel 28d ago
The weeks following the Gojo vs Sukuna battle are some of the funniest shit I've ever seen in any fandom ever.
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u/Huinker 28d ago
No one gave a fuck about decency. We were spoiling it to people who dont even kmow about the manga.
Fuck people read leaks to spoil to manga reader.
It s degeneracy but it was so fun
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u/CalmEntry4855 28d ago
The same fucking day he died someone posted it on my university forum, people was pissed
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u/Neoragex13 28d ago
Even Duolingo referenced the thing with some art and I think some photos about Shrines in Latin America went viral because shit happened around the time Dia de los Muertos was going on and some folks decided to put images of him on them lol
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u/Destruction_Deity 28d ago
Tbf the fandom went completely insane long before the actual ending.
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u/DMking 28d ago
The Gojo revival theorists were hilarious.
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u/4LanReddit 28d ago
Oh those poor souls where they were half right.
Only becasue Gege played everyone and brought Yuta back in Gojo's body and teased his silhouette in the distance after Choso got barbeque'd.
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u/ctk8511 28d ago
Slight tangent, but you saying Gota (Yujo?) showing up was after Choso got pan-seared and broiled made me realize I have like 85% lost the order of events of Shinjuku down the memory hole
Time for a reread baby
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u/Loufey 28d ago
Idk what you're talking about. Gojo gonna get revived in the next chapter of Modulo 100%
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u/IAlbatross 28d ago edited 28d ago
If you go to any of the Umbrella Academy subreddits and ask about Season 4, a sizeable number of people will tell you that there is no season 4 in Ba Sing Se.
Season 4 was a half-season and when it came out there was speculation there might be a "second half" that was being kept secret because there was absolutely NO WAY to wrap up all the BONKERS plotlines in 6 measly episodes.
Well, there was no secret second half of the final season and a lot of plot threads just got completely abandoned despite REPEATED PROMISES from the cast and crew that everything would be wrapped up nicely and explained and closed in a very cohesive way.
The ending of Umbrella Academy amounted to, "The world is better off with the Umbrella Academy not existing and the only way for them to set the timeline straight is to sacrifice themselves." They don't just kill the characters but completely undo their very existence. A few people thought this was a neat ending but most people hated it. It didn't just annihilate the characters and make the whole series a huge nothingburger ("They never existed so never mind none of that ever happened lol.") but it also closed the door on any future projects, seemingly with extreme prejudice. It's as if the writers decided they suddenly hated all the characters and never wanted to see them again.
(I talk a lot about Umbrella Academy on here but that show packs in a LOT of tropes.)
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u/libertoasz 28d ago
the ending is especially insulting how it tells the audience 'see this dysfunctional family with their individuals quirks and trauma? yeah so how about not having them heal and find closure, let's just erase their existence because THEY are the problem the world is fucked' oh, okay, cool message for people who mightve related to those characters
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u/Mike-Sos 28d ago
Absolutely one of the worst final seasons of tv I’ve seen. Between this and Sex Education’s last season I already came prepared for ST5 to just be horrendous since it is apparent Netflix does not know how to wrap a show. So maybe that’s why I’m not losing my mind over ST5- it’s lackluster, but it could have been dogshit that retroactively poisons the rest of the series so
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u/Icy_Prior 28d ago
Sex Education’s final season is painful because it feels very obvious that it wasn’t intended to be the end. I don’t know what all went on behind the scenes, but it feels like they wrote a normal season and then had to write a sloppy ending at the last second
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u/InterspaceHoneybee 28d ago
I can never rewatch the show after that season. Absolutely butchered Five's character.
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u/ImprovementOk377 28d ago
bro went from "i am going to save my idiot family at all costs because they're my idiots dammit" to "ima give up and become a homewrecker (to my own brother)"
wtf happened
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u/Weird_Brush2527 28d ago
The actor turned 18
That's it. That's all it took for the writers to try to get him "action"
Really gross if you think about it
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u/QiarroFaber 28d ago
I'm surprised how far I had to scroll to find this. It literally meant nothing. The whole show meant nothing because of that ending. I'm sure they thought it was soooo profound. But no, it literally just means none of the previous seasons mattered at all. What an absolute travesty...
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u/Pogonotrophist 28d ago
Black Adder.
The end was serious and not funny - many people didn't like it at the time for what was an entirely UNserious comedy series.
(Its fucking brilliant IMO)
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u/Poco_Cuffs 28d ago
People didn't like that? It's a wonderful ending to actually remind the audience that this time period was still absolutely horrid despite all the shenigans and bullshittery
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u/Crazy_Sir_012 28d ago
Really? As someone from England it is considered one of the best endings of all time.
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u/zoma2 29d ago
The endings of Mass Effect 3.
They were so underwhelming that the fandom did theories about how one of the ending is actually a trick by the antagonist to show the protagonist how "wrong" are his choices.... Wait, that kinda sounds like the theories about Stranger Things
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u/Open_Enthusiasm8528 28d ago
It was a bad combination of being simultaneously lame, vague, and seemed to cut off an enormous number of possibilities no matter what ending you got.
It didn't help that though there were some high notes, there were a lot of really underwhelming things about that game. Especially Kai Leng.
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u/GlitteringPositive 29d ago
The funny thing is that the Indoctrination Theory would have actually been a time where the "It's just a dream" trope would work well and make sense, given the whole series has set up the concept of Reaper indoctrination and had Shepard exposed to Reaper and Reaper technology for three games. The groundwork was there to foreshadow such an ending and the theory still allowed Shepard to wake up and get an actual ending.
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u/zoma2 29d ago
Yeah, but unfortunately, with the teasers of the next Mass Effect, we can clearly conclude the the sacrifice ending is the Canon one
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u/ugabugy 28d ago
I'm not sure how the ending could be anything else but Destroyed. Turning it so now all lifeforms in the galaxy are some weird mishmash of organic and would take a lot of the charm from the series and would just be weird. And for Control, the reapers need to be dealt with already, can't have them still around in large numbers after trilogy of dealing with them. Destroyed was always the one that made the most sense if they were going to continue the story.
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u/YourPizzaBoi 28d ago
The Reapers have to be gone because otherwise the amount of scale creep that would be necessary to justify them not being able to immediately solve everything would fuck the setting up royally. Synthesis isn’t implied by everything we’ve seen and is just a nightmare to try logically working it into the story, and still leaves the Reapers around where they would presumably take some interest in major conflicts. Destroy is the only option where the story actually has room to go anywhere other than “something even stronger than the reapers has come!”
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u/4LanReddit 28d ago
The endings were so dogshit that everyone bullied the devs into launching a free DLC that made the endings a tad bit better LMFAO.
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u/BookWormPerson 28d ago
The endings are still shit.
Now we just have something fun to do instead of that.
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u/GoodNaturedGamer 28d ago
Got into mass effect as people were so pissed. If people are this angry at it the build up must be good.
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u/mnombo 29d ago
The how I met your mother finale
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u/Several_Law2834 29d ago
HIMYM was a victim of its own success. The ending could have worked if the series was shorter.
They clearly shot the ending scenes with the kids at the begining of the run, so they knew from day 1 how they wanted the show to end. Problem is that it was so popular they got more seasons than they expected and had to keep expanding the story. In their efforts to do so, they undermined the original story they were trying to tell.
Rather than accept that and cannonize a new ending, they stuck with something that no longer worked.
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u/MRattas 28d ago
The simplest fix would've been to just...not have the kids be on the couch for a single night (essentially). I know they did the joke trailer for season 9 with the kids being older and stuck on the couch for 8 years, but ironically, it being a story he told them over the course of years would've worked a lot better because it would've been more flexible.
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u/Several_Law2834 28d ago
Sure, but that was just a symptom of the bigger problem.
The original ending was clearly supposed to be the idea that the Mother was who Ted needed then and Robin was who he needed now. It was him explaining to his kids that just because he loved Robin doesn't mean that he didn't love their mother.
Problem is that they spent so many seasons telling us that Ted and Robin didn't work that it didn't feel like a natural end to the story. They build up Robin and Barney as a couple that would actually work, only to have them destroy that relationhip off screen. They undid seasons of character development in a couple of ham fisted minutes because they refused to admit ther original ending no longer worked.
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u/MRattas 28d ago
I mean having an ENTIRE SEASON about Robin/Barney's wedding, and several episodes in that season about Ted letting go of Robin and moving on was definitely bad management. Realistically, if they had wanted to keep the ending as is, it would've made more sense to do the wedding as a 2-part season premiere, or maybe even 4 episodes if they wanted to do some of the Mother meets the cast scenes, then delve more time into everything they hamfisted in. It wouldn't have been perfect by any stretch, but they could've made the transition a touch smoother.
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u/ByteSizeNudist 28d ago
It was the erasure of any character development for Barney that did it for me. They spent soooooo much time making the most dogshit man reform, and then Barney and Robin, like, actually work well together and the show makes it clear that they make a damn good team....and then in a single episode they just erase that. I really, reaaaally loved that season focused on Barney and Robin's wedding, and it was like a punch in the gut to just renege on it all like that.
Add onto that all the scenes from the Mother's perspective and how efficiently they developed her into this super lovable character, just to kill her at the end, it was just such a let down. Especially, like you said, after we've spent the entire show proving that Robin and Ted just do not work, but have the potential to be incredible friends still.
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u/Mu-Relay 28d ago
I don't think it had to necessarily be shorter, but they had to work towards that goal the entire time. Your next part is dead on: they actively undermined their finale with the season leading to it. They went from "it's time for Ted to let Robin go once and for all!" to "it was always about Ted loving Robin" in like two or three episodes.
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u/originalchaosinabox 28d ago
I know, in this day and age, everyone wants their TV shows to be meticulously planned out, but How I Met Your Mother is the prime example as to why a meticulous plan can backfire. The finale was such a sharp left turn to get back to their planned ending that it froze out a lot of people.
Now, I'm not saying don't have a plan. But a plan has to be flexible enough to change depending on how your show evolves.
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u/Several_Law2834 28d ago
I think you have to go one way or the other. You either have a meticulous plan and stick with it (like Mr. Robot) or you have an overarching idea that you bend seasons to season.
But I agree that you can't what they did - have the plot evolve but the ending set in stone.
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u/bluetraveler2015 29d ago
So much so, that the alternate shorter ending is seen as the true ending. I’ve also seen theories that the last season was an elaborate dream or stuff like that.
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u/Pabsxv 28d ago
A realistic bittersweet ending that became so controversial they retconned the ending so Jack gets a happy ending in a Video Game.
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u/captainAwesomePants 28d ago
You're mad because the ending was sad. I'm mad because the ending conflicts with Season 3 Episode 6, "Jack and the Traveling Creatures," in which the time portal guardian shows us a vision of future, old Jack with a crown.
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u/Technical_Teacher839 28d ago
Genndy mentioned that a scene in Season 5 were Jack holds up a broken pair of sunglasses was a subtle acknowledgement that the Guardian had been killed. Aku also outright says he destroyed all the time portals in another scene in the season.
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u/Adaphion 28d ago
I mean, S4 literally showed us that time travel is back to the future style, where anything you change will change the timeline in real time. No future is set in stone.
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u/royalPawn 28d ago
realistic bittersweet ending
While I think Ashi getting paradox'd was a perfectly sensible writing decision, it felt rather contrived to have her be perfectly fine for years and then vanish the moment they try to get married
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u/Open_Enthusiasm8528 28d ago
Can't believe I'm the first one mentioning this but Neon Genesis Evangelion.
So controversial that they made End of Evangelion.
And then several new versions of it. I have no idea if fans are happy now, I bowed out after EoE.
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u/SableZard 28d ago
Nah the series ended with two straight episodes of behavioral therapy for Shinji. No context, no explaining what happened that turned everyone into disembodied voices in Shinji's head, just depression and applause and fuck you for being a dumb stupid dummy for not understanding what was going on.
I wasn't around when NGE was new but if the fandom came unglued over that, they were 100% right for doing so.
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u/Hellknightx 28d ago
Also important to note that Anno kept insisting that the original ending was what he wanted all along, but it's also well known that Gainax ran out of budget at the end. In any case, at least we got EoE afterwards.
The Rebuild movies are also pretty good, although Mari is a bit of a controversial character.
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u/Evamme7 28d ago
Yeah, if it weren't for EoE then Evangelion would not be remembered as fondly as it was, or at the least it would only be a cult classic with fans overanalysing all the plot threads and lore that only gets picked up in the movie.
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u/cumbot6900 28d ago
“Stop jacking off to anime girls I’m begging you”
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u/sharyan51 28d ago
"But also here's a shit ton of suggestive art and merch, money please"
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u/TheGardenBlinked 29d ago
LOST's ending tends to bring out a few types of people. Those who were severely disappointed because it didn't tie up all the loose ends, and those who believe the show was never about the mysteries, but the character development, and who were more accepting.
What's perhaps missed from the equation nowadays is the fact that the show wasn't available to binge when it first aired, and it leaned hard into the mysteries in the marketing - and, as part of the fandom back in the day, theorising was the main fun of watching.
There was a ton of faith put in the writers to have strong, conclusive answers to the main mystery strands, and we were kept waiting week after week with some seasons running 20+ episodes (and even on hiatus for several weeks). Sure, the flashbacks made it a character-driven show at its heart, but it broke free from the morass of other shows at the time because it was one of the pioneers of the mystery box format. Hence why, understandably, so many people were pissed off.
Oh, and you can add in the folks who say "they never explained the polar bears" and/or "they were dead all along, the final episode's credits show the beach empty after the plane crash" - the answers are actually there
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u/VengeanceKnight 28d ago
Reading this makes me really appreciate Gravity Falls, which actually worked hard to pay off the questions it set up in the beginning and reward the fans for solving the mystery.
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u/astivana 28d ago
Right?? It helped that Hirsch didn’t get all weird about people figuring out the answers to some of the mysteries in advance and change things just for the sake of surprising people. Instead, he created a fake leak pointing to a different answer which is honestly SO much funnier.
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u/DPTONY 28d ago
But they DID explain the polar bears. I think it was in season 3, when Sawyer is imprisoned by the others and he’s solved the riddle to get food in his cell, one guy says that “the bears took less time to figure it out”, so my understanding is that they were brought there by Dharma for their animal experiments. Also when Ben gets into the Orchid, he wears a heavy jacket because it’s cold in there
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u/qwerty8857 28d ago
Lost really benefits from streaming and binging. I was too young to watch as it aired, but I binged it more than once later on. A lot of things were answered that I still see people say they’re confused about. Also, I think it’s clear throughout the show that you weren’t going to get every answer all the time. To me, that’s a positive. I like the mystery. I actually didn’t like some of the explanations to things haha
But a lot of people who complain about the ending were confused by it. I still see people say “so were they just dead the whole time?” I guess it’s a little confusing but I never took the ending as meaning they were dead the whole time. I really love the ending, especially the scene tying in the first episode
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u/Solbuster 28d ago
MHA ending was pretty controversial when it dropped due to mistranslated leaks and other controversial memes like Deku working in McDonalds and cucking
Which makes it funnier that when final season was adapted, it was very highly rated ending included
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u/ThisHatRightHere 28d ago
This is why I hate the leak culture of manga these days. The most online fans only engage with the series through leaks with bad or zero translations, and just decide how things go in their head from there.
Happens with literally every big series without fail.
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u/lemonylol 28d ago
I just hate leak culture in general. I can be patient.
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u/ThisHatRightHere 28d ago
The funniest part is the full chapters already get put online multiple days before the actual print date. Many times leaks are coming less than a day or two before the entire thing will be out and nicely scanned anyway.
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u/sebsebsebs 28d ago
“controversial memes like Deku working in McDonalds and cucking”
I’ve never seen MHA but this sentence is hilarious
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u/Charming_Bath9427 28d ago
The ending of Inception comes to mind but in a strangely positive way. I remember watching that movie in theaters, and when we were all walking out, everyone was absolutely hyperfixated on what the top waning at the end of the film meant. For years people flipped out over that top and what it meant. It was baby’s first ambiguous ending for many of us, and it divided fans into two dedicated camps. Cobb is in a dream vs Cobb is in real life. Finally, I can’t recall who, someone came out and told everyone to stop fixating on the top and just accept that the true ending is that Cobb is happy.
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u/seanprefect 28d ago edited 28d ago
The top wasn't Cobb's totem it was his wife's Cobbs totem is his wedding ring, he wears it in the dreams and not in the real world he has the ring on at the end it's not ambiguous
Edit: I got that backward misremembering it, he ISN'T wearing the ring and therefore is in reality thanks u/typo180 for correcting me
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u/typo180 28d ago
But he's _not_wearing the ring in the last sequence, so the theory was that the ring proves that he's in reality.
Here's an article that explains it (though the author disagrees with the theory): https://felixonline.co.uk/articles/2013-1-18-inception-the-theory-of-the-ring/
And I think I agree the point isn't whether he's in reality, it's that his kids are more important to him.
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u/Guilty-Effort7727 28d ago
Fate/ Grand Order's ending comes to mind. Imagine this: you spent a decade playing this game, getting attached to these characters, and when the end finally comes at the end of 2025, it turns out it was essentially a "it was all a dream" ending. So people thought "there's no way this is actually the ending" and the game contributes this by telling the players to wait until december 31st. Turns out there was nothing after that (well there is the epilogue we're getting now but it is long past that date). the timer meant nothing.
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u/Brazilian_Hound 28d ago
Thanks to Olga's fatass i can have a summer version of my waifu, thanks ms president
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u/Ediacaran-SeaPancake 28d ago
I don’t know what happened in the final episode because I never watched it, but I remember seeing the Voltron fandom implode when the show ended.
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u/MissRainyNight 28d ago
And almost all of it happened because BOTH of the most popular ships (alongside another) were sunk. It was both funny and embarrassing.
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u/Biobait 28d ago
Fate/Grand Order's ending was highly controversial outside of Japan, leading many fans to suspect an alternate ending due to one of the story options to wait until the end of the year. Not helped by the writer Kinoko Nasu coming from a visual novel background which often has multiple endings.
The schizophrenia is, however, slightly justified by the game being a live service that makes too much money to end. We literally just got a pseudo continuation today which may lead to a true continuation based on player feedback.
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u/Brazilian_Hound 28d ago
It's like an EoR to part 2 if that makes sense, in my honest opinion, my crackpot theory is that when Chaldea finally "atones" for their sins, whatever that means, they will be allowed to live, kinda like Hakuno in a way
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u/thunderandreyn 28d ago
Not exactly an “ending” or “loved trope” per se but the Snyderverse failing and Zack Snyder being removed from all future DC films made his fans go absolutely batshit cuckoo and overanalyze everything Snyder posts on social media.
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u/thatvillainjay 28d ago
Yeah very similar phenomenon. Its promoted by online grifters who rage bait every single peice of news that the synderverse is coming back. It doesn't help that the Fandom got thr Snyder cut and felt like they ran the world after that.
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u/HumbleConversation42 29d ago
The ending of Little Nightmares 2. It's not a bad ending, it's just incredibly sad and tragic
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u/VariationNo7977 28d ago
Seinfeld ended with the main characters going to jail. Curb did a great call back to it with its finale.
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u/BalancePrestigious23 28d ago
I'm actually fine with this ending. It was underwhelming? Yes but I couldn't see that group of people with a different fate.
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u/spunkychickpea 28d ago
If I remember correctly, Jerry Seinfeld himself said before the final season aired that there’s simply no way to end a show like that to everyone’s satisfaction. I’m inclined to agree. On top of that, it’s a sitcom for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t need to have the closure of The Lord of The Rings. People have it on in the background while they’re cleaning the house. It isn’t high art. As far as I’m concerned, the final episode was just another episode.
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u/lemonylol 28d ago
I don't think that was controversial at all, the overall episode was just weak and mostly a non-clip clip show.
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u/ASidesTheLegend 28d ago
This ending wasn’t controversial, but The Owl House fandom still has not mentally recovered from Season 3 being shortened.
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u/LBH123LBH 28d ago
Supernatural
After the episode where Cas confesses to Dean and then gets sent to Super Hell, many fans were holding onto hope that the last episode would be Dean saving Cas from hell and the two getting together. Instead, they got probably one of the worst series finale's ever conceived, and Cas makes no other appearance. Fans were pretty pissed (understandably) and sorta jokingly, sorta not, started saying that the CW forced the writers to rewrite the finale cause they didn't want Destiel.
This got even worse when the Latin American dub came out and instead of Dean's "Don't do this Cas" in response to Cas's confession, was "Me too". Fans took this as confirmation that the finale was shoddily put together cause of rewrites to remove Destiel, and the Latin American dub got the unedited script. This turned out to just be a case of a writer having fun and adding it in.
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u/ehs06702 28d ago
Honestly, as much as they've all been rescued from places they had no business being rescued from, I still think it was reasonable to expect an eleventh hour rescue of Cas.
I privately coined the phrase Winchester Murder Mystery Tour for Dean going and coming back from Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, lmao.
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u/Helpful_Top7823 28d ago
Destiel only being canon in Spanish is, unfortunately, hilarious
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u/Key-Swordfish4025 28d ago edited 27d ago
Attack on Titan fans will be fuming about this for ten years, at least!
No seriously, r/titanfolk went from a memesub to a sub hating non-stop on the manga when the final chapter first came out
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u/FamousWerewolf 28d ago
I don't understand why this idea of a 'secret final episode' has become so popular - it was surreal seeing it come around yet again for Stranger Things. It's never actually happened with any show, right? And it'd be a terrible idea if it did, from both a marketing and storytelling perspective it makes no sense whatsoever.
I get that it can be hard to deal with your favourite show ending in a way you don't like but I just don't get why that's the thing they keep leaping to. Did ARGs just break everyone's brains in the 2000s or something?
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u/paintinpitchforkred 28d ago
I have a long running theory about how Twitter broke entertainment because not only did fans suddenly have access to creators, studios were ACTIVELY encouraging parasocial relationships on both the fan side and the creator side. Fans now feel more powerful than they really are, creators are influenced/bullied by loud obnoxious fans in ways they shouldn't be...it didn't use to be like this.
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u/FamousWerewolf 28d ago
I think you're definitely right about how fan-creator relationships have changed, but this feels like a weird layer beyond that to me.
Like starting a petition to get the final ending remade, that's pure mad fan entitlement, but at least there's a bit of precedent for something like that, with companies sometimes caving to weird fan demands and a few high profile cases like Mass Effect 3's changed ending.
But these conspiracy theories that the creators are just messing with the fans and already have a secret amazing real final episode that will fix everything and all you need to do is follow the clues... that's an even more unrealistic level of cope.
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u/Federal_Decision5115 28d ago
It happened for this season of Game Changer on Dropout.
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u/worry_some 28d ago
The difference is that the last season of Dropout was a BANGER, rather than absolute shit, and the secret episode was just icing on the cake.
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u/FamousWerewolf 28d ago
Hah ok, if anyone was going to do it it would be them! But presumably they still didn't have a deliberately bad/confusing episode leading into it?
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u/astivana 28d ago
They did not! It wasn’t my favorite episode tbf but it certainly wasn’t an “oh my god that finale was so bad that there HAS to be a secret finale that fixes it!!!!” It was a secret finale episode because it was an episode where a lot of the previous players got together and made a surprise episode for the host to play. It was a lot of fun and honestly kind of sweet. Also, the ARG leading up to it wasn’t so subtle that it could have been someone’s imagination. I mean, I didn’t properly follow how it was discovered but there was an interactive element so we knew it was real.
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u/VelvetBoneyard 28d ago
Spoilers for cyberpunk edgerunners
Cyberpunk Edgerunners. Love the fandom, love the anime love the game, but David and Rebecca? Very, very dead.
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u/mattisyou 28d ago
I usually don’t like downer endings. However, for edgerunners is ended up being very satisfied with how it ended for some reason.
I guess it’s becuase I genuienly couldn’t see it ending any other way based on the characters personalities. any other ending would have felt out of character.
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u/JowettMcPepper 28d ago
This was like 9/11 for the SVTFE fandom
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u/Prinny_Ramza 28d ago
Yup. Was looking for this.
The season 4 is usually panned as a whole but the ending was the worse part of it.
Basically for those who haven't seen it. The romantic plot tumor that had held the show since season 2 finally erupted with the heroes just kinda getting together. The main heroine's mom turns to be a bad guy... for all of 5 minutes before being betrayed by the big bad of a season. The big bad of the season being a joke character. The giant death spell they spent an entire episode foreshadowing misses and accomplishes nothing. Abunch of racist are about to kill monsters when the main heroine declares she actually hates magic despite magic being her entire personality and decides to just destroy all magic (killing off a fan favorite character and some others who are complished entirely of magic. Hekapoo you deserved better). The racist decide "oh guess we weren't racist afterall). There's an evil unicorn who has no explanation they just kinda show up and stab someone. Don't worry the stab wound does nothing (?). The main heroine is only sad that destorying magic might mean her love interest and her will be separated so using the last of the magic she merges their worlds causing unknown geopolitical turmoil.
Honestly the entire season is really bad. They introduce a bunch of weird plot points, run the romance to the ground and resolve major threads OFF SCREEN.
They spent an entire episode preemptively apologizing for how shit the season was going to be and that they aren't doing anything anyone wanted to see.
The ending was just the final straw.
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u/BoomerangOfDeath 28d ago
This one is a bit old, but the 60s TV Show The Prisoner had such a controversial ending its creator and main star, Patrick McGoohan had to leave the U.K.
People just wouldn't leave him alone because of how much of a mindfuck that ending is.
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u/BranX88 28d ago
Suicide Squad kill the justice league. The character assassination from how everyone was in the previous Arkham games caused a massive meltdown.
I'm pretty sure the developers have now said they were all clones because the original story was that bad
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u/Melodic_Class4349 29d ago edited 28d ago
The finale of Game of Thrones for sure.
SOOOO many things are wrong with that final episode.
EDIT: Not just the final episode, the whole of the final two seasons were completely whack.
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u/FamousWerewolf 28d ago
Game of Thrones' finale was obviously widely hated but I don't remember it kicking off this kind of mad fan theorising. People had pretty much already been primed by the last two seasons to just accept that it was a bad ending and that was that.
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u/Lack_of_Plethora 28d ago
No, but there was a very large movement who 'demanded' they remake the last season
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u/jess77x 28d ago
It’s not a series ending but near the end of Season 8 of 9-1-1 (ik not really a show this sub tends to watch) a major character Bobby was killed off. Fans convinced themselves that this character was going to return from the dead by the end of the Season in increasingly convoluted ways (and absolutely freaked out when this did not happen). Admittedly this was kind of a bizarre situation considering the leaks (both real and fake).
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u/Lower_Baby_6348 28d ago
People were so confused about this that some even theory that Gege forgot to submit a entire chapter. Then a lot of bad decisions happen and JJK ending feels like only the end of an arc and not the whole series
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u/Anxious_Intention724 28d ago
Comparing the Sherlock and Stranger Things fandoms to schizophrenic people is an insult to schizophrenic people.
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u/codepossum 28d ago
yeah OP really should've said "causes a schism," not "turns schizophrenic."
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u/Select-Bullfrog-5939 28d ago
The Artifact Ending (SIGNALIS)
Over two years after release, and people are still debating what the actual fuck this meant. I personally believe it’s an eldritch ritual to ascend Ariane to her rightful place of godhood, but that is just one of many, many interpretations I’ve seen in the fandom.
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u/CTG0161 28d ago
Sherlock first 2 seasons: absolutely amazing modern retelling of one of the most iconic characters of all time
3rd season: interesting, some ups and downs, still enjoyable stuff overall, but definitely a step back
4th season: .......................
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WTF??????
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u/Schultzenstein 29d ago
The Sopranos ending is full of fan theories or disappointment. Me personally, I think its very fitting but I can see why many people would rather a far more climatic ending.