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Game of Thrones, How I met your Mother, Lost, great stories don’t always have great endings but that’s the bigger question, can a bad ending ruin a story? 

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What makes a bad ending, why do some people hate the How I met your mother finale so passionately, what about it makes the viewer feel betrayed by what they’ve been watching for the past 9 seasons? Is it because had a pre-conception of what the ending would be, well yes and no, there’s a great phrase attributed to Orson Welles, that goes something like this: “the public doesn’t know what it wants” so you have to try to give the public what they want while also giving them what they didnt know they wanted, in the case of How I met your mother, spoilers for How I met your mother, the public wants Ted to be with the Mother, that’s what the show has been telling is going to happpen since its very first scene, but at the same time, the show has been establishing that Ted wants to be with Robin, time and time again, when you think Ted has moved on from Robin, he goes back to her again.  And as seasons went on the sentiment around it got worse, like Robin is getting married to one of your best friends and you still cannot take a hint, not to say that this is the first and only season to have the titular Mother, whose name is Tracy, be a series regular, and we get some flashforwards during the season of Ted and Tracy together, all that just to get to the ending killing her and having Ted going back to Robin not even ten minutes later, and if that wouldn’t be that bad already, they try to establish that the only reason Ted is telling his children that is so they can be cool with him, getting together with Robin at the ending 

Game of Thrones was probably the biggest show of its time, while also being one of the most expensive, the show was for 4 seasons, highly praised and generally thought to be one of the greatest, starting on 5 the opinion began to drop, especially regarding the dorne arc, but it was still a great hit, season 6 also had some non-favorable reviews, but season 7 is when things started to get grim being the most divisive season of the show, some loved while others hated, but season 8 was the nail on the coffin, I gotta put in some context from the time, Game of Thrones creators and main writers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had recently closed a deal with Lucasfilm to work on a Star Wars trilogy and a 200 million Netflix deal, all that combined meant that D&D  wanted to end the show as soon as possible, and even though season 8 was the only season that was had a 2 year break to be made, it ended up being the worst season by a large mile, everything about this season was horrible, things that were building since the very first episode, came and went so quickly, you could almost forget it even happened, it was so unimaginably bad it made its writers get fired. 

Attack on titan is a curious case, different from the other two this one is an anime, so it will have a more eastern way of writing, even though you can clearly see things it takes from western tv shows, season 1-3 are some of the best seasons of any tv show periodt, the style of writing, the twists, everything felt akin to the aforementioned Game of Thrones, but things started to declined from the “final season” onwards, which was not the final season, since we had like two seasons and a movie after that, but season 4, the “final season” was very different from the previous seasons, it started with a timeskip and with characters in a completely new way of thinking than where we left off, and as it went with each new part of the “final season” it just started getting worse and worse, until we reached that ending, and to be fair it was much worse in the manga. 

Okay, but in the end, do I think a bad ending can ruin a story? Surprisingly no, even though I kinda vented a lot about these endings in this video, I still really like these tv shows, and went back to then after their ending, because to me, it’s not so much about the ending, but the journey that took us there, and even though what was at end of that journey wasn’t very good that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the actually good parts of the story.