r/TopCharacterTropes • u/MeepMan324 • 2d ago

Hated Tropes (Hated Trope) Endings so awful they completely destroy the legacy of the media.

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  1. Two and a Half Men's final episode teased Charlie Sheen's character coming back and going to harm the other characters whilst also having insults to his character and Charlie Sheen himself. It's clear the director had a grudge and the ending where his character comes up to knock then get crushed by a piano before it cuts to the director before he says "winning" before getting crushed by another piano
  2. 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 (Star Vs The Forces Of Evil)
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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

I usually think “THIS ENDING IS DOGSHIT” people overhype things for their given piece of media. AOT’s ending was flawed but not property-destroying and I think TADC’s was actually pretty decent.

Not with Chainsaw Man. This ending fucking blows. It’s genuinely the worst conclusion to any piece of media I’ve ever seen. It is legendarily terrible and Fujimoto will never and should never live this choice down.

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u/EntropicMeatMachine 2d ago

I'd really like to see what was going on behind the scenes of Part 2's production.

Part 2 arguably started way better than Part 1. Asa was a better protagonist, the artwork was completely flawless, it was absolutely shaping up to be a perfect sequel.

Then you get to Chainsawman Church and its like he had a stroke. Nothing makes any sense, the pacing is completely breakneck, the artwork completely falls apart (obviously due to being overworked).

So much of later Part 2 just feels like malicious compliance.

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u/Due_Enthusiasm1145 2d ago

Almost certainly a case of "shonen jump mangaka had beginning of series as an idea in their heads for years, then eventually reached a point where they didn't have a plan and ran up against how brutal jump's deadlines are, not giving them the breathing room to figure out what to do, resulting in them essentially doggy paddling until they can't anymore."

Happens more often than you would think. Chainsaw man is just a REALLY egregious example of it.

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u/Urusander 2d ago

Stormlight Archive says hello. I swear this always happens with long series where author had been polishing an idea for a while resulting in a very strong start, but has no clue how to develop it after initial hit.

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u/SpecialistEast9457 1d ago

Also ironic since part 2 of chainsaw man was a biweekly manga sometimes so fujimoto had more leeway than most!

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u/chum-guzzling-shark 2d ago

My theory is the publisher wanted chainsaw man to be the focus of part 2 and pressured Fuji. The ending is a big fuck you to them and the fans that didn't understand what he was trying to do with part 2

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u/Kirosh2 2d ago

His editor was still the same as for Chainsaw Man, and is the editor for works like Spy x Family, Dandadan, or Centuria as well.

I feel like it's more likely Fujimoto got burned out of his own series, and ended it with what he had planned.

Except that it doesn't fit the buildup to it at all.

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u/chum-guzzling-shark 2d ago

didnt they part ways from the publisher?

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u/Kirosh2 2d ago

The editor built his own publishing company, but was still working with the Jump on those series with a contract.

The full departure is recent, and might have been because he was trying to poach talents to his company (based on rumors). And we do know that Fujimoto will follow him no matter what, as he has been his editor since his Fire Punch Days.

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u/eltristo66 2d ago edited 2d ago

The shift to a female incel was incredible. I fucking love the beginning of part two. Gradually less and less was making sense, but I put up with it a little longer because it’s chainsaw man and stupid bullshit kind of comes with the territory. I got to about the point where eating demons causes the concepts they embody to not exist and realized that there was never going to be any kind of satisfying conclusion and that I no longer cared. I wanted off Fujimotos wild ride

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u/Quirky_Ground_6417 2d ago

I think a lot of these recent Manga authors just get so bored and burnt out with their work they just try to end them quickly and wrap it up so they can move on to other projects so they just stop caring about story and art

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u/Chapeaux 2d ago

Feels like he was done with it and wanted to do the ending earlier but was pressured to continue.

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u/ToeCompton 2d ago

I think he just got in over his head with how convoluted the second part became. It was an amazing run, and pulling it all together would have been a masterstroke, but he just did not have it in him. Too bad (but seriously how you gonna do Nayuta like that?)

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u/Solo_Wing_Buddy 2d ago

From what I heard, he was getting bored writing CSM and just wanted to finish it no matter what so he could move onto the next idea that had him interested. No idea how much truth there is in that but I believe it.

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u/arcodash 2d ago

I'd say more burnt out than bored.

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u/topdangle 2d ago

i mean he straight up does not give a shit about finishing the linework on characters even at the start of part 2.

drawing manga is a brutal job but if you hit it big it pays really well (big portion of every volume sale goes straight to the artist). part 1 already set him up for life.

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u/this_is_a_hellscape2 2d ago

drawing manga is a brutal job

And this is what forever cements Togashi as the penultimate god of manga.

Man fucks off for X days, offers no explanation, comes back for 3-4 months and drops generational chapters, announces a hiatus, drops concept art, repeat.

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u/Blupoisen 2d ago

Nayuta's stuff genuinely pissed me off

The most egregious case of fridging I have seen

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u/Mironder 2d ago

Do you mean that part 2 had an amazing run?

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u/ToeCompton 2d ago

I thought so yes. Although the whole series was great, I was really vested in the second part, especially the whole Asa/Yoru dynamic

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u/dearth_of_passion 2d ago

I stopped giving a shit about CSM when Nayuta got written out.

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u/Shinard 2d ago

People say TADC's ending was bad? Huh. I really enjoyed it. Sure, it ties up a bit too neatly, a bit too happy , but it's nowhere near terrible - I thought the Jax stuff was genuinely great. I think some people just want to complain, sometimes.

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u/AegisThievenax 2d ago

TADCs ending wasnt even particularly bad, I just wish they had more of a general focus on characters

We were supposed to get a ragatha episode which just ended up being completely unrelated to ragatha

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u/goedegeit 2d ago

Yeah like there were bits of writing that weren't great here and there but I feel like people massively exaggerate the pitfalls because it's a trans story written by a trans woman.

Like there's real criticisms I have of Steven Universe, but there was a lot of hate directed at that show just because it was queer, and people knew they couldn't say that so they got mad at the writing or the shape of the mouth or whatever.

With TADC though, I think a lot of the audience are children with terrible media literacy who wants everything to be a FNAF lore wiki entry.

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u/Blupoisen 2d ago

People just really but REALLY hate Jax and hate the fact the entire episode was dedicated to him

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u/GetInTheKitchen1 2d ago

It was a good JAX EPISODE. it was not a good ensemble cast episode. jax straight up consumed the show. I hate her for it.

What more about zooble and gangle, kinger and bubble? 

And spoiler alert going through the ringer is not an excuse to be an ass esp when others abstract over your bad coping mechanisms. take some responsibility....

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u/-theprototype- 1d ago

Jax and Pomni are the main characters, so it's going to prioritize them over the rest of the cast. Kinger and co. just aren't entitled to the same time.

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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

I think the stuff with Caine needed more time, but animation is also very expensive and Gooseworx probably prioritized a story that’s more relevant to our current social climate what with the transphobia and such

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u/Reeyous 2d ago

Gooseworx was also already starting to check out of the story about halfway through the show and just wanted to be done with it because the fanbase was already such a fustercluck. Not to mention the asshats that were already going after her for the sin of existing as a trans person.

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u/GetInTheKitchen1 2d ago

Ues this too i feel like it was going in a diff direction and this was unfortunately the best outcome. the jax lovers were insufferable and ised jax's popularity as an excuse to be assholes. Good thing Gooseworx turned Jax into something those assholes hate but with just A LITTLE better a/b plot pacing TADC would have been amazing 10/10 endinhg. the whole caine arc at the finale was a ok but i need a better conclusion than each char learns their irl fate and is straight happy about it. it was a bit too neat imo.

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u/Pegussu 2d ago

As someone who watched it after the finale and barely knew it existed beforehand, my impression is that the appeal of the show for a lot of people was the mystery of the setting. When the finale turned out to be entirely character driven, they disliked it because it didn't really explain anything about the "mysteries" the show had set up.

Personally, I feel like the show didn't really set up any mysteries that it didn't answer and any remaining ambiguity doesn't need to be explained.

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u/wurmsrus 2d ago

my only complaint with TADC's ending is that it could have been better if was split up and fleshed out into 3 ~half hour episodes rather than one hour long episode first covering from end of episode 8 to Jax's abstraction could have given more details on how the rest to the cast adapting to life without Caine and the knowledge they're all copies. 2nd episode would be basically the same as the middle section of the finale we got, ending with the building of the pillow fort for abstracted Jax.(maybe on the shot of Caine watching the cast on the couch if they wanted a cliffhanger) Third episode would give same amount of time to Caine's redemption arc as finale and used the extra time to flesh out what life is like for the cast and Caine afterwards rather than it just being a montage.

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u/smallerpuppyboi 2d ago

Fujimoto is GOATed at oneshots, but his work should never be serialized again.

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u/nopethatswrong 2d ago

Never really joined the discussion about AoT's ending, only memes that popped up. You seem to have a measured approach, why do you think the ending was flawed?

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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

It introduced parallels and concepts that I don’t think the series had properly foreshadowed. The attempt to connect Mikasa and Ymir seems forced, I don’t know why they needed to add the detail of Eren getting his mom killed when it hadn’t been foreshadowed.

I think that Eren was not actually the mega-cool genocidal gigachad people thought he was and actually a terrified teenage boy scraping together the best thing he could consider for a solution while having an incoherently bizarre worldview, so I don’t really find those complaints valid. I think the “10 years at least” thing was going way too far onto the nose. The anime leans to it being deliberately comedic but even then I don’t think it should be there because it undercuts the scene.

AGAIN, I accept criticism of it but I also don’t viscerally hate it. It’s a 4/10 in the manga and like a 6/10 with the anime.

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u/Ghede 2d ago edited 2d ago

As someone who was a fan of Fujimoto since Fire Punch...

yeah, the ending is bad. It does directly tell you why it was bad though.

The Japanese Manga industry is very, very, very exploitative. It takes artists with passion who by and large cannot earn a living making Manga. Most of them might not even get published past a one-shot.

The worst thing you can do though, is succeed. You will be made into a spectacle, a celebrity... and still underpaid, in most cases. Outside of some super successful strong personalities who either owned the IP rights outright, or aggressively negotiated their contracts... Mangaka aren't paid shit, and they are very, very overworked. They also typically don't see a dime of the merch/anime sales.

I don't think he wanted to do part 2 at all. But he was probably trapped in a contract, and the success of part 1 meant they would never let him out of it. Forced to write and draw something that increasingly made him miserable. Trapped between his need to create, the demands placed on him by his success by both the public and his bosses... So the series limped along and ended with "Chainsaw man was a mistake, success has ruined me"

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u/MegatonDoge 2d ago

AoT's ending did end up destroying its legacy though. While I do agree that it wasn't the worst ending in history, it made sure that every discussion about AoT would involve its ending.

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u/Sketchy278 2d ago

Nah most people I’ve met irl love the ending, and are surprised when I tell them about the discourse surrounding it-I have yet to meet one person that even somewhat enjoys csm’s ending

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u/MegatonDoge 2d ago

You do know that we're in a thread about botched endings, aren't you? It isn't a competition either whether more people hate Chainsawman ending or AoT ending. I don't really want to go into irl aspects because the conversations would be vastly different based on the friend group you keep.

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u/Patenski 2d ago

I hate how I can't see any scene without the ending making it worse in retrospective. The first episode is totally ruined.

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u/MegatonDoge 2d ago

Yeah, I was planning to rewatch AoT because I felt that it would become better with a rewatch. After the ending, I didn't feel the need to do that, I don't think many do either.

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u/TotallyObviousBot 2d ago

How was AoT's ending flawed? That was the only place for that story to go. Are you one of those people who thinks a story needs a happy ending for everyone to be good?

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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

I explained my reasoning but basically I think that the stuff with Mikasa and Ymir wasn’t shown as a parallel clearly enough and Isayama did not devote enough time to carefully handle something like Stockholm Syndrome with a single line, and I think that Eren killing his mom was an unnecessary shocking swerve.

The dialogue was clunky. The anime cleaned that up a lot but “10 years at least!” Still feels a little flat because I feel like the anime took the side of it being intended to be funny which sort of undercuts what is supposed to be the most emotional scene in the series.

I don’t hate it, should have made that clear. It still mostly follows through on the story and invokes the emotions and thoughts it was supposed to. The anime version is a 6/10.

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u/Fossekall 2d ago

I never finished it. What's so bad about it?

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u/MegatonDoge 2d ago

It was all a dream. The real issue was that Fujimoto couldn't figure out where the series should go after a few arcs as he hadn't planned it out and just started shitposting with time as he stopped caring and felt that people should hate Chainsawman.

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u/Blupoisen 2d ago

In the middle of what feels like the second act one of the characters basically say "I'll kill myself and erase my existence"

Somehow it fixes everything and everyone have an happy ending, that's it that's the ending

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u/an_agreeing_dothraki 2d ago

I think TADC’s was actually pretty decent.

mark my words in a few years people are going to think the ending haters are mad at absolutely nothing. The source of this is because of fan-theory brain

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u/Earlier-Today 2d ago

Wait, there are people who think the Amazing Digital Circus' ending was terrible? That's insane - it's exceptionally well done. I could understand people being disappointed it didn't end how they wanted, but it's absolutely a well written, well executed ending.

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u/DarkenedSpear 2d ago

Would you mind tldring the ending and/or the reasons it's disappointing to one who only has passing knowledge of the franchise?

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u/2ndlifeinacrown 2d ago

Can you please tell me whats wrong with the ending? I know nothing about the manga but I wanna know how they fucked up

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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

Full universe reset with no foreshadowing so that none of the events of the series ever happened, not even the protagonists know what happened. It’s also done as a Deus Ex Machina. Characters that needed to stay dead for narrative weight brought back in the epilogue without explanation. Half-dozen side characters either receive no narrative explanation/resolution or point to them, including the main villain. The author writes an apocalypse but forgets to explain how it’s resolved so the world will probably still end in the reset universe.

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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

If you tried to think of every way you are not supposed to resolve a story this ending would fulfill it in some fashion.

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u/2ndlifeinacrown 2d ago

Holy hell, this is super weird. Thank you for explaining. Can I ask, what's the thing with the posted manga page, where the girl calls the dude chainsaw man? Why is that important/what does it mean?

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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

The girl was the deuteragonist of the second half, the guy was the protagonist. He could turn into a dude with chainsaw hands in the original universe but can’t now but she calls himself Chainsaw Man because he had one out in a bid of cheap fanservice. This might imply they have some subconscious sense of the previous events, but they still don’t actually remember anything.

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u/2ndlifeinacrown 2d ago

Holy shit this is so weird. Its like the jjba stone ocean ending but bad. Thanks again for the explanation 🫶

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u/Disastrous-Dare-6926 2d ago

TADC's ending works, but imo to an extent it feels like path of least resistance was taken. Like instead of doing what made its inspirations stick for so long it just kind of becomes thie heavy handed parable for growth. It feels like it abandons its premise in lieu of emotional comfort something it did hint during earlier episodes, but didnt really commit to. My guess is some of the older fanbase didn't like that

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u/Nico_the_Suave 2d ago

I mean...were people really deluding themselves into thinking Chainsawman was ever good in the second half? Like, the ending to me was just everything the series had become dialed up to 11. I frankly enjoyed it in a "so bad it's good" way.

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u/addictedtoketamine2 2d ago

I ignored all the red flags because I thought Fujimoto would pull together all these bizarre plot threads into something instead of just dropping it when he couldn’t handle it anymore

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u/iamanengine1 2d ago

Will they fix it for the anime…?

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u/MegatonDoge 2d ago

No chance. Part 1 still has a good ending though so you can stop there if you want.

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u/spar2031 2d ago

You just didn't get it