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

[u/MeepMan324]

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)

[u/waldeinsamkeit666]

now you can find BTS footage that all but confirms that. cast & crew repeatedly ask the writing team for clarification on plot details relevant to their jobs and get back “we’re figuring that out” or “we don’t know yet” instead of an actual answer. it’s shameful tbh

[u/Robo-Connery → u/waldeinsamkeit666]

Sometimes writers write mysteries that they themselves can't solve satisfactorily.

Take Lost, the absolute pinnacle example of this, if you want to have long term theorising and discussion about your show across seasons then its good to have this really puzzling stuff, little details sprinkled in that fans can really grasp on to. What TV shows tend to do though is sprinkle in clues that don't mean anything and then later retcon them to the solution that they just wrote. Sometimes the clues don't fit the final solution at all.

Movies don't have this issue cause they are self-contained they cane dit the whole movie as one, and self-contained books too but long book series have the same issue.

[u/waldeinsamkeit666 → u/Robo-Connery]

the Lost writers have admitted they started trawling internet fan forums for ideas 🫠 that was more JJ Abrams’ broader “mystery box” writing problem in that he never has a good answer for what’s in the proverbial box (if he has an answer at all) and so he often fumbles the ending when it comes time to conclude the narrative. it’s why a lot of his work is very hit-or-miss.

[u/goodnamestaken10 → u/Robo-Connery]

LOST was quite a bit worse than people give it credit for.

The grand directive was very clearly: "End every episode on a cliffhanger".

How the hell do you resolve all of those cliffs?

[u/waldeinsamkeit666 → u/goodnamestaken10]

yep, that’s exactly the problem I’m talking about. in both instances, viewers trusted that the writing team knew where they were taking all those cliffhangers, and it turned out they had no plan all along. which was a real slap in the face when those mysteries were what kept people watching in the first place. especially when Lost revealed that everyone was dead in the final season because the showrunners had been flat-out denying that theory in interviews and panels since like season 2 and insisting that wouldn’t be the ending.