My How I Met Your Mother Rant
Originally posted April 2nd, 2014
This is my rant about the ending of How I Met Your Mother. I know, there are millions of them out there so why do we need another one? Because I have to. There's just this horrid weight on my chest, and I need to get it off the best way I know how. By blogging and ranting to the abyss that is the Internet. So ladies and gentlemen, here we go....
***SPOILERS: PLEASE DO NOT READ ON UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING THAT HAS MADE ME OH SO VERY ANGRY***
Now, how to begin detailing everything that went horribly wrong with the HIMYM series finale... It's tricky formulating my unhappiness into coherent thoughts. But mostly it goes something like this.
Dear Carter Bays and Craig Thomas,
I have been a loyal follower of your hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother since my dark days of depression sophomore year at UC Berkeley. During a time when I thought nothing could bring me out of my hole and back into the world of the living, I found solace in this simple tale about a young man named Ted trying to find true love, and his friends, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin. Their adventures and misadventures reawakened my deadened spirit. I never felt more alive than when I marathoned season after season of these 5 friends. It was like Friends for a younger generation. More hip. More stylish. More suited.
HIMYM provided an escape for me from my dreary life as an EECS major. It took me away from my project failures, difficult classes, obnoxious classmates, and overall sense of mediocrity that was my second year of college. Without it, I would never be where I am today, slightly above mediocre and about to graduate in less than two months. Without it, I would never have survived.
And do you know what kept me coming back year after year, season after season, even after I got over my dark days? Even when the jokes ran old, when the "will they or won't they" started driving me crazy, when I started forgetting references like the slap bet? It was the characters. I fell in love with the characters. And despite the fact that Ted's optimism and stupidity never swayed (well ok it swayed once or twice), watching him struggle was fine because I knew he had a happy ending coming. I just didn't know when it would come.
Now somewhere around the 7th season, I started to lose hope. But a deep part of me still cared about these characters and an even deeper part of me wanted the closure of meeting the mother. Like Ted, I had waited so many years (fewer than him obviously because I actually didn't pick up the show until later on), and I wanted to meet the love of his life. And then it happened. A miracle. You showed her. The Mother. And she was... That girl from the Broadway production of Once.
Truthfully, I never really had expectations for what the mother would look like. No ideas for what actress would be good for playing her, but Cristin Milioti turned out to be one of the better choices you made. Because she was brilliant. I loved her. And it seems like a good majority of your fans loved her too. And that was the first mistake you made. You let us fall in love with her. And then you killed her. Bastards.
This is How I Met Your Mother. It is not Game of Thrones. It is not a Joss Whedon production. It is not How I Met Your Aunt Robin. It is HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER! This is not and should not be the story about how Ted and Robin got together. That ending felt cheap, cruel, and outdated.
Look I get it. I do. I understand as much as the next person that you probably had this ending planned for years. You probably had no idea how popular your show would get and so you locked yourself into an ending with the kids because you were afraid the actors would be too grown up by the time the show finished. In the end, it was the fans and the success that led to the horrific ending. In a way, it was our fault for making the show too successful. But you didn't have to go and throw us under a bus for helping you make millions of dollars.
Because here's the truth. There are so many other ways you could have done this. First, you didn't have to use the ending you had already filmed with the kids. You could have changed it. You could've left it at the spot that I thought you were going to leave it at: when Tracy and Ted first meet. You could have let it be because it was perfect. They were perfect. And you destroyed the perfection. You destroyed the hope. You taught America that the person you should be with is the one who you sometimes have feelings for and who sometimes as feelings for you, but not at the same time. You taught us it's ok to break up and get back together a million times, because that story is much more worth telling than the story of true love. You crushed all of our hopes and dreams, and all of your viewers who followed this show because we're optimists and idealists and hope that one day we can find true love as well will never forgive you for not letting it end the way it was supposed to: happily ever after.
To make matters worse, you wasted an entire season on a wedding that ended in divorce merely 10 minutes after it happened (in real time, 3 years in TV land time). And not only that, you let us get to know the mother. We got to know just how perfect Tracy was for Ted. How amazing she was in helping Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin. How caring and kind and understanding and perfect the two of them were together. And you didn't even let us grieve her death. So I guess in a way, that's what I'm doing now.
Ted may have been ready to move on back to Robin. You might have been ready to move on back to Robin. But I most certainly am not. And I may never be. It might take me until the rest of my life to accept this ending, because I just can't come to terms with the fact that Tracy is gone. You know what probably broke my heart the most? Was that up until you flashed forward to Ted and his kids, that ending, with Ted and Tracy meeting at the Farhampton train station under their yellow umbrella, was everything I could have ever asked for. It was everything I had hoped for. It was beautiful, perfect, tear-worthy, and I was filled with so much happiness and joy. I think I d'awwwed and squealed for the entirety of that scene. Then you pulled the rug from under my feet and the perfection was gone. My bubble was shattered. My hope was annihilated.
The funny thing is, it didn't have to be this way. If I had quit watching at season 3 or 4, I might have actually enjoyed the ending. I read another opinion article about how the series finale was perfect for HIMYM fans who stopped watching. And I agree. They made a good point, that if Robin and Ted's relationship was more fresh in our minds, perhaps we wouldn't have all been so angry. I read another great article about how you could have made this all work together. The author suggested various alternative routes you could have gone to make the ending with Tracy's death and Ted and Robin's eventual hookup not as devastating as it was. But the fact of the matter is, you didn't go that way. You didn't stop to think about how your loyal fan base, who followed you until the very end, would feel. No, you just went ahead and did whatever you thought was the right story.
I know. You're the writers. This is your story. But here's the thing about being a story writer with 9 years worth of an audience. This story is no longer just yours. It can't be. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to those of us who cried when Lily left Marshall for San Francisco. And who cried again when Lily came back. It belongs to those of us who couldn't decide if Barney's proposal to Robin was the most romantic thing ever or the worst prank in the world. It belongs to those of us who waited year after year for the next slap to be given. With the amount of power you held, you had a duty to the fans to tell our story, not just yours.
But now, it's too late. You can't take back what has been done. I cannot unsee what I have seen. And I do not know if I can forgive you for what you have done. Maybe one day I will. Maybe one day I will wake up and come to terms with the ending you gave to Ted's story. Maybe one day I will have a life experience that will make me understand why you chose to close things out the way you did. But until then, I will just have to be happy with the sense of closure I received. Until then, I will have to accept the brief time we were able to spend with Tracy. Until then, I will pretend the last three minutes of the series finale never happened.
With much anguish and resentment,
Your former fan Amy
This is my rant about the ending of How I Met Your Mother. I know, there are millions of them out there so why do we need another one? Because I have to. There's just this horrid weight on my chest, and I need to get it off the best way I know how. By blogging and ranting to the abyss that is the Internet. So ladies and gentlemen, here we go....
***SPOILERS: PLEASE DO NOT READ ON UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING THAT HAS MADE ME OH SO VERY ANGRY***
Now, how to begin detailing everything that went horribly wrong with the HIMYM series finale... It's tricky formulating my unhappiness into coherent thoughts. But mostly it goes something like this.
Dear Carter Bays and Craig Thomas,
I have been a loyal follower of your hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother since my dark days of depression sophomore year at UC Berkeley. During a time when I thought nothing could bring me out of my hole and back into the world of the living, I found solace in this simple tale about a young man named Ted trying to find true love, and his friends, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin. Their adventures and misadventures reawakened my deadened spirit. I never felt more alive than when I marathoned season after season of these 5 friends. It was like Friends for a younger generation. More hip. More stylish. More suited.
HIMYM provided an escape for me from my dreary life as an EECS major. It took me away from my project failures, difficult classes, obnoxious classmates, and overall sense of mediocrity that was my second year of college. Without it, I would never be where I am today, slightly above mediocre and about to graduate in less than two months. Without it, I would never have survived.
And do you know what kept me coming back year after year, season after season, even after I got over my dark days? Even when the jokes ran old, when the "will they or won't they" started driving me crazy, when I started forgetting references like the slap bet? It was the characters. I fell in love with the characters. And despite the fact that Ted's optimism and stupidity never swayed (well ok it swayed once or twice), watching him struggle was fine because I knew he had a happy ending coming. I just didn't know when it would come.
Now somewhere around the 7th season, I started to lose hope. But a deep part of me still cared about these characters and an even deeper part of me wanted the closure of meeting the mother. Like Ted, I had waited so many years (fewer than him obviously because I actually didn't pick up the show until later on), and I wanted to meet the love of his life. And then it happened. A miracle. You showed her. The Mother. And she was... That girl from the Broadway production of Once.
Truthfully, I never really had expectations for what the mother would look like. No ideas for what actress would be good for playing her, but Cristin Milioti turned out to be one of the better choices you made. Because she was brilliant. I loved her. And it seems like a good majority of your fans loved her too. And that was the first mistake you made. You let us fall in love with her. And then you killed her. Bastards.
This is How I Met Your Mother. It is not Game of Thrones. It is not a Joss Whedon production. It is not How I Met Your Aunt Robin. It is HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER! This is not and should not be the story about how Ted and Robin got together. That ending felt cheap, cruel, and outdated.
Look I get it. I do. I understand as much as the next person that you probably had this ending planned for years. You probably had no idea how popular your show would get and so you locked yourself into an ending with the kids because you were afraid the actors would be too grown up by the time the show finished. In the end, it was the fans and the success that led to the horrific ending. In a way, it was our fault for making the show too successful. But you didn't have to go and throw us under a bus for helping you make millions of dollars.
Because here's the truth. There are so many other ways you could have done this. First, you didn't have to use the ending you had already filmed with the kids. You could have changed it. You could've left it at the spot that I thought you were going to leave it at: when Tracy and Ted first meet. You could have let it be because it was perfect. They were perfect. And you destroyed the perfection. You destroyed the hope. You taught America that the person you should be with is the one who you sometimes have feelings for and who sometimes as feelings for you, but not at the same time. You taught us it's ok to break up and get back together a million times, because that story is much more worth telling than the story of true love. You crushed all of our hopes and dreams, and all of your viewers who followed this show because we're optimists and idealists and hope that one day we can find true love as well will never forgive you for not letting it end the way it was supposed to: happily ever after.
To make matters worse, you wasted an entire season on a wedding that ended in divorce merely 10 minutes after it happened (in real time, 3 years in TV land time). And not only that, you let us get to know the mother. We got to know just how perfect Tracy was for Ted. How amazing she was in helping Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin. How caring and kind and understanding and perfect the two of them were together. And you didn't even let us grieve her death. So I guess in a way, that's what I'm doing now.
Ted may have been ready to move on back to Robin. You might have been ready to move on back to Robin. But I most certainly am not. And I may never be. It might take me until the rest of my life to accept this ending, because I just can't come to terms with the fact that Tracy is gone. You know what probably broke my heart the most? Was that up until you flashed forward to Ted and his kids, that ending, with Ted and Tracy meeting at the Farhampton train station under their yellow umbrella, was everything I could have ever asked for. It was everything I had hoped for. It was beautiful, perfect, tear-worthy, and I was filled with so much happiness and joy. I think I d'awwwed and squealed for the entirety of that scene. Then you pulled the rug from under my feet and the perfection was gone. My bubble was shattered. My hope was annihilated.
The funny thing is, it didn't have to be this way. If I had quit watching at season 3 or 4, I might have actually enjoyed the ending. I read another opinion article about how the series finale was perfect for HIMYM fans who stopped watching. And I agree. They made a good point, that if Robin and Ted's relationship was more fresh in our minds, perhaps we wouldn't have all been so angry. I read another great article about how you could have made this all work together. The author suggested various alternative routes you could have gone to make the ending with Tracy's death and Ted and Robin's eventual hookup not as devastating as it was. But the fact of the matter is, you didn't go that way. You didn't stop to think about how your loyal fan base, who followed you until the very end, would feel. No, you just went ahead and did whatever you thought was the right story.
I know. You're the writers. This is your story. But here's the thing about being a story writer with 9 years worth of an audience. This story is no longer just yours. It can't be. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to those of us who cried when Lily left Marshall for San Francisco. And who cried again when Lily came back. It belongs to those of us who couldn't decide if Barney's proposal to Robin was the most romantic thing ever or the worst prank in the world. It belongs to those of us who waited year after year for the next slap to be given. With the amount of power you held, you had a duty to the fans to tell our story, not just yours.
But now, it's too late. You can't take back what has been done. I cannot unsee what I have seen. And I do not know if I can forgive you for what you have done. Maybe one day I will. Maybe one day I will wake up and come to terms with the ending you gave to Ted's story. Maybe one day I will have a life experience that will make me understand why you chose to close things out the way you did. But until then, I will just have to be happy with the sense of closure I received. Until then, I will have to accept the brief time we were able to spend with Tracy. Until then, I will pretend the last three minutes of the series finale never happened.
With much anguish and resentment,
Your former fan Amy
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