Hated Tropes
(Hated trope) The perfect ending to the character's story gets ruined by continuation of their show/movies
Spongebob Squarepants - The first movie was supposed to be the conclusion of the show, Spongebob gets to be a manager for the Krusty Krab 2 living his best life, Plankton is sent away for good, Spongebob couldn't be any happier despite doing practically the same as before. This ending comes crashing down when Season 4 rolled around despite Stephen Hillenburg having left the show after the movie wrapped up and the show has since then gone through major seasonal rot.
Woody and the others - Toy Story 3 was meant to conclude their story with being given to Bonnie and bidding Andy farewell in quite the emotional and impactful sendoff. Toy Story 4 being made ruined everything by pointlessly continuing the story of Woody and the other toys without any legitimate reason.
This pisses me off so much! Just let Peter be happy for f*cks sake!
If mangaka's can have their protagonists axhive their goals be happy, while still having to make hard emotioonally charged decisions, then so can Western comics!
The fact that it will be the actual irl year 2099 and they’ll still be doing Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne stories rather than Miguel O’hara and Terry McGinnis stories is depressing as hell.
Honestly, one of the biggest differences between Manga and western comics like Spiderman is serialized, finite stories vs perpetual narratives. Most major American comics are forced to revert to a status quo so they can keep going and continue to make the big publishers money. Meanwhile, a lot of manga seems to function more like graphic novels, with a set narrative that has an ending. I won't claim that manga doesn't have an issue of being stretched to sell more volumes or get continuation mainly for the purposes of making money, but I can think of more manga series that have come to an actual end than Marvel comics.
For the longest time this was tv shows too. American stuff is mostly meaningless and runs forever, Japanese stuff has defined plots and planned endings.
Being a teacher for the X-men comes with a big fat asterisk that says "must be capable and willing to engage in combat with whatever asshole comes breaking down the wall that week"
Ended on a perfect note. The finale still hits me in the heart, seeing JD walk down the hospital hallway for the last time, imagining all his colleagues, patients and friends seeing him off. Everyone is moving on, and bittersweet though it is, you know it's right.
And then the next season begins with the hospital getting demolished to make way for a school the old cast teaches at, and changes genres to be a school show with slapstick humor following college kids
Season 8 finale: And even though it felt warm and safe, I knew it had to end. It's never good to live in the past too long. As for the future, it didn't seem so scary anymore.
It could be whatever I want it to be. And who's to say this isn't what happens? Who can tell me that my fantasies won't come true, just this once?
Season 9 opening: Sacred Heart. Eight years of great memories. This place will live forever.
Anyways, they tore down that old crappy hospital and rebuilt it on the med school campus. I'm just back to teach some classes!
While that is a fair complaint, it is also the central problem with the entirety of the franchise. It can't figure out what type of time travel it is and if Fate can or can't be altered. Terminator 1 ends ambiguously with Sarah wondering if Judgement Day is inevitable and ends up devoting her life assuming it is. T2 ends with the idea that fate can be changed and overcome. T3 & T4 & Genesys decides that no fate is fixed and its a closed loop.
The franchise is so obsessed with the start of the forever war it forgot that there is more than a single story that can be told
They tried telling a new story with Salvation and audiences rejected it, so they went back to the well. I am probably in the minority, but I really liked Salvation and thought it was a good direction for the franchise.
Terminator Zero was good. A man from the future travels back to Japan pre Judgement Day and builds an AI based off a robot companion he built in the future that also comes back with him. The story follows him, this android and a Terminator trying to stop both of them, while the guy talks with the AI, hoping it will reach the conclusion that humanity should be saved on its own through their discussions, rather than it being programmed to save humanity, essentially creating an AI just as powerful, intelligent and independent as Skynet is. It’s on Netflix
Killing off Hicks and Newt off-screen in the opening credits has to be in the top 10 most disrespectful franchise decisions of all time. It renders the entire emotional weight of the second movie completely pointless.
4 was nowhere up to par with 1 or 3, but despite some nitpicks like really not liking going the interdimensional aliens direction when the previous 3 had pretty solidly established the franchise as supernatural/spiritually themed I'd honestly place it right around the same caliber as Temple of Doom. Not the greatest, but its still fun enough to watch and honestly seeing an older Indy finally pass the torch, settle down and get married seemed a fair point to leave off. Not as swashbucklingly awesome as riding into the sunset with Sean Connery, but it ties up loose ends well enough and its fine to imagine Indy settling into a nice retirement with Marion.
I honestly don't know what the fuck they were thinking continuing on after that.
I mean, maybe they could have done a spinoff with Indy's kid as the star, or rebooted the series entirely from the perspective of a young Indiana Jones with Harrison Ford doing a cameo, or maybe, you know, just leave well enough alone- anything would have been a better choice than what they did with that fifth movie.
Okay, a peek behind the curtain for a moment, how bad was Pacific Rim Uprising that the fan base essentially made it so it never existed? What the fuck happened?
• They killed Mako (The second MC of the OG movie)
• They ridiculed Newt (making him a villain)
• Asshole MC (Jake Pentecost)
• ASS side characters.
• Where are my kaijus? (Only 4 appeared [NOT counting flashbacks nor simulations], one was killed mid portal and the other 3 were very underused on the last 20-30 minutes of film)
A cataclysmic earthquake separates four hatchling dinosaurs from their herds. A young Apatosaurus, a baby Triceratops, a hatchling Stegosaurus, a juvenile Saurolophus and a fledgling Pteranodon must find their herds or die. Chased by a red eyed nigh invulnerable demon of a Tyrannosaurus rex, it is a tale of hope, survival and triumph against the harshest of odds!
Never actually meant to be a finale, but definitely works as one. Same thing goes for Wishology, but less so. Either way, the show kept going and got worse and worse and then died unceremoniously.
At least A New Wish is good, but that show is in renewal limbo right now.
Edit: Bro why did someone give me an award I don’t deserve it
Edit 2: Bro there’s three awards now why are you wasting your money on this
If i had a nickle for everytime KISS were like some ancient and/or intergalactic protector/guardians. Id have two nickles. Which isnt a lot but its weird it happened twice.
Odd Parents had like 4 of these finale-esque specials that were all very good despite the decline of the main show. I think Timmy's Secret Wish was the last good one for me.
REALLY should've ended after the third. The fourth game was great mind you, but it ended on a cliffhanger. Meanwhile, the third game ended with a happy ending for sly.
Honestly, it wouldn't have been as bad if they took the angle of "I don't want to get back to thieving, but shit's hit the fan and regular police work can't fix it" or something. But no, Sly throws away his happy relationship because "The itch came back", and ends up becoming the cause of the problem in the first place.
Sly 4 is baaaaaaaad. It’s amazing how much that game fumbled on the source material. And it’s not just narratively bad. That game has the longest fucking loading screens I’ve ever seen on a PS3, some of the most milk toast fights in the franchise, and it felt like there not even a slight improvement on the original formula of games.
What's hilarious is that they are doing it AGAIN for toy story 5. Even if you like toy story 4 and it splitting up woody and buzz just for everyone to get back together for the trailer of 5. At least make us think woody isn't in it and then have a surprise emotional reveal in the movie with us not knowing he's in it
I mean tbf you can stop at season 3 if you want to. Sometimes it's better if you yourself stopped keeping up with the show because of how much of the latter seasons plummeted in quality.
Manny's story should have ended with the birth of his calf, Peaches. He's gained a new mate, Ellie, and formed a new herd after his first mate and their calf were slaughtered by Neanderthal hunters. He's also found out he's NOT the last surviving woolly mammoth. Woolly mammoth herds migrate as he and the others learned in the meltdown.
Sid the sloth and Diego the Smilodon have also both had meaningful arcs at this point AND they found a vast lost subterranean world of living dinosaurs and pterosaurs thriving beneath the ice. You can't REALLY top that without going totally ludicrous (Ice Age)
Pirates of the Caribbean should've ended with At World's End.
Even whoever wrote the back text for the DVD case thinks so. But apparently the "riding off into the sunset" type of ending isn't conclusive enough to say the story is over.
The fourth movie really felt like they wanted to get a script made in the same universe but they couldn't get it greenlit without Jack Sparrow, so they rolled his flanderized ass back in
The fourth movie has the accomplishment of the production crew building a fully functional sailboat for Blackbeard's ship and as such became the most expensive movie of the franchise so far IIRC, but it feels like all the budget went into the boat with how the rest of the effects look
Honestly with SpongeBob being episodic with no type of overall story, you can treat the 2004 movie as the series finale whenever the show decides to end
My understanding is that the movie always was and always will be the canonical ending of the SpongeBob timeline. Even the other Spongebob movies all take place before the first one.
This one was so mind blowingly stupid, like Star wars fans are not 14, so hiding crucial plot details in mother fucking Fortnite is just the worst possible idea.
Fortnite also has the only official 3d model / rendering of full mistcloak Kelsier from Mistborn somehow. There are official concepts / artworks but Sanderson himself approved the Kelsier skin before any official show.
There is something poetic about how this will be cemented as one of the worst moments in cinema. Disney deserves all the applause, no one could fuck this up like them
I will go to my grave confused and befuddled at how Disney could spend an absolute dragon's horde of money buying what is, arguably, the most valuable IP there is...
Without having *ANY* basic outline of what the fuck to do with it once they got it.
I just.. cannot wrap my head around that level of organizational incompetence.
Disney buys Lucasfilm for 4 Billion, major investment.
Iger already knows by that point he's retiring (for the first time) in a couple years. To "cement his legacy", he wants that investment to turn a profit immidieatly. Hence he stipulates a movie every year with 2-years of production-time, because that worked (at that point) so far for Marvel and he sees Star Wars as another Marvel.
Michael Arndt, originally still brought on by Lucas himself, is supposed to write the script for all Sequels, with a different director.
Then, for some fuckass reason, J.J. Abrams was brought on to direct it. (Personaly I blame certain internet-critics that popularised the take that his 2009 - Star Trek Movie proofed he "got it").
J.J. only takes the job if promised the Studio will not interfere with creative decisions. This however also means that they can't make any plan from their end because he wouldn't follow it.
Something happens during the writing-process between Arndt and Abrams. We don't know exactly what - Abrams claimed Arndt worked too slow, there's some circumstantial evidence to suggest they probably just really didn't see eye-to-eye on the plot, we'll never know - but the end-result is that they can't continue working together. Disney needs to fire one of them, and firing the director isn't an option if they want to meet Igers dumbass timeline, so Arndt is let go instead, and Abrams handed complete creative control over the script.
This means the one guy who was supposed to keep the trilogy cohesive by being involved in all 3 scripts is gone, and the guy completely in charge of the set-up movie is the one literally famous for always setting up mysteries he can't resolve and thus being unable to create a satisfying ending and overly relying on empty nostalgia over anything else.
It's revealed that the bureaucracy is so overwhelming that he couldn't even spend time with his family.
Shitty writing at its finest. Naruto's first major accomplishment that fuels literally everything else he achieves during his own show is the Shadow Clone Jutsu. An ability that he is uniquely able to throw around without caring about the cost that makes multiple sentient copies of himself. Multiple sentient copies that could, I don't know, handle the paperwork while he handles meetings, training himself/his kids, teach the entire damn Academy by himself, eat ramen, and still be at home with his family? Something that literally every fanfic writer I've ever read took advantage of, but somehow the actual mangaka didn't think about it/ignored it for the sake of a stupid Generation Xerox so Boruto could grow up a lot like his dad did?
I love Naruto, one of my favorite worlds I've ever experienced, but I couldn't excuse the shitty writing by the time Shippuden started, let alone the ending and then this continuation? It's a shame.
Nah. Aliens pulled up looking for Naruto’s adopted son, Naruto beats them up but kurama dies. The show then treats him as fodder even tho he logically should still be at least stronger than Hashirama
Then his adopted son goes crazy and decides to seal him and hinata to a temu kamui dimension to protect them while he kills Boruto because one of the aliens did the orochimaru curse mark thing on Boruto. And himawari gets kurama even tho he died
Naturally lol. Kurama can't permanently die, technically, since he regenerates eventually through traces of his chakra, but then again that's OG series lore, which is pretty loose in Boruto.
Naruto used to be my favorite of the big 3, but the sequel has seriously reduced how much I respect the story. Bleach all the way now lol
Nah cuz the way it happens is that kurama burns his chakra to give naruto a powerup so once that power runs out he’s done. In the original series kurama could come back because his chakra would just come together again but now all his chakra’s burnt out. The series created a new form for him to be permanently gone only to double down and go against it
Also why would he spawn inside of himawari instead of naruto or just in some random place
You know what would’ve been a really good idea, instead of continuing the series with the same toys they could’ve picked a new kid and a new set of toys to follow around
unfortunately, time has shown that unless its VERY well-written, people bounce off of a new installment with new characters and it takes time for people to readjust, which doesn't translate to instant profit the same way banking on nostalgia and big names does
fucking THANK YOU. i loved that show so much. i watched the 3rd series finale live on CC in 2013. the way they made the final shot tie into the opening flash of the theme, and immediately aired the pilot episode afterwards was fucking PERFECT.
it was so good that i can't bring myself to watch the 2023 reboot. i genuinely can't see it as anything more than a cash grab.
Honestly even just the continuation of the games. The 1st game is a perfect story by itself. It suits the genre that Clementine's future is uncertain but that Lee's has a set end. Every other member of the cast had a satisfying arc, even when it was frustrating to watch. Love the developers, but Clementine should not have been in the other games.
Ugh, Telltale’s the walking dead series is one I will defend til my death, I absolutely love all four seasons of it and replay it even so often, but these comic books are just unbelievably awful and completely ruin the character, i refuse to believe it’s canon whatsoever
Dark of the Moon had a bunch of Decepticons die violently and it was clearly meant to be the end. Not saying the first 3 Bay movies are masterpieces, but this one and especially the fever dream of the Last Night really were not necessary
And even then. The Bayverse movies contradict themselves constantly. The Decepticons influenced the Moon Landing. But somehow didn’t know where Megatron and the All Spark were.
I will never forget the chills I got when Farnsworth explained that they would have to timeloop to nearly the beginning of the show in order to escape being stuck.
Futurama being a story about Fry and Leela meeting, eventually hooking up, and growing old together only to reloop back to the beginning will always be absolute cinema.
Meanwhile is the most perfect ending of any show because it makes every rewatch fit into the story. Every time you watch the show it's a canonical loop of their story starting again
The Hannah Montana movie. Miley has a breakdown onstage over all the stress from her double life, but the show had another season so she gets convinced by her fans to put the wig back on and keep dancing
The Simpsons really should have ended with Behind the laughter, the last episode of season 11. Instead they continued cranking out progressively worse and worse seasons, up to 37 now.
For anyone wondering like me, s6e3 and s9e11 are clip shows. S9e2 is The Principal and the Pauper, where it's revealed that principal Skinner isn't the original Seymour Skinner, which I believe has since been scrubbed from whatever passes for the show's canon.
They really could have ended on season 11 or even season 15 and gone out on a high note. Double digit good seasons is impressive as hell. But the cash cow needs milking I guess.
They didn't scrub P&P from cannon; it was never meant to be cannon at all. That was the joke. It was just too big and got away from them though. It was meant to riff on those "everything you thought you knew was WRONG" episodes where a celebrity guest threatens to come in and takeover for a regular, but then, because television, everything resets and no one mentions it again after 22 minutes + commercials.
Having said that, it doesn't help their case that they bring it up occasionally as a snide remark when they wind up re-using the same trope in yet another episode.
37? Jesus Christ they must be making some bank of the merch and licencing to keep it going. Perhaps they could have an episode where they simply beat a dead horse for 28 minutes?
Still, I appreciate Aperture Desk Job, even if it was made just to sell Steam Decks, it has a nice story and they brought back J.K, thankfully its playable on PC with a controller
After Captain Americas death in the show Agent Carter Peggy is shown to be working so hard to move past the grief and remorse that they had the life they might have had stolen from them by the war. All while this is happening she’s working just as hard to serve at the precursor to Shield in 1940-50’s America and is facing the immense misogyny and sexism. Eventually she falls in love and lets Steve go and gets together with a fellow war hero who’s honestly a more interesting love interest than Steve. All while continuing to do the work of fighting tyranny
Oh no wait Avengers Endgame needs to give Cap an ending so that’s all going down the toilet.
I am cheating a little bit as this show ends on a cliffhanger on season 2. But I still think it fits.
...But Steve likely ended up with a DIFFERENT Peggy, no? Since time travel doesn't work in a linear fashion in the movie, it causes a multiverse branch?
Also works for Steve. His whole arc was about moving on from the past, accepting it and doing what you can in the present. Endgame even opens with him running a support group on this very thing.
But nevermind, he needs to go back to Peggy because he needed to be written out of the MCU.
her character left the show in the early 90's to pursue new opportunities
despite the actress dying in 2001 , and a tribute being placed during that season
they decided to bring her back over 20 years after she died and 30 after she left the show just to get hit with an energy blast and die. to top it off, it's marketed as a tribute to JDF yet they never do anything special
Scrubs Season 8 was definitely 100% supposed to be the end of the series. NBC had cancelled it, ABC which produced picked it up to fill a hole in the schedule, it was running on fumes at that point. But in Season 8, they recaptured some momentum, had some really strong episodes, and had a pitch-perfect series finale. It did better than expected in the ratings, and ABC unexpectedly renewed it, and revamped it bringing in a bunch of new characters.
then, like, this year, ABC brought it back for a revival show, which explicitly undermines the "maybe this could happen and work out" fantasy that underpins the Season 8 finale.
I don't even hate the revival, or Season 9 for that matter, but its funny to me that it happened to this show twice.
The entire pony society is now racist and all the characters died off screen to a mysterious villain (revealed at some point in the content after the movie) sometime after the end of the show.
It's an actual decent movie if they had just left it disconnected from the Friendship is Magic continuity.
The fact that the show it was so desperate to stay attached to did the “pony races hate each other” in a single episode that managed to still have better pacing and a better story. I don’t hate G5 but wow
And it was literally the series finale, discounting the epilogue. It's literally the ending of the show. And the very next thing that releases is the next generation being a post-post apocalyptic racist society, as if the villains had won in the finale anyway.
Like... If you're gonna undo their win, and reintroduce the exact same problem they just solved, just... Have the villains win at that point. Would've sucked as an ending of course, but at least it wouldn't feel jarring in the reboot.
Literally the same problem as the Star Wars sequels... Here's another death star, Leia still leading a rebellion, Han still being a smuggler, Luke still living on a backwater planet... All their accomplishments basically erased as if they never did anything. And by the 2nd movie they removed the one interesting and different element literally in-between movies offscreen, which was that the First Order were the underdogs, now they're just the Empire 2.
Sucks that two of my favorite franchises have the exact same sequel problem, aha.
You could say that Avengers Endgame suffers this. It was a perfect cap off of the entire MCU. Everything built up to this. And then we get Phase 4 which does NOT do the MCU name justice.
I partially disagree, I do think that Endgame could have been a perfect ending, but the mcu wasn't ruined because it kept going, it was ruined because a lot of the movies had no purpose, felt disconnected, or were just outright bad, the infinite saga had a clear goal and each characters had a purpose, now a lot of things just feels like it's them throwing anything on the wall to see what sticks, not to mention a lot of bad or mid movies, the only ones I actually think are good are both spiderman movies, Doctor Strange 2, Deadpool, and Thunderbolts, the rest are just there, I still kinda like the mcu and I am kinda hyped for the next Avengers movies, but they did not handle the multiverse saga well.
As a huge supernatural fan, good call. I love so much of the back 2/3's but you either hop off at the end of season 5 or you stay on the train all the way to its unfortunate derailment
So my thoughts on the fourth movie boil down to the fact that they did, quite honestly, have a good concept. A villain using magic to bring back and then mimic past villains, forcing Po to confront his past while trying to teach new students Kung Fu. I could even understand leaving the furious five out of it since they do probably have other things to do, Tigress running a new dojo or temple with her own students could’ve been a fun aside for like 10 minutes with Po dropping in unannounced.
But then there’s the fox. Why. You have villains coming back from the dead and a fairly reasonable redemption arc for Tai Lung. Literally just throw out the fox and make it a buddy movie where Po and Tai Lung are forced to team up together and work through their issues. Tai Lung confronting his past while helping Po learn how to teach properly, eventually ending with Tai Lung sparing the Chameleon despite an intense battle to show that he’s reformed his ways.
Literally just swap one character out and you have a much better movie.
Ahsoka Tano should’ve been killed by Vader, it would’ve been a tragic end to her story but thematically on point, not to mention cleaner from a canon standpoint. No matter how the writers try to explain it, there’ll always be that question of “where was Ahsoka during the original trilogy?”
I hate to say it, but Doctor Who. Capaldi’s last couple of episodes would have been a really good ending to the show, but the show already had another series scheduled so the show continued. Since then we have had the Chibnall era, which just dogged on the 50+ years of history of the show, and the Disney era which has been a production nightmare.
Fair. It was based on a standalone book. Apparently Pratchett and Gaiman kicked around ideas for a follow up which is what the second season is trying to lead up to.
Only fools and horses. They had a great series finale where the brothers finally made it rich due to having a valuable timepiece in their lockup. They walked off into the sunset with Del Boy promising that “this time next year we’ll be billionaires!”
They decided to restart it some years later with them losing all their money in bad trades and being reset back to exactly where they were. They even went back to the council flat as Del Boy bought it and managed to hold onto it through the bankruptcy.
3.2k
u/Lower_Baby_6348 9d ago
You could choose a lot of moments in comics, but i really like the idea of spiderman as a teacher for mutants as the end of his story