I just finished the New Girl finale, which was lovely and fitting and kind to its characters, and it reminded me anew how much I fucking hate how the creators chose to end How I Met Your Mother.
There’s a theme for Jess throughout the show that she went on Craigslist to find an apartment and found a family. These weird three (sometimes four) guys were her family, a family she looped her childhood bff into, and when Winston and Aly fell in love, Aly was immediately part of that family, too (despite occasionally not wanting any part of it). 4D brought them together--Jess never let someone cross the threshold for the first time without saying “welcome to our home”--but they became family because when things got stupid (and to quote Jess again, they knew it could get really stupid) or hard, they were a unit. And we got to see, in that flashforward, with little Reginald VelJohnson, Moses, Ruth, and Dan Bill and his four siblings, that even though all of those 4D fools have lives and kids and homes and jobs and new haircuts, they’re still a family that comes together for the stupid stuff and presumably all the other stuff, too. You know they were there when Aly went into labor, every time, that they were there for Moses’s bris, that no one really knows who’s godparent to which kid because they’re all aunts and uncles to these assuredly aggressive, joyful little weirdos.
And that was what How I Met Your Mother always promised us--Ted would meet the mother of his kids, and she would complete their little group. They all needed her, just like those 4D boys needed Jess and all the nonsense and people she brought into their lives, and whether or not they were in the booth at MacLaren’s or someone’s front porch, they were a family and would meet life that way. And yeah, in real life, you have kids and careers and you can’t get together as often as you want and you lose touch sometimes, but that wasn’t ever the future How I Met Your Mother promised for its characters. Future!Ted always talked about how his kids knew this or that about Uncle Barney or Aunt Lily; they were family and they were knit together for life even when life got busy. This was a show about fate bringing people together, and the finale broke that shit to pieces. Life sure as shit gets in the way in real life, but in a show about finding your partner and going through the big things with your friends beside you, going back on that by fracturing relationships and putting distance between best friends and killing off the person that would somehow complete their booth is a betrayal of the premise and the characters and what they’ve gone through together.