The Disney Delusion and How I Met Your Mother

[MysterionMuffles]

Two weeks ago marked the series finale of CBS's hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which ran for 9 seasons. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it's basically about a father telling his kids the story of how he met their mother. It's filled with plenty of twists and turns, heartfelt emotions and side busting hilarity--and most importantly, character development. Basically it focuses on how the father Ted Mosby had to go through a journey of love and loss to become a genuine enough guy to deserve a woman as lovely as Tracy McConnoly, the Mother character. 

 

Although Ted is the main character of the show, a lot of its attention is garnered towards Barney Stinson, the polar opposite of Ted. Where Ted is a hopeless romantic whose stories are all about how much of a fool he is, Barney likes to talk himself up and is basically a misogynist that uses women for sex. Barney has actually been dedicated to educating Ted the ways of a Bro, in which he teaches him the etiquette of being a wingman and a ladies man.

 

However, the past few seasons have been focussed on turning Barney into a one woman man, particularly to the point of getting married to Robin Scherbatsky. Ted met and dated Robin first, even told her that he was in love with her on their first date, and that crippled his chances with being with her for about a year. They did end up dating, but they had a clean break up because they respected each other's personal preferences. Ted wants to settle down and have kids, Robin wants to travel the world as a world reknown journalist. Eventually the attraction built between Robin and Barney created that havoc between best friends having shared a woman who belongs to their circle of friends.

 

There's also a matter of the characters Marshall and Lily, who I think are the first genuine young couple in TV today who are just ALLOWED to be in love. They are basically the ideal relationship to people as broken as Ted, Robin and Barney, but of course they share their own marital problems throughout the course of the series. They're not entirely unimportant to my analysis, but I thought it was worth mentioning who their remaining friends were in one of the greatest 5 piece ensembles I've seen on TV. Eat your heart out, Friends.

 

ANYWAYS, I didn't want to bore you with too much of a synopsis, but I did want to provide enough context to make the series finale make sense to you and why it caused such an uproar to the long standing fanbase.

 

The show has already been highly scrutinized by fans and former fans for a variety reasons, but the series finale topped off that hatred with an ending that was less fairy tale, and more realistic. And that drove people up the wall. Spoilers ahead obviously:

 

The 9th and final season focussed on the entire weekend  leading up to Robin and Barney's wedding. Yes 24 episodes based on 3 crucial days in the lives of this ensemble. People were lead to believe that Barney had reformed and will settle down and be a one woman man. And of course Ted will find the woman of his dreams and live happily ever after with her.

 

But here's the kicker: the finale featured snapshots of the ensemble's lives in the distant future. We find out that after only three years of marriage, Robin and Barney get divorced, and Barney in his 40's goes back to his misogynistic ways running lame plays to get laid. Meanwhile Robin gets to travel the world and report the news like she's always wanted. When I watched it, it rubbed me the wrong way too when they show Barney being all sleazy again, but he gets what he deserves when he challenges himself to get laid 31 days straight, and ends up knocking up the 31st woman.

 

In hindsight, I feel that his character arc was completed when he finally got to hold his newborn daughter in his arms, and swore to give everything he had and everything he is to her, the new love of his life. It made sense for him to become a father because he's always so concerned with mentoring Ted, it was just his inner father all along. Barney himself has had daddy issues because his dad abandoned him, but one of the biggest turning points in his character development WAS meeting his father and patching things up with him. Plus Robin can't have kids so their marriage wouldn't work out well for Barney if kids was his unconscious desire all along.

 

Ted of course gets to enjoy a little more than a decade of an ideal marriage with kids, but it comes to an end when Tracy, the Mother, is revealed to be dead in the future. And the reason why Ted told his story to his kids is because in his middle age, he's been single since the 6 years after Tracy's death, and wants to know if his kids are okay with him hooking up with their Aunt Robin. This pissed people off because there was so much build up for this character, then they introduced her and showed flash forwards of their perfect marriage throughout the 9th season, and also showed how she met all of Ted's friends before meeting him. My personal pet peeve was not having her in enough group scenes because she had great chemistry with all of them individually. Save for Robin, didn't feel it as much, but anyway!

 

This ending pissed people off because they expected Barney and Robin--and Ted and Tracy, to live happily ever after, but didn't. Life went on and changes were made. I personally enjoyed the ending and thought it was perfect. It all came full circle because Robin was the woman Ted first truly fell in love with, but had to put those feelings aside for a long long time. Especially after they broke up and Robin continued being part of their group. It makes sense that even though he fought his feelings as hard as he could to encourage Robin to go through with the wedding, decades later he knew he's always had a place in his heart for her.

 

I posted a status about this finale being pretty much perfect tying up all loose ends, and a friend of mine actually said he would have preferred the fairy tale ending. That he watches shows to escape from reality, not be reminded of its sometimes unnerving ways. 

 

I guess that's what I really wanted to talk about in this thread. Thank you for reading through this if you've gotten this far in my post. I wanted to talk about what I call the Disney Delusion in which love and romance means happily ever afters...as opposed to what HIMYM presented, which was life goes on and love and romance are things you need to work at keeping alive. And that it is possible to have multiple lovers in your lifetime, but some will be more significant than others and take up a certain amount of time in your life.

 

Your thoughts?

[Tyler Durden]

I really enjoyed the first couple of seasons and thought it was the best comedy ever, but the show lost much of its appeal to me after that so I stopped watching. It became sort of a mixture between comedy and drama, but not quite succeeding at either genre, at least in my opinion.

 

So I haven't seen the finale either, but after reading your post just now, I think they ended it well.

 

We've all grown up with this Disney narrative of what love should look like and it's simply not a useful narrative to have. It inspires white knightism and causes men to ignore all the red flags that particular women throw at them, and it inspires women to act like, well, princesses.

 

So yeah, I think it's great that popular shows like HIMYM are breaking that narrative. And if people are having a hard time dealing with that it only shows how necessary it is.

[MysterionMuffles]

Not to mention how they glorify the awkward beautiful girl. According to Disney, all interactions that have anything to do with romance need to be awkward and full of people bumbling over their words like idiots. Worse than it actually is in real life.

[Patrice Stanton]

New here on FDR forums (forums anywhere, really). Thanks for the overview of the show. It has been a favorite of my (nearly-21 y.o.) daughter since she began watching on Netflix (a couple of years ago, I think). Good to hear it's a quality story (not sure why I never tried it). Will have to ask her what she thinks of the finale.

[MysterionMuffles]

Personally I think the first 6 seasons were the strongest, but afterwards it was a weird mix between 80% compelling story moving episodes and %20 filler throughout seasons 7-9. Either way still a fun ride! So yeah report back here when you've gotten your daughter's thoughts lol

[MysterionMuffles]

 

THIS just popped up on my Youtube front page and this greatly expresses how most HIMYM fans feel about the ending.