Stories that should've ended much sooner

[skykiii]

Inyasha doesn't have a sequel. I don't acknowledge it.

And for good reason. Yashahime, much like Dragon Ball Z's sequels, isn't based on a manga by the original author but is something the anime studio made up to milk a franchise.

Speaking of which, the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie from 2004 should've concluded the series with a high note. I think Stephen Hillenburg planned for the movie to be the end all, be all but Nickelodeon demanded more since it was a cash cow (or a cash square.)

Or cash sponge.

They finally ran out of Fleming Bond stories, so IDK what the fuck they're gonna do now

A lot of the movies already have basically nothing to do with the books except for appropriating the titles, and by the Timothy Dalton era they weren't even doing that.

That said, if they need a book to adapt, there's always the John Gardner novels, which feel like they were written to be set in the movie-verse while maintaining aspect of the novel canon.

The guys at the forefront of all the 'Doctor Who is shit now' stuff eventually admitted that it's because Moffat (showrunner, wrote the starts and finishes on each series) didn't emphasize 'elevating queer identities' as much as RTD did. The reason they hated it literally was just because he made the series less gay. Series 5, 6, and 7 were all better than 1, 2 and 3, and I am not budging on this. At least series 5 and 6 actually felt like the kind of whimsical magic children's show that it SHOULD be.

The first few series were basically trash tv but in space and the only reason I bothered watching them was because my father was a big DW fan in the pre-reboot era.
Just as a few reminders of what the first few series were like, all the main characters beside the doctor were either council housing chavs with bad teeth or unfortunate brown mongrels and also the mongrel gets cucked. At multiple points, the show makes reality tv slop an actual focal theme of what is supposed to be a sci-fi series. The scariest monsters are either skinheads with a roastie's vagina for a face or literally just people with gas masks on.

All I can say is I remember when the Matt Smith episodes were first airing and while some of the plots were interesting, it also felt like all the "The Doctor is the most specialist person EVAR!" stuff, and everything being this navel-gazing about how the Doctor is so awesome that the universe literally revolves around him and whole seasons were devoted to his stupid romance and Clara is special explicitly because she saves the Doctor's life (as if she's the only companion who ever did that)... that I just got so sick of it.

The reboot series, like I said, always felt like a bad fanfic but somehow Moffat kicked it into overdrive. On a personal level, I rather like the idea of the Time War because it's basically the writer's way of saying that the real Doctor Who is over, anything after that is a different thing even when it plays occasional lip-service to the past.

Oh, and also there was that Christmas Special where the Capaldi Doctor meets the William Hartnell Doctor, and for some reason the Hartnell Doctor is written as a sexist prick... which is nothing like how the Hartnell Doctor actually was in his stories. If Moffat wanted to comment on changing cultural standards, why not just have the soldier dude be the sexist prick, instead of demeaning a canon legacy character who did not behave that way? It kind of reminds me of how Turtles Forever turned the 1987 Ninja Turtles into incompetent giggly bitches.

 

[Sir Baz the Intolerant]

Warhammer 40,000
(Brace yourselves autism incoming)

Literally everything after 7th edition, including the Fall of Cadia and the return of the primarchs, has been an unmitigated disaster for the franchise's lore and setting, and the decision to cave in to the faggots and trannies on reddit asking to 'advance the story' will eventually end up killing the IP.

The 41st millennium as a static setting point was perfect as it allowed for near infinite freedom to tell whatever story one could want to within a 10,000 year time frame and a full galaxy worth of physical space. This allowed for a siginficant variety in both official scenarios and published stories, including galaxy spanning high stakes events like the Horus Heresy, the War of the Beast, and the Tyranid Wars, as well as relatively "smaller" but more locally intensive system/planetary conflicts like the Badab War, the Siege of Vraks, and the Armaggeddon Wars. And that's to say nothing of the human focused stories like Gaunt's Ghosts that are some of the best the setting has produced.

This variety of content is something we'll never see again, because now literally every single piece of media put out by Games Workshop absoluterly HAS to feature a pre-approved cast of MCU tier superheroes like Guilliman, Cawl or Cypher going up against a similar assortmant of Saturday night cartoon villains in the form of Mortarion, Magnus, or Trazyn, in a mission to save the galaxy by getting magic-techno MacGuffin No. 87. (Make sure to buy the next 7 part novel series when they do it all over again).

The decision to turn 40k into an evolving story has now set the writers on a course of having to maintain a constant state of high scale tension at the expense of the setting's depth. This has led to a stakes creep problem where GW has already run out of ideas on how to keep the story relevent as you can't up the stakes when they're always turned up to 100 all the damn time. I'm convinced this will eventually end with them giving up and hard resetting the franchise to a more marketable, PG13 IP that they can then whore out to Disney to make goyslop shows and movies.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Avatar: The Last Airbender
Story is pretty solid, but the comics following up the series is the problem.
Avatar: The Legend of Korra
I think the series should never made but if is; only S1 & S3. S2 was a mistake & S4 starts good but falls entirely at the end.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Avatar: The Legend of Korra
I think the series should never made but if is; only S1 & S3. S2 was a mistake & S4 starts good but falls entirely at the end.

I feel like Korra had the issue where every season was a completly different plot. There was no overarching thread like in TLA. It was like the show writers thought they were just gonna have one season, got it renewed and though it would be only once more season, and again and again.

 

[Absolutego]

House
Can't say in which season I quit, but it overstayed its welcoming, and became less interesting to watch.

They did ok with the whole arc where he built a new team and then for a season or two after that, but once that whole bit where he hallucinated a relationship with Cuddy finished and it wrapped up there, the show should've just ended with him going into the asylum.
Don't get me wrong, Hugh Laurie acted his ass off for that bit, but to then go and try to actually answer the "will they/won't they" between the two was a bad idea.

 

[Disastrously Dumb]

Honkai Star Rail should of ended at Penacony because it reached a Peak ending of a story
whereas the new world and prolonged story is so fucking bad.

HunterXHunter - Gon's goal established since chapter 1 is finding his missing dad. After he found Gin the story should've ended because the entire motivation have been achieved and everything else seems superficial onwards, also the writer cant think of any credible story content onwards since so it became HiatusXHiatus

Heck theres alot of anime/manga that kept on going when it should've ended.

e.g. Boruto <-- unnecessary story to the Narutoverse
e.g. Highschool DXD the moment they started censoring that stuff, just end it before you went full censorship
e.g. Prison School <-- the story pushed and made an ending so horrible that noone talks about it anymore

and etc.

 

[Smokeski]

Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien was just schlickin it to the idea of having a butt buddy that loved you. It was basically Brokeback Mountain with elves. Tolkien was a well known homosexual philanderer.

 

[Bogan]

Top Gear
As soon as the classic trio went to Amazon, the BBC should have just let the show end. At best bring in someone who had new ideas instead of copying the same format with 3 random people with varying presentation skills and interest in cars.

House of Cards
4 seasons were probably about as far as things should have gone, season 6 sucked for unrelated reasons of course but the show was already slowing down.

Red Dwarf
It had 6 good seasons and everything after that is just the creators jerking each other off.

The entire Jurassic World series
The whole franchise has a total of 1 good and 1 decent film. Everything else descends into just hollywood slop. If they were going to come back to it an R18 miniseries of the first book would be the best trend to follow considering how much money HBO makes every time they do it.

 

[Warai Otoko]

Arcane should've ended at season 1, considering that most of writers left for the second season.

 

[quisquiliae]

Also, preemptively, One Piece does not belong on this list and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

I generally agree with you, but the pacing and quality have been all over the place post time skip so I can understand why some people would say it has gone on too long.

The second part of Death Note after L dies is weird

I hate to be a MangaFag™ but the spoiler event happens exactly halfway through the manga as opposed to the anime where it is about ~70% of the way through. The two halves rhyme more or less so the effect isn't the same when the timing is different. It also makes the post-L anime seem like a rushed afterthought.

To contribute my own I would say: The Promised Neverland
They shouldn't have attempted anything beyond season one. The second season is an abridged version of a ton of content with many anime original inventions to try and make it work and it is just terrible. The manga had already finished by the time the second season aired which means everyone was already aware of how badly the manga crashed and burned, so they should have just let it be. Season one is very good, and the manga is incredible up to a point where I'm convinced the editor realized what the ultimate conclusion the author was building up to was and told him he absolutely could not do that and he would have to rewrite the last third or more of the story. For anyone not averse to spoilers; the original ultimate conclusion of the story was most definitely Genocide is the answer.

 

[Neodanthril]

Rockford files, an old detective show about a professional conman turned pi was good for what is was, no doubt because of the powerhouse that was Steven j canell. I lost interest in season five because the character had little resemblance to the titular Rockford of earlier seasons.

 

[NiggerKing22]

I'm gonna rape a dead horse but
Attack on Titan
I think there were 2 points that would make the manga still peak if it stopped there.
First was when Eren found the basement and went to the sea, showing maybe one last epilogue chapter showing what happend to characters like Reiner. (Last panel offing himself would be really funny)
Second was when the rumbling activated. There was no way a genocide ending, asspull avengers or le loop ending would satisfy either side of the fanbase, plus rumbling's supposed to be the equivalent to a biblical apocalypse, if it happens, the whole WORLD gets fucked pronto.

Chainsaw Man (Part Deux)
Fujimoto has no idea how to write a long running series, he deludes himself thinking he's Araki or the Coen Brothers just because he got a few months of fame.

Moving onto Koreans.

Hellper
Very cool and emotional take on Bleach. Total turn off when stupid "ichigo you are le devil actually" (main character's part of some gay prophecy, can't remember) shit appeared near the end, and even worse is when the story kept going and left it unresolved, teasing a sequel that never even happend.

Solo Levelling
(yeah I gave that gay power fantasy a read) Should've ended when the MC gave his mom the pills. When it kept going I just stopped and read the ending was he finds out he's the Big Gay of the world's Genesis and promptly returns to living an ordinary boring life. Good god.

 

[Tsukasa Kadoya]

Stargate SG-1

Season 8 was a great way to end the show (Jack and Sam being a couple, Teal'c getting a GF and being offered a position among the free Jaffa nation, Daniel going to Atlantis, the Goa'uld being defeated alongside the Replicators, Anubis being stopped, i could go on) and aside from Mobius being a shit ending to the season it was a great ending....except we had Seasons 9-10, which deflated the ending and felt NOTHING like the other 8 seasons. Sam was boring, Daniel was a dickhead, Teal'c was uninterested, Vala was a skank and Cam was needless. The Ori were neat enemies but didn't fit with the aesthetic. Also the stories got worse and worse, with the second half of Season 10 being total dogshit. The ONLY thing I liked was Ba'al being a pain in the ass.

 

[NoReturn]

I'm convinced the editor realized what the ultimate conclusion the author was building up to was and told him he absolutely could not do that and he would have to rewrite the last third or more of the story. For anyone not averse to spoilers; the original ultimate conclusion of the story was most definitely Genocide is the answer.

THE EDITOR is who did that?!

 

[quisquiliae]

THE EDITOR is who did that?!

I have no proof, but that is my theory. Based on interviews with other Shounen Jump manga authors that I've read and how sharp a turn the story takes. Bleach's author has talked about how he was pushed in different directions by his editor, with him it was mostly related to sales though, lengthening arcs when they were high and shortening when low. One Piece gets new editors every few years from what I remember and there has been a lot of schizo forensics done on how the story changes based on who the current editor is.

 

[twinArmageddons]

Homestuck should of ended with intermission 1

 

[Safir]

and the manga is incredible up to a point where I'm convinced the editor realized what the ultimate conclusion the author was building up to was and told him he absolutely could not do that and he would have to rewrite the last third or more of the story. For anyone not averse to spoilers; the original ultimate conclusion of the story was most definitely Genocide is the answer.

The mango starts declining pretty much as soon as the kids escape.
single biggest bullshit
The Promised Neverland is globohomo soy jizz and I will tell you why
When no one died in the hunting grounds, I knew it'd be shit. A writer who couldn't have even one death there couldn't possibly have the balls to write or even plan a genocide.

Thread tax: The Black Company should've been one book. For those who didn't read it, in the book (it's grimdark fantasy), the protagonists of the titular company get recruited for a war between two "evil" factions and involved in a civil war within the faction that recruited them. Meanwhile, one of the soldiers rescues and adopts a teenage gang rape victim who's eckshually humanity's prophesied savior; she's a background character for the duration of the book, and at the end, the two successfully escape to presumably save the world. Apparently, this is where the writer initially intended to stop, but then he wrote a shitton of sequels where Ultimate Good most definitely exists, compromising the initial grimdark setup.

 

[Town Drunk]

Dragon Ball
So... DBZ ended at the perfect place: the heroes had just defeated the most ridiculous exaggerated monster they could, encountered the biggest stakes in series history (the world had literally been depopulated), it literally required the contribution of all the people in the world for the first time in history the Spirit Ball actually worked... and to double-dog-sure it, Buu's "evil" half got reincarnated as a good guy, Goku is destined to live for 1000 years, and he's training a successor.

The primary reason none of the DBZ follow-ups ever worked, IMO, is because... there's nowhere to go. Unsurprisingly the various sequels do what superhero comics do: reset buttons, nostalgia baiting, introducing a multiverse.... and all the while they wind up just kinda making the end of DBZ kinda pointless, while the "lore" of the series--a series that was already accused of being rather autistic--gets even moreso.

So Buu can destroy entire solar systems easily. Where do you even go from there with the power creep? The few episodes I watched of Super was just Goku trying to get stronger, because he wanted to be stronger... Also Vegeta is still chasing him, even though his story arc and search to surpass him ended in the Buu saga.

I feel like Korra had the issue where every season was a completly different plot. There was no overarching thread like in TLA. It was like the show writers thought they were just gonna have one season, got it renewed and though it would be only once more season, and again and again.

They actually did. They had no idea if any season was going to be the last. Which is why the pacing is so terrible, and nothing connects.

LOK peaked when when she contemplating suicide in the first season finale, because she lost her powers and knew the world would be without an avatar until she died, but broke down because she was too cowardly to go through with it. An ass pull saved the day though, and we never saw that human version of Korra ever again.

 

[Spergichu]

JoJorion
The final arc is longer than Phantom Blood in it's entirety. It just meandered for entire volumes until someone obviously told Araki to finally end it, creating one of the most rushed and scuffed endings I've ever read in my entire life. Entire plotlines completley dropped, half the cast dying unceremoniously, the worst written main villain in the entire series (Made all the worse considering he was the follow up to MY FUARKING PRESIDENT), and a random flashback arc that had no bearing on the actual story. But this was a story about breaking le curse so that means it's the best part ever according to room temp IQ redditors.

RvB
Everyone agrees it should've ended years before it's actual "finale" but can never agree on exactly when. I'm going to take the based contrarian opinion and say it should've ended after S13. Despite it's flaws, the Chorus Arc honestly rivals the original Blood Gulch run for me and the finale is the perfect sendoff for the series. One of the few good things the actual finale did was retcon away everything that came after the S13 finale so it would technically still be the series finale. (Although that also just makes everything from S14 onwards all the more pointless)

 

[Dysnomia]

Roseanne: The final season should have never existed. And The Connors pretended it never happened. Roseanne winning the lottery was all her terrible test kitchen for an American version of Absolutely Fabulous that thankfully never happened.

That 70s Show. When Topher Grace left that was it for me. I consider the show concluded at that point. Red and Kitty were the only reason I even bothered after Topher Grace's exit.