HIMYM Ruined Its Best Character By Turning His Growth Into a Rollercoaster
When fans want to get fancy in their debates, they start talking about character development and arcs — specifically, about how they got messed up by the writers.
After the last season of How I Met Your Mother, this has become even closer to the show's fans; but these talks were there even before the not-so-grand finale.
Barney Stinson has always been a special topic for discussion, and we won't go through all the reasons why — we've talked about that enough by now.
Like his friends, he's also changing throughout the series, but for some reason, he always slides back down as soon as there's the slightest opportunity.
Barney's character development is more of a roller coaster that brings him back down no matter how high he's risen.
There are many instances of this pattern, but we'll just cover the most important.
Nora was an amazing woman Barney fell in love with. He actually wanted and tried to change for her, and when no one else saw hope for him, she somehow managed to reveal his best sides.
For Nora, Barney even decided to give up all his lies… And that was some character development, knowing Barney!
Then he cheats with Robin and unexpectedly comes clean to Nora about it. He even admits it meant something to him when Nora asks, even though he realized it will ruin their relationship that he — for once — cared about…
But after Nora leaves him, he becomes the same old Barney again, with all his lies, as if nothing changed.
The same happened after Barney and Robin's wedding: we watched an entire season of them struggling but coping and becoming better to be together, and the very fact that Barney decided to marry someone and become a family guy is a huge leap in his character development…
But then again, as soon as they get divorced, he immediately becomes his old self.
This happened many more times during the series, too. It's like Barney resets, time after time, into his default mean womanizer state, and nothing can change it.
Somehow, the writers even drop his biggest development aka changing for Robin and marrying her, and explicitly show us that degrades back into how he was at the beginning of the show…
Then, as if suddenly realizing that they can't just leave him like that in the last episode, they give him a newborn daughter that he immediately falls in love with and swears to become the best father for her.
His growth for Nora was reversed; his changes for Robin were reversed; everything else that seemed to have impacted him was reversed.
And in the very end he just randomly has a kid and now he's a different man?
How are these latest changes supposed to be believable after we've seen many times that they mean nothing when it comes to Barney?
It was not a character development but a character rollercoaster at best. Considering what a memorable and fun character he was, it was straight-up dirty to do him like that.