How I Met Your Mother

Barney should've stayed with Nora. That's all I'm saying.

That would have been even better. But this is a sitcom, and we all know how shitty these shows get with their characters' decision making skills.

Yeah, the thing isn't just that he regressed, he regressed completely. Take the pregnancy scare in "Not A Father's Day" in season 4, or the one in "Symphony of Illumination."

When the former happened, he still took the pregnancy with a lot more maturity, despite the fact he was literally praying to God that she wasn't pregnant and creating a holiday to celebrate it. That's just sad. And in SOI, he takes it ridiculously well. He eventually gets scared by meeting Dwayne, but not enough for his behavior in the finale.

Someone had an excellent point earlier... they had the perfect out for Barney: Barney wasn't the right girl to make him mature; his daughter was. They could've explored this, but instead they went with bad wi-fi and Barney somehow disliking spontaneous trips and adventure.

You mean Robin wasn't the right girl.

... well, my typo's not wrong. Barney wasn't the right girl to make Barney change.

A true mathematician.

My hat's off to you, good sir. But you still meant Robin.

Getting away from the ending and shipping Character A with Character B, I got this to ask: How come we haven't applied With Friends Like These... to Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin? First, they do rude gestures when Ted does poetry, second, they watch The Wedding Bride behind his back, and third, they don't like his red cowboy boots.

Are you all hugs, kisses and tickle-fights with your friends? It's almost the definition of a friend that they can rip you a new one and you'll still love them because they love you. I've recognized in my life that I don't need a buddy who accepts everything I do, I need someone who is willing to kick my ass once in a while when I need them to.

And it's not "Let's gang up on Ted." They all tease each other to varying degrees, like the various Interventions and the Gaps in Knowledge episode. If anything the ratio is skewed more against Barney, but his personality and behavior would be intolerable if they didn't.

Fair point, thanks.

Theory: the reason Lilly is such a Karma Houdini despite her Manipulative Bitch and other Jerkass tendencies is because Ted is exaggerating the later two (as in her breaking up his relationships weren't as well thought out as Ted represented them for example) because he's still bitter that she broke him and Robin up.

edited 2nd Sep '14 5:59:48 AM by Archivist10

Makes sense to me.

Potentially, but the fact Ted really seems to go out of his way to whitewash her actions makes it unlikely (the fact that he usually winds up basically going "yep, your Aunt Lily was absolutely right in the end" doesn't jive with any sort of resentment about these things).

Maybe he's trying to make himself look like the bigger man.

Why not both? You can acknowledge someone was right and still resent them for it.

I still don't get all the accusations of Lily being a Karma Houdini. She is called out for her selfish behavior almost every time and has to go through some emotional turmoil for it before she is forgiven. It's just that her mistakes tend to be along the lines of Strawman Has a Point, she goes to extremes to help her friends but tends to come across as selfish even if her rationale is accurate. And the whole fiasco from "Unpause" and the follow-up where people hated that Marshall felt bad for hurting his wife's feelings, when it should be obvious he loves her more than they do.

I think it might be the fact that she has the least bad things happen to her. I mean, Ted has a bunch of breakups, being left at the altar, losing his job, and other bad stuff. Marshall is left by Lily, has to take a bunch of terrible corporate jobs instead of the environmental protection jobs he wants, and then his dad eventually dies. Robin has a bunch of relationship problems, mostly with Ted, a hard time getting into the actual news anchor business, and some problems with her dad to the point that he was the last person she wanted to see, along with the fact that she couldn't have kids and later got divorced. Barney had a rocky relationship with Robin, a bunch of issues with his dad, and a few other minor things. And Lily just has bad stuff that happens to her because of selfish things she does, unlike most of the other cases, where bad things happened even though nobody else was at fault. Her biggest tragedies were her shattered dreams of becoming an artist, which were later solved with the Veterinarian and the Captain, and her rocky relationship with her dad, which was actually a lot less sad than most of the other parental relationships. That's just my two cents.

I really don't buy it. It's giving people too much credit to justify a reason to passionately loathe someone.

I think it's really just as simple as she offers advice that the characters agree with and certain members of the audience don't. It doesn't mean what she offers is bad advice, only that someone thinks they can come up with something better.

Like "The Leap" when Ted's career was on a downward spiral, she suggested that taking the teaching job is a reasonable place to go when being a freelance architect was just not working out. I know some people were upset she was identified as right just because they felt Ted should just tough it out with the almost rock bottom freelance attempt. Of course, in the long run the architect job gave him stability until the GNB project came back around AND was responsible for him eventually meeting the Mother.

eh, I don't know, I personally hated Lily at different times, but I never thought that was something bad she did. I just hated the fact that she left Marshall at the end of Season One, she kept a ton of credit card debt secret from Marshall even though they were supposedly in a relationship without secrets, she was always getting so mixed up in other people's affairs, like stealing Ted's boss's ball even though that job was a personal favor and breaking up Ted and every girlfriend she disapproved of, and I think there were some parts of Season 9 where I hated her with the whole "moving to Italy" plot, but it's not as bad as some of the other things she's done.

I guess I dislike her more than Barney because every terrible thing Barney does has a ton of attention drawn to it, while most of Lily's mistakes are kind of tossed aside relatively quickly or only important for one episode. I mean, the biggest discrepancy that comes to mind is when Ted stops being friends with Barney after he finds out he slept with Robin, a plot that takes up a big part of Season 3, while the "Lily has been secretly sabotaging practically every relationship Ted has been in" lasted for one episode even though that seems like a much bigger line to cross than Barney sleeping with Robin. These are just my opinions, though.

I don't hate Lily, but on my second viewing of the first few seasons I was really struck by a lot of Fridge Logic about her actions. Like, I wanted to like her as I think she's funny and all, but I just kept getting hit by how bad some of her behavior was.

The only time I'd say I really disliked her was when Marshall was interning for the NRDC and she was being all Stepford Smiler, saying she supports him fully but deciding the stress is too much and planning on basically fleeing to Spain. It's treated as a sacrifice that she doesn't go, and that bugged me, because even considering it was a really, really shitty thing to do, any way you cut it.

Basically, Barney's bad behavior made him the Butt-Monkey. Makes sense. Ted got hit by Laser-Guided Karma all the time, bordering on Cant Get Away With Nothing. But Lily did some seriously crummy stuff and was always Easily Forgiven, not to mention instances where no one even got mad at her in the first place.

edited 3rd Sep '14 7:30:50 AM by Larkmarn

I always felt that several characters enjoyed toying/torturing Barney too much. Marshal enjoyed the slap bet far too much considering Barney has never done anything horrible to him IIRC.

Plus Barney seemed to have at many points in the show moments of Jerkass Has a Point, particularly in his moments of Brutal Honesty and when he correctly deduced hat Ted was unhappy living with Robin.

With Barney, I think that nearly every time something bad happened to him, it was because of something he did, usually some Zany Scheme backfired on him.

As far as the Slap Bet, of course Marshal enjoyed it, but Barney agreed to it of his own free will. That he didn't anticipate how much torment it would cause him was because he underestimated how much of a Magnificent Bastard Marshal could be.

... also Lily was an awful commissioner. Though again, Barney brought it upon himself for appointing his opponent's wife as the commissioner.

She was perfectly impartial with the original bet, Marshall even got three slaps to the face without argument for hiding the falsehood of the previous slap. Barney chose the 5 slaps over time option, and Lily also implemented a cease-fire to preserve Thanksgiving peace, which Barney ruined by making the dinner just as obnoxious by taunted Marshall about it. I really didn't get the whole switch over with the Ducky Tie and three more slaps (something about preserving the thrill of the slap bet vs. the torture of the tie), but it seemed like Marshall asked Lily ahead of time about offering that exchange, it wasn't something Lily came up with on her own. And again, Barney accepted the terms.

I will agree that Lily, overall, was probably punished the least for her misdemeanors, but she also had the fewest mistakes of the group overall. The episode revealing her credit card debt was the last of the really serious mistakes she made, after that it was either close calls or at least meant well. The Spain trip was a culmination of supporting Marshall even though they didn't have any money coming in and fearing he was giving up on having a baby.

Well-meant mistakes are still mistakes, and in fact, most mistakes are usually well-meant. And I don't think sabotaging relationships was really well-meant, it was more selfish "I don't want to have to deal with this person in 30 years even though Ted probably wouldn't stay with someone that long unless he actually really loved her" reasoning. Also, what exactly do you consider the mistakes of the rest of the group, because I would have to say that Marshall is generally the one with the least "mistakes" and Ted has the highest ratio of punishment to mistakes, meaning he's made a lot of mistakes, but he's gotten punished a whole lot more as well.