YMMV / Final Crisis

• Anvilicious: Turpin's character arc includes some not-so-subtle nods to the dangers of smoking. After the prologue shows Metron gifting humanity with fire, it match-cuts to Turpin lighting a cigarette and remarking on humanity's habit of using great achievements to kill themselves. When Turpin is possessed by Darkseid, his metamorphosis leaves his skin discoloured and dried, he struggles to breathe and he's hooked up to some medical equipment. Batman also shoots him in the lung, which leads to the Black Racer purging Turpin.
• Broken Base: To be expected when you have Grant Morrison make an event comic. Is it a grand epic and the culmination of years of stories, paying tribute to great works, with an ultimate payoff well worth the wait? Or a barely decipherable mess that doesn't care if anyone gets lost, and Morrison's screwing up the DC Universe in a huge fashion while caring more about tying it into their Batman run?
• Character Rerailment: After many years of chronic suffering from both Villain Decay and The Worf Effect, Darkseid returns to his designated role as the resident God of Evil and as the most powerful threat to the DC universe. And not only that; he gets upgraded into a straight-out Eldritch Abomination whose mere presence outside the celestial realms causes the very fabric of time and space to literally break apart, dragging the multiverse down into an endless dark, hellish pit and basically becoming the multiverse.
• Complete Monster:
  • Darkseid is dying, and so as a final gesture wants to destroy the entire multiverse and all life on it. He murdered his heroic son Orion to permit himself to gain dominion over Earth. Once there, he enslaved the minds of everyone he could touch, turning them into savage parodies of themselves, intending to as he said "murder their souls and take them to hell without end."
  • Libra, real name Justin Ballantine, became obsessed with balance and founded the Injustice Gang seeking to become a God. Instead, he ended up dispersed over the cosmos, eventually reforming on Apokolips and pledging allegiance to Darkseid himself. Taking on the Anti-Life equation, Libra comes to Earth to seduce its villains to his side, even murdering the Martian Manhunter. Enslaving countless minds and warping them into agony and evil, Libra prepares the way for Darkseid to return where every living thing in the multiverse will submit, become his mindless slaves or be exterminated and their souls plunged into an eternity of suffering. Libra even attempts to kill the baby son of Weather Wizard to force him to join up and indicates he intends to make sex slaves of the female super heroines, promising Lex Luthor he can be "first in line" with Supergirl. The insane prophet of the God of Evil himself, Libra devotes himself utterly to darkness, never looking back in his pursuit of wickedness.
  • Terror Titans tie-in: The second Clock King is the whimsically cruel successor to the goofy original. Mysteriously appearing shortly before the Crisis, he recruited a group of troubled teenagers as his accomplices, namely a new Bolt, Copperhead, Persuader, and Disruptor, Clock King offered his services to the Dark Side Club as a procurer of metahuman slave gladiators. Clock King later assassinates the human host bodies of Steppenwolf and Vundabar, who managed the arena, to take it over for himself. Dulling the slaves' wills with drugs and the Anti-Life Equation, Clock King also encourages his Terror Titans to discard their morals by goading them to murder their loves one, and as the cherry on top is also a sexual predator who grooms attractive teenage girls as his mistresses while truly caring nothing for them—as shown when he immolates Disruptor after deeming Ravager a superior replacement.
• Continuity Lockout: Good luck on having complete understanding of this book without a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe's history. Specifically, Anthro the First Boy, Jack Kirby's New Gods, Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory, Morrison's Batman run, Crisis on Infinite Earths, 52, JLA: Earth-2, Kamandi, O.M.A.C., Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew, Countdown to Final Crisis (though Final Crisis takes serious Broad Strokes in relation to that series) and The Trials of Shazam! (so you know why the hell Captain Marvel Jr. is Captain Marvel now).
• Epileptic Trees: A very popular theory is that Final Crisis is meant to act as a response to the works of Alan Moore, in particular Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? - with Nix Uotan and Mandrakk acting as author avatars for Morrison and Moore respectively. This essay by Rikdad further explains the theory.
• Funny Moments: Final Crisis: Requiem shows the Injustice Gang being violently ambushed by the Justice League. While Lex, Ocean Master and a few others are getting massacred by their respective nemeses, Batman and Talia just make out. It's all a hallucination, which really shows where Talia's mind is.
• It Was His Sled: Batman dies or does he...?. The collected edition shows Superman holding his charred body, so even if you hadn't been keeping up to date, you'd know about it.
• Les Yay: The possessed Mary Marvel keeps coming on to Supergirl the more they fight, with Mary showing signs of being a Combat Sadomasochist. Actually, it was Desaad in Mary's body.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "ALL IS ONE IN DARKSEID," "ANTI-LIFE JUSTIFIES MY X," and the various other marketing slogans for Darkseid's dictatorship. "ANTI-LIFE JUSTIFIES MY HATRED!" in particular got a lot of mileage, especially in forum threads complaining about bad comics.
  • The panel showing a factory under Anti-Life manufacturing Darkseid's Justifier helmets en-mass while a Justifier beats one hapless and overworked staff member has a banner hanging over the workplace declaring "TO DIE ON THE JOB IS TO DIE FOR DARKSEID!" It became a common retort against any business owner who feels entitled to underpaid or even free labour, or to employees putting their jobs ahead of their own well-being. Gained even more traction after the 2020 coronavirus pandemic forced people to self-quarantine - consequently leading to numerous businesses having to shut down until further notice and outrage from business owners and consumers who don't care about the well-being of employees and want the economy reopened at all human costs for the sake of their own wealth and convenience.
  • Final Crisis and The Spongebob Squarepants Movie have the same plot.
• Misaimed Fandom: Grant Morrison had intended for Mary Marvel's possession to be a commentary on how the comics industry often corrupts and perverts superheroines for cheap drama and fanservice. They had hoped that people would be horrified at watching one of the most innocent superheroines in the DC universe acting like a Psycho Lesbian. A lot of readers found her evil side hot. It probably didn't help that Countdown to Final Crisis, in a misguided attempt to, well, count down to Final Crisis, had turned Mary evil twice, desensitizing audiences to it, making it into a joke, and inadvertently proving Morrison's point.
• Moral Event Horizon: Inertia crossed it (again) when he killed Weather Wizard's baby son. Also Libra and Human Flame, for killing Martian Manhunter. Darkseid obviously crossed it long, long ago, but what he does in this story is certainly up there with the worst stuff he ever did.
  • Mandrakk crosses the Horizon when he murders his ex-wife, Zillo Valla. Even he's shocked by what he just did, showcasing the last bit of humanity left in the cosmic destroyer.
  • For all Darkseid steals the show in the story, it's easy to forget that the one who actually distributes the Anti-Life Equation to the globe is his scientist, Mr. Mokkari, which he does while sporting a calm smile.
• Narm: "Come closer, I need to eat you raw! SLLUUBBBRR." Apparently even DC thought so since they replaced this with "Where Mandrakk waits for you" (which was earlier in his monologue in the original) in the later collected editions.
• Nightmare Fuel: Now has its own page.
• Older Than They Think:
  • New Gods having host bodies? Black Racer did that with Willie Walker in the original New Gods book by Jack Kirby.
  • An Eldritch Abomination that is consuming all existence being defeated by a countervibration that dilutes it to near nothingness? Is this Final Crisis or Doom Patrol's Anti-God?
• Paranoia Fuel: The Anti-Life Equation can be transmitted through any form of electronic mediALL IS ONE IN DARKSEID.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Kanto is briefly seen as a bouncer at the Dark Side Club, but disappears soon after, while Steppenwolf, Devilance, Doctor Bedlam, Bernadeth and Virman Vundabar don't appear at all. Steppenwolf and Vundabar's human hosts (the managers of the Dark Side Club's gladiatorial arena) are killed in the tie-in Terror Titans, so it's possible Darkseid simply didn't deem them useful enough to his endgame to transfer their essences to new hosts, as happened to Godfrey, Simyan, and Mokkari.
  • Most of the Secret Society get little more than walk-on cameos.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One can only assume what this series would've been like if DC listened to Morrison's plea for an embargo on the New Gods characters.
• Vindicated by History: When the series was originally released, it was incredibly hard to follow, due to the series' "channel flipping" method of storytelling, the Schedule Slip that affected the essential tie-in Superman Beyond 3D, and significant Executive Meddling, particularly in regards to Countdown to Final Crisis. Now that the series has been collected properly and the readership has had time to properly digest its contents, it's much more well regarded, with a number of readers considering it a modern classic. It's still considered divisive, though.
• The Woobie: Overman, an alternate version of Superman who landed in the Sudetenland in 1939. He describes his world as one "built on human suffering", and it's made pretty plain he's not remotely proud of that fact. The only reason he's involved in the crisis is to find his world's version of Supergirl. And he does, but only after she's dead.

---