This week's poll was suggested by our member Viki.kdrama. What if you liked the entire series all the way up to the ending? Maybe the protagonist didn't get with your preferred love interest or there was a deus ex machina. How would you rate it? Would you even bother recommending it?

You can submit poll ideas here: https://www.mangaupdates.com/topic/kilkdnn/site-manga-poll-suggestions

Previous Poll Results:

Question: How do you feel about endings that are ambiguous or open to interpretation?

Choices:

• Like them - votes: 353 (19%)
• Don't care - votes: 480 (25.8%)
• Dislike them - votes: 1028 (55.2%)

There were 1861 total votes. The poll ended: March 15, 2025 (5 minutes ago)

If you read from the comments of last week, people's opinions were quite different on this one

A just ruler amongst tyrants

the ending matter a lot to me, it can easily ruin a story for me.rushed endings is something i can deal with but not ones like a romcom where the main couple don't end up together or a dark fantasy where everyone got revived

the protagonist didn't get with your preferred love interest How would you rate it? 1/10, that's my most hated scenario in fiction i stay away from harems/love triangles because of that

I don't think I'd give a bad rating bc of the ending. I always analyze how was the story and the characters throughout the manga before deciding. I don't focus only on the end.

I ended up voting "maybe", but really I'm torn between that and "yes" because it really depends on how bad the ending is/what kind of bad ending.

Rushed endings or ones where it just kind of feels like it petered out and the like that are just disappointing don't necessarily ruin a series for me enough to give a bad rating (although they might knock a few points off the final rating), but if it's axed so it has no proper ending, it has a tragic ending, or the FL ends up with a super shitty ML for no good reason instead of an objectively superior 2nd ML, then even hearing spoilers that those things are going to happen is enough for me to drop a series without even finishing it, but if I do end up finishing it I'm not likely to rate it well.

Also if it feels really terrible and incongruous to the rest of the story, like the author set out to tank the series or something, it can retroactively ruin the entire story for me, no matter how much I liked the rest of it. I remember loving Usagi Drop when it was just a heartwarming story of a single guy suddenly raising this orphaned 6 year old and how he had to learn out of nowhere how to be a good parent, but of course

all of the sweet parenting moments just add to the horror when he ends up in a relationship with the little girl he raised at the end of the story.

Really depends... But I definitely lowered series rating due to bad endings quite a few times... But i wouldn't usually do it straight up bad rating if i liked series overall...

I am envoy from nowhere in nowhere. Nobody and nothing have sent me. And though it is impossible I exist. © Trimutius

Depends on how it's bad and how bad it is. I usually only lower my rating a bit, not completely drop it to the bad range.

I don't remember a time that I thought the ending was so bad that it made me think the whole series was badly written. Even if it makes me dislike the series, I don't give bad ratings just because of that.

I think the reason the results are so different is how even an ending that isn't known until it happens feels better than an ending where you don't know what happened or what the consequences were.

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

I would rate a series fairly, regardless of how the ending made me feel, but here's the thing: sometimes, in extremely rare cases, the ending really does break the story so badly it tanks the rest of the story.

I can't exactly give an example of that for manga, because I don't remember the one or two I've come across. I think the live action Game of Thrones, however, perfectly fits. That ending was a dagger through the heart from the back. The ninjas were not chopping onions, just the good will the audience had for the series.

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

I tend to not really like numeric ratings. I feel like they kind of give more of an idea what a person that would already like a story thinks about it more so than like what I would think about it, and it doesn't really communicate why they like it. Especially if a manga has like an anime.

But to get back on topic >^<. I think the journey is more important than the destination. Many manga I like never got a proper ending. And that is fine, if the majority of the plot and art was enjoyable I'm having fun. I don't really get the people who need like this whole package to be satisfied. Or who would never read something unless they are sure it gets finished or has a good ending.

For those who can't read my name, you can call me gloomy.

Yes, if the ending makes me hate the series as a whole. Specially when it's a series I liked and then bam! I hate it with all my being, because of that ending.

"Oshi no ko" would be the best example. 😔

Quote from 鬱姫

I tend to not really like numeric ratings. I feel like they kind of give more of an idea what a person that would already like a story thinks about it more so than like what I would think about it, and it doesn't really communicate why they like it. Especially if a manga has like an anime.

But to get back on topic >^<. I think the journey is more important than the destination. Many manga I like never got a proper ending. And that is fine, if the majority of the plot and art was enjoyable I'm having fun. I don't really get the people who need like this whole package to be satisfied. Or who would never read something unless they are sure it gets finished or has a good ending.

Numeric ratings give a general vibe of how multiple people see the quality of the series, at least in theory. It's not about one individual person's view is (that's what reviews are for). It's often useful as a tool to find different series one may not normally be interested in and convince them to check it out, or for publishers to see and use that as a jumping off point to figure out what to do with a given series... well, maybe not the latter with how many awful manga or LNs are getting anime adaptations while good ones take forever to even be considered for them.

It's like anime studios are allergic to good storytelling nowadays because most people consume whatever slop they can get without questioning it. But I digress.

Anyway, as to why a bad ending can ruin a series: that's because a story is a complete package. Do you bother to buy a whole pack of ground beef if you see the one end is spoiled? Because the rest is still good, right?

Okay, all analogies fall a bit short, but a journey that concludes badly leaves an aftertaste that's bad. One that ends so badly it spoils the rest of the series leaves the reader feeling like leaving a relationship: they wasted time and money and don't get any of that back, and could have started a different relationship with a better person and not had to experience the bad end.

And readers really do feel that strongly. For example, in the manga Fuuka, during the mid way point of the story,

The lead female gets hit by a bus and dies.

This left such an impact on readers, causing so many IRL people to get depressed, that when the anime was being made, the mangaka changed that part of the story because of how bad they felt about what that story did to so many of the readers.

At least, that's what the mangaka said in an interview.

My point is, people love stories and they hate having the rug pulled out from under them. Most rug pulls aren't so bad as to spoil the whole experience, but some are.

Well, I hope I was able to convey the feelings of some of us in regards to the rare ending that's so bad it spoils the rest of it. Emphasis on rare, because most series we read do have a journey that doesn't get spoiled by the ending even if it's a bad ending (either in theme or in poor quality writing with bad characterization and such—both can do it).

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

It depends how bad the ending was.

Its not going to matter much to the rating if I'm just disappointed in how it ended. Main character didn't get together with best girl? Disappointing, but I'm not going to penalize a series for something like that.

Maybe the series got axed and its a badly rushed ending that affects the quality of story then maybe it takes a small hit in rating. Stuff that is out of character for the protagonists or the author changes direction along the way that leads to a weaker ending is going to take more of a hit.

If the ending violates my values like the female lead falls for a genocidal maniac at the end or she gets together with her rapist (yes there are unfortunately stories like that) it doesn't matter how good it was to that point its getting a serious downgrade.

Also I take exception with the last choice which implies giving a bad rating to a series is somehow unfair. Like I tried to point out above, there are degrees in quality of endings. Small stuff not going to matter much, but very bad endings affect the overall story and should be penalized in ratings.

If I don't like the ending I think I'd look for an arc with a good ending and unofficially assign that as the ending in my head lol

I voted yes, but that's only for seriously bad endings or the lack of an ending in the case of a rushed or axed ending. A disappointing or ending I wasn't expecting wouldn't affect my rating too much. Last Wish to the Shinigami is the series that I would slash it's score due to the lousy rushed/axed ending.

I wrote "depends" but it doesn't just depend on how much I liked the rest of the series, it also depends on how much the writing of the story is dependent on its ending.

Some manga are ALL about the journey and experience. There is no conclusion they are obviously building towards, so how that conclusion is ultimately handled has little to no bearing on my enjoyment. I may still personally want plot threads wrapped up, as mentioned in the last thread, but if the series as a whole wasn't an overwhelmingly plot-driven manga, my rating of the series won't change at all.

Baby Steps is a perfect example. It was canceled at the start of the main character's first ATP 250 event, not due to waning popularity but because the magazine decided it wanted a shift in the type of content it put out. It had a super open ended ending--which I didn't like at all--but that didn't change my rating of the series as a whole because the open-endedness was constructed in such a way that it matched the tone of the whole series up to that point, but "now Maruo is doing his thing in the big leagues".

One Piece, on the other hand, while it is currently my favorite series and has been for 19 years now (following for 21 years), is putting a LOT of weight on its ending. If the ending of One Piece is for some reason bullshit--something that's impossible to imagine since Oda's editors have known about it for decades and not tried to change his mind on it, but I'm just saying if--then that'll downgrade it from an 11/10 to an 8/10. A huge huge dip. It'll go from "if you are not reading this you are missing out on the greatest experience of our generation" to "it was a really enjoyable read, but if that's the ending it was building towards, maybe it's not worth a new reader getting through 1300+ chapters for THAT"

Liar Game's ending wasn't even awful but it was certainly a disappointment in comparison to "what could've been" (for a lesson in how to handle an ending for a series constructed like that, look at Tomodachi Game), and that took it from a 9/10 manga to 7/10 for me.

The weirdest situation is probably Detective Conan. Because the whole series has, technically, been building to the ending with the black organization, but most cases have nothing to do with that at all. I would probably only dock it one point if it has a shit ending. The rating for the few people who only read the non-filler-case chapters would probably go down drastically--like, if you excluded all the cases where no member of the black organization appeared or were mentioned, no new tech from the professor was introduced, and no meaningful character development like a new recurring character's introduction or a meaningful progress in some romantic pairing or another metaplot like when Kaito Kid found out Shin'ichi's identity, you would cut out literally 70% of the series, and that 400-chapter result would be MUCH more disappointing if it had a shit ending. But if you really enjoy the case-to-case details like I do, like you're just reading old detective stories instead of a 30-year-old manga with a real plot, then the ending doesn't affect much because that's just been getting teased at us for hundreds of chapters anyway.