Did anyone else hate the ending to Y: The Last Man? (Spoilers)

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    cheddarhead4

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    Edited By cheddarhead4

    I almost just stopped reading in #55 when Yorick left beth for 355. I was so pissed off. then the book just spirals out even further getting less and less satisfying as it went on. I LOVED the first 30 or 40 issues, but all the issues they spent to develop stupid third string characters (like the israeli chick and the last two comics, 53 and 54,) just really made me want the stupid thing to finally be over. I would understand if this thing is supposed to be a tragedy (the main character's name IS yorrick). When you chase a girl across the world for 5 years only to leave her from your butchy, emotionless,  character-deficient bodyguard because beth wanted to travel 5 years ago is just really stupid. It's not tragic, because they try and make Yorrick's 30 seconds with 355 sweet.

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    caret33

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    #1  Edited By caret33

    I agree with you for the most part here; I just finished reading the series for the first time a few days ago, and I felt mixed about the ending of it.  I could honestly go on for days as to why I wasn't really too crazy about the last several issues (basically the whole France cycle/Whys and Wherefores, as it's called).  The three main reasons why I didn't like the very end were (and these are in order of the flow of my argument, not in the order of precedence in terms of going from what bothered me the most to what bothered me the least):

    SPOILER WARNING OF COURSE SO IF ANYONE HAS NOT READ THE END PLEASE DO NOT READ ON UNLESS YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT SPOILERS AND ALL OF THAT


    1) I could understand 355 dying, and I could accept it...but did it have to be so undignified?  I mean, she had a deadly duel with Toyota in China or Hong Kong (I forget which) during the Motherland story run; to die from that would have been more dignified--but to be picked off by a sniper bullet?  I know, I know, it was shot by Alter, who was the ultimate main antagonist, and 355's death made for emotional momentum to rile up the Yorick/Alter fight, such as it was...but I still think 355's abrupt, ignoble death was BS.

    2) This is the thing that made me the most upset (and I see you mentioned this above): Beth Deville and Yorick not staying together.  Now, I KNOW a trillion people could come down on me or you or anyone else who feels this way, but eff it, I will state my case on behalf of Beth Part One (not to be confused with Former Flight Attendant Beth Two, whom I never really liked).  a) Beth One did wait for Yorick; sure, she might have had relations with women, perhaps, as she hinted in the meantime, but Yorick...see above with Beth Two as well as connecting with Sonia (who was admittedly probably my favorite female figure in the entire series...cut down too soon), Kilina, and maybe others we didn't see, "off screen" as not every moment was captured in the ten story cycles here, of course.  We did see Beth One going around Paris, showing a photo of Yorick, trying to locate him.  b) As with the death of 355 above, I could accept Beth One and Yorick not staying together per se, but at least make it for a more dignified reason than Yorick not accepting the idea of maybe being dumped (under other circumstances) FIVE YEARS AGO.  If Beth One somehow betrayed Yorick significantly in the year/at the time at which most of Whys and Wherefores took place, fine.  If there were some other more clear and present (with emphasis on "present," as opposed to the past) reason, fine.  But not this BS.  I felt a bit cheated as a reader to come all this way, and be denied a happier ending, for this BS.  Now, I know, I know, Vaughan was probably looking to surprise people, catch them off guard, which he did well per se in having his twists at the end here.  And I know that for me to want Beth One and Yorick together at the end is kind of Hollywoody and Disneyesque (as I read another person online suggest)...and I can appreciate that Yorick developed bonds with Beth Two (whom I wasn't crazy about) and 355 (whom I did really like) over time, and there is the destination (Beth One) and then there is the journey (Beth Two, 355, and others), and both are equally important.  But part of me will always have wanted it to be Beth One and Yorick in the end.  Also, c) Beth One wanted to break up with Yorick at 22; is she such a bad person for this?  Yorick is awesome, yes; but who at 22, upon just finishing college or being close to it, doesn't want to get out and see the world, and perhaps collateral to that, start fresh and maybe break some eggs in the process?  I know that runs counter to what I just said about wanting to see Yorick and Beth One together in the end, but I'm looking at their "normal" situation at 22 at this point; like Beth One, I suppose, I then look at them at 27 and think that under those circumstances, and after all that they each went through (and yes, Yorick went through a crapload more than Beth One...at least that's how it seems, although we don't get nearly enough of Beth One's story in the series...thus making it more convenient to make her the distanced one and seem all the more the wrong, "bad" party here between the two), sorry, long parenthetical:) anyway, after all they went through, they should have been together in the end.  Yes, it was somewhat nice for Yorick to be with Beth Two in the end.  Yes, it was somewhat nice for Beth One to be with Hero in the end.  But it just wasn't enough for me.  Again, I can appreciate innovation, and surprises, and twists, but it just didn't resonate well with me in the end.

    3) I want to go into how much the last issue generally just bugged me, but I need to get to bed soon...I will continue with this point sometime in the next couple of days.  Thank you, Cheddar, for posting this initial post, in any case.  I will post again soon.

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    caret33

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    #2  Edited By caret33

    Sorry for the break in this, had to sleep:)...just wanted to complete this line of thought now.  As for 3) of my points above, I just didn't like the way that the last issue took things in one uber bizarre final leap into the future.  I mean, the part of me that appreciates originality and innovation kind of appreciated it, but then again, I just felt that the end of the series should have been a bit more conventional, given how long the story had been going.  Especially when one thinks about how earlier story cycles of the series (for example, literally "Cycles" which was Book 2) had a good, straightforward amount of falling action at the end, what with there being a whole issue--after Victoria was killed, then Hero killed Sonia in turn--a whole issue for the dust to settle after that climax, with Yorick talking to the other ex-convicts of Marrisville and what not, telling them to play Bowie at Sonia's funeral and so on...with the end of Whys and Wherefores (Book 10), you have Yorick's battle with Alter, then him knocking out Alter in front of the other Israelis, then his sitting in front of a fountain--and then all of a sudden we're catapulted sixty years into the future, with NO dust settling in the "present" immediately after the Yorick/Alter fight, as, again, there was time for the dust to settle, for example, at the end of Book 2 after the climax there.  I wanted to see Yorick talk to Beth One at least one last time.  I wanted to see the characters shaking off a bit what happened in the last few issues up through Issue 59.  The loopy-ass Issue 60 just did not do it for me--again, I can appreciate something different (I actually liked, for example, the interlude with the garbage-truck girl Waverly in Issue 53, which gave us a small, neat break from the main action, then plunged us back in, no harm done)--but doing something totally off the wall at the very end, when one is expecting/at least hoping for things to wrap up neatly, is just crappy (I read online somewhere, someone saying Vaughan "tricked us" at the end...I don't know if it could be called a trick, but it was just a bizarre runaround of sorts).  Yes, there were flashbacks in the last issue, with Yorick cutting his foot and thinking he would die, and Yorick being bald and visiting his sister (but not Beth One, who's also there) in the Kalahari, and Yorick taking Ampersand out for the latter to die in the snow...but it was all just such a strange blur, really cryptic, it felt incomplete and lacking in several places, and was just not the sort of thing I wanted for the last issue.  You know, maybe if the loopy-ass "sixty years later" thing were some kind of Special issue or Epilogue Issue 61, AFTER having an Issue 60 which was a conventional "dust settling/shaking off the climax" issue, I might have appreciated it more--but I still wanted that dust settling/shaking off closure, and to be denied it just sucked and, as others have said online, made the end of all this feel really rushed.  The series was long enough as it was, but that was all the more reason to take its time a little bit more with the ending, and its abruptness in the end was just BS, originality and innovation of its execution aside.  To say that the transition from Issue 59 to Issue 60 was jarring is the understatement of the year; there should have just been more time taken with what happened in the days after Yorick left Beth One, he watched 355 die, and he defeated Alter.  I really would have liked to have seen that.  One last thing (I know this has been so long but I just want to say): I hate those people online who are like "This series couldn't possibly have ended any other way"--that's BS.  I'm not saying that my "dust settling/shaking it off/Beth One and Yorick together etc" ending is the only way to go--I'm just arguing here that it could have ended more than one way after all.  I'd really like to hear what others have to say on this.

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    luoxiang22

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    #3  Edited By luoxiang22

    I think that anyone who ever says that a piece of work can only end one way is just complimenting the work or saying how much they liked the ending. Any piece of work can end in a variety of ways.


    While saying that, I really like the way Y ended. It threw me for a bit of a loop really, but it made sense. It's all about Yorick finally growing up, perhaps a little later than he could have. I think that's something a lot of men can relate to, when looking back on early experiences of being in love. The relationship with 355 simply had more to it, although it didn't necessarily have to skew romantic. As for Ampersand, well... tough ending.

    I also thought that the politics in Y, right up to the end, were done a heck of a lot better than in Ex Machina.
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    DH69

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    #4  Edited By DH69

    at first i did, i thought the writer took the easy way out by taking the fastfoward to the future route, but going back to it, it was the best way to go. If they picked up right where it left off with yorick being met in france they would have had to cover a lot of ground and all the emotional relationship stuff would have taken a big amount of time, instead the writer chose to give us a complete rundown with nice little glimpses of what happened after france

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    moywar700

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    #5  Edited By moywar700

    agent 355 death felt kinda forced. They had survived countless situations and hard ones too. I felt her death was cheated because it didn't make sense how they survived all these crazy situations and died by a sniper bullet.

    I didn't mind the the love how yorick ended up with agent 355.i did like him being with her.

    I did like the covers for the series, they were very well done.

    The supporting cast had way too many lesbians in the story.If you're gay in a class of 30 kids,chances are there only gonna be 1 or 2 gay kids. Half of Yorick supporting cast was lesbian.

    Overall, i did like the series, i enjoyed it overall

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    moywar700

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    #6  Edited By moywar700

    anybody else read the series recently?

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    the_stegman

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    #7  Edited By the_stegman  Moderator

    I read the series years ago, loved it then, and still love it now, including the ending.

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    moywar700

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    #8  Edited By moywar700

    @The Stegman said:

    I read the series years ago, loved it then, and still love it now, including the ending.

    tell me what you didn't like about it

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    SuperShafe

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    #9  Edited By SuperShafe
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    moywar700

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    #10  Edited By moywar700

    omg i was so sad agent 355 died =[ =[ =[

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    the_stegman

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    #11  Edited By the_stegman  Moderator
    @moywar700: There's literally nothing I don't like about it, and I don't say that about many series, to this day, it is my favorite comic series...ever, to me, it's perfect from beginning to end, and if I wasn't so poor, I'd buy them all in those fancy deluxe editions.
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    Hostile

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    #12  Edited By Hostile

    I'm the kind of guy where the ending can kill the entire series for me (it can go from meh to dislike) and this was one of those times. The ride was enjoyable overall but I didn't feel like Yorick should have loved 355 in that way. I really was expecting too much because I thought the series would be brilliantly written because of the praise I heard but it left more to be desired.

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    cindycenter

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    I loved this series, it started soooo strong. Every month it would be the top issue I would read. Things started to go south, and while the ending wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t the same quality of the beginning

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