Why Was The Half Bad Ending Controversial Among Fans?

I saw a lot of fans losing their chill about the ending of Half Bad. I get why, because in many ways it was a pulling of the rug from under readers after 3 volumes of development. Yes, much of the outrage stems from issues with the plot for certain arcs that readers had been hoping for, but I think a lot of it stems from the ways in which the author played with readers expectations of the growth or development of favorite characters. Were their difficult moments redeemed by kind ones? Some arcs were cut off abruptly, while others seemed to twist in unexpected ways, while still more remained ambiguous. Many of the chapters in the book were deliberately slow-burned in order to explore complex moral grey areas, but the rapid-fire climax and its aftermath seemed to be paced in entirely different fashion. As a result, the typical emotional pay-off that readers expect from a resolution felt off-kilter to many.

There is a big tonal divide between the moral ambiguity of the slow burn of the earlier volumes and the harsh/cold ending that many readers felt was nihilistic rather than courageous. Some even felt that it was unfair in that it didn’t reward the characters for growing or learning in a kinder way. Fans are very quick to divide along shipping politics and harsher/sidelined pairings often get a lot of hate.

Most interesting was the way all this negative sentiment sparked so much more engagement of the book than would have otherwise been the case. There were many, many thinkpieces published on the various elements of the ending; a huge amount of fanfiction that re-wrote the ending in a number of ways; and on Twitter and elsewhere, countless heated debates over the wording of a single sentence or other such minute details. The ending of Half Bad mattered to readers precisely because they cared so very much about the story and its characters. And even though some of the choices were quite upsetting to me, even grumbling at them, I found many of the darker choices to be hauntingly memorable in their own way. Not everything has to be neatly tied up.

What annoyed me about the ending of ‘Half Bad’ by as much as it did is that the author seemed to be trying to tie together a few of the main themes of the book (identity, power, consequences) but he seemed to have been going for a cathartic ending that many readers had been hoping for instead. Rather than having closure, the ending was ambiguous in places which, I suppose, could be good for showing themes but is also good for being annoying when it feels that characters have been manipulated in order to reach a point that makes a statement rather than one that feels right for them. In the end, my annoyance at the ending was more that some of the plot points had felt unearned rather than that they were unhappy.

The social dynamics within fandom around Half Bad were fascinating to watch, particularly as they were played out online. Many readers had wanted certain things from the book and were disappointed to find them absent in the final pages. Those thoughts and feelings were then shared with the rest of the fandom, quickly building into more solid forms of criticism – some of which were wonderful in that they explained away the decisions that the author had made in terms of character. Other thoughts and feelings, however, were less positively set out and earned my scorn as they attempted to read the end of the book only in terms of certain ship(s) or in terms of a particular moral take on the novel as a whole. I saw lots of good quality criticism and some very bad ‘hot take’ style criticism of the book’s ending. I think, however, that it is worth noting that the controversy over the ending of Half Bad has highlights an important point about narrative ownership: once we bring our own histories and hopes to a text then the ending can never be neutral. And, actually, that controversy with Half Bad goes to keep the book ‘alive’ in conversation – even if that conversation is mostly negative.

So, so much angst has followed the revelations about the ‘Ending’ of Half Bad. This isn’t really a post about the twist(s), though – how they were foreshadowed or poor or fantastic – so much as about the blow to people’s expectations, and, for me, the abrupt, heavy, unsettling quality of the last part of the book after so much time spent with its characters and their inner journeys. (It’s also – strangely – so very very good, and I’ve gone back and reread parts of the novel in search of hidden clues that I must have missed the first time, and there are already a few excellent Half Bad fanfics underway, too). Just: so many late nights of chatting with friends online who would get worked up, some of them nevertheless vehemently defending Nathan’s decision, others ranting against the ambiguity. For me, it hurt most, because I’d invested so much in those relationships and in Siddig’s inner journey. But even so – despite the pang of disappointment – it’s been strangely good to dwell on this aftermath, this aftertaste, and this many conversations had, and kept having, as a result.