Summary
- The Gamer’s ending left fans feeling betrayed as key characters were separated, ignoring the obvious ship.
- Noblesse’s anticlimactic ending disappointed fans with loose ends and no meaningful plot closure.
- The Breaker: New Waves lacked closure, devaluing key characters as the plot focused solely on the protagonist.
Manhwa series end all the time, be it by the axe’s fall, or the weight of the story finally sliding towards a resolution. But some Manhwa series had controversial endings that left many fans with their gears grinding.
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Some stories end in absolute disarray, while others have endings so confusing that fans are still gathering the pieces after years. Others might have been great throughout the plot, but the endings are so bad that they kick out their followers. Be it as it may, this list contains series which have endings that fall in any of those categories.
Warning, This List Contains Spoilers!
7
The Gamer
Half A Thousand Chapters And A Ship That Sank
- Genre: Action, Martial Arts, Dystopian, Fantasy, Comedy
- Author: Sung San-young
- Artist: Sang-ah
The Gamer inspires conflictive feelings in its fanbase, many of which are related to its bad habit of leaving loose ends and making fans get false clues about one of the most obvious ships in the history of non-romantic Manhwa. After going through heaven and hell together, Kwon Shiyeon and Han Jihan seemed to be destined to be together.
But, alas, the author had other plans and decided to go into the ‘walks into the sunset leaving everything behind’ ending. With Han Jihan’s appetite for knowledge, magic, and power being endless, he just said: ‘Hey, going into another universe,’ then proceeded to leave his ‘better half’ behind. For all those who were shipping these two, this felt like a punch to the gut, and the fandom exploded in anguish. So much waiting, all for nothing.
6
Noblesse
Too Many Loose Ends
- Genres: Action, Supernatural, Urban Fantasy, Gothic Horror
- Author: Son Jeho
- Artist: Lee Kwangsu
All the fans of this stylish Mahwa series about vampires, werewolves, and other things living among us will know that it also has one of the worst and most anti-climatic endings in the genre. With so many loose ends that, for a brief instant, fans thought it would have a sequel set years later.
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But no, it was just a curtain fall over a series of confusing threads that never knitted a good plot. Though many of the arcs were great, and the incredible battle scenes left fans asking for more. That ending with the impending nuclear holocaust though, was just a shot into the air. Too much gunpowder just to say: life kept going as it was going before the last Arc, The End.
5
The Breaker: New Waves
Lacked Closure For Key Characters
- Genres: Action, Martial Arts, Drama
- Author: Jeon Geuk-jin
- Artist: Park Jin-hwan
The sequel to the incredible and powerful The Breaker series was such a disappointment for fans, that many barely bothered to read the third iteration of the series (Eternal Force). Though the worldbuilding and the character development in the original were detailed and praiseworthy, New Waves commits the sin of forgetting about key characters, devaluating them in a near-criminal way.
In the end, it’s all about giving weight to the MC and the rest of the cast was just there to fill the corners of the picture. Shi-Woon devolved into a generic Shounen protagonist, and his performance during the second part was lackluster in comparison with the previous series. In the end, an anti-climatic ending breaks apart everything that the MC learned, in the worst written betrayal arc fans will ever see in a Martial Arts Manhwa. Makes no sense at all.
4
Sweet Home
The Ending Left Fans Confused And Frustrated
- Genres: Horror, Psychological, Thriller
- Author: Kim Carnby
- Artist: Hwang Young-chan
Horror Manhwa, and especially the Psychological Terror sub-genre, has a tendency to use suspense to pump up the plot, and even drag the ending to the extreme, making the survivors really fight for their ‘get out of here’ trope. In the case of Sweet Home, that resolution comes in such an ambiguous and confusing way, that fans surely had to re-read countless times before making sure that what they were seeing (and reading) was correct.
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The author focused too much on delivering fan service and totally forgot about explaining how the outbreak started, or why Hyun succumbed to it, transforming into one of the worst beings in the series. In the end, too many loose ends, bad people get away unpunished, and meaningless character developments.
3
Bastard
A High Stakes Story With A Disappointing Ending
- Genres: Psychological, Thriller, Drama
- Author: Kim Carnby
- Artist: Hwang Young-chan
It’s not every day that fans can stumble across a series that is so well-written and intense that forces them to be glued to the chair (or couch) binge-reading through dozens of chapters. In that sense, Bastard, the story of a son figuring out his dad is a serial killer and swearing to bring him to justice is perfect.
Sadly, it has a rushed and disappointing ending where every character gets what they want, without an ounce of consequences or common sense makes readers feel cheated. Why did it end in that way? Neither fans nor the author have a single clue.
2
Magician
One Of The Longest Fantasy Manhwa Runs, That Ended In A Lame Way
- Genres: Fantasy, Action, Drama
- Author & Artist: Kim Sarae
When a Manhwa runs for more than 10 years, one grows fond of its characters. More so if the author makes the protagonist grow as readers swallow one chapter after the other. In that, Kim Sarae did a splendid job. The story of Enzu and Iremi started with them being children and ended with them being adults on a ship that luckily sailed on time. But its ending was so strangely unfulfilling and left so many holes, that made fans think the author grew tired of his work and decided to axe it himself.
After more than a decade of fantasy traveling, magic mysteries left unsolved remained, and a rushed ending ruined lots of the carefully constructed worldbuilding in an attempt to provide some sort of fanservice and a false sense of continuity. Iremi and Enzu ended up raising Ethermask’s son when most of the main conflict of the story was because he couldn’t form a family since he had lost the ability to do so (he kind of adopted the main characters of the story to fill that void). The ending makes no sense at all.
1
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