5 Reasons How I Met Your Mother Finale Is As Bad As You Remember (And 3 Reasons It Isn't)
3. Is As Bad: The Reason Ted Was Telling The Story
This really was a kick in the teeth. Throughout the show, fans had always just assumed that Ted was telling his kids a sweet story about his young life and how he met their mother. No one really considered the fact (why would they?) that Ted actually had an ulterior motive about the whole thing, and was just telling the story to get his kids' blessing to ask out their Aunt Robin.
But that's exactly what happened. His oldest child, Penny, picks up on the fact that her mother is barely in the story, and that Ted was clearly just sitting them down so he would be allowed to go after Robin, his first main love interest, years after the Mother had fallen out of the picture.
Ignoring the fact that this is kind of manipulative on Ted's part, it relegates his kids' mother to nothing more than a side character in her own story, and defeats the purpose of the show by brushing over the story it had originally set out to tell.