The New 52: Futures End / YMMV

Captain Obvious Reveal: The entity responsible for possessing the Engineer and destroying the Stormwatch ship being Brainiac. The comic tries to sell it as a big twist, but it's hard to not see it coming a mile away when both the possessed Engineer and the entity's robot minions are wearing Brainiac's logo on them.
Complete Monster: Brother Eye (also in Batman Beyond (Rebirth)) is an A.I. created by Batman and Mister Terrific, originally designed to protect humanity but having undergone a sudden Face–Heel Turn. Despising flesh and seeking to exploit psychological warfare, Brother Eye decided to assimilate everyone, turning superheroes into grotesque embodiments of Body Horror either by turning them into cyborg monsters or by sewing them to fleshy servants like Frankenstein. Upon learning of Batman's plot with Terry McGinnis, Brother Eye decides to sew Batman with the Joker to create a cyborg monster that it sends back in time. In the past it is revealed that Brother Eye manipulated Cadmus by holding King Faraday's family hostage and making a deal with Fifty Sue—whose later rejection prompts it to spite her by revealing her file in order to psychologically break her—taking advantage of the discrimination against Earth-2 heroes by subjecting them to inhumane experiments and embedding them with implants that spread over them like cancer. Brother Eye always takes its time to taunt people, culminating in The Reveal that all of the plot was meaningless as Tim Drake goes forward in time to find a hologram of a perfect future, which quickly dissipates as Brother Eye mocks him, disguised as his Love Interest. All too casual to subject everyone to torture from children to Superman himself and revealing in its sadism, this incarnation of Brother Eye is one of the most pointlessly cruel villains in DC's recent years.
Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: The point of the story is that time travel can solve some problems, but Brother Eye is not one of them this go around, not even when Brother Eye itself decides it needs to stop its own future development. It's a point that takes over forty issues to hammer in. The program is finally defeated for good in the "present" day in Batman Beyond volume 5, but after forty issues of a drawn out conflict just to reset back to where it started with the heroes even worse off than before, readers gave up and volume 5, where they finally make their comeback, only lasted 16 issues to Futures End's forty something out of reader fatigue. Presumably the seeming defeat of Brainiac was supposed to soften this blow, but those who know Convergence know that know his real end wasn't here either.
Esoteric Happy Ending: The future not being modified at all and it being up to the survivors to defeat Brother Eye could be uplifting if not for the fact that all the character developments in the series are undone, leaving lots of unconcluded threads and no progression for many, many characters.
Fridge Brilliance: Of course there was no hope for this timeline. The Future's End era is one where Doctor Manhattan's control went on fully uninterrupted, and he did everything he could to make the DC's heroes as miserable as possible.
It Was His Sled: The ending of the series is a "Shaggy Dog" Story that undoes almost all of the Character Development while still leaving the world in its apocalyptic state. Expect any discussion to go back to this point.
Like You Would Really Do It: The event billed itself as being the future of The DCU...but 5 years is a long time, especially for comic books. No one seriously bought that this would be the future of DC Comics, when at best, it was something that could happen, especially since comic books don't lock in plans for the future that far ahead. Regardless, Dr. Manhattan basically ensured that it wouldn't but could happen (what with all alternate universes being real.)
Memetic Mutation: The infamous scene in Issue 0 where Frankenstein rips open his clothing to reveal that he stiched Black Canary's face to his body is widely used as a example as to what a misfired attempt at Darker and Edgier leads to.
Misaimed Marketing: Considering the dark tone of this comic (as noted above), this is clearly the perfect comic to promote on Free Comic Book Day.
Moral Event Horizon:
- Brother Eye when it decides to assimilate people. And if you feel charitable about all the misery it's causing the "gotcha" he pulls on Tim at the end definitely establishes him as the ultimate sadist.
- Brainiac probably crossed it long ago given the amounts of civilisation's he's destroyed, but his conclusion to kill Stormwatch and take Manhattan marks an in-narrative moment for him.
- Ronnie Raymond trapping Jason Rusch inside their shared mind for weeks just to not soil his reputation, including subjecting him to sexual intercourse against his will.
Nightmare Fuel: What Brother Eye does to most of the heroes and villains is not pretty. Essentially an attempt to make You Will Be Assimilated go up to eleven. And even the examples that are Nightmare Retardant from how over-the-top they are in absurdity are still pretty repulsive to behold the first time around. Here's a few examples.
Nightmare Retardant: While Brother Eye's robot army should be a terrifying concept, it doesn't make much sense for Eye to give them such unnecessarily complicated robot bodies. It Crosses the Line Twice with how ludicrous some of the roboticized characters look, like with Batgirl's torso attached to the Bat-Signal.
- Brother Eye's banter with Fifty Sue and pulling a "gotcha" with Tim at the end makes what was previously a cold, ruthless intelligence into a brat.
- Someone thought it was a good idea to have one of Brainiac's^note avatars be a bunch of evil corn mooks, culminating in Midge getting killed by a corn stalk.
Padding: The entire series could have been condensed to 3 or 4 issues and nothing would have been lost.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: So Terry McGinnis and Brother Eye play a Terminator Twosome to see whether or not a Bad Future that essentially wipes out the DC Universe happens. They undershoot their target times meaning that part of the Bad Future is going on and they need to scramble to see how they can make things better/worse. And Terry dies pretty soon, forcing Tim Drake to take over as "Batman Beyond". And then Timey-Wimey Ball crazy stuff happens that pretty much makes the whole attempt to change the future (and even the vision of the "earlier" Bad Future) into a complete waste of time (in and out of universe) at worst, an extremely vague "Ray of Hope" Ending at best.
Trapped by Mountain Lions: Lots of it. The book has roughly seven different plotlines all running, but only a handful actually contribute to the actual main story. That the ending renders virtually everything outside of Terry and Tim's arcs pointless does not help. To say nothing of the tie-ins which interrupt their own series' plot to tell stories that have nothing to do with the rest of the story.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
- Ronnie Raymond suffers from a complicated example. Over the course of the story it's made clear that he's in the wrong... except he's called out on the wrong things, like his temper and ego. His actual flaws (i.e. kidnapping Jason Rusch inside his mind for several weeks and forcing him to experience sexual intercourse against his will, essentially raping him) are never called out, and ultimately the narrative asks you to forgive him.
- Fifty Sue is treated as a misguided person who is who she is due to never having a mother. Upon being adopted by Lana Lang, she continues to murder people, clearly disproving that assertion, though the story doesn't address this at all.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: This was released as a top-biller at Free Comic Book Day, which while not alien to adult properties (see WE 3) is still primarily geared at all families. Meaning that children were at the very least exposed to covers showing the mutilated, robotic corpses of classical superheroes.
Win Back the Crowd: Many Batgirl fans loved the Batgirl tie-in, as it featured the return of Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown as Batgirls. Even if it was just in an alternate future, it went over very well.

YMMV / The New 52: Futures End

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