How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) is known for being a womaniser, very vulgar and sometimes downright cruel (his ‘plays’ to get women into bed were almost insulting).
While part of us loves him anyway, that love is sometimes tinged with guilt, especially in light of the #MeToo movement.
But there’s one massive part of the HIMYM story that was occasionally forgotten during the show’s nine-season run and it could change everything about the way we view Barney.
How I Met Your Mother ran from 2005 to 2014, filling in the sitcom gap the recently-ended Friends left.
The show centres around Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) sitting down his two teenage kids to tell their parents’ love story. As we find out in the final season, their mother loses her battle with cancer and Ted reignites his romance with former flame and Barney’s ex-wife, Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders).
But how does this tie in with Barney’s characterisation?
As one widely-accepted fan theory explains, Ted Mosby exaggerates his friend’s behaviour to keep his kids on his side in the Robin-Barney-Ted love triangle.
“That moment when you realize that Barney Stinson was probably not as much of a jerk or a womanizer as he was portrayed to be,” the theory put forward by gingersaurus on blogging website Tumblr reads.
“But that story was narrated by future Ted, trying to get his children to approve of him dating Robin again, so future Ted had to make the man Robin married look like the bad guy in the story.”
The HIMYM cast (from left): Neil Patrick Harris (Barney), Jason Segel (Marshall), Josh Radnor (Ted), Alyson Hannigan (Lily) and Cobie Smulders (Robin).
And the theory has been given a tick of approval from one of the main stars, and Barney Stinson himself, Neil Patrick Harris.
“I think that that’s very accurate,” Neil tells Digital Spy. “Given the story structure, and with [Ted] telling the story to his kids, everything was able to be overdrawn.”
He adds: “There’s the crazy things, like when Barney and Robin started dating, and they get tired of each other; in that episode, Barney had gained 75lb, and Robin had her hair falling out and had gaps between her teeth! So Ted’s revisions of the characters are, for sure, proven.”
Can we go back to loving Barney now, guilt-free?
