What happened to Barney Stinson after How I Met Your Mother ended? The character was played by Neil Patrick Harris throughout all 208 episodes of the long-running sitcom. When it comes to Barney's fate, a few clues were revealed in the series finale.
Barney was known as the womanizer of the group. He met Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) in MacLaren's Pub years before the series started and infiltrated his way into the friend group despite their protests. Over time, Ted, Marshall (Jason Segel), Lily (Alyson Hannigan), and Robin (Cobie Smulders) accepted Barney's manipulative and competitive ways. Much of his overconfident demeanor stemmed from a bad breakup in which he decided to reinvent himself as a "suit." Barney also had serious "daddy issues" that he struggled with well into his adult life.
Barney's past caused him to frequently avoid commitment especially when it came to women. It wasn't until his relationship with Robin that Barney ever considered staying with someone for the long term. After he won back Robin with the last play in his Playbook, the couple became engaged. The ninth and final season of How I Met Your Mother took place over Barney and Robin's wedding weekend. There was hope that Barney and Robin would live happily ever after as a married couple but the flash-forward scenes in the series finale revealed otherwise.
When How I Met Your Mother's series finale jumped to the year 2016, the gang reunited at Ted and Tracy's house. It was revealed that Robin and Barney's relationship had fractured after her new job required a lot of travel and limited time for her husband. The couple decided to divorce, much to the surprise of their friends.
A few months later, Marshall and Lily hosted a Halloween party and Robin noticed that Barney went back to his old promiscuous ways. He continued seducing women for years until he got a girl pregnant at the end of his perfect month in which he slept with a different girl for every day of the month. In 2020, Barney's daughter Ellie was born and he fell in love with her at first sight. At that moment, he vowed to stop his old ways and settle down in order to raise his daughter as a devoted father.
There's no indication of who the mother of Ellie was or if Barney ever had a relationship with the woman. He seemed totally focused on his daughter and there's no reason to doubt that he would have been a legendary dad. Barney claimed that he was happy raising his daughter when he attended Ted and Tracy's wedding a few months later, so he clearly had a major role in the child's life. Him being referred to as "Uncle Barney" by 2030 Ted to his children also suggests he had a close relationship with Penny and Luke Mosby.
If anything could have changed Barney's womanizing ways in How I Met Your Mother, it would have been having his own daughter. Nothing would have transformed him into an overprotective father faster than imagining men out there with the same intentions that he once had when it came to women.