How I Met Your Father Main Characters & Their HIMYM Counterparts

The sitcom How I Met Your Mother gave fans a group of friends to watch with individually lovable personalities. They were equally relatable and outlandishly hilarious, keeping fans coming back season after season from 2005 to 2014.

Now, in 2022, fans have received a whole new group of friends to watch and enjoy in the spin-off series How I Met Your Father. While the series is independent of the characters and plot of its parent series, there are some very clear similarities between the two. Both shows take place in New York City, they both revolve around viewers trying to guess who the main character’s significant other will be, and they both feature an overzealous parent boring their child with long-winded stories. The characters from both series can also be compared and assigned with their own unique counterpart.

6 Sophie – Ted

Sophie and Ted are both the main characters of their respective shows and are both on a mission to find the love of their lives, which is the biggest similarity between HIMYM and HIMYF. These are the characters that are telling their own personal love stories to their children, but their similarities don’t end there.

Ted was the hopeless romantic of HIMYM. No matter what happened to him, such as getting left at the altar, Ted never gave up on finding his perfect match. Sophie is similar in that while she never had a good example of a romantic relationship from her mother, and she has never been in a serious relationship herself, she still believes that her one true love is waiting for her out there. Both Ted and Sophie’s romantic optimism makes them great protagonists to watch and ensures that audiences will remain hopeful that the two will find their happy endings.

5 Jesse – Robin

For every hopeless romantic character like Sophie and Ted, there has to be a character who is focused on anything but true love. For HIMYM, this character was Robin, who was too focused on her career to care too much about getting married and having kids. She still enjoyed making connections and dating and fell in love a couple of times throughout the show, but her main ambition in life was not romance.

In HIMYF, the parallel character to Robin is Jesse. His self-deprecating sense of humor makes him one of the funniest characters in How I Met Your Father, but he is certainly not the most romantic. When Sophie meets Jesse, he quickly informs her that he does not care to find love. In his case, however, he has been burned in love and therefore no longer sees it as an option for him. He thought he had found true love but was publicly rejected when he proposed to her. Undoubtedly, just as Ted helped Robin see the benefit of love in her life, Sophie will end up doing the same for Jesse.

4 Valentina – Lily

Valentina is Sophie’s best friend and roommate, and so far one of the best characters in How I Met Your Father. She is outspoken, confident, and unafraid to embrace her own sexuality. She cares very little whether she makes anyone uncomfortable with the way that she casually talks about her experiences or desires, and her friends are people who accept her exactly as she is.

Lily is very similar in that she is never ashamed to discuss her fantasies. Her active sex drive is often the punchline of jokes between her and her husband, and she frequently expresses her desire to have a physical experience with Robin. While Lily and Valentina differ in their experience level, they both are open women who have no interest in pretending to be something that they are not.

3 Sid – Marshall

Sid is Jesse’s best friend and roommate. He is a fairly chill character, always supporting his friends in their moment of need. Audiences meet him as he is preparing to propose to his long-term girlfriend Hannah, with whom he is in a long-distance relationship. He is loyal, supportive, energetic, and funny and he’s the perfect supporting character.

This makes him very similar to Marshall, who is Ted’s best friend in HIMYM. Marshall met Ted back in college and the two slowly became unlikely friends. Marshall’s endlessly kindhearted personality contrasted will with the pretentious Ted, creating a dynamic that audiences fell in love with. This same dynamic has now been recreated with Sid and Jesse.

2 Charlie – Barney

Charlie is a British aristocrat who moved to the US in order to be with Valentina, his girlfriend. After he made this decision, his family financially disowned him, meaning that he had to live like a regular person for the first time in his life.  As a result, he is somewhat clueless when it comes to the day-to-day lives of the rest of the group. However, despite the fact that he is completely out of touch, he has a heart of gold.

Barney is the seemingly arrogant and self-centered friend of the group. He is obsessed with having as many sexual conquests as he can, with absolutely no remorse for the deceitful ways that he finds to achieve them. However, despite all of this, he reveals during the show that he is actually a very sensitive person. He ultimately would do anything to support his friends, even though he is somewhat clueless about the appropriate way to do so. While Charlie is considerably less problematic than Barney, which is one of the ways HIMYF is better than HIMYM, the two characters are still extremely comparable.

1 Ellen – Tracy

Ellen is Jesse’s sister who recently moved to New York City after divorcing her ex-wife. She is silly and impulsive, often making odd comments and somewhat reckless decisions. However, her weirdness makes her unique and endearing. She is quickly accepted by the group, becoming fast friends with each one of them.

Tracy is the mysterious mother from HIMYM. She is only in the final season of the show, but the writers did a great job of creating a character that was likable and believably meshed with the group that viewers already knew and loved. They did this by creating a somewhat goofy character, who makes up quirky songs, plays in an economics-themed band, and pronounces words every bit as pretentiously as Ted. While Ellen and Tracy may be different in many ways, their weirdness and versatility makes them perfectly comparable

About The Author

Angel Shaw
(86 Articles Published)

Angel is a Senior List Writer at Screen Rant. She is deeply in love with any form of storytelling, whether it be books, movies, TV Shows, or video games. In her free time, Angel can typically be found binge-watching comfort shows, playing any Zelda game, or goofing around with her family.

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