I've never had the experience of really attaching to a series of this kind and then finding that it ran so long that I tired of its people or wished other lives for them.
I wouldn't say I've had it happen to anything where I was passionately attached, but there have definitely been episodic series that palled for me before they ended. More on TV than in books, though; where it happened with books, it was most often with things like Valdemar or Pern where the setting as a whole is more than a single series. I enjoyed early Anita Blake, though, and then it just . . . slid inexorably off a cliff.
"Resent" is probably too strong; it just chimed irresistibly with the earlier assessment. I don't enjoy the inherent shapelessness of this model—I have read many first books of planned series which do not function as novels so much as whacked-apart portions of plot—and the absence of structure often makes me mistrust the writer's ability to catch up to their ambition. If it sticks the landing, great. But I'm having a hard time thinking of an open-ended, non-episodic series that's done it, even outside of cases where it's unfair to blame the author because they died. In the interests of fairness, because this is a mode of long-form narrative I don't especially enjoy, I haven't read tons of it.
And in fairness, I can't presently think of any examples of a successful metaplot-style series that didn't at least have their first installment feel reasonably self-contained. I don't believe it has to be inherently shapeless; just as there can be substructures within a single novel, I think there can be substructures within a multi-book series. But we don't have a large number of models to follow, the way we do with other types, and the most prominent models we do have (e.g. the Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire) are . . . kind of rolling disasters when it comes to their structure, because the authors visibly made some very bad decisions about how to approach the work. So I'll admit that in its pure form, I can't name any good examples of this off the top of my head. (Though I'm going to ponder and try to find some.)
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I wouldn't say I've had it happen to anything where I was passionately attached, but there have definitely been episodic series that palled for me before they ended. More on TV than in books, though; where it happened with books, it was most often with things like Valdemar or Pern where the setting as a whole is more than a single series. I enjoyed early Anita Blake, though, and then it just . . . slid inexorably off a cliff.
"Resent" is probably too strong; it just chimed irresistibly with the earlier assessment. I don't enjoy the inherent shapelessness of this model—I have read many first books of planned series which do not function as novels so much as whacked-apart portions of plot—and the absence of structure often makes me mistrust the writer's ability to catch up to their ambition. If it sticks the landing, great. But I'm having a hard time thinking of an open-ended, non-episodic series that's done it, even outside of cases where it's unfair to blame the author because they died. In the interests of fairness, because this is a mode of long-form narrative I don't especially enjoy, I haven't read tons of it.
And in fairness, I can't presently think of any examples of a successful metaplot-style series that didn't at least have their first installment feel reasonably self-contained. I don't believe it has to be inherently shapeless; just as there can be substructures within a single novel, I think there can be substructures within a multi-book series. But we don't have a large number of models to follow, the way we do with other types, and the most prominent models we do have (e.g. the Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire) are . . . kind of rolling disasters when it comes to their structure, because the authors visibly made some very bad decisions about how to approach the work. So I'll admit that in its pure form, I can't name any good examples of this off the top of my head. (Though I'm going to ponder and try to find some.)