Ever read a book series and found yourself wondering "Why can't the later books in this series be more like the earlier books"? Well in some cases, later installments in a book series can actually be a lot more like the earlier installments than you realize, and not necessarily in a good way.
- A common criticism of Animorphs is the frequent usage of bizarro episodes that frequently had very little to do with the overarching Myth Arc and rarely, if ever, got brought up or become of relevance to the plot ever again, all of which became especially common during the time in which K. A. Applegate took a break and relied on ghost writers to get the series done before returning to personally write the books for the final arc. But for all the complaints against this detail, Applegate herself wasn't above this practice herself, as several books she personally wrote before the beginning of the series' ghost writer era are just as guilty of being a seemingly pointless Bizarro Episode as the worst of the similar books written by the ghost writers (with the Sario Rip to the Amazon rainforest in book 11, Rachel suffering an allergic reaction to a newly acquired crocodile morph and subsequently having to expel it from her body over the course of book 12, etc.). But these instances were easier to forgive since they were written fairly early on in the series' run and had a feeling of authenticity lent to them by having K.A. Applegate herself at the helm in writing them, while also still feeling like fun adventures in their own right worth reading despite their lack of overall contribution to the main overarching narrative. But as more and more books continued to get written, with ghost writers having to take over for the majority of said books, the usage of big lipped bizarro episodes became increasingly frustrating to the readers due to coming across as a cheap means of dragging out the story longer than necessary while also both not having the original writer's direct involvement to lend authenticity to the stories and opening the door for increasingly large numbers of ultimately never resolved questions, which made it much harder for the readers to ignore the snail's pace at which the main overarching narrative appeared to be working towards its conclusion.
- In the Bitterbynde trilogy's first book, The Ill-Made Mute, the characters frequently sit down and begin to tell a Tale-within-a-Tale, usually some retelling of a known myth about magical creatures. This fit in with the book's easygoing pace, the characters in question, and it helps to build the world of Erith as a world where such occurrences are commonplace. The prose is also lavish and very detailed, but again, it's used well and it creates a beautiful and distinct world in the reader's head. By the time the second book rolls around, the easygoing pace is maddeningly slow, the prose has gotten to a point where the reader needs a dictionary handy at all times, and a knowledge of how to diagram a sentence, and the constant interruption with myths and folktales becomes a huge distraction and hindrance. The third book is nearly unreadable, for these and other reasons.
- A Court of Thorns and Roses:
- A complaint of the later books (reaching a nadir in A Court of Frost and Starlight) is the tendency to focus more on Feyre's love life than the large-scale conflicts. The first book had Feyre's romance with Tamlin take most of the spotlight; the conflict with Amarantha doesn't become prominent at all until the last third. This was more forgivable for readers because Tamlin wanting to romance Feyre and thus break the Spring Court's curse is the whole reason Feyre gets involved in the plot, and Feyre's confrontation with Amarantha occurs largely because she's fallen in love with Tamlin, so it's understandable the book devotes a lot of pagetime to their relationship. However, in the subsequent books the conflict shifts to Hybern threatening to invade both Prythian and the human realm after Amarantha's defeat (and Feyre learning to cope with being turned into a High Fae); Feyre's romantic relationships no longer play a central part in this, so for some readers it's less justifiable that they're focused on so much.
- Some readers have criticized Rhysand's portrayal in the fifth book as seeming wildly out-of-character compared to the Rhysand they know and love from earlier books, mostly because of how he treats Nesta, his overprotectiveness of Feyre and his decision to hide important medical information from his wife; in previous books some of Rhysand's most prominent traits were his Hidden Heart of Gold and empowerment of Feyre. However, other readers would argue that Rhysand isn't really acting OOC because he was always like this: since the first book he has done extremely questionable things to achieve his goals, including being cruel to protect Feyre. The books have previously focused on Feyre's POV and she is witness to Rhys' more benevolent side, accepts his explanation for his actions and overall presents him in a more romantic light. Once the book shifts to a different character's POV - one who doesn't like Rhys or accept his excuses so readily, nor is on the receiving end of his benevolence - his less savory behavior sticks out a lot more and is harder for some readers to accept or excuse.
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: From the very beginning, the main plot of the series has involved the titular wimpy kid Greg being a complete Butt-Monkey and undergoing a never ending chain of unfortunate events. But in the earlier books in the series, this was easier to tolerate since the earliest books had proper plots that connected all the unfortunate events together and allowed for a proper buildup to relatively happy conclusions. But as the series went on, the plots of the books became blatantly random and unfocused with no more overarching story tying it all together; at which point readers started finding it a lot more difficult to care about what happened to the increasingly large number of unlikable or incompetent characters now that there was no longer any proper narrative backing it all up.
- Earth's Children:
- Even as far back as the first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear, there were several paragraphs or even entire pages dedicated to describing geography, Stone Age-tech and other aspects of the setting. This was more readable early in the series, because the books were shorter and also included interesting plotlines and character interactions, so the parts delving into the author's research came off as story-enriching world-building. However, by the time The Shelters of Stone (Book 5) came out, the books had gotten substantially longer while the plots were a lot more thinly-stretched (The Shelters of Stone in particular barely has any plot advancement at all, yet is the second-longest book at 753 pages). Consequently, it can start to feel less like reading a story where the research is used to enhance or provide context to the plot and setting, and more like a drawn-out non-fiction book with the occasional narrative interlude.
- The series became somewhat notorious for the sheer amount of sex scenes interrupting the plot. The Valley of Horses (Book 2) was the first book to start this trend, but it wasn't so bad here because the majority of the sex scenes had some relevance to the plot and/or helped develop the characters (e.g. the sex scene between Jondalar and Noria helps explain how First Rites work, and gives us more insight into Jondalar's character and how he functions in intimate relationships, while Jondalar and Ayla's sex scenes are the first time Ayla has ever experienced consensual and pleasurable sex, and brings them closer emotionally). However, increasingly the sex scenes have less relevance to the plot and characters, and thus far less justification for taking up page space (e.g. in The Plains of Passage only about two sex scenes serve any purpose beyond fanservice).
- Goosebumps: Troy Steele at Blogger Beware has argued
that the Goosebumps series was ruined by its sixteenth book, One Day at HorrorLand, long before the series' generally acknowledged decline. While HorrorLand became one of the series' most popular books, it eschewed the semi-realistic approach of earlier Goosebumps entries, where ordinary kids encountered a low-key, supernatural menace (dummies, ghosts, haunted masks, etc.) within everyday environments, in favor of a fantasy environment heavily populated by monsters and magic, increasingly improbable and convoluted plots, and a complement of gross-out effects. While Steele himself never liked HorrorLand even as a kid, he admits that a lot of other kids loved it and still look back on it with nostalgia, in no small part because it was the book that seriously delivered on the monsters and the in-your-face frights whereas its predecessors were more low-key. Because it was such a hit, R. L. Stine revisited its basic formula again and again, to rapidly diminishing returns. - Inheritance Cycle: The Film of the Book Eragon often receives heavy criticism for being a forgettable and unoriginal fantasy story that's already been told countless times before in much better fashions prior. That being the case, it has to be noted that the first book of the cycle was also heavily derivative itself to the point of containing various characterizations, plot points, and other elements borrowed wholesale from various other prior fantasy stories. However, for all the more comparatively unoriginal elements present, the book still had a fairly small amount of elements that were original that could be easily found if one paid close enough attention (i.e. the setting being largely based upon Christopher Paolini's home state of Montana instead of Europe, the fairly unique culture of the elves and dwarves compared to past portrayals of elves and dwarves, etc.). Unfortunately, due to the people behind the film choosing to cut most of the seemingly more extraneous elements for the sake of focusing on the bare bones of the story, all of the more fresh and unique aspects of the story ended up removed while additional clichés that hadn't been present in the book ended up added in, leaving the film to come off as a generic and uninspired Cliché Storm with nothing available to allow it to stand out on its own.
- E. L. James' post-Fifty Shades of Grey novels, namely the trilogy retelling Fifty Shades from Christian's POV and standalone novel The Mister, have been criticised for presenting abusive stalkers as romantic heroes and horribly regressive gender roles in general, and didn't sell nearly as well because of it. All of these things were present, and widely criticised, in not only the Fifty Shades books but also in the Twilight series that inspired them, all of which sold extremely well regardless. For many readers it was easier to overlook in the Twilight and Fifty Shades series given that the heroines still found their love interests attractive in spite of their questionable behavior; given that we didn't know Christian's exact thoughts and motives the readers could also interpret his actions as being more benevolent or misunderstood. But when the narrative was presented from the perspective of the man doing the stalking and the abuse and left no further room for denial, these things became impossible to ignore and hurt critical and commercial reception.
- In the latter two books of Jumper, Cent is a Base-Breaking Character, since a lot of readers found her to be obnoxiously perfect; able to trivially take out adversaries in seconds, when her parents never managed to solidly defeat them, inventing tricks that her parents never imagined, being an author mouthpiece for various issues in identity politics, and everyone else ultimately being a supporting character to her space program in the final book. However, just about all of this is true of Cent's father Davy and the first book too; about the third thing Davy does with his power is get effortlessly rich, he fairly often uses his teleportation ability to defeat terrorists where nobody can oppose him, and he consistently tests his ability and develops new uses for it. Furthermore, the first book is almost an Author Tract peddling Alcoholics Anonymous and its sister organization Al-Anon, and Davy is a teetotaler start to finish. The difference, in these readers' eyes, is that Davy is shown to be a flawed and somewhat morally-ambiguous individual even when he ultimately begins doing heroic deeds (he gets his money by robbing a bank, and he only begins his hijacking interventions for the decidedly selfish reason of finding his mother's killer), and the author carefully rations out the times when Davy is able to use his power to simply solve the plot while also allowing him to make mistakes and suffer due consequences for as much over the course of the story. Cent starts as a Plucky Girl and consistently forces her way through the world through a combination of powers and sheer stubbornness, and rarely suffers any consequences for doing so; even when things do go pear shaped, it's not due to any flaw of hers, but the independent actions of others.
- In L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz series, filler chapters where the main characters visit a Wacky Wayside Tribe with a particular gimmick go back to the very first book, when Dorothy and her friends visit Dainty China Country on the way to see Glinda the Witch of the South. L. Frank Baum would go on to use this in many books to come, and in moderation it could serve as Worldbuilding, although some might say Baum relied on it excessively in a few books (The Road to Oz in particular being practically nothing but Wacky Wayside Tribes). In his final four books or so Baum managed to rein this in, with steadily fewer such diversions from the main plot. When they did appear, they would at least be plot relevant. Future authors in the series such as Ruth Plumly Thompson would take this trope and run with it, however, sometimes to the point where it felt more like padding to make the story longer.
- People who criticize Thompson's addition of several previously unmentioned tiny micro-kingdoms within Oz might forget that L. Frank Baum actually did this first; the Queen of the Field Mice in the very first book being the first appearance of an alternate monarch in Oz, with the first small kingdoms within Oz being introduced in the sixth installment (Utensia, Bunnybury, etc.), and larger prominent kingdoms being Jinxland in The Scarecrow of Oz and Oogaboo in Tik-Tok of Oz. They were usually less central to the overall plot in Baum's books than Thompson's, however. The main problem people had with Thompson’s usage was she often used it to focus on her own original characters at the expense of the established Oz characters created by Baum, who would be relegated to minor roles if they appeared in the plot at all; but again, Baum sometimes did this himself.
- In fact, quite a few of the things Thompson's Oz books are often criticized for; loads of characters, filler Wacky Wayside Tribe chapters, excessive pun-based humor and the like, are all things present in Baum's Oz books to varying degrees, especially the earlier ones. To what degree she is either being judged too harshly just because she replaced Baum, or she actually does over-accentuate the weaknesses already inherent in the series, may vary from book to book, and the reader's opinion.
- The chronic Protagonist Title Fallacy issues of the series go back to the very first book, since the Wizard, the namesake of the book, is a relatively minor character compared to Dorothy and her friends. To be fair, it wasn’t Baum’s first choice for a title, and later on the publisher was the one to decide on book titles, often going for marketability over reflecting what the actual story was about. And furthermore, despite not having quite as prominent of a role in the story as Dorothy and her friends, the Wizard himself did manage to at least be of moderate relevance to the plot due to the act of reaching him and getting their wishes granted by him being the shared goal of Dorothy and her friends for the first 3/4 of the story. Later in the series, Tik-Tok of Oz and The Scarecrow of Oz would have the namesake of the book be absent for the majority of it and be a secondary character when they did appear, while also often not having their roles in the stories be nearly as important to the other characters in the narrative compared to how important a figure the Wizard was for the motivations of Dorothy and her friends in the 1st book. And while not every book has this problem, it still crops up throughout the rest of the series just often enough for readers to take notice and be displeased.
- People who criticize Thompson's addition of several previously unmentioned tiny micro-kingdoms within Oz might forget that L. Frank Baum actually did this first; the Queen of the Field Mice in the very first book being the first appearance of an alternate monarch in Oz, with the first small kingdoms within Oz being introduced in the sixth installment (Utensia, Bunnybury, etc.), and larger prominent kingdoms being Jinxland in The Scarecrow of Oz and Oogaboo in Tik-Tok of Oz. They were usually less central to the overall plot in Baum's books than Thompson's, however. The main problem people had with Thompson’s usage was she often used it to focus on her own original characters at the expense of the established Oz characters created by Baum, who would be relegated to minor roles if they appeared in the plot at all; but again, Baum sometimes did this himself.
- Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future has been heavily criticized for its unmistakably misanthropic themes. However, one of Dougal Dixon's more well-received earlier books, After Man: A Zoology of the Future, took a noticeably dim view of humanity as well. That being said, it wasn't dwelt upon as much and far more focus was given on the many wondrous creatures that evolved after human extinction, which is much more palatable than Man After Man and its incredibly bleak portrayal of human descendants becoming exclusively ugly, cruel monsters.
- Some readers and reviewers have noted that many of the flaws of Ready Player Two (which was subject to Sequelitis) were present in the first one, but that they were more tolerable there or at least balanced out by the more positive aspects, which Ready Player Two lacks.
- Many readers opine that while Ready Player One could be shallow and silly at times, with underdeveloped characters, it was also a straight-forward adventure story that wasn't too difficult to understand and had a logical, satisfying conclusion the plot had built up to. Ready Player Two has a near-identical premise but its story is a lot more convoluted and contrived, with an abrupt ending that raises more questions than it answers. The poorer plotting and weak ending compared to the original makes its other flaws harder to overlook and it's more difficult to enjoy even as light escapism.
- Wade had his flaws in the first book, but this could be chalked up to him being a teenager with a crappy life and he developed into a more selfless person, so for some he worked okay as an Escapist Character. In Ready Player Two however, he's now an adult in an extremely privileged position whose flaws are even more glaring, including abusing his position to get his own way even if it hurts others, so for many he comes off as an obnoxious Designated Hero.
- Both novels are filled to the brim with 1980s pop culture references, which was more enjoyable in the first book as many of the references were to things even the average person would likely be familiar with, while also including a few more obscure references for fans of those works; while some readers found it a bit much, it was generally tolerated. The sequel has far more obscure references that few people outside their niche fanbases are likely to understand and to make matters worse, it even gets some of these references factually wrong, making it harder for anyone to appreciate.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons succumbed to the sprawling, complex nature of the A Song of Ice and Fire storyline that had previously been a selling point. The series has always been about gradual plot development and long term pay-offs, with a lot of detail put into exploring the backdrop of the action and the world in general — but this was all complemented by significant happenings. Though some POV characters had less to do than others, each book had a dramatic arc to it. Feast and Dance, meanwhile, are criticized for essentially very little happening because the focus is drawn so wide, with too much time spent describing characters and places that don't really matter—issues that culminate in the books ending without their logical climax out of a combination of the author and editor needing to publish SOMETHING already and the fact that Dance was already so long that it tested the limits of bookbinding technology despite being unfinished. Notably, when the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones reached this point in the series during season 5, many of these same criticisms — namely, that the show was moving too slowly and was having trouble corralling all of its many plotlines — were repeated almost verbatim by TV critics, even with the show's attempts at Adaptation Distillation.
- Fans of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 alternate history saga often criticize the later installments for being boring, predictable, and (occasionally) poorly researched, since they effectively turn the series' "alternate history" into a blatant retelling of actual European history transposed to North America. Some history buffs have criticized the books for failing to explore some potentially interesting implications of their historical setting, while others take issue with them for occasionally twisting the details of American history to justify the direction of the plot. But the series started down this path in the very first installment How Few Remain, which is still considered a classic of alternate history. How Few Remain is ostensibly about a theoretical Second American Civil War in the 1880s, but savvy readers will recognize the central conflict as a loose retelling of the comparatively obscure and lesser known Real Life Franco-Prussian War with the United States and the Confederate States standing in for France and Germany, and the contested Mexican territories of Sonora and Chihuahua standing in for Alsace and Lorraine. The novel also features Abraham Lincoln becoming a Socialist organizer (something with, at best, questionable historical basis) just to bring the political climate of 1880s America closer to that of 1880s Europe. Not to mention that the plot hinges on Emperor Maximilian I controlling the Second Mexican Empire in 1881, yet never bothers to explore any of the implications of that fact—which arguably would have made for a more interesting story.note It was just a lot harder to tolerate when the series started taking its cues from more well-known historical events like World War I, the rise of the Nazi Party, and the Holocaust (which still hit pretty close to home for many people), making the lazy writing easier to notice.
- The Twilight Saga:
- A reason why Breaking Dawn is a Contested Sequel might be due to this reaction and poorly executed Wish-Fulfillment. Breaking Dawn, among other things, significantly empowers Bella, inserts her into a Teen Pregnancy storyline that ultimately ends well, has clumsy Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends involving Bella's child, and has an anti-climatic Happily Ever After ending. Thing was, while these elements did have their roots in the earlier booksnote , Bella seemingly worked just fine in those earlier installments as an Escapist Character who could easily appeal to teens since she was presented as (at least ostensibly) a Cute Bookworm Naïve Everygirl who finds herself cavorting with filthy rich vampires and greaser werewolves, and even has romantic entanglements with them. And the fact that there were times in which she was either genuinely in danger or going through unpleasant moments of fairly relatable drama over the course of the first three books also helped. However, once she became an Invincible Hero who has Idealized Sex with her new husband Edward, blatantly enjoys her newfound wealth and power, and has an equally glamorized daughter, any relatability she had was essentially gone, and the writing issues of the previous books became more apparent.
- Bella's constant angsting in New Moon has been criticized as wangsty even by readers who genuinely like the books. While Bella was already plenty pessimistic and angsty in Twilight, she tended to combine it with sarcasm and wit, so it was more entertaining to read, and she was still being proactive about things like uncovering the truth about Edward. In New Moon, though, she does little but angst ceaselessly for the whole book and her entire character arc centers around how miserable she is about Edward leaving her (to the point of suicidal ideation), which is a lot more emotionally draining and frustrating for readers.
- Kristen Stewart's performance as Bella in The Film of the Book has been criticized as over-using Dull Surprise and making Bella seem bland and two-dimensional. Some have defended Stewart though, by pointing out she didn't exactly have the best material to work with because Bella is much the same in the books. A possible explanation for why this worked better or was overlooked in the books is the difference in medium: because the books are written in first-person from Bella's perspective, it's easier for the reader to immerse themselves into the story and get distracted by the Vampire-Werewolf Love Triangle and what have you. With the film adaptations though, the audience is forced to view Bella from more of an outside perspective, so her lack of depth becomes more obvious.
- While The Wheel of Time always suffered from too many subplots, dozens of viewpoint characters and massive word count padding, in the earlier books it was easier to overlook this because Robert Jordan was able to write an interesting story into each thread of the epic. Then came Crossroads of Twilight, when the first section of the book was dedicated to showing what various characters had been doing during the Battle of Shadar Logoth, which was essentially 'nothing at all.' Crossroads of Twilight was seen as the weakest book in the series for this reason.
- The later installments in Gregory Maguire's The Wicked Years are sometimes criticized for being rather deliberately paced, with meandering plots that generally put more emphasis on characterization, world-building and philosophical themes than on advancing the Myth Arc. But this criticism could also arguably be made of the original book Wicked, which is still widely considered a modern classic.note Much like its sequels, Wicked suffers from a rather slow-moving plot with relatively few major plot developments, and even some of its most important story beats either happen off-page or are left ambiguous. Readers just didn't mind as much at the time, since the protagonist Elphaba was interesting enough to make up for it, and the novel was a reimagining of an extremely well-known fantasy story. Not to mention that it was pretty clearly not intended to be the start of a saga (hence the 10-year Sequel Gap between Wicked and Son of a Witch), so most readers didn't mind that it was more of a leisurely character study than a gripping epic. But when it was followed by novels that had clear and deliberate sequel hooks, much fewer classic L. Frank Baum characters, and protagonists that generally weren't as memorable as Elphaba, the flaws in the story just became more obvious.
