I'm not talking about bad endings (that's a whole other thing). The following things usually happen further on in the series when people are starting to look for other things to drag the story along.
1: An established story goes back in time and restarts with an alternate timeline.
And in the same vein, if a story skips back and forth around different timelines.
Examples are the X-Men movies, the new Star Trek movies, the Heroes TV series, and the Fringe TV series.
I first noticed this with the 3rd generation Star Trek movies. They essentially went back in time and wiped out all of the other Star Treks.
When a creator does this, they're telling us that everything that came before had no meaning. It just feels like someone new took over an old story line and didn't want to think about about any continuity.
For the Heroes show, it was a bit different. This time, they were always fighting to prevent these different horrible futures from coming true. They fixed one, and shortly after there was another horrible future they had to avoid. I stopped in the third season because I was sick of it (though I was tempted to continue if only to follow Hiro Nakamura. He's great. Definitely one of my favorite characters. Too bad his show fell apart).
There are a couple other variations on this.
I was reading a comic series called Agatha Heterodyne: Girl Genius. I started to get into it for a while. Then all of a sudden they had mysteriously skipped ahead a couple years? (Or maybe several years - I forget).
I quit reading right there. Everything I'd been following in the story seemed like it got left behind and that all we had was a new set of problems. Again, it felt like nothing before mattered.
A long time ago I found a book sequel to the movie Willow.
That was very exciting. Until I started reading it. In the book, some horrible event had wiped out the kingdom and most of the characters. And the characters that remained were so different that they might as well have been different people.
What was the point of even calling it a sequel to Willow? They may as well have just started a new book.
I quit that book early on too.
2: This next one has popped up in several books I've read in just the past few months. And in all of them, I quit reading the moment I saw how bad it was getting on this point.
Making characters extremely inept for absolutely no reason. The characters are even supposed to be very smart or strong or something, and they're just completely useless.
I started the second book from Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. And I stopped about half way through. The students still have bodies of children, but they're all basically 80 years old. They've had decades to prepare to face the evil monsters that want to eat them. And they all have impressive powers.
And they can't do anything.
They spent all that time in hiding, and they haven't prepared at all. All the cool stuff they could do with their powers doesn't even occur to them. Miss Peregrine is a horrible teacher.
Then I read another sequel called Angelopolis. I read the first book a while ago and liked it. But I didn't get very far with this book. There was a battle between a seasoned angel hunter and a skilled angel assassin. And the angel ran away from the guy, who had no trouble running her down and knocking her over. She's an angel! Why the hell didn't she fly away? How did she let herself get taken down so easily?
Lame.
3: A person secretly has a twin.
This hasn't yet made me quit reading something, but it is extremely exasperating.
What, you couldn't come up with any other ideas? You're going to say this person secretly had a twin the entire time?
I've run across this in a couple manga. Most recently, Black Butler. It doesn't even feel like it fits in with the story.
Instead, I will now link an image of not-secret twins!
Heheh. Since I first started this draft, I keep thinking of more things that bug me.
4: Bringing people back from the dead (or pretending someone's dead and having everyone cry only to find that they're not dead. They're actually fine. I'm looking at you, Bambi sequel. Everyone who's seen the first movie knows that Bambi doesn't die). This may not make me quit something, but I'll definitely lose a lot of respect for it.
They started doing this in that Once Upon a Time TV show. And I'm told they keep doing this in the newer Marvel movies too.
If you're going to kill someone, don't take it back. Otherwise the death has no meaning.
There might be some cases where this works, but I'll have to think of a good one.
So yeah. There's a new trailer for Star Wars 9, and they seem to be leading up to Darth Sidious coming back. Jeez, they'd better not do that. It would be the worst thing a Star Wars sequel has done.
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