She said it was like writing an essay the night before it's due. You start at like, 7, and you're still pretty awake and you have plenty of time, so you can perfect it and do your best work. Then it's like, 9 and you're starting to get a little stressed but not too bad. You're not doing your best, but it's not terrible. Then it's midnight, and you've just got to get this essay done because if you don't you fail the class and you're just trying to do it as fast as possible.

The thing with Hunger Games and Divergent is that they both have huge, potentially obnoxious fanbases that want the new book as soon as possible. In fact, I think fandom's inability to deal with hiatuses is a problem. There's a difference between "I can't wait I love this show/book/franchise!" and "They need to get the new season out soon or the fandom's going to go insane!" (shout out to the Sherlock fandom). I'm digressing a little, but there's this general mentality of "I want it now!" that businesses -like the publishing business - pick up on.

Interestingly enough, one of the FAQs on Rick Riordan's website is "Could you get the books out faster?". The response is that he's trying to make sure they're good. And I haven't met a Rick Riordan book I haven't liked.

That's not the only factor, but I think the others have been more thoroughly discussed already.

Having read all of the Hunger Games trilogy, and the first two Divergent books, I have a different idea.

A lot of the time, the scope of a series will start off small. In Divergent, we're mostly concerned with a single factor; even in Insurgent, we're looking at one city (and practically ignoring the existence of the outside world). Similarly, in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, the scope is mostly limited to 'teenager fights in arena'. Yes, there are hints of more, but they're just that - hints, things taking place which our protagonist doesn't take (much) part in.

And then, for the finale, the scope widens explosively. That definitely happens in Mockingjay, and the conclusion of Insurgent suggests Allegiant will go the same way. Which means... well, partly that the fans are getting a distinctly different book to the last two, but partly also that the author is working outside their comfort zone. To pick another (non-trilogy) example: J.K. Rowling spent six books writing about a school, then wrote the last book as an epic quest. There were complaints about that on this very Board.

I think to a large extent this is local to young-adult fiction - or at least fiction starring young adults. They quite deliberately start with a 'teenagers think [small thing] is the most important thing EVER' approach, and build up to 'then the world ends and they're involved'. The 74th Hunger Games, the Dauntless initiation, finding the Philosopher's Stone - those were all pretty much business as usual for Panem, Chicago, and Hogwarts (respectively). But the finales? Those were world-changing events - or, in the case of Allegiant, seem set to be.

And a lot of the time, the author can't cope. I've not read Deathly Hallows, but a fair number of people here disliked it for just that reason. Mockingjay is my least favourite of the Hunger Games series - though I do still enjoy it. (I actually really disliked the Divergent Trilogy, but that's another story).

So what's the solution? Simple: make the shift before the last book. I'll use another YA series - Percy Jackson.

In Lightning Thief, we're fairly small-scale. Three teenagers go on a road trip across America. Yes, the stakes are high, but the scope is small. In Sea of Monsters, we have two sets of teens, plus a villain who's actively out to get them. Titan's Curse expands the group, and introduces literal world-changing with the raising of Othrys, and also threatens the gods directly. Battle of the Labyrinth starts off as a quest, but turns into... well, a battle.

So by the time of Last Olympian, we're already primed for a big, all-out fight. If the first four books had just consisted of 'go on a quest, find the thing, try to thwart the villains along the way', Last Olympian would have been as big a shift as Mockingjay was. And yes, that goes for both the readers - we wouldn't have been ready for the change - and the author. If you've written two or four fundamentally-similar books, writing a completely different last one is hard.

Another example: Lord of the Rings (of course). Fellowship has a very small scope - them, not to the world. In Two Towers, though, we see the build-up - Aragorn starts out as a Ranger chasing orcs, but finishes the book leading a battle. That primes us for the big battles of Return of the King. If the Hornburg hadn't happened, or had happened off-screen - if Aragorn had travelled to Edoras, then ridden straight to Isengard - the battles in the final volume would have come pretty much out of nowhere.

Too many words, nowt left to say; stopping now.

hS

That is, that the initial installment is super well-received, but any and all sequels get panned. I think this is because the (collective) audience enjoys being introduced to an entire new world at the beginning of the story. The sequels, however, are showing us more of the same setting, and more of the same characters (for the most part), and for some reason, it just doesn't hold the audience's attention as well, even if the plot is still steamrolling forward.

I'm specifically thinking of two examples here. One is the Matrix series, where the first movie dedicates a huge amount of time to being inside the Matrix, where everyone is clean and pretty, in cool costumes and doing amazing, physics-defying fight scenes that had pretty much never been seen before. The rest of the trilogy had that as well, no question, but not as much, and spent a lot more time in that universe's real world, where everyone is grimy, dressed in whatever they could sew together, and eventually having a fairly ordinary steampunk-leaning scifi shootout. And also having really gross sex scenes that are also dance montages somehow. I think part of the reason the Matrix sequels get panned is that they got more mainstream compared to all the newness of the original. For the record, I love the entire trilogy, and don't really look at them as separate movies, but a single storyline that got split up.

The other example is Lost. The first season was pretty much fantastic and amazing, and it threw at the audience two mysteries: "What is going on on this island?" and "Who are these people?" The first question only got answered slowly, throughout the show's run (and only partly, really, because that was never the point of the show), but the second question was most heavily dealt with in season one. Sure, new characters were introduced in later seasons that had new backstories and motives to show us, and not every secret of every season one character was revealed in season one, but I think all the later seasons suffered a bit for drifting away from the characters' flashbacks and focusing more on the island's immediate action.

Focusing specifically on the finale aspect of this discussion, I think the last installment tends to suffer from this problem the most, having to focus more energy and time/space on the events that complete the story and less on new aspects of the world or characters.

Audience expectation is definitely part of it, especially for a really popular series. People get invested in long-running stories. They craft a golden ending of their own in their head. That can sometimes lead to disappointment if reality doesn't match up with one's preconceived hopes.

Another aspect, as eatpraylove mentioned, is the difficulty in wrapping up a multi-part story conclusively. Character's fates need to be addressed. Plot lines need to reach a satisfactory end. Plot holes need to be filled. Failure to do so on the part of the author can result in a less than fulfilling conclusion.

Some of it might even be a bit of fan bitterness, if you'll allow a bit of speculation on my part. I'm sure every trilogy has a few fans that are upset that the story is coming to an end at all. They're getting part of a story that they love, but they won't be getting any more after this point (unless the author changes his or her mind about continuing, of course.)

But there can be other reasons. Sometimes a multitude thereof. The original Mass Effect 3 endings, for example, had both of the above issues plus internal mismanagement. Apparently, the endings were only written by one or two people and were not subject to the same collective peer reviews as the rest of the story. And thus a sizable fan outcry was born.

Interesting idea. Tamora Pierce has written several fantasy quartets, most of them set in Tortall, and all the books in each quartet have been given good reviews/blurbs. Same thing with the Harry Potter series (or so I'm told; I'm only up to Order of the Phoenix myself).

On the other hand, my brother described "Mockingjay" as feeling rushed, like Ms. Collins just wanted to get the story other with. So maybe it's just hard to end a series conclusively or something? I don't know. (I think your high audience expectations theory makes sense, though.)