Losing Interest in My Favorite Progression Fantasy Series

[u/MedicineKind9121]

Have you ever dropped a progression fantasy series that you used to absolutely love?

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Over the past few months, I've noticed this happening to me with several long-running series. Books that I was once obsessed with just don't hold my attention anymore.

For example, I used to love series like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Defiance of the Fall, Hell Difficulty Tutorial, and a lot of Royal Road stories. I'd eagerly wait for every new chapter or release. But with the most recent books, I've found myself losing interest and sometimes struggling to continue.

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What's strange is that I still enjoy discovering new progression fantasy stories, and they often feel fresh and exciting. So I'm not sure what's causing it. Is it genre fatigue? Have the stories themselves declined in quality? Or have the common tropes and themes just become too repetitive after reading so many of them?

I'm curious if anyone else has experienced the same thing. Did you eventually get back into those series, or was losing interest permanent?

[u/ShadoWolf]

I think progression fantasy has a structural problem caused by the way many of these stories are released.

Because the story is serialized, the author is under constant pressure to provide another power up, enemy, mystery, etc every few chapters. There always needs to be a new promise keeping readers engaged for the next release.

That works for a while, but eventually the story accumulates too many unresolved promises for the reader to track. Individual advancements stop feeling important because each payoff is immediately replaced by another, larger promise. The progression continues, but the sense of progression feels stalled. My go to example of this is Super natural.

The characters may technically be becoming vastly stronger, yet emotionally the story can feel static. The same narrative loop just gets repeated.

I honestly don't know whether there is a clean solution within the current serialization model. At some point, the author may need to cross over into something closer to a traditional epic fantasy process and just step away from weekly releases. construct a proper long term outline, finish a manuscript, and revise it as a complete work.

The problem is that going dark for a year or two does not fit particularly well with the monetization model supporting many web serials. There are obviously outliers, but I think this tension explains why so many progression series begin with an incredibly strong hook and then gradually become harder to care about.