This has now happened to me twice – spoilers for the ACOTAR series and Red Queen ahead.
As I was reading ACOWAR I was 100% convinced that Rhys was going to die (for real, permanently) that I started to build a post-Rhys world in my head. I was looking at the remaining 2 books in the box set, thinking that's why the next book is so short and the final book is so long. There's going to be a dark mourning phase followed by a long rebuilding phase. Feyre will need to ascend to be High Lady of Night Court on her own without Rhys by her side. What an interesting twist, that a former human and a woman is now the strongest in all of Prythian, independent. And I was so convinced and so invested in the idea that when Rhys did die – but then immediately came back to life – I was turned off from finishing the series. That was like a year ago and I still haven't.
Today, I finished Red Queen and Mare DOESN'T BECOME QUEEN. There is no red queen. It ends with a silver king. From like Chapter 3 I was thinking, oh this is cool that we know the end of the book because it's in the title but we don't know how it's going to happen. And then it almost happens like 5 times, which I thought was fun, that there was misdirection along the way, but eventually it has to happen, right? My copy of the book had 60 pages of bloat at the end, making me think I was still many chapters from the conclusion, when suddenly it just ended. Not at a particularly strong endpoint, but seemingly randomly. And I now know that this is the first of a long series so I'm guessing we know the end of the series, but this experience turned me off so much that now I don't even want to continue (which I recognize is silly).
I can't think of a time that I've been disappointed like this by the ending of a contemporary fiction book, or a sci-fi book, or other genres. I this it's specifically fantasy (or perhaps the less-structured romantasy) genre that makes my mind wander ahead and potentially ruin the ending for myself like this.
by FuckingaFuck