Hyperion to Endymion (WTH?)

This is a post for all of the readers of the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons because I need to know I’m not alone here.

I know I’m not alone in having read Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. Amazing books. They are raised in this sub often as recommendations for great sci-fi and that’s because they really are. From the beginning of Hyperion to the end of the Fall of Hyperion, you’re hooked. The characters all have a depth that gets delivered to you through their own very interesting backstories and behavior while together. The world building and the interplay of forces are very well-done also.

Then… the Endymion portion.

>!Raul Endymion is a late twenties something jacked and, somehow even though he is only in his twenties or very early thirties at the start, somehow experienced in basically, well, everything. Oh, but he’s also just a normal, down-to-old-earth kind of guy. Then, over the course of these two miserable reads, thanks to a time debt, he is also able to fall in love with once early teenager he was basically babysitting on an adventure. If you’re wondering if they start hooking up, don’t worry, Simmons gives you a number of just unbearable sex scenes between the constantly cringey couple who now refer to each other as “my beloved” almost exclusively. Raul CONSTANTLY acts like a possessive teenage boy and is butt hurt SO often in the Fall of Hyperion. When he isn’t wingeing, he is going on and on about himself—be it his extraordinary strength of superhuman pain tolerance. The supporting characters are all shallow and often just silly or seem like last stereotypes. The world building is neat, however, as the landscape of the Endymion portion covers more ground through additional worlds. It still just, more or less, reuses worlds from Hyperion.!<

I am struggling to find a single saving attribute to the second half of the series. Anyway, I’ve never read a series that fell off of such a steep cliff halfway through.