So I'm getting annoyed at a long series of books but don't know if it's justified. I'm on book 13 or 14 of a series. Started off tightly focused on one character, and had some good setting building. Ended up with the author and others writing canon short stories elsewhere in the universe. Then the books mainly followed that main character, but has steadily introduced additional characters up to the later books maybe 1/3 to 1/2 from the main PoV character and the rest from others PoVs. Okay, no big deal.
However, the author is (co-)writing two other series in the same world,a dn is having it impact the main storyline. We suddenly have a bunch more PoV characters we're supposed to care about that didn't develop organically with the main character, just sprung full-grown in this series because they were developed int he other books. Many scenes seem shout-outs to happenings in the other series, and there has been major changes in plot direction (new big bad, new "oh everybody hates this though we never talked about it for the first ten or so books", etc.) that are bolted on from other books.
The book I'm reading now I was 124 pages in, and there was one 6-8 page scene with the main character talking to one other person while sitting at her desk, and all the rest has been exposition, mostly from characters introduced in other books, about how the state of the universe has changed due to major actions in the other books.
Is this really a problem? Should I just consider it one rambling series of books instead of three plus several short story collections? The problem is that the protagonists from the other books don't interest me nearly as much, nor the shifted sub-genre of some of them. I've read a bunch of them years ago, not just one or two, and don't really have interest in revisiting them.
