How do you expect to feel at the end of the series? I don't mean your reaction to the fact that there won't be any more books. I'm talking about how you'll feel when our heroes/heroines have nothing more to do, nothing in the scale of defeating the Dark One, at least.

For me, I think the end is going to sharply bring out the fact that this is a fantasy, not in the sense that it is a novel with magic and gods, but that there's something firmly unrealistic about the story itself. After 14 long books, and quite major changes in our characters, we would have ended up seeing around three years of their lives. In the cases of many of the channelers, three years is going to be less than 1% of their life.

However significant these years turn out to be, they're too young for it to be likely that they'll live their remaining lives without changing phenomenally, especially the channelers. Yet, all that is going to be in the haze of "ever after", unless RJ did a JKR on us and has a 20 years later chapter.

In a way, this is nice. I think the world RJ created, and his characters, are rich enough that we can imagine any number of events in their future. And we obviously don't want an extended set of novels, ala Star Wars, where the world and the characters are so beaten to death that the original (quite fun) stories lose their meaning and significance. But all that said, I guess it would have been nice if these characters spent more than three years of their life fighting the ultimate source of evil.

Anyway, I thought, given the utter listlessness of the board, that we can discuss how the end of the series is going to leave us.