: One of the things I like least about a lot of story franchises is that the mystery, intrigue, and such of the story world goes very much bye-bye after about the second or third installment. The mythic becomes the commonplace, the taken-for-granted merely so a hero can have more than a hero's journey but become essentially a demigod or indeed a god, which is lazy and boring, IMO.

In old tabletop RPGs in day ior yore, we called such stakes-raising "planet-busting"... and "boring" and "lazy.