Something I just noticed as a pattern: the development of franchises that are constructed to "pace" the growth of the target audience.
E.g. in the Star Wars prequels the first movie had a lot of elements which aimed at a kiddy audience. This is quite distinct from having a child as one of the protagonists, extending also to theme and treatment. E.g., the child is ridiculously precocious, there are lots of cutesy characters, and the overall story is mostly a light adventure. (Poor plot & exposition, to be sure, but largely a quest with no internal conflict.) In the second & third movies, you've basically got sex & adolescence as major elements, and the tone becomes darker and more "mature". (Note I'm not saying those movies were terribly sophisticated or well-done, just that they took on the hallmarks of being targeted at older audiences than the first one.)
Now I think you've got a similar arc with Harry Potter--not only the characters mature but the tone and the seeming target audience as well. With the series Ben 10 (I have a nephew who's into it, I don't really know it myself) I find that
"the storyline [of the sequel] is notable for having matured the character and taking a darker tone, with more complex plots, and sometimes more characters dying."Think about this for a minute: there's no particular reason that a given story has to "grow up" in the sense of becoming dark/gritty/angsty just because the characters hit puberty. Or conversely there's no reason a story featuring child protagonists has to be softened for a putative child audience (e.g.,
Empire of the Sun).
As I consider this pattern, I'm not entirely sure I like it. On the one hand I feel that this sort of "tailoring" over time is harmful to the integrity of the story as a whole, and is becoming cliche as it gets repeated from one "franchise" to the next. On the other hand, these approaches seem to be a strategy of "hooking" and then retaining the commercial allegiance of entire cohorts--that is, it's not only artistically questionable but seems to be taking exploitation to a new level.
What do you think? And is this a new thing, or has it happened (to the same degree?) before? Off the top of my head, the Chronicles of Prydain seems to have followed a similar arc; possibly Earthsea does as well?