There are few things more annoying to me as a reader than noting some sort of problematic aspect of a book or show and being told, "Oh, just hang on until the third book / the next season / whatever, and all that is addressed." I mean, why should I have to slog my way through a whole bunch of stuff that erases me or pisses me off just on the hope of a promise that maybe--just maybe--Things Get Better at some unspecified later date? Especially when there are so many other things I could be consuming?
There are few things more frustrating to me as an author than knowing readers are upset, impatient, or feeling erased by some aspect of my published work while knowing that I'm doing something later that stands a good chance of not simply addressing their concerns, but making it worth the wait. I can hint, I can promise--if people really want me to, I can offer private spoilers. But that doesn't change the fact that in the glimpse of my world available to them at the moment, there are things that might make them not willing to wait for it.
One answer to this contradiction is that one can never write the book that all of your readers want. Certainly not all at the same time. A book can only have so many characters and so many themes. Not everyone will be willing to stick with you for the whole journey. Not all of them will be happy with where that journey would take them. And those are the breaks. You can know--absolutely know with the divine power that is authorship--that an issue will be addressed later. But nobody reads in the later, they read in the now.
Writing a series is a long game. From the point when I knew that Alpennia was a series, and not just a stand-alone novel, I've been setting up characters, conflicts, situations, foreshadowings that won't come to fruition for books yet to come. And because Alpennia is such a character-focused series, readers latch on to specific characters and spin out hopes and dreams for them based, not only on the information in the text, but on the ways in which they identify with those characters. Will Anna's heart be broken? Is Iuli going to fall in love with the entirely-too-obvious candidate? Is Iohanna Chazillen going to have a miserable life due to the circumstances of her birth? Will Serafina get to have a happily-ever-after just like the white protagonists do? Who will be the next Prince of Alpennia, and what will that mean for everyone else? Where will the fault lines open between all my central characters come the revolution? When will I seriously address class issues and the knee-jerk valorization of the monarchy?
When the series is complete, I can hope that readers will look at the whole and be able to see, "Yes, this character, this event, that bit of dialogue, that description, the chain of events over there--taken in isolation, I can see how that would look. But those things are in conversation with these characters and those events. This plot thread challenges and comments on that one. This interaction is set up to contrast with that one. These characters shed light on how we're meant to undersatnd those ones." I can hope, but I can't rely on it. I can't even say, "For the answers to these and other exciting questions, stay tuned!" because I have no right to demand that anyone "stay tuned" if they aren't tuned in to what's already on the page. But if you do stay tuned, I can guarantee that a lot of the answers will be unexpected--perhaps even delightfully so.