Beyond Selidor

The thing that particularly irritates me about that ending is that it makes a huge fuss about the importance of human choice and human free will — the victory of the Light literally hinges on these things — and then it ends with erased memories and those choices and free will wiped away as if they were nothing. And the whole point is that Will (and indeed other Old Ones) are incapable of completing their quests and winning their cosmic battle alone — they need human allies, and those allies perform crucial tasks — so to conclude with Will alone, locked in this unbearably lonely situation of being the only one with memories of all their adventures, always seems to me to be unspeakably cruel.

It was very common in twentieth-century children's literature to indicate change, and that the characters had 'grown up' by taking magic and the supernatural from them, and barring the way to otherworlds that they had visited as children. So I understand that Cooper was just conforming to genre expectations, but it always leaves a sour taste in my mouth.