Wheel of Time series

No fucking Mat yet. At all. This is bullshit. I'm about to cut a bitch.

1- no buffer on the sword+ it has a flaw in which ANY female channeler can force the person using it into a ring that HE (sword user) cannot control
2- it is a DUAL sa'angrael...it does Saiden And...True Power
3 ...rand is not the one that uses it...Rand uses it as a Trap for Moridin! (which was awesome in it's own way) with moraine and nynaeve being the women(as speculated)

Oh my god, I was fucking right about Taim being a new chosen! Score one for me!

I honestly don't remember either of them, especially the True Source thing. All I remember is Rand tapping the True Source to escape Semirhage, and it having something to do with his connection to Moridin. The rest, I can't recall.

Bela dying....She just always randomly pops up and then at the end dies saving ugly olver's ass.
Also the people of hinderstap fighting in the last battle was pretty cool, I didn't pick up on it till near the end where they made it obvious but when i did I was like thats a pretty sweet idea.

he wanted a way to tie the Sharans in to the Shadow, instead of just having them rock up out of nowhere for the Last Battle after 13 books of having nothing to do with the main story.

All the Last Battle stuff with Mat vs Demandred was freaking amazing, although I think Sanderson got a little Gateway-crazy. Lan, Gawyn, Galad, Egwene, the Horn, great stuff.

All the Shayol Ghul stuff was weak sauce. Poor Fain...no lead-up, thrown out and forgotten in like 5 pages. All the Shayol Ghul characters felt like they got pushed aside, "there was a battle here too" stuff going on. Nynaeve and Moraine, Ishy/Moridin, very glossed over. Callandor being for the True Power too? Holy shit out of left field in the last book of the series. Rand vs Dark One? We already went through this storyline in "Gathering Storm" and it was done better there. Rand vs Dark One was a let down...in fact, it felt like it changed the philosophy of the series as I understood it. One Power = Creation and Destruction working together in two halves to drive the Pattern and the Wheel of Time. Dark One = nothingness...he wants to end everything, he wants to make it so everything never even existed. That's what made Ishamael cool. A philosopher who was sick of the endless repeating, who wanted an end. But now suddenly the Dark One is part of the Duality and responsible for free-market capitalism...or something...right...

In no particular order:
- The Last Battle (at Merrilor). Badassery.- Androl. Maybe the most normally human character of the entire series, and pretty much the ONLY one to do cool shit with the One Power instead of making giant light shows.- Corruption of the Great Captains. Something intelligent from the greatest evil geniuses of history???- Mat/Tuon interaction.- Egwene. I never felt especially sympathetic for her character since she was such an uncompromising sanctimonious ass, but her death scene was well done.

In no particular order:
- Rand's resurrection. I get that he's a messiah figure but he should have stayed dead. Cover the Bore with his soul, or something. The whole secret to beating the Dark One was to "let go" and allow people to make their sacrifices. The same should apply to Rand on a meta-level.- What gives with Rand being able to light the pipe at the end? Is he the Creator? Is the Fourth Age some elaborate Tel'aran'rhiod-ish creation in his own mind and projected on everyone? Out of place any way I can think of it.- Demandred was very disappointing. Though obvious, it would have been much more appropriate for him to be Mazrim Taim than for him to have been hiding off stage for FOURTEEN FUCKING BOOKS. That's not a twist, that's just lazy/selfish writing. Also, what kind of demigod military mastermind at the head of the most powerful army ever fights a series of enemy peons himself, with a pointy stick? Wtf?- Why spend half the first 100 pages building up Talmanes to be a major badass and then literally stick him in a dark hole during the Last Battle?- Sharans. You don't pull a whole new nation/culture into a story during the finale. Should have been Asha'man Dreadlords under Taim. Meh.- M'Hael. A new Chosen, ok, but one who gets promoted for picking Rand's pocket while off stage? Come on.- Rand vs Shai'tan. Amateur philosophy hour, and as Neb said, totally offbeat compared to the rest of the books. Callandor suddenly amplifies the True Power?- Wtf Padan Fain. That was the lamest and most anti-climactic ending to a character with a fourteen-book build-up I've ever seen. He was set up to be a major power and then dies when Mat trips over him while doing something else entirely? If you're going to include him at all, give him some real treatment. If he was just going to blow through the story he should have killed Mat and been left as a loose end.- Perrin becomes Nightcrawler. I get it, he's master of his own mind. The teleporting got silly.- Lan should have stayed dead. It would have been a much more fitting end to his character than "happily ever after". Duty is heavier than a mountain.

The ending "twist" with Callandor was Jordan's truest tribute and deviation from Tolkien. The forces of light stand on the precipice of doom, utterly defeated, despite their vows to stand for their beliefs. Suddenly an unexpected happening provides the path to victory for the Light. In Jordan's telling though, it seems like the Light knew what needed to be done, if not exactly why, instead taking the prophecies on faith. The eucatharsis isn't as strong thusly, but it also allows Rand to make the choice that the confrontation had lead to. Destroy the Dark One or let the wheel turn.

On that front, I appreciated how the Dark One played Moridin. The guy wants an end? Why did he expect the Father of Lies to hold to his promises?

Egwene's death was the pure manifestation of the dualism that Jordan had espoused through the series. A female who had just lost her mate ended the age with a great feat of channeling. Instead of creating a mountain she created a sinkhole. Instead of a great act of chaos and entropy she held the pattern together with crystal, one of the lowest entropic forms of matter.

Was pretty solid closure to the series overall, with some amazing moments and a few meh ones.

- Egwene's death scene was seriously cool, it was a pretty awesome way to fully bring her around after how annoying she was at the beginning of the series but felt kind of anticlimatic to her storyline as a whole. They build her up as this revolutionary figure in the White Tower, then she dies instead of going on to actually implement her changes? It also made Siuan's death kinda meaningless, since right beforehand she's talking about how her legacy lives on through Egwene, but, nope.

- While Lan v. Demandred was incredibly hardcore, having already gone through it twice with Gawyn and Galad getting their asses kicked made it feel a little repetitive.

- Androl/Pevara were awesome the whole way through. Nice to get some more human characters who still kick serious ass.

- Logain was a bit hit and miss. he started out great, then went a bit off, while it was nice to get some insight into the effect his life had had on him, it seemed a bit out of place right at the climax of the series, although I guess it builds up to greater things. I was expecting a bit more from him, hoping he'd take down one of the forsaken or something

- Mat was amazing the whole way through. Complete 180 from how shitty he was when Sanderson first picked up the series. Although the whole Fain thing was really anticlimatic and just felt tacked on

- Perrin was almost a complete reverse, he was awesome in TGS/TOM but was basically on the sidelines or caught up in one shitty minor subplot the whole time, all he did was kill a side-villain who barely played a role through most of the series

- The idea of Moghedian suffering for the next few centuries as a Damane makes me warm and giddy inside. Although it does have some interesting implications when you consider that the Seanchan, who don't seem to have quite given up on their 'conquer the world!' obsession, now have access to a massive amount of knowledge from the AOL with which to arm their Damane. The Dragon's Peace ain't gonna last very long if Tuon has anything to say about it, unless maybe Hawking kicks some sense into her.

I felt like they could have cut a good 100 or so pages from the first half of the book, went into way too much detail about the different battles before Merrilor when they ended up being pretty inconsequential anyway

- Elayne was actually.... not as much of a pain in the ass as usual. Still the worst character in the series by a massive margin, but slightly less so. Birgitte's death/return was epic.

As was Loial, especially in that first scene where the Ogiers are charging into battle in Andor or Cairhien or wherever it was. Tam kicked ass too, that brofist moment with Lan was epic

- The whole Rand v. Dark One thing was way off, basically totally shifting the philosophical basis of the series. Instead of being something totally evil, completely outside creation, now he's apparently an essential part of maintaining free will or some bullshit. I guess Sanderson wanted a reason to not have Rand kill him, but it was pretty weak stuff. The DO was never some dualistic personification, he was a counterpart to the maker, who made creation with good/evil/free will in it, whereas the DO wanted to unmake it entirely. He didn't represent the freedom to make bad choices, but nihilism, total annihilation, total lack of choice

wtf was the deal with Rand at the end? They didn't do a good job of explaining exactly what happened there. Fan theories said he'd swap into Moridin's body, but it sounds like it was Moridin they burned in Rand's place. Which body was he in? And why did he lose the ability to channel, since it's been explicitly stated that channeling is linked to the individual's soul? And if he couldn't channel, how did he light his pipe? They'd stated that the trio were no longer Ta'Veren, so it wasn't that either. wtf happened there? And why?

That said, I think they did a good job keeping the whole fisher king theme going there, though it felt like I was reading an Excalibur novelization at times, all that talk about 'dragons this' and 'one with the land' that.

Anyone else think that Olver was Gaidal Cain after all? I know Rj denied it, but the evidence is so strong, and Birgitte specifically said she'd only be a few years younger, implying that she knows that he's already been born, and when it happened'

All in all, it was a good close to a series which has been a massive part of my literary life for the last 10 - 15 years. Can't really ask for much more, other than for some gaming companies to start pumping out licensed video games. Seriously, the setting is fucking gold for something like an RTS with RPG elements, or a bioware style party based RPG, or even an action RPG

I have to disagree with your analysis of the nature of the Dark One. We really only had Moridin's word that he wants to unmake creation. And frankly, he's not reliable at all. Moridin even mentions that being returned to life was his punishment for being crazy and claiming to the TDO. But it's punishment because TDO IS evil. The literal source of it. He punshied Moridin because excessive punishment is what he does. The deam that Rand saw first seemed to me the real goal of TDO. A world where evil has more weight than good. WoT has always been oriented towards the good vs. evil Manichean dualism. I think it more of a reflection of how our society has changed over 23 years that we now want to view it through the prism of order vs. chaos.