Yay! Full WoT discussion time.
First, the non-spoilers series review:
There's a lot wrong with the series. Women are frequently written badly, sometimes it's not clear what's supposed to be sympathetic or heroic about some of the protagonists, at times there will be an entire book's-worth of material in length spent on minutia…It's pretentious, overlong, and occasionally somewhat insulting.
That said, I'd still consider this THE Great American Fantasy Series. For all its faults, the sheer scope of the series as well as how well it interconnects is amazing. I also realized on this read I never gave Jordan enough credit as a writer. He's extremely good at shifting voice for different perspectives--especially in sequences in which he gets out of the time and place of the series proper, like the flashbacks in Rhuidean--and I can think of few writers who set up an event or sequence much better. His characters are also really damned memorable and in some cases quite dynamic/nuanced. And best of all, he makes almost all of those teases in fourteen books pay off in one way or another.
We'll have to see where Song of Ice and Fire ends up--I personally think its quality has diminished since the first book, and it's obviously a much different vein of fantasy from WoT--but I think Jordan's series is worthy of a helluva lot of respect, and not just in fantasy circles.
That said, now the spoiler-filled whinge-and-complain sequence!
! The further I get from finishing MoL, the more I find less satisfying. Overall, I still think Sanderson did as well as he could, but…well, here are some of my greatest disappointments:
! -as Huschel first pointed out, Moiraine got completely shafted in the final book. Her role at the battle conference was fine, but she had so little to do. Even stranger, she admitted her ability to use saidar was greatly diminished, so friends with Rand or not, why is she in Shayol Ghul? My dream scenario came from The Gathering Storm, since Rand's transition to Dark Rand was paralleled in the book with Mat getting the letter from Moiraine. My assumption was that her return would be what finally allowed him to abandon that plot. …I like my idea better than what actually happened in this case.
! -speaking of shafted, poor Perrin. He really peaked in the fourth or fifth book. It's not that he became a terrible character, it's that his stakes were always so much lower. Also, I was pissed off beyond measure when he finally met with Elayne and she seemed willing to consider him a rebel and deigned to grant him a stewardship. Why not just make Manetheren an independent nation again? It would have made its history much more relevant in the final battle. You know, the one where Two Rivers archers were able to shoot individual Trollocs in a row with flaming arrows from a hundred paces in front of a moving horseman…sigh
! -I loved Olver blowing the Horn of Valere, despite it going against every original notion I had. On the other hand, WHY WAS THE HORN OF VALERE NOT IN MAT'S POSSESSION SO LONG AGO? Were they still storing it in Tar Valon? THE PLACE FIGHTING A WAR AGAINST BLACK AJAH, SEANCHAN, AND AT ONE POINT A FORSAKEN? That said, it gave us the scene with Noal and Olver, so I'll live with it. [vaguely related note: I ignored every sign that Noal was Jaim Farstrider because I assumed that he was one of those dudes from the Age of Legends. When he revealed himself, I thought he'd just gotten ripped out of Tel'an'rhiod or something. Nope, completely in keeping with everything else we knew about the guy.
! -Characters that are really kind of worthless when viewed in long context: Bryne, Gawyn, Galad, Birgitte, Alanna, and, I hate to admit it, Logain. How in Seven Hells did we not get Logain v Taim?
! -As much as I enjoyed Androl and Pevara, the tonal shift in writing/character was so clearly Sanderson v Jordan that I would have rather that sequence be cut at least in half. Especially the "stumble into Taim/steal discs" sequence.
! -I was sure the Last Battle was setting up Cauthon v Demandred. The anti-magic medallion, the previous similar situation with Couladin, Mat's desire to not be a hero, Demandred's false belief that his opponent had to be Rand…On a related note, I was not a fan of Lan's Last Charge. To me, Lan is inextricably tied to the Borderlands and the Blight, so I thought he should have been in Shayol Ghul, where his opponent would be Shaidar Haran, King of the Darkspawn. Instead, the Dark Lord just sucked all the moisture out of Haran and he was another moot point.
! -Speaking of which, FOUR ONE ON ONE BATTLES WITH DEMANDRED?
! -Elayne is terrible. I usually can understand why an author likes or has created a character even if I don't like him/her. I don't understand how anyone is supposed to find her at all appealing by the end of the series. And she gets a lot of space and credit. And I loved her whole, "Welp, just gonna take the Horn of Valere and truck out of here."
! -How do we get roughly 500 pages of all the other fighting and something like fifty of Rand and the Dark One? Maybe wouldn't have been good to have more, since it just turned into every other fantasy series' debate on freewill.
! -And perhaps the thing I found most disturbing annoying, though it wasn't my biggest disappointment: where was the mourning? Mat, in particular, never seems to reflect on his war, continuing his entirely too chuckles-and-snark rampage from the last few books. I understand he can't dwell on it–when Egwene and (he thinks) Elayne die, he says as much--but even when the battle is over, he throws out a few more one-liners and catches a Raken to chill with his sweetheart. It's even worse with Rand. The epilogue--which, admittedly, was Jordan--has Rand basically faking his death and not telling his father and the women perhaps most responsible for helping him through (Nynaeve/Moiraine) and then nigh-giggling at the fact that he has three different women he might make out with. MORE THAN HALF OF THE PEOPLE YOU KNOW ARE DEAD, INCLUDING THE GIRL YOU WERE IN LOVE WITH WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG. BE A LITTLE SAD.
! At some point I've actually got some content questions, but I needed some space to rant a little. Again, overall, I'm perfectly satisfied with the series, but with something on this scale, I was bound to have disagreements.