I got to book 4 and gave up on the series.
That's pretty much where I'm at. It is such terrible writing, in terms of the characters and plot points. I mean, you have to hand it to the level of prose and description, clearly a lot of work and talent there, but no matter how you dress up a turd, it's still a turd.
For those who defend the great "characters" in this, can you think of one female character who is not constantly pissed off at everyone around her, even her supposed allies? Let's play a game...which female character does this sound like? "That fool girl!" thought ____, "I have half a mind to switch her till she's won't sit for a week! She's almost as bad as the men!" Answer: All of them! Their "go-to" emotion when thinking about anyone else, usually friends and allies, is to imagine how they'd love to visit some violence upon them for their stupidity. Some one barges into the Amrylin Seat's office, and her first thought is, "How dare you, I'll have you scrubbing pots till your fingers bleed!" rather than, "Gee, I wonder what is so important! This must be urgent for them to barge in like this!"
Look, I remember as a boy when the TV show A-Team premiered. And I watched it and was excited about it. It seemed different, original and fun and not formulaic...for about six episodes. Then you notice every episode is following the exact same formula, all the damsels in distress are essentially identical, all the villains are identical, and the whole thing is really a very formulaic and weak and superficial story. That is basically WoT. You can get through the first book and maybe part of the second before the repetitive behavior and reactions and same behaviors and manner of speaking and attitudes by every character (particularly the women) just becomes too glaring and detracts from being invested in the story.
Who possibly buys into the problem of the Amrylin Seat having to keep secret her involvement with and support for the Dragon from the other Aes Sedai or face mutiny??? Okay, for this to be legitimate, we have to believe that every Aes Sedai other than the Amrylin Seat and Moiraine are total idiots. Because if a prophecy says the Dark One will win and turn the world to Hell EXCEPT that this man who can channel defeats him, though in the process he causes a lot of death and destruction, WHO POSSIBLY thinks the right approach is to still that Dragon before he defeats the Dark One? Who is so incredibly stupid they would prefer the Dark One winning to letting a man channel??? Okay, I would be willing to buy the notion that there is a small segment of Aes Sedai so set in their thinking that they would refuse to see the logic of the Amrylin Seat and Moiraine's position, but just a very small segment. Beyond that, the writer is creating a very unrealistic and false dilemma.
I've seen works where the cheat in not making the back-story match the present. Here we are repeatedly assured this particular Amrylin Seat is really awesome, insightful, regal, smart, confident...just about every good thing you can think of, in spades... Yet somehow she cannot sue all that to make the other Aes Sedai see the very obvious logic and correctness of her approach?? Yet somehow despite all that, a majority of the Aes Sedai support a MUTINY to overthrow her, to torture her, to still her, and to have warder fighting warder, and to falsely spread lies that the Amrylin Seat was a dark friend??!! What the hell kind of people are these faceless Aes Sedai that are going along with such an absurdly over-the-top and evil / immoral strategy!
Guess what, if some one proposes spreading lies that some one who is not a dark friend actually is a dark friend, the painfully obvious conclusion is that the person proposing that is, in fact, a dark friend. So, no, unless the Amrylin Seat is so inept that she has been raising a generate of Retarded Psychopathic Hitlers, then, no, it is not plausible to think that a majority -- or even a substantial minority -- of Aes Sedai voted to pull off that horrific mutiny.
Go back to the scene in Book 4 when the Amrylin Seat is confronting the mutiny and see how painfully repetitive her dialogue and thoughts are...how many times in five minutes can she threaten to stretch Elaida's hide before it is stupid? 3? 4?
Weak authors often write that vague, unspecified, faceless characters acting en masse do the stupidest things, like all those Aes Sedai deciding to mutiny, and they can get away with such absurdity because they don't have to give the back-story for these non-characters who we never meet, to justify how they could be so stupid, gullible, etc.
People claim his popularity means his books are not weak. Well, A-Team was a hit show for years, but it sure was weak and superficial. Some people just don't have good taste, or they care more about superficial explosions and car chases rather than REAL characters and believable plot movement. I mean, some people actually claim Avengers; Infinity Wars was a good movie, when it was also crap dressed up with some glitz that could not hide the horribly contrived plot that did not come close to having any internal consistency. So, I guess there's no accounting for taste. But you should not fool yourself into thinking Jordan's writing is on par with, say, Raymon Feist or Julian May or Anne McCaffrey or Tolkein or Stephen Brust or David Eddings..well, there's a lot of people who actually avoid being so painfully "one note" in how they draw characters, and who force them to do absurd things to create a plot point. It reminds me somewhat of the Warlock of Graymaere (sp?) series by Christopher Stasheff (sp?) which I started reading in the 80s...some elements I like in stories, but by the second book it just got so contrived and two dimensional and repetitive, I gave up on it, but he published a number of books in that series and was successful...they were still weak.
Oh, and you DO definitely need to somehow justify all these people rushing to be Dark Friends despite the fact that, apparently, there has never been one single success story among people who did that in the past...they all wind up tortured, fed to Trollocs or executed, etc. If you try to claim some people think the Dark One will win and fear being on the losing team...well, first the friggin' PROPHECY says the Dark One loses, so I think most people would see that as the safer bet. Second, this implies that these people are motivated by fear. But if cowardice is their primary motivation, the LAST thing they'd do is willingly seek out involvement with the Dark One as a Dark Friend. That's some very dangerous ground to tread on. It just makes no sense. I mean, if Jordan wanted this to be plausible, he needed to think up what would motivate real people to enlist with the Dark One and face all that risk, with literally NO example of anyone ever having a good result from such dealings. It can be done. It's not impossible. But it means being smart in your plot creation, and that is where Jordan is very weak. He wants to impress us with numerous threads of stories, but he apparently is biting off more than he can chew to have to short-shrift giving us DIFFERENT characters, making them more realistic, and making the plot points arrive without heavy-handed contrivance.
The biggest block budget movies that make the most money are NOT the great movies, they just have some commercial success. Black Panther was so bland and unoriginal and yet it broke all the ticket sales records, so success is not a mark of good writing.
