What also irritates me is the lack of male-female friendship. We see no real examples of this which I find both frustrating and irritating.

 

There are precious few friendships in the series, regardless of gender. It's curious, because I think Jordan excels at character development and consistency, but he does a generally poor job with relations between those characters. People fall in love simply because they need to for plot purposes, they treat their so-called friends like garbage (Egwene is the worst offender here), and there are very few instances of people showing genuine concern for each other. It's a rare and startling moment when a character does as little as hug another, as Nynaeve did for Rand in ToM.

 

 

That would be my primary issue, but my second is that Jordan let the cast of characters get too big. I anticipate some people will take exception to that, and I agree that some very nice characterizations and moments would have been lost if the cast were cut down, but I think the benefits outweigh it. The major problems with making your cast so large are that you A.) Waste time on unnecessary character interactions and thus bog down the narrative and B.) Lose some of the distinction of your more minor characters.

 

Case in point is Thom. In the first three books, he was terrific, one of my favorite characters. He was deep, he had great back-and-forths with Mat, he was an active character who made or at least influenced decisions, and got a lot of screen time. Contrast that to the last few books. Instead of being paired up with Mat or Mat/Rand, he's clumped in with Mat, Tuon, Selucia, Edesina, Joline, Teslyn, Setalle, Domon, Egeanin, Juilin, Thera, Olver, Noal, Luca, and an entire traveling circus. Goodbye amusing, entertaining Thom who plays an active role in events. Hello boring adjunct Thom who kicks around worthlessly in the background until ToG.

 

Example #2 is Noal. Maybe I'm a cold-hearted SOB and am the only one who feels this way, but I felt nothing when he died in ToG. No sobs, no sniffles, the room didn't even get a little dusty. Why not? Because he was one little member of a giant menagerie who did nothing more than play stones with Olver. Contrast that with Ingtar, who died in a similar manner with a similar purpose, and struck a major chord because, while there were a bunch of soldiers along with them, the relevant group of hunters was really the big 3, Loial, Ingtar, and Hurin. He had face time, decision-making power, and felt like a distinct character. If it had been Mat, Thom, and Noal churning across Altara for two to three books, I'm confident I would have made a connection with Noal that would have given his death some pathos. But because RJ had to hold onto these ostensibly useless and minor characters, the Noal interactions were sparse, limited, and ultimately meaningless.

Wonderfully said.

Bloody wonderfully said.

Title says it all.

Mine is the amount of sexism. Seriously, it caused me to put the book down on several occasions, and after I read The Way of Kings I realised how childish it made the characters seem.

All of them, seriously. It had me fuming at some points.

Noice.

I don't, that was the entire point of this post...

Perhaps I didn't really make that clear.

Is there any list of such things?

If not, let the compiling begin!

If you know any instances of the books being mentioned or seen onscreen in any television shows, movies or songs, share them.