Agree on Rand... nope.  I like him (he's the main character and all) but i can easily see the points of people that hate him/dislike him.  The same with most other characters.

Moraine - i don't like her, but that comes from a general dislike for anyone AS.  I dislike an organization that is so caught up in its own self worth that it fails so miserably at nearly everything it does.  

Thats why i said that you wont find any main or maybe even secondary characters that everyone will like.  To much screen time to split opinions.  The 3rd/4th teir characters are made to fit exact roles so they are ones that most people will either like or hate according to the role written for them.

At least Demandred. I haven't heard any bad words against him

That's because Damandred has had about as much screen time as that seeker that was questioning everyone. Hard to like/dislike someone with about 20 total sentences worth of screen time in the whole of the series

Cenn Buie, everyone likes him. I mean whats not to like about the cantankerous old man that basically waves his cane around and yells at kids to stay off his lawn.

But honestly most characters with lots of screen time with have people that love and people that hate them. Get to the tertiary characters and you get people everyone likes or everyone hates because they don't have any characteristics except those needed to fulfill their roles as 3rd rank characters. Egwene's parents fit this bill nicely. She's the most polarizing character in the books, but no one ever says anything bad about her parents.

Tell me about it, i hope they do release a comprehensive "World" book and put all of Jordans notes in it. That would make me a very happy randlander :)

Hmm. So she controlled them? Can animals be compelled?

Its unsure if she brought them, but its pretty much a given she was controlling them... having seen grolm in the books we can be pretty sure she wouldn't have been able to hold them off with a stick.

We have seen animals be controlled/compelled before in the series... ravens moving in murder packs hunting perrin/egwene, ravens and rats used as spys, the dove(?) grendal used, the insects that the blue ajah can control. Lots of little things that say, yes it's possible to control animals using the one power.

As to whether or not these grolm were native of this mirror or she brought them is unclear though, they had to come from somewhere and this mirror world is a good a place as any for that (as they dont appear to be native creatures of the main randland)

perhaps whatever people or whatever caused the trails in the air causes the scars on the landscape to.

More than likely in my mind. Burn marks as sharp as a razor sounds an awful lot like laser based weapons and in a world where the greatest scientists used the one power to break the laws of physics to achieve super technology its not too far removed from possibility.

aliens... this I support fully :)

Yeah I figure it will never be explained, unfortunately I latch on to the oddest things when I read, they are never of any consequence but they are the holes that bother me the most. Bela could end up being the Creator and Tam al'Thor the Dark One and it wouldn't bother me like this does lol (i'm an odd one)

True it never said that all humanity was destroyed (and that was a uninhabited land even in the main world) but it was a lifeless world still, where there are no humans you would expect to find rabbits and birds and foxes, etc and they didn't even see a single sign of that.

I mean even if the trollocs took over rand land, there isn't much they could have done against a culture with Jets and "modern" military technology So they could have been totally wiped out. I think that section of the great hunt has puzzled me more than everything else in the series simply because no answers are given for any of it. I mean what are the burn lines on the ground that are so perfectly straight, why is there no life yet seems to still exist, what happened there, etc. I reread that section a lot but there just aren't any hidden clues that i have ever been able to find. Closest I can figure is there is a technologically advanced culture either far to the south or on another island continent that the trollocs couldn't get to and when they ventured north/came to explore they discovered massive hordes of trollocs and eventually nuked the whole area

It was a very odd mirror world indeed.

But i believe the books basically say that if the Dark One is bound in one of the mirror worlds he is bound in them all, same as if he is free in one he is free in all? I would think that would be the same for his "levels" of freedom.

It could be simply a jet contrail from some island nation not connected to randland/seandar. I mean trollocs have a hard enough time with a river... i couldnt see them being able to cross an entire ocean to attack a place. Could simply be an atlantis style nation somewhere out there in that mirror world.

But with out RJ or his notes telling us it's probably just going to be speculation

I asked about this very thing about a month ago. It seems to be a contrail of a jet (which counters the dead world, and jets don't just make or fly themselves... unless they are transformers)

But no one really knows what it was as i dont think RJ ever explained it to anyone or no one ever asked him.

I'm hoping after everything is said and done with the series they release all of his notes in a book that might shead alot of light on little things like this.

Here is a question that struck me as I was on my current read through.

The Great Hunt:

While Rand, Loiel and Hurrin are in the Portal world that is bare of life (save lanfear and gholum) what is the thing he see's in the sky? It sounds an awful lot like Rand is describing a Jet contrail. Has anyone ever asked what it was or has a better idea?

Yeah I have a feeling that Perrin will end up playing a bit of go between when the Dragon and the Amrylin meet up at the FoM. Which suits him well as he isn't usually prone to let emotions lead him as much as thinking through things (which Egwene and Rand have problems with at times)

Also the thing about Perrin that a lot of people seem to gloss over is (which the books did to so it's a little understandable) is the man lost his entire family to a horrible murder. He's all of 22 and his parents and uncles/aunts and grand parents and younger siblings were all murdered and left to rot. And on top of that the only other father/mother figures he had to turn to (the blacksmith and his wife) now treat him as a lord instead of someone barely a man, that the year before would have probably adopted if the same murders would have happened. Its not a huge wonder he turned to Faile with such gusto.

She's the only family he has left.

I blame it a bit on the books not having time to give much thought to this happening (was a very busy time of the story) but having your entire family murdered is going to break things inside a person and for all that Perrin has still kept going.

Out of the 3 Two Rivers boys he's the only one that has truly lost people he cared about.

About the only others to suffer something like this were Lan (when Moirane "died") and that almost caused him to get himself killed on his way to his new bond, and Thom when he lost his lover and he took his rage and destroyed a nations powerbase over it.

All Perrin got was a few paragraphs worth of morning, before he was thrust right back into having to lead the entire Two Rivers against a trolloc invasion that could have very easily killed every man woman and child there.