Wheel of Time is good. My husband just finished reading reading all the books. Choosing Sanderson to finish the series was brilliant.
The biggest problem I had with WoT, though, was the women. I couldn't stand the VAST majority of them, and they are the reason I couldn't continue and finish the series. My husband tells me there is a lot of emotional growth with Nyneve and Egwene and such, so that they are less annoying, but that only happens in the last few books or so.
I know, it sounds kinda stereotypical, since I am a woman, and I dislike mainly the women in the series. But I do try to be fair. I just couldn't stand all of these women calling all of the men, especially Rand, "wool headed idiots" and bullshit like that ALL THE TIME.
Rand could be 100% justified in doing something that a female character doesn't understand, and because she doesn't understand, she takes offense and runs her mouth instead of asking first to get the whole story.
And Nyneve would fucking hit people on the head really hard and call them (mostly the men) fools and idiots and worthless. It's just awful. I know she became a LOT more rounded and wise towards the end. But I couldn't take 8 or 9 super long books of her and other women's bullshit, just to get at the sort of growth in those characters at the end.
Maybe it was just really affecting me because a lot of my life, I was treated in that way. If I did something someone like my family or friends didn't understnd, I would be very very badly verbally and emotinally punished/abused, because no one took the time to ask me what was up. They just got in their heads "oh she must be doing this to get back at me!" Crap. Just rumorMills and stupid assumptions that don't fit my character or actions one bit.
Like an example, one time I accidentally broke one of my old roommate's water glasses, while I was doing both of our dirty dishes. I apologized a lot and she seemed okay. I found out later she thought I purposefully did it to "get back at her" for some stupid petty thing we had (or i thought we had) resolved days earlier.
My mom is the queen of it, though she got better over time. But it left me with so many hurts. I ended up very submissive and quiet most my life. I was scared. I started to lie a lot about things I liked or didn't like, because I was so afraid I'd say I didn't like a certain piece of music or media that someone else loved. And that would be grounds to be angry with me, as crazy as it sounds.
I understand now I was being emotionally abused and I hung around severely emotionally abusive "friends" because that is all I knew, from my family and how they treated me. I felt like there was this perpetual emotional "fine print" sortof, that other people could read but not me.
After I became older, and much more my own person at the help of my husband, I started to stand up for myself. I announced my engagement on facebook, and one of my "closest" but worst friends from high school sent me a message. She was basically demanding I pay her $7,000 to be my wedding coordinator. The kicker? She JUST STARTED. I would have had to pay 7 GRAND to be a fucking guinea pig/lab rat as her first and only client!
I politely declined but, in a friendly not pretentious way, said she could come to the wedding. She promptly blocked me on Facebook. Shit like that. That petty, slimy stuff.
I'm sorry this is so long winded. My point of course is that due to my past hurts, I could not sit there and read most of the women being so horrid to themselves and the men. I've just recently gotten out of toxic stuff like that. And being fully immersed into it again through the books was overboard.
The story is amazing. I wish though Robert Jordan had scaled back on that kind of stuff. It made the women look foolish, petty, catty, you name it. Manipulative and mostly unwarranted verbal abuse, and certainly emotional.
Some of the women in the books are amazing awesome characters, don't get me wrong. I do love several of the females. Just the majority I couldn't stand, and the bullshit they got away with so much I just had to stop torturing myself and put the series down.