Biscuit Hanmaa said that he thinks RJ crapped out towards the end of the series.
~MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW~
Hey, I don't disagree with you on the fact that he's seemed to crap out on the last ones, but you have to give him credit that books 1-5 were fan-fucking-tastic. Both times I read the series, I finished The Great Hunt in six days. I dunno what it is about that one in particular, but I could never put it down.
IMO, he just moved way the hell too quickly to meet his self-set quota of only having twelve books. If he took the pace that was set in books 1-5 and stuck with it, he'd probably be better than Tolkien when it came down to it, if you could get past his long-winded descriptions of things.
Yeah, it seems like he really lost steam after book five, it took for-fucking-ever to find the Bowl of Winds, and the whole
Men... Women... play on things started to get REALLY annoying. Once you realize that Nyneave has developed from a dynamic character [i]into[/i] a one-sided feminazi who can do no wrong in her own mind, that's where a part of me dies.
Here's a character summary of how they went wrong.
Rand - He ha><ed the MUD after book six.
Perrin - Too much whining about Faile. "Faile! Oh Faile! *Whine* *Whine* We get it, he loves her, damn. He's WAY too repetitive. He coulda been a real badass with how he was turning out in book three, but nooo~.
Mat - Probably the only character who didn't seem to lose much. The only question I have is why the fuck did he not bring a staff with him in the first book?
Nyneave - See above.
Egwene - She was okay through most of the series until she became Amyrlin.
Aviendha - She just disappeared completely, didn't she?
Min - She was cool, I never had a problem with her.
Elayne - She gets really annoying right around book eight when she just won't stfu with Nyneave. And she gets REALLY annoying in book nine with the whole Caemlyn stuff.
Etc.
Anyway, Robert Jordan did an awesome job when his world was full of peril around every corner and you didn't know what was fucking what. Look at book four. We think Rand's secure; he's got Callandor and all of that good stuff, but he and everyone else around him almost gets wtfpwned by a Bubble of Eeeevil. That was good shit right there. You never knew what was coming up next. But in these later books, Rand is absolutely nothing like he was, his silence even to the reader (considering it's an omniscient viewpoint) is just ridiculous, and he takes out like, what? Five or more Forsaken in book nine? It's just retarded.
I am willing, however, to look past these (actually pretty minor things, I just exaggerate a lot) and say that he's a really good writer. If you looked only at his first five books (From the start to Rhuidean, the events kinda run together once you read the whole series, eheh.) you'd just be like, "Wow," am I right?
