Yes!!!! I love love love that she’s a main character and the only one of the main women who can’t channel, it adds so much to her and I feel like there was such a missed opportunity to really emphasize how people gain power without the One Power. I agree she just gets the short end of the stick because there are so many POVs to cover.

I apologize if that’s how my post came across! I didn’t intend to criticize Min as a character or say that it was bad for her to care for Rand. It was just frustrating and sad to see her go from being written as a multifaceted, independent character to being written as a one-dimensional sap whose only purpose was to moon over Rand and say everything he did was perfect even when Rand himself was acknowledging that he did something wrong. It’s totally possible to have a character care about another character without making them lose their entire personality, but the way Min is written in the later books makes her lose everything that makes her interesting.

At least in my opinion, the little bits about Min doing research don’t outweigh the many scenes where she’s doing nothing except simpering over Rand or sleeping in his bed or clinging onto him. RJ didn’t portray her as well as he could have, and it sucks because she had the potential to be an amazing character.

I absolutely agree with you! The thing that’s really frustrating is that her research gets such short shrift whenever we have her POV or the POV of someone around her. We know that she’s doing research and that she’s intelligent and will find something super important, but we barely see it because in 99% of the events where she’s present, she’s fawning over Rand.

Again, this isn’t a criticism of Min, it’s a criticism of how she’s written in the later books. Too much weight is given to her being in love with Rand, and way too little on Min as a character with independent motivations and a personality.

No worries about the long answer it’s great!! The best thing about this series is how everyone reads it a little differently depending on who they are and everyone likes different characters for different reasons. There’s nothing better than hearing other opinions, if everyone felt the same way then WOT wouldn’t be the epic that it is.

I didn’t really think about the effect Min had on softening Rand but you’re totally right. I think she’s a super super valuable character (and plus no spoilers & I haven’t read it but someone said she gets an amazing plot line in AMoL) so hopefully when I reread the series I can look at her with a different mindset.

It does feel like many of the characters get Flanderized & boiled down to their “stereotypical” personality traits by the end of the series, which is maybe because there are soooo many characters that the story is following. Mat & Nynaeve & Egwene (love her or hate her) all develop and become such strong characters, but others become pretty one-dimensional like you said. It’s absolutely not just Min, I just made this post after an especially frustrating chapter :p

sorry this was also long!