They are excellently written but too simplistic and personal in their portrayal. The enemies of the main characters are all corrupt and venal and selfish or they are stupid and too blind to see that the heroes have everone's best interests in mind. And the whole 'good' and 'bad' axis aligns itself along the preferences and aggrandizement of the main characters. What helps them is good, and those who oppose them and fail to enjoy their lovely family camaraderie because, I don't know... they aren't zillionaires with no cares in the world beyond which one of their buddies to give a castle to, are evil villains who must get their comeuppance. Rohan is an emo poser whose ambition to weild total power is idealized as some sort of heroic affection for the rule of law. Laws which put him in charge, conveniently.

The dragons are lame and weak. They're basically big animals that exist for the convenience of the heroes. Imagine if the direwolves in aSoI&F shit Valyrian steel weapons for the Starks and you get the picture... And because they work out for HIM, the ruler of a main character puts these giant flying carnivorous lizards (which at the beginning of the story are hunted as threats to livestock and people, and one of them kills the main character's dad) on soem sort of medieval endangered species list forbidding anyone to kill them on penalty of taking all your stuff. But it's not JUST because it's convenient for the budding tyrant of a protagonist, he would have done it anyway even if he found out they were poisoning the water supply with their ear wax, because he thinks they are pretty (and never mind that they never bother him in his castle in the middle of the desert - eating all the sheep of his vassals who eke out a living in the mountains is the price people must pay so their emo prince can admire them migrating from one area of impoverished sheepherders to another.

The romance is tiresome and all the heroes just happen to land hot chicks and the heroines just happen to sensitive caring guys. And at least one of each pairing is rich. Honestly, ever character's romantic subplot could be expanded into a harlequin romance.

It's cool, with limitations, but as always seems to be the case, a dislikable and contemptible organization is in charge. It's basically Aes Sedai, with different magic, two genders, and later on, it turns out that mirrors and gems have magic significance. Only a woman could have written this. And speaking of which, since I hadn't read that much sci-fi/fantasy when I read this series, it combined with a few other crappy authors that had been recommended to me to lead me to believe that all female authors in the genre included protagonist-centric worldviews and some contrived institutionalized form of promiscuity.

As a-holes. It was a marvelous job of creating total a-hole d-bag self-satisfied smug jerks. Bad things happened to the few characters I found sympathetic and everyone's head had a good view of his prostate.

I got really disgusted in the latter triloogy when, during a war against a foe that actually used professional soldiers, a small group of soldiers escorting a bunch of doctors to help the war effort runs into the enemy and they arm the doctors, which helps them win the ensuing battle because their knowledge of anatomy & surgical skills make them deadly in battle!! I kid you not! Earlier in that same trilogy, during a battle with the same foe, a badly wounded character desperately conveys crucial information to the leaders about the current battle: she gasps out "Armies move to the right!" which is received as timely and important datum which is key to the outcome of the battle. Which is a crock. It reads like a factoid that the author picked up somewhere and thought was so cool that she had to shoehorn it into the book somehow. In the first place, if no one in the battle noticed the armies moving to the right, telling them is probably not going to save them. The author has zero understanding of combat or warfare and seems to think of it as some sort of sterile chess game that is nonetheless, evil, as every bad-ass warrior type is killed in a manner suggestive of the deserving fate of a substance-abusing, fornicating teen in a horror movie. Except the inner circle of heroes, who are SENSITIVE, high-skilled warriors, which is only a single aspect of their Renaissance-man characters. One character takes a very minor wound, and dies because he is too sensitive for the violence and horror of war and he is mourned far more than his superior officer/general who does more to win the war than anyone outside of the exalted inner circle of sensitive Renaissance-man main characters (the sensitive emo asswipe's dad is in that circle). Instead, the boss-warrior's death is dismissed off-handedly by the heroine, Sioned (his father's sister), because he is one of those icky types who are good at war and because he had enjoyed finding something he was good at in his middle age.

That sense of smug moral superiority applied to the main group of characters made me hate the books, despite the skilled characterization and world-building.