Brandon Bloody Sanderson is my biggest. I just posted on another messageboard that if the topic of "wishes" ever comes up one of the first things that always comes to mind (you know, after peace on earth and health and security for my loved ones) is "I wish Robert Jordan was able to complete WoT".
After being picked to finish WoT Sanderson wrote about having read the books when he was younger and declared what a big fan of the series he was. He then posted his thoughts about the characters and the worldbuilding while praising RJ's attention to detail as he re-read each book when preparing himself to start his writing. All of that actually gave me hope that WoT was in good hands. It took reading all of a few chapters of TGS to realize how wrong I was.
His depictions of the characters were so far off I wondered if he had actually read any of RJ's books at all. Since when did Mat become illiterate?!? He may have been foolish at times, but never did RJ portray him as stupid! This so jarred me that I actually had to put the book down for a spell. To this day I can not grasp how anyone who has read WoT, let alone a professional writer who claimed to so appreciate the source material, could be so remarkably amiss with their interpretation of it's characters. Was Harriet not RJ's editor as well as his wife? Did she not proofread Sanderson's books? Could she not see how profoundly altered the behavior of some of her late husbands main characters were now being written? I was dismayed.
Yes, he did improve somewhat during the concluding two novels thankfully but never to the point where I could imagine that these were the same characters I grew to love over the course of RJ's eleven plus WoT books, and believe me I tried hard to pretend they were.
That's all I want to write now.
Personally, my biggest BS pet peeve is him messing up the numbers. It's bad enough with massive chunks of everyone's armies vanishing into thin air, but... It's kind of dampens the mood of the Last Battle when you just want to turn to the good guys and say "... You DO know you have like dozens and dozens of times more channelers then them, right? ... Are you EVER planing to use them?". -_-
Killer sa'angreal are nice... But it doesn't really matter if you're a THOUSAND times stronger then normal, when the other guys have WELL OVER three thousand more channelers then you do... And their own sa'angeal... That is suddenly near equal to yours in spite of that rather important detail having never came up before...
BS didn't handle the OP well... Like at all, but that just makes the Shadow's plan look out and out stupid, and the Light look worse at that.
Who knows how RJ would of handled it... But it could of hardly been worse.
... No, really. Even just one Aiel clan had something like four hundred Wise Ones who could channel. They had the Shadow so freakishly out numbered, the non-channelers could of likely just sit the whole thing out while they just flat out butchered everything the Shaqdow could field.
