I get your tone, but I'll take any excuse. I'm not ALL about the hating Egwene, but there are so few excuses to really go on about Nynaeve. In fact, when defending Nynaeve from some way that Egwene wrongs her, I have a hard time staying on the topic of Egwene's wrong-doing, and not going off on how awesome Nynaeve is. It's simply not as controversial a position, and most people like Nynaeve in spite of those perceived flaws, so there isn't much chance to get in a good rant.
Nynaeve wasn't one of my favorite characters until I started re-reading the series ... When I was younger and reading the series as it was being released I thought of her as something of a bully, and there are certainly elements of that in her personality, but as I re-read the books I started to see more of her heart and internal motivations come through. I love that she was willing to throw her entire life's work away to go track down a few wayward teens. The bravery it would take to grab your horse and travel alone through monster infested woods and into what must have seemed like a massive city chasing down a woman and her companion that represent the greatest power you can imagine is astounding. She's also one of the only characters in the entire series that is shown to have true personal growth. The Nynaeve in EoTW and the Nynaeve after all her experiences is a much different person, but oddly exactly the same too. I'm not sure I can really explain it in a short post, but she matured without becoming a totally different woman. Egwene, in contrast, drastically changed in ways that made her nearly unrecognizable as the same person in some ways. I found her interesting and I tend to enjoy the intrigue and political machinations plots in general (what fiction I do read tends to these kinds of stories) but despite that I recognize that she doesn't have the heart that Nynaeve possessed. Egwene was the character that learned to play the system from within the system and Nynaeve was the character who truly tried to move the system. For me both have appeal as characters to read about.
I absolutely agree. I never understood why people thought I didn't like Egwene's parts of the book or would want them excised. I liked reading that stuff, and I would not have thought WoT improved if she had set herself on fire trying to cook that rabbit in EotW. I also like horror movies and history, so it's not like I need happy endings, after all. No matter your opinion of the character as a person, WoT would have been less for the absence of most of them.
I think I see Elayne in more of the position relative to Nynaeve that you place Egwene. I like their partnership of contrasts, and how Elayne's rationality balances Nynaeve's intuition, Elayne's diplomacy against Nynaeve's frankness, and so on. While I was more than glad to see the end of the Ebou Dar sojourn, in both tPoD and WH, I really liked how their meetings with Tylin and Setelle Anan illustrated those traits complementing each other, completely without artifice or calculation. Nynaeve dove right in and took Tylin at her word, breaching the walls of status, position and courtesy, and Elayne followed up on her seeming blunder to exploit the opening and make a real human connection with Tylin that bettered all the efforts of a well-respected Gray & official ambassador. With Setalle, Nynaeve made the absolutely irrational but completely accurate assessment that there was an active group of channelers or people involved with the Power, and these people could help them find the Bowl. Elayne, and in all probability, most readers, had no idea what she was up to, or why she was going along with Mistress Anan's course of action, but she ended up being right. And then when they get there, and Elayne has evidence to work with, she starts the wheels turning and figures out even more about the Kin. It was really amazing, and the sole comfort I take from hearing people complain that all they do is walk around and talk, is that they are missing out on something they don't deserve.
I think I just saw that Elayne brought out the best parts of Nynaeve. I tended to want more of the POVs to come from Nynaeve, but at the same time I suspect she was a better character to be shown from an outside view. To your point the discovery of the Kin wouldn't have been as cool if we knew right off the bat what Nynaeve was up to and the POVs we do get from Nynaeve highlighted her soul to me ... Her pain at other peoples injury stood out even in the Sanderson books. When she cured the Taint madness you could tell she was both emapthetic and brilliant in the way she puzzled it out. I was also drawn in by her lack of confidence at times too. Here we have a truly gifted individual, brave, smart, beautiful, commanding sense of self and nearly as strong in the OP as it was possible to be, yet she still doubted herself when faced with something outside of her wheelhouse. In some ways she gave in to this early in the series, but as she matured she began to truly invest in herself and did some pretty stunning things.
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