On these two particular notes: I feel similar, execution-wise, but I think I'm okay with those resolutions plot-wise. My beef is with the way they were written - it seems to me like RJ left notes that were like 'Mat kills Fain due to immunity to SL evil' and 'Demandred in Shara, comes with massive army and fucks up the AS camp', and then Brandon used no imagination in executing those.

I like the whole red herring of Fain as the next ultimate evil, I would have loved for him to have clawed his way through the Blight, increasingly dominating all kinds of badasses, building himself up to destroy Rand or the DO, only to be casually dispatched by Mat at the entry to Shayol Ghul. That's cool. But yeah, 2 paragraphs? It was like how Brandon utterly ruined Semirhage by having Cadsuane 'break' her in like 30 seconds. That scene could have been handled so much better if it was just fleshed out a bit more, or written a bit more imaginatively. His handling of Fain was hardly delicate.

re: Demandred - I thought the reveal was great, we were just thinking 'oh yeah, Aes Sedai fighting mountains of Trollocs and Fades, making the earth rumble under their feet and hurling lightnings, yawn' and then this HUGE effing gateway opens up to these foreign warriors that no one expected - it conveyed a sense of menace and shock that are hard to come by in a series where Trollocs and Fades stopped being scary by book 3. Plus, establishing himself in the one place in the world where he could gather vast armies, channellers, etc while 'letting the Lord of Chaos rule' was absolutely fitting with Demandred's intelligent character. But there was no follow-up whatsoever - it was like 'the Aes Sedai get thrashed. Egwene barely escapes after seeing Demandred.' Then all of a sudden everyone's POV is just like 'the Sharan army was there'. There's no 'WHOA, where did these Sharans come from?' No reveal as to what is up with them. No 'holy crap, Demandred did this? Crazy' by any of the characters. The actual impact of Demandred's plans only lasted as far as the first appearance of the Sharans and the first onscreen appearance of the Wyld. After that they were just more enemy cannon (err, dragon) fodder. Totally mishandled in my opinion.

Other than that, I thought it was kind of rad that Taim got turned into a crystal by Egwene. Haha, what a loser.