Brandon and girls.

[Wolfstar]

It seems to me that he's not writing more females than males... it's just that the cliche in most mass-media is that we get a strong, handsome, young male from a back-water town that turns into a mighty hero...  Mr. Sanderson does a lot to break cliches, so it appears that he makes it a point to give us both a heroic male and heroic female character in each book that are equally awesome, but since we are trained to see male heroes, the female ones really stand out.

I mean, let's just face it... Vin is one of the coolest characters out there.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Brandon wasn't always that way. I hear that the girl in the very first draft of White Sand was just there to be the main guy's love interest. He realized how boring she was and after that worked very hard to make his female characters interesting and important to the plot.

[AllWrong]

My problem isn't with the "frailties" of the women, or the "stupid things they do"  (Lord knows the men do enough stupid stuff for that to not matter.  No, my problem with the women in the WoT books is that they are so completely unreasonable.  If I knew women that acted like them in real life, I would go out of my way to avoid them every time I could.  (And I'm not referring to being opinionated or strong-willed.  I've been surrounded by women like that my entire life.  My grandmother opened the first cardiac unit in the state of Louisiana, and now the biggest cardiac unit in the state is named after her.  With that kind of example to look up to, strong-willed and opinionated is not a problem I have with women.)  No, my problem is that in their opinions they are right and everyone else is wrong.  End of story.  No ifs, ands, or buts.  They are (almost without exception) all completely unreasonable.

[Patriotic Kaz]

You've obviously not met my aunts and my mother..i avoid them myself

[Inkthinker]

It would have been funny had he added a emocon so we knew it was intended as a off-colour joke...try it again with one like this : ... get it...


if you take this post seriously i will go drown myself for losing all hope in humanity

I find it safer to assume that if a post can be taken as a joke or sarcasm, one should do so. Most people aren't as mean as all that, anyhow.

But yeah, that's what a  is for. Because we don't want anyone to know what a dirty pervert Brandon really is.

  

I actually thought Sanderson struck a great balance with his characterization of Vin. She presents a strong front and consistently performs powerful, even lethal, acts. But as readers we're aware of the internal conflicts and insecurities that she struggles with, possibly in a way not even other characters like Elend really understand.

I can easily see how other characters in her world would see her as frightening or... "witchy" (ahem), but we understand her better than that. That's depth, baby.

[Ari54]

Just a thought: While Brandon tends to write many female characters in main roles, he tends to write about their interactions with men a lot more than their interactions with women. Woman-to-woman relationships aren't as common and as deep as opposite-sex and man-to-man relationships are in Brandon's books, although this may just be because Brandon wrote a woman lead who was very much "one of the boys" in both Elantris and Mistborn. So I think it balances out in his epic fantasies pretty well even without considering Alcatraz.