The reason people don’t like rand in the first couple books/seasons is that he hasn’t accepted the wheel of time’s call to adventure yet. He spends all of eye of the world and the great hunt trying not to. In the entire first book, though he is forced to accept the initial story’s call to adventure to protect his home, being like ‘I can’t be the chosen one’ and then all of the great hunt being like ‘being the chosen one fucking sucks I’m not doing this shit’ and complaining about the role he’s been cast in.
He doesn’t fully accept the full series call to adventure until book 3, even though he is declared as the dragon in book 2 with the banner and the sky battle, and he does so by hiding from the narrative itself, not lending his pov to the narrative for MOST of the book called ‘The Dragon Reborn.’ He finally accepts the call to adventure, the title of Dragon Reborn, mostly off page. Instead we start getting his ascension through the point of views of his friends. And most people agree that his arc in the following book, the Shadow Rising, is where his character starts getting more interesting.
This is one example of what I mean when I say the wheel of time is a story about hero stories. About what it means to be the Chosen One, and what it means to be someone who loves that human person behind title and role. How the lives and acts of real people get turned into rumor and oral storytelling and written history and mythology.
