Finished the series, great ending, but two major complaints

First, we didn't get to see Hawkwing's meeting with Tuon.

For like the last 3-4 books I had been building this inevitable meeting up in my mind. She'd be all amazed and honored to meet her near-sacred ancestor, and he'd just smack her in the face (maybe metaphorically, maybe even physically) and excoriate her for the empire built on lies and slavery in his name. It'd be like Lincoln being brought back from the dead and being put face to face with modern republicans (forgive me for the politics reference, it just seemed too apt). Yes Hawkwing had issues with Aes Sedai in his time, but in the time since his death, watching the world from the world of dreams, he would have come to realize a lot of that was manipulation from Ishamael. And even if that's not the case, there's a big gulf between not liking Aes Sedai vs enslaving them and treating them like animals. Unless I'm massively misreading him, I don't think he'd be ok with their practices regarding damane.

It would be the only thing that would actually get Tuon to change, she's not gonna listen to anyone else, ever. It would be the thing that would resolve the Seanchan problem, not immediately to be sure, but would set them on a corrected course toward a better future.

And then Mat tells Hawkwing to go talk to her in the aftermath of the battle, holy shit here we go, it's HAPPENING! .... AND IT HAPPENS OFFSCREEN!! and with only one other scene with Tuon afterward, and it's not even addressed! WTF

I cannot describe how much I NEEDED to see this lol. I'm still crashing out about this and I'm thoroughly disappointed.

Second, Padan Fain was criminally underutilized.

So, this one is more complicated. In hindsight, I saw foreshadowing in a few things when it wasn't actually there, and maybe missed or incorrectly assumed some details about the nature of Mashadar.

To explain where I thought things were going:

-There's a recurring theme of duality throughout the series, and Eqwene comments on how everything to do with the power has an opposite. Two sides to every coin. Except, that doesn't seem to be the case with the dark one. There's two halves of the one power, Saidin and Saidar, so why is there no other half to correspond to the true power. Then I thought about Mashadar. It was never very clear what exactly that evil force that consumed Shadar Logoth truly was. Just a bizarre evil force that manifested as tendrils of silvery mist.

-Padan Fain, as Mordeth, would often think of the dark one as an ancient enemy.

-Damer Flinn was able to contain the evil infection from Fain's dagger on Rand by sealing it together with the evil from the wound from Ishamael. Sealed together, they seemed to counteract and balance eachother out. This phenomenon was then used by Rand to cleanse the source by filtering Saidin through Shadar Logoth, allowing the two evils to counteract and cancel eachother out.

-In the last battle when Fain showed up, he was now calling himself Shai'sam, eerily close to Shai'tan.

I basically thought Fain would end up being a Gollum parallel in a sense. Rushing at Rand at the final moment to kill him, only to get tossed into the void, and inadvertently become integral to successfully sealing the dark one away. Figured in the aftermath, they would realize it would only have been possible to firmly seal the dark one if both halves of evil were sealed together so they could counterbalance eachother. Shai'tan, and Shai'sam, the darkness and the silvery mist, black and white. And they would discover the reason for the weakness of the original seals was that they never re-sealed Shai'sam back during the war of power, which left Shai'tan alone and unbalanced and able to slowly wear down the prison.

Instead, Fain shows up and Mat just kills him almost as an afterthought, and that's the end of it. Meh.

From reading the wiki about these things since finishing, apparently Mashadar actually was just a weird phenomenon that manifested in Shadar Logoth during the Trolloc wars. I figured that was just what people assumed it was, not the truth of it. Oh well.