What's With the Wesley Hate?
What's With the Wesley Hate?
I watched TNG from beginning to end and throughout it tried to see anything to be critical of about Wesley and couldn't find anything. What's the big deal?
He's a Mary Sue. I know that term gets misused by misogynists for, "female character I don't like," but it was originally a term for Trekkies' self-insert fan-fic characters, and Wesley fits the trope perfectly: the youngest, smartest person to graduate Starfleet Academy/serve on a Starship, with unusual skills or special talents, who the ingratiates himself with the main cast, and finds himself at the center of major events despite his young age and low rank.
Some of the "hate" might be overblown (and played up). But he's still a poorly written character. He's boring and one dimensional. There's conflict right there, his dad died under Picard's command, and Picard now wants to boink his mom. But he's just normal teenage asshole + nerd trying to get into Starfleet Academy. He swoops in to solve a problem like a deus ex machina device one moment, then is a stupid angsty teen the next.
Also, he's kind of written as a nerd in a bad way; not bookish or introverted, or almost autistically passionate about one or two topics, but a sort of do-gooder ass-kisser. The kind of guy who'd rat you out for hacking the holodeck to have a booze-fueled orgy with a bunch of simulated women designed from an adolescent's ideal of unrealistic expectations.
Enterprise crew are supposed to be the best of Starfleet, having worked their way to the top of the lists to get there. Wesley's there because his mom made it on the list; there's no reason to expect he'd be any different from other teens: hormonally driven, prone to bad judgment and still figuring out life as a young adult. But that's not how he's written.
Put the Wesley character into any high school, and he'd be bullied. Even nerds wouldn't like him.
I mean, what you said: he's written as if by someone who's forgotten what it's like to be a teenager.
The kind of guy who’d rat you out for hacking the holodeck to have a booze-fueled orgy with a bunch of simulated women designed from an adolescent’s ideal of unrealistic expectations.
"There are some games I'm not ready for yet."
Bullshit, you'd be going to pound town the minute you got down to that planet and you would have broken their law by fucking your way onto that greenhouse.
He's very much a Mary Sue-type character.
And an important one in the History of the term Mary sue
There is no interpersonal conflict allowed in Gene's vision of Starfleet. Oh they might but heads occasionally, but every episode resolves with everyone putting their differences aside to work as a team. It's practically a cult mentality. Gene would not have let them write episodes telling those kinds of Dead-parent/Step-Parent/Oedipal stories. That doesn't exactly excuse the bad writing of the Wesley episodes, but it does explain why the writing did not go to those places.
found Wills alt, y’all
I wish Will would make a Lemmy account. I've always wanted to chat with him. Dude just seems legit fucking cool.
I'd just like to thank him for possibly changing my life. My husband had a tweenage crush on Wesley which caused him to be into nerdy guys like me as an adult. So I might be married thanks to Will's role on TNG.
I still miss TableTop, really got me into Boardgames
He used to be pretty active on reddit, and he was pretty fucking cool. If you didn't hassle him and just had a conversation like he wasn't famous, he was even cooler.
I don't think he's using much of anything social media related frequently any more though, not on an account connected to him in an obvious way for sure. Can't say I blame him.
I've talked to him a few times in century club and around reddit/Google+ in the old days, he seems like a decent guy IMO
Didn't he have a mastodon account for a while? I think he accidentally got a TERFy blocklist and got harassed off the platform over it.
I've thought that for a long time. I'd love if he'd hang out here, and would hope he'd be respected being here (like he wasn't on Reddit)
The only thing I really hate about the character of Wesley Crusher has nothing to do with the character himself, but the whole "chosen one" bullshit surrounding him.
Well, at the time the main complaint people had was more about him being shoehorned into things in a way that didn't make sense combined with him being "superkid".
But yeah, I always thought the character was more of a positive than a negative, even when he was badly written. If nothing else, it gave younger viewers/fans a bit of a viewpoint character that was pretty rare in sci-fi that wasn't kid oriented to begin with.
Plus, Wheaton did damn fine job considering the scripts were sometimes not really good dialogue for him. Stilted, a bit too "I'm an adult trying to write a teenager, but can't actually remember what it was like"; and often not really about his character as much as they needed someone to do the things he was doing, and Wesley's turn came up. Hell, if you factor in the shit the guy was going through at home, he was amazing.
The whole show, including his character, dramatically improved as it went on. Wesley was awesome in that later episode with pre-Tom Paris.
I’m unfamiliar with his home life. I know he’s publicly discussed mental health issues, has he been open about whatever happened at home?
Because it awakens the bullies who don’t like smart kids. During that era it was common to pick on ‘the nerdy kid’ and it was considered the right of passage to be ‘cool’. Wesley embodies the type of victim a bully goes for.
The hate you refer to is more the issue with the bully rather than their targets. Wil Wheaton did a great speech about bullying.
Wesley Crusher was a wish fulfillment character for Gene Wesley Roddenberry (yes, that’s his real middle name). We don’t have a problem with smart kids, they just gotta stay in their lane: focus on school and hobbies, having fun, and chipping in the occasional good idea. When the “smart kid” gets written to be the ship’s last hope and miraculous saviour (on more than one occasion) it turns the show into a farce.
Shut up Wesley.
He was a child prodigy on board a pretty cool starship, and he got away being annoying to the Captain. We all wanted to be in his shoes... but it was just a bloody fantasy. So we began to hate him.
It's the perky brilliant kid mascot trope. It is a tired and fucked-out trope since about 1971. That's why the hate.
can you give any references to this “trope” and it being “tired” by the time TNG first aired? Just curious what other shows had young brainiacs that so angered audiences to the point that they were fed up with the whole idea by TNG’s premiere.
There is nothing wrong with the character—it’s just generational hatred of the idea that there could be new star trek content and latching on to weird shit to complain about. Lots of “fans” complained about TNG when it first started airing.
He honestly has a pretty interesting character arc for the era and show he was a part of— being a young princeling, fucking up in school and ultimately realizing that he needed to go his own way and become a The Traveller (over the course of 7 seasons of episodic story telling admittedly so it’s a little woobly).
Shut up, Wesley.
I liked him that episode where he almost got mauled to death by Kai Winn.
He came across as the Scrappy Doo of Star Trek. Small and annoying.
Agreed. There were a couple of scenes where he was kinda whiney, but overall i think he's a very compelling character who i enjoyed watching
