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  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

52 comments