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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UHlXzddaM8&t=120s
Had to look it up. That’s just good goddamn television.
Did you see the episode of lower decks that brought back “not tom paris”? Great episode they even put a lamp shade of him looking like tom.
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?
Oh yeah, he went into it on his blog, and in more detail in an autobiography rerelease back in 2022. Plus a good bit of it in interviews after that.
Physical and mental abuse from his parents is the short version. Which is the root of his PTSD and related issues.
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.
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.
