TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

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).

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.

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/04WJEEb33CY?feature=shared

It's the perky brilliant kid mascot trope. It is a tired and fucked-out trope since about 1971. That's why the hate.

I liked him that episode where he almost got mauled to death by Kai Winn.

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.

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.

found Wills alt, y’all

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.

Shut up, Wesley.

He came across as the Scrappy Doo of Star Trek. Small and annoying.

For one thing, he grows up to be a dick.

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