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?
I liked him that episode where he almost got mauled to death by Kai Winn.
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.
It’s the perky brilliant kid mascot trope. It is a tired and fucked-out trope since about 1971. That’s why the hate.
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.
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.
Damn. That sucks. I’m glad he’s got himself together, even if it is a lot of work some days. He’s always come across as a genuine and good dude.
The whole show, including his character, dramatically improved as it went on. Wesley was awesome in that later episode with pre-Tom Paris.
“The First Duty” which is also arguably one of Picard’s best speeches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UHlXzddaM8&t=120s
Had to look it up. That’s just good goddamn television.
I remember this one. I was like man, Wesley messed up.
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.
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.
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.
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 still miss TableTop, really got me into Boardgames
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
I wanted to be Riker but ok
I wanted to be Data.
I wanted to be Barclay.
I didn’t hate him because I wanted to be him, I hated him because he was a gary stu, fellow-kids sort of character.
He came across as the Scrappy Doo of Star Trek. Small and annoying.
For one thing, he grows up to be a dick.
Shut up, Wesley.
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
