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29 Days of Star Trek Meme: Day 3
Feb. 8th, 2012 05:07 pm3 - Who is your least favorite character?
Another question where there’s more than a few answers I could have gone with. There’s Neelix – but while he’s utterly intolerable most of the time, when the show focused on him (“Jetrel”, “Fair Trade”, “Mortal Coil”), he was genuinely interesting as it became clear that much of his usual cheerfulness was a mask for insecurity and depression. There’s Dr. Pulaski – early TNG certainly could have used a bit more conflict between the main cast, but there’s a difference between ‘conflict’ and ‘refusing to accept a main character as a sapient being’. There’s Captain Archer, who, in what little I saw of Enterprise, seemed to have as his defining characteristic ‘stubborn refusal to accept more experienced people may, in fact, know more about things that he did’ - he honestly reminds me a little of George Bush...
But in the end, I had to go with the cliché answer of Wesley Crusher. Sure, everyone hates Wesley to the point there’s been a slight backlash against the hate – but honestly, there’s a reason he’s so disliked. The reason being he’s a Mary Sue of the worst kind.
Mary Sue gets thrown around a lot, which is a shame, because I think it is a useful term that shouldn’t mean ‘any disliked female character’. To my mind, the thing that makes a Sue a Sue isn’t just that they’re a big damn hero that the story revolves around. Janeway isn’t a Sue, Kira isn’t a Sue – neither are Kirk or Spock or Picard. In fact, I’d argue that a Sue isn’t a hero or a protagonist at all – the defining aspect of the Sue is that they’re fundamentally passive characters. They tend to have awesome powers or backgrounds right from the start, or are given them through no effort on their own part.
To switch universes for a second, it’s one thing for Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi after losing his parents, seeing Obi-Wan die, facing Vader and undergoing trial after trial throughout the trilogy. It’s quite different for Corran Horn to suddenly, out of the blue, discover he’s an awesome Jedi in addition to everything else he can do. In the latter case, it feels unearned – more importantly, it’s not a story.
And Wesley is a Sue in that respect; the character that the author is too much in love with to be bothered with such mundane details like ‘actually writing a story about them’, or wasting time establishing why they’re so awesome rather than just announcing it and assuming the audience will go along with it. For all that Wesley’s supposed to be a genius, we rarely see him actually doing anything a nameless red-shirt wouldn’t do. The Traveler claims he’s on the path to some sort of transcendent evolution, but he never seems to have any real insights that would demonstrate that power, nor does he have to struggle to attain that destiny.
Paradoxically, Wesley might actually have been a less insufferable character if he had saved the ship more often – at least then he’d be justifying his existence a little more.
Another question where there’s more than a few answers I could have gone with. There’s Neelix – but while he’s utterly intolerable most of the time, when the show focused on him (“Jetrel”, “Fair Trade”, “Mortal Coil”), he was genuinely interesting as it became clear that much of his usual cheerfulness was a mask for insecurity and depression. There’s Dr. Pulaski – early TNG certainly could have used a bit more conflict between the main cast, but there’s a difference between ‘conflict’ and ‘refusing to accept a main character as a sapient being’. There’s Captain Archer, who, in what little I saw of Enterprise, seemed to have as his defining characteristic ‘stubborn refusal to accept more experienced people may, in fact, know more about things that he did’ - he honestly reminds me a little of George Bush...
But in the end, I had to go with the cliché answer of Wesley Crusher. Sure, everyone hates Wesley to the point there’s been a slight backlash against the hate – but honestly, there’s a reason he’s so disliked. The reason being he’s a Mary Sue of the worst kind.
Mary Sue gets thrown around a lot, which is a shame, because I think it is a useful term that shouldn’t mean ‘any disliked female character’. To my mind, the thing that makes a Sue a Sue isn’t just that they’re a big damn hero that the story revolves around. Janeway isn’t a Sue, Kira isn’t a Sue – neither are Kirk or Spock or Picard. In fact, I’d argue that a Sue isn’t a hero or a protagonist at all – the defining aspect of the Sue is that they’re fundamentally passive characters. They tend to have awesome powers or backgrounds right from the start, or are given them through no effort on their own part.
To switch universes for a second, it’s one thing for Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi after losing his parents, seeing Obi-Wan die, facing Vader and undergoing trial after trial throughout the trilogy. It’s quite different for Corran Horn to suddenly, out of the blue, discover he’s an awesome Jedi in addition to everything else he can do. In the latter case, it feels unearned – more importantly, it’s not a story.
And Wesley is a Sue in that respect; the character that the author is too much in love with to be bothered with such mundane details like ‘actually writing a story about them’, or wasting time establishing why they’re so awesome rather than just announcing it and assuming the audience will go along with it. For all that Wesley’s supposed to be a genius, we rarely see him actually doing anything a nameless red-shirt wouldn’t do. The Traveler claims he’s on the path to some sort of transcendent evolution, but he never seems to have any real insights that would demonstrate that power, nor does he have to struggle to attain that destiny.
Paradoxically, Wesley might actually have been a less insufferable character if he had saved the ship more often – at least then he’d be justifying his existence a little more.