The important distinction, I believe, is that Kai Winn and Dukat were villains, characters designed to be hated. Wesley was supposed to be a precocious scamp, bringing levity and juvenility to an otherwise dry and mature crew, but just ended up being… Wesley.
Kai Winn is intended to be hated. And Dukat is such an enjoyable character that the writers had to go out of their way to remind everyone that he’s a bad guy.
I don’t think people hate Wesley in the same way. They don’t hate the fictional person, they hate the way the story presents him. They hate the way he saves the ship by being effortlessly superior to everyone, including Data. And it doesn’t help that he was a young actor with limited skill, featured most prominently during the shows weakest seasons that suffered from bad writing.
I think there’s far less negative reaction to the Wesley we see in The Samaritan Snare or The First Duty. He’s still a smart kid with a lot of potential, but the story presents him as a flawed, vulnerable person, rather than an obnoxious little shit with a terminal case of smug overconfidence.
Eh, never hated Wesley back when the show was airing. When the episodes where he’s badly written (and there are many) are spread out over weeks or months, he’s not annoying enough to hate, and he does get some okay writing here and there.
If anything, having a younger crew member helped teenagers and kids find a more relatable character to have an in to the show if they weren’t already fans of TOS and the movies. So in that , even though he was poorly written most of the time, he’s still a valuable character.
Honestly, even back then my impression was that the writers were just crap at writing a believable “gifted” kid. That Wesley was supposed to be even more than gifted didn’t help because getting the kind of personalities that form around kids that really are that much smarter than those around them isn’t exactly a common experience even among gifted kids. The kind of genius that Wesley was described to be is just too rare for even the mensa set to have a lot of experience talking to.
That’s what I think the problem was. You had adults that weren’t used to the kind of intelligence Wesley was supposed to have, and didn’t really remember being Wesley’s age trying to write him. They just used tropes and guesswork to turn him into what amounts to a DMPC, a free check to make bad writing choices via “super genius saves the day” vs “teenager fucks up” mismatches.
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