holly

Wesley Crusher as a character is just so fascinating to me. He’s a child prodigy genius with no friends. A weird god-like time travelling alien starts stalking him when he’s fifteen. Because of this alien he ends up with a job on the federation’s flagship as a teenager. Over the next four seasons everyone proceeds to act like it’s completely normal that he works there now and no one ever questions the child labour of it all. The only people he’s close to are at minimum twice his age. He got the death penalty for stepping on a flower bed. He got stabbed through the chest and fully died once. His mother leaves him to be raised by their coworkers for a year when he’s just sixteen. He accidentally created new life while doing a science project one time. He technically failed his academy entrance exams twice but Picard still made him a full ensign anyway just because he felt like it. He was at the helm during the Borg attack and has to live with the fact that if they hadn’t found a last minute way out of that shit he would’ve crashed the Enterprise into the Borg ship and killed everyone on board. His last episode as a main before he goes off to the academy is about him nearly dying of dehydration in a cave and the whole time he’s just going “actually, I think I’m the luckiest boy in the whole wide world”. He finally makes some friends his own age and then he accidentally but recklessly helps cause the death of one of them. He participates in a cover-up to try and hide this but then he’s found out, gets held back a year at school and looses pretty much everything he’d been working for since he was fifteen. He burns out, becomes severely depressed and isolates himself from everything. He goes on a stereotype of a Native American Vision Quest, decides to drop out of uni and helps incite an uprising against the federation. It’s at this moment when he’s at his absolute lowest that the aforementioned weird god-like time travelling alien turns up and convinced him to leave behind everything he’s ever known to also become a weird god-like time traveller. This is framed as the correct choice for him to make. I didn’t even list half of the crazy traumatising shit that happened to that boy. About 95% of the stuff that happened to him is never addressed and the other 5% is only ever addressed briefly as they try to convince us that Wesley is fine, actually