Quote: The Wesley

There are certain characters who receive a lot of hatred from the majority of the fanbase for one reason or another. Most often, when their creators pick up on the hate, it’s either ignored, rescued from the scrappy heap, or sometimes, played into.

There are times, however, when it becomes obvious that at least one writer has become attached to a hated character, writing them into more and more scenes, giving them more — and more important — things to do, having the other characters rave about how awesome they are and sometimes even making them the proxy voice of the author, all while blissfully ignoring the fact that the fans absolutely hate this character.

That’s The Wesley in a nutshell (a.k.a. the Creator’s Pet or “author’s darling”).

The main characteristic of The Wesley is that the writers’ focus on them is detrimental to the show, not so much that the parts featuring this character necessarily suck more than the rest, but that so much effort is being directed to them that it detracts from the quality of the series as a whole. It’s as if the writers think that there’s nothing more important than browbeating the viewers into falling in love with this one character. And it never works.

The trope is named after Wesley Crusher of Star Trek: The Next Generation, probably the most (in)famous example of this syndrome. Star Trek fans have a really hard time understanding why the snot-nosed kid is the one saving the Enterprise-D every other episode, so the writers explain it by… revealing that he is actually a super-special genius destined to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Then, they wonder where things like the Usenet group “alt.wesley.die.die.die” came from.

–(from tvtropes.org)