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alt title(s): Creators Pet
How bad is he? The actor who played him hates his guts.

"Ahsoka Tano, by the way, is annoying. She bats her grapefruit-sized eyes at Anakin and offers suggestions that invariably prove her right and her teacher wrong."
Roger Ebert says it best

As you've probably read elsewhere, The Scrappy is any character hated by the majority of the fandom. Most often, when their creators pick up on the hate, it's either ignored or, sometimes, played into (as eventually happened to Scrappy in The Movie).

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

That's The Wesley in a nutshell (a.k.a. the Creators Pet or "author's darling").

The main characteristic of The Wesley is that the writers' focus on him is detrimental to the show. It's not that the parts featuring this character necessarily suck more than the rest, it's that so much effort is being directed to them that it's taking away from the 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 every other episode, so the writers explain it by... revealing that he is actually a sooper-special genius destined to move on to a higher plane of existence. Then, they wonder where groups like alt.wesley.die.die.die came from.

The Trek franchise is strong enough to overcome the original, but other shows haven't been as lucky. When a character starts developing into The Wesley, it's often a code-red Jump The Shark sighting. Like Wesley's puppy-powered cousin, he can still be Rescued From The Scrappy Heap, but that's rare and takes considerable writing talent. The only certain way to dodge this particular bullet is to either put him on a bus or outright kill him off.

Keep in mind that this isn't "The Scrappy with a big role." Nor is it the Mary Sue, although related traits and tropes are often a factor in why this character is hated. The Wesley is a combination of being hated by fans (The Scrappy), loved by the writers (Creators Pet) and butting into big scenes for no reason (Character Focus). If it doesn't meet those three criteria then it doesn't fit. And this page is for describing general and well-documented fandom agreement, not any personal dislikes you may have.

Compare Spotlight Stealing Squad, which happens when Character Focus pushes a lot of the other characters out of the limelight for an extended period of time, and The Barney when this kind of character is the main one from the beginning. Also compare the GMPC, which is often this in a Role Playing Game. Contrast The Artifact, as a fair solution to a character who is only a Wesley because of overuse: the writers no longer find them interesting, but can't write them out of the series without royally screwing things up.

No connection to Mr. Butlertron.

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Wesssszzzzzzley.