This is sad but true. I had the thought during my reading of Shadows Have Offended about “this Crusher plot feels kind of generic, rather than tailored to her,” and got to thinking about what even we HAVE of Crusher’s character, and that just doesn’t really feel like much, especially in comparison to the other characters. Medical stuff is her wheelhouse, but outside of being “the Doctor” for the Enterprise D/E, I struggle to think of the details of her, as an individual.
As for René himself, I think the big issue with him is both that one, as a child, it’s difficult to fit him in to the bigger storylines, and two, TNG novels after Destiny have been very spread out in terms of general focus - it’s kind of the same as over in post-Destiny DS9, we have a whole new cast to establish alongside the old familiar characters, and there just hasn’t been the time to give everyone their full due - like, Dina Elfiki has been part of the Enterprise crew for a decade of real time, and her biggest feature was in DTI. Post-Destiny TNG and DS9 both seemed to gain more of a focus on the Events as opposed to the characters.
Like I don’t mean to trash the stories or anything, because I feel like I’m saying this and it comes across as harsher and more critical than I intend, but I do feel like there’s a real difference in post-Destiny TNG and DS9, as opposed to Avatar-DS9 and post-Destiny Voyager, and the thing seems to be a push to progressing the story at the pace of the characters, taking the time to stop and focus on them, as opposed to the faster pace in TNG/DS9 - like it seemed like those books were trying to speed their way through the 2380s, going through them at an almost real time pace at the period around The Fall, which didn’t leave much room for exploring the character development - either things just lingered for a long time or they just got offhandedly spoken of and wrapped up too quickly.
Like one of my big hopes every time there was a “what do you want from next year’s books” thread, I kept wanting to take some time and fill in some of those timeline gaps and spent time establishing the new characters and dynamics. Much as I’m going to miss new stories in the Litverse continuity, I keep thinking that I’m not necessarily going to miss character development, because it feels like many characters were only as developed as they needed to be for a given plot, rather than as individuals.
Still have characters I’m going to miss, of course, but if I compare my attachment to the cast of current TNG or DS9 novels against, say, if this came after Unity released, I can only really think of a couple of standouts, as opposed to almost the full cast there.
