You’re not alone in that. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever encountered who dislikes Pulaski as character… it’s because all they remember of her is that first scene.

She’s a great example of just how brutally important first-impressions are.

I definitely disagree that she wasn’t her own, distinct character – she was, I think you’re letting that bad first impression continue to color your perspective. It’s easy to misremember Pulaski as being abrasive and antagonistic because of that first scene, and hard to remember that she apologized very quickly after that, and very quickly became friends with Data (and remained very supportive of him throughout her time on the ship).

So it’s weird seeing so much of the “discourse” on Pulaski boiling down to fans being angry at her for being mean to Data that one time while conveniently forgetting that she was one of only two people on that whole ship who went out and befriended the Android.

Some (okay, quite a lot) of that pushback seems really weird to me. There’s so many people pontificating about the “convenience” of Reddit, and having access to every community on the same platform… somehow failing to realize that an Internet browser is, itself, a single platform that can access everything and that clicking on a specific sub from a website’s drop-down menu is functionally no different from clicking a bookmarked webpage from a browser’s drop-down menu.

I think folks are just scared of change and upset at the (minimal) inconvenience of having to set up a new account elsewhere.

Here’s hoping this takes off! In retrospect it probably would’ve been smarter for me to pick the same username as my Reddit account, but given how few people have registered here so far, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to grab Kestrel.

Was pretty skeptical about all this stuff, but it seems like y’all have succeeded in moving a good chunk of people from Reddit to this new place, which hopefully bodes well for the future.

Hopefully y’all will be able to keep moderation functioning well, especially considering that a lot of Folks’ll stay split between here and the Reddit subs. Like the biggest reason (IMO, of course) that r/DaystromInstitute is/was one of the best subs out there was just how effective the moderators are/were.