The Kathryn Janeway hate is needless and truly problematic

There's a pocket of fans online who refuse to see Kathryn Janeway as anything other than a war criminal. They're all the same type of fans, mind you, so it shouldn't be surprising that they heap bizarre and antiquated concepts onto her in order to bury her character and render her time as captain of the Voyager less than by proxy. Yet, the arguments brought against her are assumptions at best and misreads at worst.

There's a belief that Janeway killed Tuvix, ergo she's a murderer. Except Tuvix was never alive. He was never born. It was an accident that caused two of her crew members to cease to exist. She found a way to save her crewmates, and yet she's seen as a villain. Why? Well, we have our theories.

There's the accusation that she committed genocide, which isn't true. She helped create a weapon that could fend off an alien race hell-bent on galactic dominance. A race that could leave and enter their space as they wished, and they kept wishing to enter the space we know as "ours". As the kids say, "f--- around and find out" and the race known as Species 8472 found out. It's one thing to defend yourself, as some hypothesize the 8472 to have done, but they were directly attacking other races as well.

The idea of a perpetual victim in any scenario is why people don't see this as what it was; three sides fighting different battles. 8472 weren't innocent farmers, they were bloodthirsty aliens who did their fair share of killing.

And yet, despite there being logical arguments for why Janeway did what she did, we never talk about the crimes of other captains. Again, you can guess why. Jean-Luc Picard planned an entire genocide of The Borg at one point, an alien race that only was a threat because Picard decided to have a stick-measuring contest against a literal god and got bodied in the process. He used his status as captain of the ship to bully children like Wesley Crusher and cadets like he did with Sito Jaxa. Hell, Picard even killed an innocent alien for no real good reason. We don't talk about Picard's history of problematic behavior.

We don't talk about Benjamin Sisko, killing an entire planet with a toxic fog, forcing millions of people to flee and die. We don't talk about how Sisko actually covered up an assassination of a diplomat, an actual war crime. We don't talk about that as frequently as we talk about Janeway. In the same way, some will point to Sisko's poisoning of a planet and 'reee' "But did they die", we would argue the same thing for Janeway.

We have no proof that Janeway's weapons were used in any way other than in self-defense and retaliation.

And the truth is, it doesn't matter what fans can cite or source, because at the end of the day, all this means is that it was an utter failing by the writers to write characters who could be upheld with the constant need to protect and defend them. We're tired of seeing half-baked think pieces that just denigrate Janeway, despite no captain in Star Trek history having his or her hands clean.