I'm a trashy Barbie girl living in a Hydra Husbands world

Here we are hitting the 10 years mark since Brock and Jack made themselves known to us in CAWS and filled our minds and imaginations with their stories.

Starting today, 25 February 2024 for one year long, we will celebrate this couple through fanfiction, fanart, sharing and remembering how we discovered them and why we adore to write and create about their lives.

Please forgive any awkward phrasing. English is not my first language, but I really wanted to put this into words.

“Where you never get away from your first love” — Mitski, In a Lake

At first, I wanted to write a post about the way Nicki is mischaracterized in fanfiction. But the longer I thought about it, the clearer it became that the problem is not interpretation itself. Fanfiction exists because people reinterpret canon, shift emphasis, argue with the text, fix things, break things, save characters, or imagine them differently.

The problem begins when Nicki stops being a character and becomes a function.

Most often, that function looks like this: Nicki becomes Lestat’s first trauma, his tragic ex, or a short flashback that explains the pain of Lestat’s past without interfering with the main pairing. He is not brought into the story for his own sake, but to make Lestat seem deeper, more broken, more tragic. What remains of Nicki is not a person, but the effect he had on someone else.

In The Vampire Lestat, it works differently.

Nicki matters not only because he was Lestat’s first love. He matters because he appears before the myth of Lestat exists. Before Louis, Claudia, the Théâtre des Vampires, the rock star, the legend, and all the later roles through which Lestat will keep rebuilding himself. Nicki knows him at his human starting point: before immortality, before power, before the grand vampire story.

That is why their escape from provincial France to Paris cannot be read only as a prologue to future tragedy. In that part of the story, Nicki is not Lestat’s “ready-made wound.” He is the person with whom Lestat first tries to leave behind the life written for him by family, class, and circumstance. They are both suffocating in the old world. Both want an impossible way out. But Lestat looks for it in the stage, movement, desire, and visibility, while Nicki looks for it in music, negation, and a darker kind of clarity.

Their Paris years matter as lived experience, not only as the beginning of disaster. There is poverty there, theatre, Lestat’s first roles, the struggle to survive in a city where freedom is not easy, but at least becomes possible. Nicki is not standing beside Lestat as a decorative shadow. He is part of the very structure of that escape. Without him, it would be a different story: not “we got out,” but Lestat running alone toward the stage.

Nicki’s music is not decorative either. The violin is not there just to make him aesthetically tragic. Through music, the text expresses what Nicki cannot say properly in words: tension, anger, concentration, and a painful sensitivity to the world. His music is not an accessory to his image. It is a way of existing. Lestat acts through body, voice, performance, gesture. Nicki sounds. That difference already tells us something essential about both of them.

Lestat survives through motion. He wants the world even when the world is cruel. He reaches toward light not because he does not see pain, but because he does not know how to live otherwise. The stage gives his desire a shape: he can be visible, wanted, free, at least for the length of a performance.

Nicki looks at the same world and sees falsehood first. His darkness is not just a temperament or a “sad personality.” There is intelligence in him, sarcasm, envy, pride, talent, tenderness, and cruelty. He senses emptiness where Lestat can still see possibility. So the conflict between them is not a simple pattern of “bright Lestat and dark Nicki.” Nicki is not Lestat’s opposite and not his moral mistake. He is the person beside whom it becomes clear that love does not automatically give you access to another person’s pain.

That is especially important when reading their relationship. It would be dishonest to turn them into a purely tender love story, but it would be just as dishonest to reduce them to a toxic episode Lestat had to outgrow. Nicki is complicated. Dark. Envious. Painfully intelligent. He loves Lestat, but there is not only warmth in that love. There is resentment toward Lestat’s light, his vitality, his ability to keep wanting the world.

Nicki is drawn to Lestat and, at the same time, cannot forgive him for being able to burn instead of only seeing the darkness.

That is where Nicki’s complexity is. He can wound. He envies Lestat: his vitality, his resilience, his talent for still wanting life. But that envy does not erase love. And love does not erase cruelty. This is what makes Nicki a living character rather than a convenient role.

When Nicki is written only as a victim, his sharp edges disappear: his intelligence, his anger, his unpleasant perceptiveness, his ability to hurt and to be unbearable. When he is written only as a toxic ex, he loses his love, his talent, his music, and the meaning of the “golden years” he shared with Lestat. Both versions simplify canon because they remove the contradiction that makes him work.

Nicki’s tragedy matters not because he was Lestat’s mistake. It matters because he was real.

He was a witness to the human Lestat. He was part of the life in which escape, theatre, music, and love could still seem like enough. That is why losing Nicki destroys more than a romantic attachment. With Nicki, an entire human layer of Lestat’s life disappears: Paris before the vampire horror, love before immortality, freedom before it turns into another form of curse.

After Nicki is turned, this becomes even clearer. Vampirism does not create Nicki’s darkness out of nothing. It amplifies what was already there. His inability to make peace with existence does not suddenly appear because of the Dark Gift. Immortality simply makes that inability permanent. A human being can still be rescued by death, accident, time, exhaustion of the body. A vampire is trapped inside himself much more completely. For Nicki, immortality is not liberation. It is the fixation of pain.

That is why saying “he simply could not handle it” feels too thin. Nicki is not a weak character who failed at eternity. He is a character whose inner fracture was not healed by love, art, or immortality. Lestat tries to give him escape in the ways that work for Lestat himself: flight, theatre, possibility, action. But someone else’s method of survival does not automatically become salvation. That is one of the most painful meanings of their story.

Because of that, Nicki should not be turned into a stepping stone toward another love. His importance should not depend on whether he threatens Louis or proves how important Louis is. Lestat’s love for Nicki and Lestat’s love for Louis should not have to compete for the right to be called “real.”

You can love Louis without erasing Nicki. You can write Lestat after Nicki without turning Nicki into a footnote. You can acknowledge that this love ended in catastrophe and still refuse to pretend it was only a prologue to something more important.

If Lestat’s past love has to be devalued for his later love to matter, then not only Nicki becomes smaller. Lestat becomes smaller too. His feelings start to look like a simple replacement of one person by another, when in canon they feel much more like layers: accumulating, hurting, returning, changing shape, but not vanishing just because a new story begins.

A good Nicki begins where the writer remembers his scale. He does not have to be pleasant. He does not have to be right. He does not have to be safe. He can be sharp, envious, dark, tender, cruel, talented, loving, and destructive at the same time. But he has to remain a person with his own logic, not a convenient detail in someone else’s romantic arc.

And this is where I should probably be honest: Nicki is my favorite character.

Not just “one of them.” Not just a character I find interesting to analyze. He came into my life at exactly the right time. I was reading the books, reached him, and felt that almost embarrassing flash of recognition: oh. He is literally me.

Not in the sense that I identify with everything he does. Not in the sense that I think he is right about everything. It was more about recognizing an inner state: that darkness, that feeling of seeing too much falsehood and not being able to stop seeing it, that pain of living in a world that somehow seems more habitable for other people.

That is probably why I take negativity toward him too personally.

Intellectually, I understand that he is a fictional character. People read characters differently. Fanfiction is a space of interpretation. An adaptation does not have to be a word-for-word copy of the book. No one is required to see Nicki exactly the way I see him in my head.

But emotions do not work that neatly.

When a character becomes that personal, you are not only reacting to a plot decision. You react as if someone might retell something very private about you in the wrong way. So when I think about an on-screen Nicki, I feel not only excitement, but also fear. What if all that remains of book Nicki is just a function? What if the version that has lived in my head for almost ten years collides with another version, and I cannot accept it?

I know it is not fair to be angry at an adaptation simply because it does not copy the book exactly. Adaptations always shift emphasis. They do not owe me my private inner canon. Sometimes changes are exactly what make an adaptation feel alive instead of turning it into an illustration.

But it is still frightening.

I do not need Nicki to be idealized, justified, or turned into a saintly sufferer. I do not need a flawless Nicki. On the contrary, the Nicki I love is complicated: sharp, dark, talented, envious, painfully honest, loving and falling apart at the same time.

I do not need everyone to love him the way I do.

I only want him not to be reduced to a convenient function. To an ex. To a wound. To a short flashback whose only purpose is to show how much Lestat suffered before his “real” love.

Even if I remove my personal attachment, the same thing remains true in canon: Nicki is not a footnote in Lestat’s story. He is part of its foundation. Through him, we see the human Lestat, the price of escape, the limits of saving someone through love, and the horror of immortality when it does not heal an inner fracture, but preserves it forever.

Nicki does not need to be made convenient in order to work in the story.