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komaruzu · 1 year ago

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PLEASE tell me your Nick Close-Foster thoughts PLEASE. He interests me but I can’t get a handle on him

HI. I WOULD LOVE TO. i have so so many thoughts about him always. but he is my fav character of all fav characters so i hope you don't mind me taking the opportunity to infodump ... i am so sorry in advance because this is about to be so long

(major spoilers for dndads seasons 1 and 2)

SO. from the very beginning of season 1 i loved the idea of nick's character, he's shown as this really laid back, cool stoner kid who obviously has a lot of love for his dad and wants to be just like him. it's obvious from the start that he and his dad have a more best friends-like relationship rather than a father and son one but i think the close's very start of their arc in waterdeep is what really got me hooked, because:

we get to see more into nick's relationship with his dad, learning that he doesn't just want to be similar to his dad but he wants to be EXACTLY like him. there's rarely a time we see nick close not making an effort to do things specifically because he wants glenn to think he's cool. it's shown that they don't have the type of relationship where they talk to each other about emotional things, which leaves nick doing this like lying and faking a whole curse so that he could steal the battle axe of hatred with glenn and spend more time with him.

he holds his dad on such a high pedestal even when we know that he definitely isn't getting all of the attention he needs from a parent. he wants to be like glenn to the point where he wants to live out glenn's childhood with him,

in the first half of season 1, we see that nick is just a 12 year old boy that wants nothing more than to impress his dad. all he wants is for his dad to love him and be proud of him and have time for him.

he puts his dad on such a pedestal that when things go wrong, he immediately blames himself and apologizes for not being a good enough son when he hasn't done anything! he's a kid and his dad's been backing up all of his wild ideas, like hot wiring and stealing a van, planning to start a whole drug cartel with the flowers from the watermice hideout - this was the part that made him my favorite character in dndads.

later on we find out that his mother passed away when he was 7, and more things start to make sense. nick and glenn literally only had each other, his dad was the only person he had to care for him but now his dad was also the only one that could support the two of them. with his tours and constantly having to be out for work, where did that leave nick? henry makes comments about nick not studying enough for the SATs, but fast forwarding to the meth bay arc we learn that nick used to be home alone for weeks at a time. he had to keep himself fed, get himself to school, and just survive for weeks alone while glenn would be on tour. it's no wonder he wanted to do anything he could to spend time with his dad.

imagine you're 12 and your stuck in a different dimension, your dad is out on a mission with his friends and two of your teammates, and then all of a sudden you're teleported into a courtroom and placed on the stand without any warning, you have no idea what it's about or what the consequences of it will be. but your dad's there!

he's so excited to see glenn when he first gets there, and then the questioning starts and we get these lines -

he lost his mom five years ago and has had no one to talk to about anything since. he's afraid of harshing the vibe with his dad, he doesn't want to seem uncool to any of his friends, so he's just been dealing with all of this (on top of being left alone at home for weeks on end every year!) alone. he has glenn to lean on, but not in a way where he feels comfortable to really talk about his emotions.

and after the trial, after the timeline switch - he's completely different. and though i know narcolas gets a bad rep, i love nicholas foster so much.

i don't think a timeline switch like they did would work as well with any of the other kids. had the other kids been raised by different dads they'd be different, sure, but not to the extent that nicholas was. because at his core, nick just loves his dad and wants to be just like him. no matter who his dad is. one of his most discerning qualities is the love he has for his father. none of the other kids tried to mirror their dads the way nick did, he was the only one where a plot like that could even truly work!

and now he's lived a whole new life, one where he had an attentive father and his mother didn't suddenly die. then everything that happens immediately after the book castle fight - both timelines come crashing together in his new half-demon form. and suddenly he remembers living both childhoods, he remembers his mom dying but she's still alive now. he remembers being left alone but also having jodie home with him. and he's still only 12. he chooses to go with jodie but still welcomes glenn into his family in the finale because he still wants him around, still needs him around.

after the timeline mash up nicky bares more resemblance to glenn than he does jodie. with the outfits he wears and the way that he acts, and you could chalk that up to the fact that most of his family is hell demons now but nick just always wanted to be liked and loved. that was always his goal. in s1, when we see nick close with his teammates we see that they're friends for the most part. the other boys like nick and think that he's really cool. but when nicholas foster is around, he isn't really friends with his teammates. they go as far as bullying him a bit, the twins being the ones that coined the "narcolas" nickname. he remembers both of these timelines now, but knows that he's still with everyone from the nicholas foster timeline so he still puts on a performance. i think that as he grew up he started to be more carefree and playful with his friends, turning into the wildcard of the group a lot like how glenn was because he knows that everyone will think that it's cool. there's no way that he doesn't still struggle with those abandonment issues he'd had in his close timeline, and now the identity issues that come from both timelines and everything that's happened to him - i don't think nick really knows who he is. i think a lot of who he is has always just been him trying to do things that other people would like, putting himself on the back burner for the sake of getting the attention, love and validation that he always needed as a kid. from his dad, from his peers, anyone. he covers it up with his 'cool guy who doesn't really care about anything' facade, but he cares. so much. more than he should sometimes.

going off of the scenes we have of him in season 2 - nick close foster grew into a man that had practically everything taken from him, much like his own dad.

the other guys in the d.a.d.d.i.e.s. group were his closest friends. they'd been friends for 15 years already when they'd betrayed him. nick had his closest friends tell him that they wanted to trap the doodler in hell, which would destroy his home and half of his entire livelihood. but he still went on the "mission" with them that led to his betrayal. he had all of his best friends tell him that they wanted to destroy hell and he still trusted them enough to go into the woods with them, alone, knowing they were all armed and protected in heavy armor. he trusted them enough to lead the way, letting all of them be behind him. he still let himself be vulnerable with them.

he cared for all of them so much. he loved every single one of them. he trusted them all with his life, and they broke that. and in doing so they not only threatened his life but the lives of his whole family. which, i think for nick, is the biggest betrayal that could've ever happened for him.

we can see that nick wanted to be a dad. he wanted to be there for taylor, because of course he did. he knew what it was like to have a father that wasn't always there, he would've never wanted to put his own child through that. but he had to. if he hadn't, cass and taylor would've been tracked back to him and they could've been seriously hurt or worse in the fbi's effort to get to nick and get into hell. he mentions that he and cassandra agreed to get divorced "partially because they didn't get along so well and partially because he can't stay in this realm for very long." which makes me think that cass at least knew something about him being half-demon? or maybe he made the excuse that he needed to visit his dads. we know her memory would have been wiped with the first instance of code purple too, but it makes me wonder how much nick did tell her about what was going on in his life. we know they didn't end with any hard feelings, i think they definitely started as a fun couple (probably met at a bar or something of the sort) and really only got married once taylor was on the way, then realized they didn't do so well together in a married setting. i like to think they were still close afterwards and still co-parented well.

when he first talks to taylor, yeah, he fucks it up a bit, telling him to go off on his own and lead a life where he trusts no one - because he doesn't know how to be a parent to a teen! the last time he got to interact with his son taylor was just learning to walk. he never got the chance to be his dad fully and everyone he trusted most turned on him and tried to kill him, he just doesn't want taylor's life to turn out like his. it seems like all that he's done in his adulthood has been trying to keep his friends and family safe.

i'm really excited to see more of him, he's my boy, he's everything. he's even transgender and bisexual. i have a lot of headcanons for him and more thoughts about what he was doing in the 25yr time skip between seasons 1 and 2 so if you wanna hear it let me know haha but!

TLDR; nick close-foster has always had too much love, faith and admiration in and for the people he's closest to. he was a boy who went through way too much at a young age and ended up with terrible identity and abandonment issues, and grew up into a man who went through even worse and ended up with the worst trust issues ever. the one thing he wanted all his life was to be loved & have people near him and now through no fault of his own he's alone again, just like when he was a kid.

#so then i started fucking sobbing #but like holy FUCK op this is so [shakes you violently]#No one understands how much i love nick as a character #like the amount of shit you can do with him??#this bad boy can fit so much trauma

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