#this has been in my drafts for ages bc it is potentially controversial but I am bedbound fir the weekend post a medical thing

[heliza24]

just had a premonition of how ableist/sanist people are gonna be about Nicki when season 3 comes out and I am already bracing for it.

like I think the way the book treats Nicki and what to me reads as his very clear mental illness/depression/ptsd is already *not great* but I can just see the way fandom and ship wars are going to spin it into Nicki being "not worthy" of Lestat because Nicki struggles and lashes out at Lestat instead of being perfectly loving towards Lestat the whole time.

The way Lestat treats Nicki in the book honestly made me really angry. The way Lestat is so clearly repulsed by Nicki after he turns him into a vampire, solely because of the bitterness he senses in Nicki which is a direct result of the trauma and his mental illness. The way he rejects him as a vampire out of hand while he immediately falls in love with Gabrielle's vampirism. The way he kind of shrugs and goes "well yeah, Nicki can be pretty annoying so I get it" when he hears about Armand cutting off his hands. It's so ableist and dismissive, and truly the worst nightmare of anyone who has ever felt "too depressed/anxious/psychotic/etc" to be loved.

I trust the show to represent the complexities of this. I think the show has already done a good job of drawing a connection between Lestat's failings with Louis and his failings with Nicki, and I think it will also be easy to draw a line between Louis and Nicki's respective mental illnesses. We've also seen Lestat already acknowledge how wrong he was to leave Nicki with Armand, through acknowledging that he probably shouldn't have left Louis with him either. So I think the writing on the show will treat Nicki and Lestat's relationship with care and show the real tragedy of Nicki.

I do not, however, trust the fandom to get it. *Big sigh*