Throwback Thursday #2: Top Five Favorite Fanfictional Nick Roles

I’m back with the second in my series of twenty-five retrospective blogs to commemorate this site’s upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary in April! A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated AJ’s birthday with a blog about my top five favorite fictional AJs. Since Nick’s birthday is next, it only makes sense to do the same for him. So here they are, my top five favorite portrayals of Nick!

5. 00Carter

Nick is the title character in 00Carter, an AU collaboration created by my friend Rose. Rose came up with the idea of a “James Bondish fic” that featured Nick as a secret agent, although Agent 008, a.k.a. 00Carter, turned out to be less James Bond and more Maxwell Smart in our satirical take on the genre. Nick sings his way through most of his missions, managing to succeed through a combination of charisma and luck. The villains may hate him, but the ladies love him, myself included. This is probably the most light-hearted, least angsty version of Nick I’ve written, and it’s always nice to come back to him as 00Carter after hurting him in other fics.

4. Heroic Nick

Heroic Nick appears in both of the stories I published during the pandemic, Heroic Measures and The Road to Bethlehem. In the former, fifteen-year-old Nick attempts to save his best friend Brian’s life by pulling him from the band’s submerged van after it crashes into the Chicago River. In the latter, forty-year-old Nick fends off bears and bullets to find help for his brothers after their work retreat in the White Mountains of New Hampshire goes badly wrong. While Nick is often the main character of my stories, I think my desire to make him the literal hero came from A Heart That Isn’t Mine, the last novel I finished prior to these two. In that story, Nick was a helpless victim who spent most of his time lying in a hospital bed. While I love torturing him (fictionally), it was fun to take him in a different direction in my next two fics and give him more action and agency over what happens to him – even if he still ends up in a hospital bed. (Because, like I said, I love torturing the poor guy!)

And speaking of torture…

3. Cancer Carter

While medical drama has always been a major element in my fanfics, I never thought I would write not one but two (okay, maybe technically three?) cancer stories starring Nick. We’ll get to the first one in a bit, but the second (or third?) one was Curtain Call. Inspired by the Adam Sandler/Seth Rogen dramedy Funny People, this novel tells the tale of a terminally ill musician who takes an aspiring singer under his wing and offers to help her with her music career. In exchange, she agrees to take care of him and help him hide his illness so that he can continue his own career for as long as he’s able to. Having already spent five years of my life writing about Nick dealing with cancer, I really tried to avoid the whole cancer trope and inflict him with a different type of disease this time around. But, ultimately, nothing else worked with my idea as well as cancer, so I went with it. I tried to distinguish Curtain Call from my first Nick cancer story, Broken, in as many ways as possible: I gave Nick a different kind of cancer and a different kind of ending, wrote in a different point of view, and portrayed him in a different way. He’s much less dramatic and emotional, more mature and nuanced than his Broken counterpart. While Curtain Call Nick is as charismatic as ever, he’s also secretive and manipulative, using his Carter charm to deceive and exploit the people around him. He’s a complex character, and I love him for it.

I didn’t have a hard time writing Nick differently in Curtain Call than I did in Broken because the real Nick changed a lot between those two stories and the time periods in which they take place. Broken begins in 2003, when Nick was 23 and still trying to figure out who he was as both an artist and an adult. Curtain Call takes place seven later, when Nick was 30 and working on his second solo album. By then, he had gone through his “growing pains” and gotten his life back together. But, in between these two versions of Nick, there was…

2. Hot Mess Nick

My best portrayal of Hot Mess Nick is in My Brother’s Keeper, which was written in 2021 but takes place in 2008. I purposely set it during that year so that I could interweave Nick’s real life personal struggles and growth with the fictional events of the plot. I wanted to show his transformation from a hot mess to an even hotter mature adult. I drew heavily on his 2013 memoir to write Hot Mess Nick, who made plenty of stupid, irresponsible decisions as a result of his partying and substance abuse. Yet, just like in real life, he still managed to be both sympathetic and loveable because his heart was always in the right place, even when he was in the wrong. I loved showing Nick’s nurturing side as he took care of Kevin and Mason, becoming less selfish and more selfless over the course of the story. It’s one of my favorite Backstreet character arcs.

That being said, my favorite of all my Nick portrayals still has to be…

1. Broken Nick

Believe it or not, Nick used to be my least favorite Backstreet Boy. I know – sounds crazy, right? But it’s true. Late ‘90s Nick’s floppy, yellow hair did nothing for me, his teenage voice was too whiny, and I found his personality slightly annoying. He said stupid things and tried too hard to be funny like Brian. Of course, I now realize that is part of what makes him so endearing, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time. By the early 2000s, though, Nick had begun to grow on me. His voice had matured, he’d gotten a haircut that made him look a lot hotter to me, and his personality… well, more on that in a minute.

Another factor that influenced the way I felt about Nick was fanfiction. While not my personal favorite, Nick has always been a fan favorite, so it was only natural that, when I found myself running out of Brian fics to read, I started reading more Nick-centered stories. There were so many to choose from that it was easy to find fics that I liked. And the more I read, the more I fell in love with the fictional versions of Nick, which undoubtedly affected my feelings for him in real life. Around the time he released Now or Never, I was absolutely obsessed with two Nick series co-written by one of my favorite fanfic authors, Jenna. One was the Nick and Lizz series, and the other was Swollen Issues. I adored the way Jenna portrayed Nick in her stories. He always made for a great main character: charming yet flawed, brave but vulnerable, passionate yet prone to anger, full of angst, and fiercely loyal to the people he loved.

When Swollen Issues II inspired me to write Broken, one of my goals was to get my readers to feel the same way about Nick that I felt when I read Swollen. I wanted them to sympathize with him, sometimes get exasperated with him, but always root for him. And, based on the response from readers back then, I’d say it worked! Broken was my breakthrough fanfic, the story that first brought a lot of people to this site and earned me more accolades than I’d ever gotten before. While it’s far from my best work now, it was the best thing I had ever written at the time, and I was just as obsessed with writing it as I had been with reading the story that inspired it.

But a funny thing happened while I was writing Broken in 2003. Nick – the real Nick – went through what Ashton Kutcher coined his “ghetto fab” phase, best illustrated by his appearance on Punk’d, which originally aired in November of that year. While his fictional counterpart was busy fighting bone cancer with Claire by his side, the real Nick Carter was hanging out with Tommy Lee and complaining about his infected nipple piercing. I can still recall watching that episode for the first time and feeling incredibly turned off by Nick’s whole vibe, from the outfit to the accent to the aforementioned nipple rings. It gave me the ick. I can shake my head and laugh at it now, but I remember how hard it was for me to turn around and go back to writing Broken then. But, in a way, writing Broken was a relief because my fic Nick was so different from Ghetto Fab Nick – and, to be honest, I liked Broken Nick a lot better!

That’s the beauty of fanfiction: You can take your favorite characters or celebrities and write them however you want. And while I usually try to write the Boys as realistically as I can, I love seeing how their characters change as a result of the fictional situations I put them in. In the case of Broken Nick, he started out as a cocky, young pop star who felt invincible and thought he had it all, until he was blindsided by a cancer diagnosis and forced to confront his own mortality. Sick as it may sound, I’ve always loved knocking the Boys down, so I can build them back up – and Broken Nick is a perfect example of that.

I think part of the reason he’s still my favorite of all the Nicks I’ve written over the years is that, in a weird way, he’s the most relatable to me. While I’ve never been through the type of trauma I put poor Broken Nick through, I was going through my own major life changes when I wrote Broken and its sequel, By My Side. I graduated high school, went away to college, and grew from an adolescent into an adult. Looking back, I can see how much of my own teenage emotions and insecurities I unintentionally poured into my characterization of him. I may laugh at some of his more emo moments, but I still love all the angst. And while I hope that the real Nick stays healthy, happy, and two-legged, the Broken version of him will always hold a special place in my heart.

How fitting that the Broken section of this blog turned out to be considerably longer than any of the other sections. I probably could have kept going, but I already wrote two whole blogs about Broken (and two more about BMS) back in 2020 if you want to read more. In the meantime, stay tuned for my next one in two weeks!