#she's still my fav tho! always will be! hashtag i'm her metaphorical cousin!

[quackle]

Based on the last post, it looks like you have a pretty mixed feeling about how they write Nichelle.

What’s your opinion on Nichelle this season overall?

gonna ramble again. per usual lol. but tldr: yes, my feelings are mixed lol.

overall, s2 nichelle was... hm.

i can't really comment about the canon writing we have of her because we didn't get much outside the whole "take that hollywood!" shtick. it's not lazy writing at all; it's just surface level. but that happens when a character isn't the main focus. as disappointed as i am about that, i also get it. the cast is much too big and the episode time slots are much too tiny to give every character some depth. nichelle got one of the shortest ends of the stick for both seasons.

on one hand, i would have loved to see more about her this season. one of my biggest issues is her training off screen. i get that that's the point—it shows nichelle's desperation to be the action star she previously lied about being in order to secure her spot back in hollywood—but at the same time, because it was off screen, we (the audience) didn't see that growth. also, she only seems to grow physically. mentally, she's still very cocky and not so much of a friend to a lot of the contestants. so when she's doing cool stunts and taunting hollywood over and over without building any emotional bonds with any of the other campers, it gets stale. so of course she leaves pre-merge. what else was she gonna do, flip and curse out hollywood some more? they could only pull that joke so many times (and even then, they kinda pulled it too much).

on the other hand, i kind of like looking into implications that come with nichelle's character after this season in particular. like wow. she's kind of... bad at making friends? i'm going on a whim here when i say that she probably never had friends before, so she has no clue how to go about it. look at the lack of reaction from her teammates when she quits in ep 5. they really didn't care much, because while she was a great asset to the team in challenges, she didn't bond much with any of them, so why would they get upset at her being eliminated?:

and it's also a bit sad thinking about nichelle as a whole. she trained for months in kung-fu, parkour, and gymnastics, just so she could get a slim chance of fame again, even though she also tried her best to not admit that while also pretending she did it more for herself than anyone else. it's almost like she doesn't know who she could be except a big actress from hollywood, because that's what she's probably used to being. when you take all that + her vow to not quit last season + her quitting this season after getting tricked by julia... it makes me feel for her, i guess. she's a product of hollywood and it's devastating to think about 🥲

i don't know. i just find her very interesting still, even more so after this season, so i can come up with a lot of potential substance for her character. then again, i'm also upset we didn't get much about her canonically due to all the off-screen growth she went through. so, yeah. mixed feelings for sure lol.