all with their happy 'ships

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I've been revisiting The Cricket Term and thinking about its depiction of Nicola's reading life. There are a good few mentions of how vivid and immediate fiction is to her: right at the beginning, when she notes that Ramage and Hornblower are contemporaries, and Ann is baffled; when she's being dressed down by Miss Cromwell over The Mask of Apollo and notes to herself that it's 'grotty' that the book seems to have been placed on the Limited list merely for its homoerotic content; when she thinks that when she's stodged through Crommie's bread and butter she'll read Hornblower again, but not the late books containing Hornblower's ageing and Bush's death. I'm not saying that Nicola actually writes Niko/Dion or Hornblower/Bush in her spare time or anything (I think she'd find the notion a bit icky) but that her fannish absorption might go some way to explaining her distaste for roleplaying in Peter's Room -- she already has a private fanlife, and the Gondal fantasy both encroaches dangerously on that and makes it (ugh) public. Forgive me if this has all been said before and better.