I think it's perfectly fine to write about something that you did not personally experience, or about a person who is completely different than you are -- with the caveat that you do it respectfully. I think, too, that it's valid to use fiction (fanfiction included, though admittedly I've never seen it done well in fanfiction) to write about tragedy, even one that does not affect you personally, as long as you do it respectfully -- i.e., as long as you do not do it in an exploitative or otherwise offensive way.
I was thinking about this and fanfiction, and I think the reason it will never be done well in fanfiction, is because fanfiction will always be about the characters placed in that setting; never about the setting itself. We write fanfiction for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is that we want to write about specific characters (and I include RPF in that), so taking a real tragedy and placing these characters in it does that real tragedy a disservice, because the focus is not on it and the story becomes exploitative
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I was just talking to one of my friends on the phone about this, actually! And I completely agree with you. The more I think about it, the more I think the only way it could work as fanfiction would be with the canon characters as outsiders -- there would HAVE to be fully fleshed-out original characters who were just as major characters as the canon ones to make it work even remotely. If you're writing about a tragedy and it is not absolutely central to the characters' identities and to the story itself, then you're doing it wrong. I suppose it's not impossible that you could AU a character's past/experience deeply enough to make said tragedy immensely relevant to that person, but a) I've never seen this done, and b) it seems as though that would start to be hitting on the land of "is this really still even remotely the canon character, and not just some person with Sam Winchester's name?" (Though with J2 there's the whole other issue of how they are pretty much always [sometimes more, sometimes less developed] random people with
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I was thinking about this and fanfiction, and I think the reason it will never be done well in fanfiction, is because fanfiction will always be about the characters placed in that setting; never about the setting itself. We write fanfiction for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is that we want to write about specific characters (and I include RPF in that), so taking a real tragedy and placing these characters in it does that real tragedy a disservice, because the focus is not on it and the story becomes exploitative ( ... )
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