Generally I believe that fiction is a very important tool through which to examine political realities, but fanfiction in particular is extremely tricky because it is so purely for entertainment's sake, and I for one am not ready to be "entertained" by a fic about child soldiers. I remember a few years ago there was a J2 fic set in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, and it caused quite a stir in fandom -- sparked a lot of discussions about appropriation, race, etc., and not all of the conversations were even-toned: people got extraordinarily angry at the author, which seemed unfair to me although I agreed that the post-earthquake setting was a risk that went awry. As a writer, it is instinctual for me to want to write about something in order to understand it, to explore it, to take it apart and put it back together again, so I understand the impulse completely -- but it is always good to be cautious with other people's tragedies. Especially in fanfiction, because the rules are generally so fast and loose -- most fic is written
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Yeah, that's my feeling as well. I'd been looking for official reports on the efforts to rehabilitate these people, and my main interest was in exploring the psychological reality of the experiences. But at the time it was in direct response to a class I'd taken on UN Peacekeeping missions, and thus the subject matter wasn't that widely discussed in fandom (at the time). So I thought it might also be an opportunity to raise an issue a lot of people didn't have a lot of familiarity with
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I think though that the problem wasn't so much the setting of the earthquake, but that other people's tragedy was used as pretty much nothing more than the background for a love story between two white guys. Basically the tragedy was appropriated without respecting the people involved.(not to mention the use of pictures of actual victims for the art)
Yes, that's very true -- and I think it's the reason that such types of current events should be kept out of fanfiction. Generally (although there are always exceptions to the rule), fanfiction is written for pure entertainment, and we as a fic audience are reading for the characters only, to see them dropped into different circumstances -- and in service to the entertainment value, other considerations are often waylaid. I'm tempted to say I think slash more often runs into this problem -- since romance and sex are almost always the "objective", sometimes with little regard to anything else -- but I don't want to be too controversial here. Gen has its own sets of problems with regards to this.
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