I'm thinking...

[dream_labyrinth]

I am just reading The Room of Lost Dreams over at the exchange.
Of course, the point of fanfiction is to fill in blanks the original author left us (and heaven knows JKR left us enough to last a lifetime), but there is something pretty much all of the stories have in common that JKR didn't touch at all, and that is the simple act of surviving the war.
JKR didn't bother to deal with traumatized, injured, depressed people. She jumped up seventeen years and all was well.
In fanfic, it isn't, and those seventeen years didn't just fly by while everybody who lived lived happily ever after.
No matter whether the writer ignores or uses the epilogue, no matter whether the people who died in DH are dead in the fanfic or not, we try to deal with the inevitable.
Survivor's guilt, Post Traumatic Stress, marrying quickly and having children early, the psychological and the political effects of a war.

And it's not just because we want to be able to write steamy hot lemons and long hurt/comfort fics. Somehow, it feels that in her determination to wrap things up JKR not only put every single character she ever mentioned before into DH to finish the specific plotline more or less cleanly, she also made her characters less human in the end. Even the ones she had taken the time and effort to make nicely life-like, realistic and complex before were turned to mere cut-outs to file away somewhere and leave the desk nice and tidy.

As we want to continue to play, it makes sense we can't leave it at that. But still, I think we're being much kinder to the people and the universe JKR created than she herself was.

Comments

[knight0fswords.livejournal.com]

Excellent point. JKR knew by the time she wrote OotP that she wasn't just writing for children. If you go with the premise that she "grew the books up" with the characters, she had to understand that her readership was growing up as well. By 17 or 18, the readers should be able to grasp the concept of the horrors of war and its aftermath, however, she took the easy way out.

All was well, indeed! My husband suffers from PTSD because of the Persian Gulf and other events from his time in the Navy. He's been retired for 13 years, and he still has nightmares, he still thrashes around and cries out in his sleep, and that's after two stays in a psychiatric hospital to deal with it.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

That's exactly my problem. She put in so much else that is unsuitable for children; she deconstructed every single father figure she gave Harry; she even went so far as to announce in an interview that Dumbledore was gay, for heaven's sake; but she never ever, not even in an interview afterwards, admitted that wars don't just end and everybody wanders off to have a good rest of their lives.