Random thoughts

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.