Agreed. But the engaging with real life is what makes writing and discussing fic so tricky. It's obvious that the original authors, the prompter and the prompt-fillers were all engaging with the text via their own real life experience, finding parallels and resonances there... but that their experiences were so different from one another that for all practical purposes they were looking at different texts! This can be one of the joys of fandom when it works well but can also (obviously) go badly wrong too. It's so easy for someone to end up feeling that their point of view is being invalidated.