I mean, I've noticed that lately, my stories are getting darker, in part due to frustration in my personal life and many weeks of poor sleep.
Also, the more depressed I feel, the more tragic things tend to happen in my stories (sometimes I do it to my characters, feeling that if I'm upset, they're gonna be upset too).
Also, after feeling really misunderstood and like I don't belong anywhere, I've poured that feeling out into both Chomper and Litltefoot in my fanfics.
Feeling that I'm not important and need to be that way, I've poured that into Ruby.
Also, when I'm feeling aggressive, I've been making Chomper and Ptero more aggressive and vindictive.
When I'm happy, the stories usually are happier.
When I feel out of it or just plain empty, my stories usually lack detail or flow.
On the other hand, experiences I have had or have sometimes give me insights into the characters. After doing so well in high school only to do normal or even struggle in college, I admit, my ego took a beating and my brains that I thought I had made me feel that I could be normal in some ways as I often didn't get picked for kick ball or whatnot and was always away from most of the others during recess and now that I'm older, have realized that there were some situations where people took advantage of me.
I now wonder if Pterano may have felt ok as a kid or perhaps even inferior as a kid and hence wanted to a leader when he was older. He started to build his narcissism as a wall around him as he needed to feel love and perhaps felt he wasn't getting it. He thought too highly of himself and....POW....he lost his herd.
One wonders if other dinos, maybe longnecks and others, just walked by when Topps's wife and kids were killed and that's why he's so stern and bigoted and overprotective of Cera. Perhaps he's got fear inside of him, especially if it may turn out Threehorns had a role in their deaths too yet he believes that Threehorns are superior to all the other kinds.
Also, I started putting a bit of my own mother into my villainess Agatha (it makes her seem more sinister, but also a bit odd.)
Anyway, do your own personal experiences affect your fanfics and give you new insights, either into the cannon LBT or your fanfics, as to what to put? Maybe it's just me.
I know I've understood Chomper a lot more because of how I feel lately, that my disabilities and feeling that, because of the way I was born, even if I'm different that some others, that nobody will see it and that maybe I'm doomed in the end and cannot be different and that maybe I should just snap as they all expect me to anyway.