Oh, definitely! I mean, there's all kinds of serious issues rattling around in the stuff I'm doing just because my gut is telling me. The problem begins when those serious issues start taking over.

I *like* thinking about the philosophical issues in my stories, but sometimes that contemplation shifts the focus of the fic. Suddenly it's not about finding out what happens or getting my characters together, it's about issues of identity and morality or something. Which--it doesn't seem like it can't be about both, does it? And yet, the way it was fun before is fun no longer. It's fun in a new way but somehow I'm not satisfying the same impulse any more, and sometimes it makes me scrap everything just so I can follow my gut again. Or so I can work out the 'philosophical' stuff, either way.

It sounds like those impulses don't war in you, which I think is definitely the way to go!