Well first of all were not telling you what you can and cannot write, were telling you what you should and should not write. I mean write what you wanna write but don't be offended when someone criticizes it or writes a humerus short story where they judge and kill your OCs. It's just not worth it. General rule is if you post it to the internet, people will critique it. or throw twenty slurs at it.

I think it's sturgeon's law that says 90% is bad. Maybe by going for volume, you'll get the occasional good fic with a bad premise.

It depends on what you find entertaining. Sure, a Mary-Sue could be the star of an interesting read. I can't think of any right now.

Because regardless of the quality of discussion her repeated intrusion may cause, Toroll is still banned, and her posts should be scrubbed on sight.

I firmly believe that everyone has a right to create what they love.

That includes me.

You have a perfect right to create and share your Mary Sue. I have a perfect right to create and share my narrative critique.

To quote LadyDragon76 from her response to flyingcondors: "You, me, Jimbob over there, and Skippy nextdoor have no right to say what ANY person can write about. ... It MUST be a free for all, or it is nothing."

If fandom needs everything, it needs the PPC, too.

~Neshomeh

Now that I actually feel competent writing this, here's my thoughts.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinions. I thank you for your input. I believe that we can always learn something new from the thoughts of others, and that at the very least, I'll try to do that. You've given us another point of view, and people can always take something away from that. There's pieces that you like, and pieces that you don't like. To my knowledge, this isn't a hate group, where we just go into fanfiction to kill characters that we don't like, though possibly some people within and outside our community think so. Personally, I have not seen elements of the former. True, imagination is an excellent thing, but sometimes, it can be perverted, like when the Imagination Nexus became the Maelstrom. That parable is a lighter and softer version of what I think is actually happening, however. There are very depraved things happening in fanfiction sometimes. Now, the previous statement is very much YMMV. My concept of depravity could be very different from yours. For example, some people think torture is a beautiful art, but I think it's despicable. It's all a matter of what floats your boat. This community is about preventing bad writing, and having fun while we're at it. The thing is, bad writing is objective, just like whether the death penalty is wrong or not. Of course, someone's going to argue against my point. I should be fine with that, because everyone's entitled to their own opinion.

If you have read this, thank you for listening to my thoughts.

TL;DR: "Freedom is the Right of all Sentient Beings" can be interpreted in many ways, because "Freedom" is a wild card.

The vast majority of fanfiction contains Sues in one way or another, so the character type's association with bad writing was unavoidable. Sues are symptoms of bad writing, but bad writing itself, and bad writing in general, are what the PPC community addresses in missions. A disproportionate amount of missions involve Sues because, again, that's the shape of fanfiction. But missions are more about pointing out what works vs. what doesn't work in the story.

But, of course, the real topic here isn't Sues themselves, but whether writing them is "okay" for authors. And quite honestly, that argument is irrelevant in this community; we don't inform badfic authors of missions into their stories, and we certainly don't attempt to dissuade anyone from writing anything. Missions exist only as part of the fictional setting of PPC HQ. If a fanfiction renaissance ripped across the internet overnight tonight, and fanfiction quality took a huge upturn, I myself (and probably many other writers in this community) would craft artificial badfics to send my agents into, as a backdrop to my own continuing plot lines. The badfics aren't the point; the points are our characters' growth under strain, our intertextual cooperation between authors in our community to build stronger stories and a stronger setting, and our ability to find humor in bizarre moments we came across when looking at fanfiction on the internet.

Now, for some thoughts that are more distinctly my own than the general community attitudes above. Firstly, in the original post, ladydragon76 mentions, "I promise you, typos and bad formatting included, fandom NEEDS every last one of your creations." Learning correct spelling, punctuation and formatting (and, most of all, learning to DOUBLE-CHECK one's work—I've made numerous typos so far in this post, but I backspaced and corrected them immediately after I saw them) are important in real life, not just in fun writing. I frequently get texts or written notes from coworkers filled with chatspeak, abbreviations, typos and incorrect grammar that confuse me and slow down my ability to respond or carry out instructions. It's imperative that all young people growing up now learn correct writing format in order to communicate effectively in their future careers. Learning those tools, and putting them to good use in fanfiction, will only help them down the road. Disregarding the rules of writing only teaches bad habits they will need to unlearn as adults.

Secondly, while writing fanfiction is fun, I personally wouldn't bother with it if I wasn't going to put my every greatest effort into it, and make the final product as perfect and professional as I could. To put it more generally, there's no point in doing something if I'm not going to do it right. As an admin on our wiki, and one of our active members working to make backup copies of older works for future rehosting, I treat my PPC hobby with as much careful attention to detail as I do my actual, paying career. This is because, while I do them for "fun" (or at least, working on them and being able to show quality results makes me feel accomplished and valuable), "fun" does not mean shoddy or quick work, but rather complete, professional efforts I can be proud of. I see no reason to expect any less from anyone else.

—doctorlit, letting his philosophy show a bit

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Right, now that the sarcasm's out of the way, have a measured response to your points that's largely in line with the FAQ

1) Writing Mary Sues is not an important step. It's a largely unavoidable one. A Mary Sue character, according to the definition we use here, is one that makes the entire story about themselves, being the centre of attention, and twisting the universe of the original work and the characters within it purely to sate the author's fantasies. A Mary Sue is a character you should try and avoid writing, and while it's good practice to learn from your mistakes, LD76 saying they're the author they are today because of all the Mary Sues they wrote is like me saying I'm a good pinball machine repairwoman because of all the times I screwed up some simple wiring jobs and made a valuable mid-'60s Gotty start belching smoke from its motor board.

2) AUs are not inherently bad things. In fact, the PPC is in favour of good AU stories! Our general ethos is less about rigid canon compliance and more about what Huinesoron of this parish terms canon-friendliness. Put it like this: if you're writing an interesting AU in which the Lord of the Rings is crossed over with, ooh, I dunno, Mass Effect or something, and everyone's in character and acting like the people they are in the source material, then we don't have a problem with it and will indeed praise it to the skies. Conversely, if you get a lot of trivia right but Aragorn wanders around acting like an entitled twerp with a broom up his back passage, then we are going to have a problem with it.

3) So lots of people like your terrible Mary Sue fanfiction. If I may be blunt, so what? Lots of people like Burger King food, myself included. That doesn't make it healthy. Like I said above, writing Suefic is largely unavoidable when you're starting out; you just learn how not to do it and write better OCs and have a better grasp of the canon characters and how they operate. That doesn't make writing Suvian characters good.

4) There are doubtless some people out there who view themselves as fandom police, and these people are rightly viewed as really, really strange. We are not those people. It's SOP around here not to tell badfic authors that the PPC has sporked their work, nor do we leave nasty comments. The PPC is, at heart, an organization dedicated to crafting constructive criticism in a way that at least tries to be funny. Neshomeh's missions are a great example of this if you want to check them out.

5) Since there is no chance in hell of you having read this far, happy happy boom boom swamp swamp swamp. =]

6) There is no point six.

I disagree, to a point, but in the interest of providing full context to those wondering what's going on, look here and look up Alex Anaheim's "open letter to the fandom". I lost the link unfortunately, but basically the dude was being extremely rude and ranted about how AUs and Mary Sues were "ruining the fandom" (Which, for those not in the TF fandom, let me tell you it's been "ruined" by everything from Beast Wars to fans writing official comics) and how if he saw one more he would gouge his eyes out.

I expect this was posted here because honestly his attitude echoed somee of the same ones that have been put on display here. Apparently I was wrong when I told PC he was overestimating how little people care about us.