...Around the same time I found the PPC. They lack a proper community, though, and the leader never got back to me on joining.

The main difference is that none of the Sues come from pre-existing fics. A few did come from badfic the authors wrote as newbies, though.

I don't know if the PPC invented the exact concept of killing Mary Sues, but Mark Twain was probably the first one to write a story to kill a Sue (specifically, a saintly-child Stu who found out that the real world won't follow his script) even back before "Mary Sue" was named.

There have been a lot of stories about the characters entering other stories. The Thursday Next series, for example, has characters entering books, and the first one in that series was published in 2001, roughly around the time the PPC also started. There've been other stories about characters from one world traveling to another, fictional world, but Thursday Next probably has the biggest similarity because it actually involves (sometimes) fixing damage to stories.

Mary Sue as a concept has been around for thirty years or thereabouts, so it's unlikely that killing Sues was actually invented by the PPC. The setting certainly was (HQ, the Flowers, all that), but the concept itself--nah.

If somebody steals the setting specifically, then sure, we can yell at them. If they're just using the concept of Mary-Sue eradication and story-fixing, then that's not plagiarism.

It was noted earlier on by one if the board members that so long as you don't blatantly call it the PPC and do exactly what they do, you can use the idea of Sue-hunting freely, since there's not really any monopoly of sorts on it.

But your concerns are definitely understandable - their name seemed just a tad too close to a fancy-worded "PPC" to me, and if what you said is anything to go by, they do use some similar ideas, but I wouldn't worry too much about them for now.

We've actually had some dealings with these guys a while back. Some of their members hung out in the chat and there was talk of some crossovers before they dropped off again. They do things differently enough from us that there isn't actually a problem. There were some concerns that their characters tend toward the Sueish, but other than that we have at least some good relations with them.

-Phobos