[symestreem]

I disagree with the definition of "Mary-Sue" as stated here. Or maybe I don't think Mary-Sues are necessarily a bad thing. Lily said that all bets are off when the character is in its original world- that's true, but also, the authors of books about which fanfics are written are much better authors than 99.99999999999% of fanfic authors. They are better able to make their characters realistic.
My advice to a fanfic writer would be to write whatever you want, as long as A) it fits the fandom (no droids in Middle-earth unless you have a logical way of getting them there) and B) you can make it believable. If you want to have Aragorn act totally out of character, you better have a reason. Perhaps the Ring corrupted him, for example.
If measured by fanfic standards, many characters in ME would be MSs or GLs. But Tolkien makes them believable, which is the whole key to any good writing.
That said, I realize that that is very hard for a writer to do. The guidelines that everybody's posted look very helpful to the 99% of us who can't make our stories and characters believable enough to have red-haired, violet-eyed telepathic half-elven mages!

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 4:22 PM January 11, 2004: Message edited by: symestreem ]