"All fiction is suspension of disbelief. ... I would say I tend to treat characterization like a tree. The original author(s) is at the trunk, and fic authors populate the limbs. The farther you get from the trunk, the thinner the branches get, and the more careful you have to be about support all the way from the trunk to the place you're standing, because snapping the branch (disconnecting the character from the one the author wrote -- writing the character OOC) would be bad. But, if you're careful, you can actually get pretty far and still stay in the tree."
beccastareyes
"Ah, the things he can do with asparagus."
- Cody, "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody"