These things are often judgement calls and the line differs depending on reader and writer.

It took me a long time to build up my confidence to utilise the range of characters I do now. When I was a newbie the Parodyverse had rather more posters and rather more stories and rather less in the way of established consensus continuity, which both complicated and simplified things. In the arly days I had to spend a lot of time corresponding with posters to get their permission to do things to their cast and to make sure I got things right. Today I still have to do that to some degree, although a few posters have kindly offered me carte blanche. I still sometimes shy away from storylines that would require me to enter into permission correspondence because I just don't have the energy to do it. Generally I have a sense of where most poster's comfort zones are for their cast and try to write appropriately.

One thing that brought the whole "using another's character" thing to sharp relief and sensitised everyone was an incident where a poster put up a very brutal story about how a villain broke into the Bean and DOnut and beat the crap out of Dancer. It was very graphic, describing her teeth being kicked out etc. It was a very ugly, vindictive piece of writing and it really upset Shep, who has faced enough abuse in her real life to not need it happening to her fictional counterpart.

When other posters read the story they assumed it to be the work of Baron Zemo, then host and moderator of the BZL. Lisa, Messenger, Vizh and others called for the story to be deleted. Zemo denied writing the story and refused to remove it unless Dancer asked him to. Shep had already quit the board. By the time I became aware of the situation the thing had errupted into a major flame war. Zemo then sulked and deleted his entire board without warning and we haven't heard from him since (as far as we know) except to ask us not to call the site Baron Zemo's Lair. The incident cost us a couple of posters and ended the first phase of the PVB's existence.

I use this to illustrate the fact that a real danger in these shared continuity situations is writing another poster's character in such a way that it upsets that poster and spoils their enjoyment of the character. It probably explains why some people are very protective not just of their own but of other people's poster characters.