.:Types Of Mary Sues And How To Fix Them:.

Personally, I would say if you find yourself creating any of these fantastical Mary Sues, just omit them and have done with it. But, in case you are dead set on keeping that character in the story world, I’ll share my two cents on how to subvert that individual sue trope with advice based off a realistic approach to that character.
• The number one common sue I see is the girl next door. She’s just your typical good girl. She has her quirks, but they’re irrelevant. She has a few pointless little hobbies or skills that are introduced before the writer actually vomits up a plot for her. Her social life is in ruins, but she’s usually got a nice family to back her up. They mean absolutely nothing though. All she cares about in the world is winning the approval of crazy high school teen stereotype popular girls and/or good looking guys with no personality. For some unfathomable reason, she adores these people and would go through heck and back to get them to like her for even a day. Unfortunately, not possible. They bully her! And everyone in school hates her except for maybe 1-3 loyal friends who have no life outside of her interests and would do anything for her. Unfortunately, they are powerless against the forces that want to destroy this poor girl! Because nobody likes her and the world is against her. And Lord knows I can sure see why! She doesn’t have a place, even though everything in her life seems to revolve around her.
o Honestly, most of these people who think everyone hates them have brought it on themselves, typically because of some kind of pride or attitude problem they need to fix. They think everyone is out to get them just because people don’t fall in their line of what is ideal or feel like they deserve a certain “nice-ness” from people they don’t have a relationship with, outside of general respect. Or, she could give off vibes of unintentional rudeness or something that unconsciously creeps other people out or is offensive. To subvert this trope, show that its mutual fault that she isn't popular. Avoid writing cringe-worthy bully characters that the reader just wants to strangle. Show that her supposed “tormenters” are real people with lives and personalities and are not just fixed on her.
• She’s a prodigal genius. She always knows the answers and gets all the questions right. Maybe she builds things that are impossible with the limited resources she has. Maybe she’s only a highschool student but she regularly hacks NASA or hacks into other things. If something’s going wrong she’ll find a way around it without fail. She never gives up and doesn’t accept loss. She’s just too smart for everyone in this world. Usually she is physically incapable of a fight, but who cares about that if she can build a robot army that could destroy all of her enemies within seconds? But, no, she won’t do that because she’s just too good for this sinful earth!
o It’s great that you like working with genius characters that can encourage your readers to pursue intelligent past times, but…make it something on a realistic level that people can actually follow. If you’re going to show some kind of prodigal brilliance in your characters, follow their steps and explain it in your writing so that your readers can learn from it. Maybe you’ll find holes in your character’s plans or going over it will help you realize you picked too much of an extreme. Toning it down to a believable level of genius will leave you with a really cool character.
• Her family hates her. Her father beats her up, maybe even rapes her. Any siblings she has are completely irrelevant. Her mom either is deceased or irrelevant. And nobody in the world can stop her from getting taken advantage of. At school, she is bullied for looking like a freak and nobody ever stops to consider that maybe she is being abused because of her obvious bruises or anything. No, her school is all full of idiots who couldn’t do anything to help her even if they tried. The writer wants you to pity her and want to punch anyone who has ever hurt her because her story is so unfair!! The writer shows no legitimate personality of this character other than the negative thoughts she’s drowning in because of her abuse. She either spends most of her time whining or taking out pent up aggression through verbal complaints/abuse on other people or violent physical expressions directed towards others. She never actually works to solve her own situation, or even tries; but instead her life is usually changed by some cliché, unrealistic outside magical force. Despite any improvements on her life, she still retains a completely repulsive personality and is too proud to allow circumstance to make her into a better person. She’ll likely have a backstory that highlights a character who's in an intense abuse situation and all possibility of getting out of it is either crushed by their own pride (refusing to ask other people for help, who could help, even though their life is in danger constantly), and/or nobody else ever notices they are abused even though the signs are blatantly obvious (such as bruises covering their body when nobody ever sees this character get into fights). A lot of author's throw it into their character's backstory, just to be there, too, and never write the process of them being abused, how it changed them, and how they got out of the situation. No, it’s just there to be there, as if it makes their character seem edgier and darker (as if dark and edgy are absolutely positively necessary to make a good character). Also, a character that uses it as a crutch excuse for obvious inappropriate behavior. Such as, the character bullying another character for no other reason than "he was abused in his past" and then the other characters all shrugging it off as acceptable behavior because, oh, hey, he was abused. I've seen this a lot too, where the abuse sue is the actual bully in the story, and never redeems themselves, and is just portrayed as "misunderstood but has a good heart". No, a bully is a bully. Another instance (type of abuse sue) could refer to one who is unrealistically happy and unscathed from their past, as if it never happened. It is of course realistic that they will have scars too, but that isn't all that they are either.
o Abuse stories are a tricky and sensitive subject that can have a plethora of effects depending on the abuse type, story, and characters. I will say that if a character is being physically harmed, its not realistic for the characters around them not to notice at all. When someone does offer your character some help, she needs to have the common sense and the humility to accept the help, accept her situation, and grow from it into a better, stronger person.
• Which leads me to, the chosen one. She’s typically an ordinary girl with no legitimate personality who was selected for no reason at all to be some kind of special snowflake. She might gain powers or become the leader of her own team of true friends, but she’ll never be popular at her school or where things “truly matter” in her life. Typically, she is bullied or excluded for no reason at school, and doesn’t have many friends either. She’s supposedly got a good heart underneath some minor “flaws” that aren’t really flaws or are irrelevant to the story.  
o Subverting this trope would involve making the chosen “one” into a chosen group. A realistic number, probably in the tens, hundreds, or even thousands depending on your story.
• The new girl is either really ordinary or super hot, usually with no sound personality, but for some impossible reason, she's now the talk of the town and the center of attention just because she is new. She usually discovers who is going to be her enemies and who will be her friends in less than ten minutes and some guy is usually attracted to her or curious about her right off the bat, even though he knows nothing about her.
o Public schools…are huge. Nobody freaking cares about one new person. They're focused on themselves, their friends, and their grades like they were before. The new person just gets assumed into the crowd and makes their own set of friends. If they resist, they might get noticed briefly, but will eventually be more likely to be forgotten than remembered due to their lack of activity in the social structure. The only way to really subvert this trope of the new girl sue is to have an extremely small school where yes, the occasional new person would be obvious.  
• Similar to the girl next door but not exactly, this girl is someone completely intense and unstable; an expression of extreme emotion and/or energy being fueled into the wrong part of the story. She comes off as being completely repulsive and legitimately nuts with no redeeming qualities but the reader makes a lot of feeble attempts at getting you to like her and/or pity her. She's voraciously angry, bitter, and “depressed” with this unjustified psychotic temper. Sometimes she’ll even abuse the people around her by punching them or destroying things with some kind of unreasonable impossible strength. Just because she's so angry that the whole world absolutely has to know and needs to kowtow to her personal delusion of justice. People don’t like her, usually, and its kind of obvious why.
o If you’re trying to go for making her some kind of likeable character here—don’t. The way I see it, the only way to subvert this trope is to, first of all, tone her down a bit by getting rid of her unrealistic strength. But keep her psychosis, only write her as an actual, believable nut job, not some pity story about being “misunderstood”. Implying that a psychotic is only “bullied” because she is misunderstood is kind of an insult to people’s intelligence. If there is something legitimately wrong with a character, other characters will absolutely avoid them for their own safety and preservation. Or, plot twist! Maybe the psycho is the only real bully in the story.
• Wow! She has pieces of every character you love most as well as even a bit of you! Every bit about her is based off some kind of cool thing you saw in a tv show or movie! Impressive, right? Everyone will like her! So it’s a win-win! She has absolutely no original content of her own or distinguishable personality because its constructed entirely off your perception of other characters that you like. She is just…everything! Everything that you love! Threw in as much as you can, didn’t you? Even if it doesn’t match? Oh, that’s okay, right? As long as everyone likes her, who cares about consistency, eh?
o A carbon copy character based off someone else or another character or even several is just a cheap way of filling an empty space without actually doing any real work. People might think they like “your character” because they remind them of five other characters that they adore, but they really only like the characters that existed beforehand and not anything you made, because you didn’t make anything. So my suggestion is to create your own character to fill the role of the mashup character, instead of completely basing it off someone else. People may try to tell you that originality is dead, but that’s only because they're too lazy to make their own. Whatever it is, a character you create with a deep personality, believable interests and a dynamic with other characters, has never been created before by you with the words you choose. And if you put a lot of thought into it along with detail, it’s impossible to truly imitate it. Likewise, your character will never be Superman.
• Your character is the top of the top, the social hierarchy queen of all that is important in the world, AKA, school. She is usually a cheerleader and blond. Her majesty stretches even to the outer reaches of the realms of the story because she likely has a rich daddy and can pay anyone to be her friend and buy anything she wants. She's usually fixed on the destruction of others even though they're completely irrelevant to her life and she has an unrealistically good life already.
o Such a person does not exist. First of all, you’ve made her own life too perfect. Fix that, and only focus on maybe one or two realistic aspects of her life which are good. Depending on what you choose, her role in the story will follow with those things dictating her life and how she spends most of her time. She won’t have time, much less care, to personally pursue and harass some random character she hates just to crush them. In fact, if she’s a rich socialite, she probably won’t even be aware of any characters outside of her own circle because they take up so much of her life. And for God’s sakes, if she's popular, show that she has a likeable personality.
• You have a story supposedly about a certain main character, but…he or she has a sister. The main character is supposedly the focus…but…sister. This sister is everywhere. She works her way into the story so much that you just want to reach into the story and pull her out. She’s always popping up. If she’s not in a scene, she’s referred to in a paragraph in some other way. We get it. There’s a sister. So, freaking what? It’s like the “main” is obsessed with this person, ridiculously overprotective to the point of sacrificing everything important to them for this vacuum of a person that we shouldn’t have to keep seeing. We don’t need to hear about her all the time. Either, we don’t really care about her all that much, OR, she's become more interesting than the main character and she should have been written as the main. If you keep going this route you’ll end up with two things—the sister becomes a Mary Sue and the “main” ends up a hollow shell with nothing of his/her own. Their entire life is made up of their freaking sister.
o Everyone has their own life. Whether we admit it or not, we as people are all self-centered to a certain degree. Our universe, our whole point of being, does not revolve around another person. It just isn't natural. To subvert this trope, its kind of hard to tone down once you’ve already been writing it, so I say one of them has to go. Take out the sister and let the main character grow on their own as their own person. Or take out the main and write about this sister you’ve forced to carry this story all along. But don’t let her become a sue either.
• The edgiest of edgy hipster/emo/gothic girl has supposedly got a lot of mystery to her but is ordinary and predictable as can be. Something’s cool? She purposely avoids it. Something’s happy? No, it’s too cheerful for her. She's got a lot of self-proclaimed “pain” but she brings it on herself due to shutting out most all opportunities of happiness. A lot of her pain is fabricated overexaggerated delusion that just brings on an eye roll from the reader. She believes people should pity her and wants them to help her but she refuses to allow them to do so if they ever try because she doesn’t know what she wants. And she clearly doesn’t know what she needs either. Sometimes she literally physically hurts herself, obviously, to no avail. There is no way that hurting herself can help with her “issues”. Several of her issues, by the way, are probably not even real issues. She wants to fit in yet chooses not to. She hates happy people because she is jealous. She is a walking contradiction. Whether everything in her life is going right or going wrong, she chooses to gravitate towards negativity and hold onto those feelings instead of working to make herself better and/or surround herself with people who will.
o It is a huge pride issue not to let others help, especially when its impossible to get over something on your own. Pride manifests itself in the form of self-centered delusions and just as much in self-loathing as self-loving. To subvert this trope, present in the story how this girl has to make an active choice to allow people to help her by developing a humbler attitude.
• She’s your ultimate hero; she’ll say all the things that you won’t. She defies all the “stupid” and “demeaning” gender roles that YOU established in your story universe and she rebels for the sake of rebelling instead of stopping to think that some things are the way they are for a reason, and differing roles doesn’t mean that one is better than the other. She’s a girl. She’s strong. She’s muscular. She maybe even has a boyish haircut and dresses like a boy. Heck, she’s better than the boys at almost everything. And for some reason you think this is a show of “girl power” even though this character is basically a boy except for what’s in her pants and maybe her name. She hates girly things, but, SHE’S A GIRL!!! AND EVERYONE HAD BETTER REMEMBER!! I step back from this and go, what the heck? You’re promoting the opposite of what you want to promote at the most basic level. I’ll explain.
o Without knowing it, you’re actually reinforcing the exact idea that you’re having your character rebel against. While trying to establish a female who is “confident in who she is” or whatever crap, you are actually subconsciously promoting the very idea that masculinity is more appealing, more desirable, and overall better, and that girly things are childish, annoying, or “weak”, instead of encouraging the “girl” part of your female character. You are also demeaning that which is your own idea of weak if it is portrayed in that manner, when, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being weak. Think about that the next time you’re writing a tomboy. A lot of people write a token tomboy just because it’s a real thing and it’s out there. Or this could stem from some kind of inferiority complex. I don’t know where it comes from in the writer, but I’m just explaining to you the basic subconscious effect that it has on the reader. To subvert this trope, I would just suggest making the character a male. If you’re so dead set on making this character masculine, it’s so easy to make them into a male because they basically are already. This fixes the harmful issue of promoting one gender over the other because it’s not a female who believes male-associated things are more desirable.  
• You love your story so much that you want to be in it! And so, you try hard as ever to nail down a few of your best and most interesting attributes and shove them into the tiny box of a lame self-insert or persona! Great idea, right? What’s the ultimate writing tool? Yourself! So why not be IN the story? You like yourself so much that you can think of no character more special and more deserving to be the main than someone based off you, or by putting a “piece of you” into your characters. You think it’s such a high compliment to give the character’s resemblance to their writers when in reality it’s such a huge turnoff.
o To me, it’s always been pure arrogance. It’s impossible to make yourself into a character because we as people have so much more to us than can ever be expressed in a small window of text. Not to mention, it’s ridiculous to try. I want to say its kiddish but I know adults do it too. To me, it’s the ultimate expression of self-centeredness. Stories are supposed to be about someone else but you’re making it all about you by trying to put yourself in there. Not to mention using it as an excuse to take extreme offense to people who just don’t like your story or characters. You’re opening up to that, basically asking for it. Though, personally I don’t think of self-inserts as characters.
• You come across the occasional character who has absolutely no definable personality and they only ever seem to hold a position in the story, as opposed to having any sort of even hint of emotion or life to them. They are literally just shells. I will say that this type of “character”, though it isn't really a character without a personality, is common among stories written by males. I mean I’ve definitely seen a lot of girls write this too, but its usually the guys. [Most of the other types of sues I mention are more common among writing by females].
o Everyone has an inner personality of thoughts, feelings, psychology, perception, etc. Everyone has an external personality of actions, mannerisms, expressions, and interactions. Show this!
• Living in the past, everything this character says and does in the present connects back to who they used to be. All they want in the world is for things to go back to what they were but are at the same time running from their past, always running, and never allowing themselves to be at peace. They can’t go a page without referring to it in some way, somehow, and they live by the laws of it. They operate entirely on that which already happened years ago. They're static with absolutely no room to grow because that’s the box that they’ve shut themselves in. Whether the past is all they talk about or its all they think about, it’s basically all that they are. They never change, they never grow, and they are devoid of present tense attributes and personality traits.
o Character history and backstory can be interesting to add to the plot of a story, but it’s not everything. It’s important to understand that you are who you are right now. The events and feelings of the past have contributed to who you are, if you have left them, but they are NOT who you are. You are not the same this month as you were last month. You grow and change, whether you want to or not. To subvert that type of sue, when you go in depth about their past, be sure to go equally if not more in depth with their present to explain the correlation of growth.
• Your character is the best, the brightest, the strongest, who never truly fails and if they do, it’s someone else’s fault. Their power is so strong, so immense, and everyone else is just in awe. They’re so strong, and always getting stronger. They can use their powers right off the bat, and never mess up and if they do it has no legitimate consequences. Their powers are unique and able to unify others, create peace, and stop disaster. They may have trained with their powers since birth, or only just discovered them yesterday. Despite all of this, all they want in the whole wide world is to be normal, just like everyone else, and fir in with their peers instead of being so much greater and better than them. It’s such a curse to be so amazing and have everyone know you, isn't it?
o Tone this the heck down. Strip this sue of all but one or two powers. Distribute the powers and roles that were stuffed into this character into several characters. Give them all some flaws that clash with their powers. Give them a personality that dictates how they use their powers.
• She does all the work. She’s basically the mom, the dad, and the child of her household because she’s running it. She’s the only one who picks up around there, works hard, has street smart skills, and tries, usually to no avail, to get some kind of drunk deadbeat man to work. He never will of course but for some reason she just keeps going at it and refuses to ask anyone outside the household to help. Mother’s given up on the family and is typically nowhere to be found. Either that or the mom’s the deadbeat she lives with and the father is out of the picture. They live in some trap mess of a house, likely with some pets that they couldn’t logically afford given their lacking monetary situation. Their cars are usually a mess as well. The house is a mess because she’s the only one who ever cleans it, while trying to juggle that all between school and a job, and she probably doesn’t have much of a social life either. She has a terrible attitude because the world seems all to be against her. Despite her hard-working agenda, most people don’t like her, and prefer what might even be lazier company.
o First of all, it’s not all bad in life and to have all kinds of negativity thrust upon this character is incredibly realistic. Child services would have taken her away by now. A broken marriage is a sad fact of reality but they don’t all result in the absolute worst tragedy conceivable with every single bad outcome thrown in. To subvert this trope, write some positives in and omit some of the negatives.
• She’s cute! She can’t do anything, but she’s a nice person. She’s just so adorable! Aw! She makes mistakes so she has her flaws, and that justifies her as a character, right? And she is just so cute! She has…absolutely no point to be here. She’s just a token little girl to fill the role of some plot device. And she’s cute. Did I mention that? Because gaining the “aww” of the audience is all that matters. People love kids! Especially little girls!
o Maybe subvert the cliché of this by making it a guy, and/or making him older instead of going for the cliché child sympathy card. Characters placed in the story just to be cute have no point of being there. You’d do fine to completely omit this character and redistribute their roles in the story to others.