It used to be simple to spot a Mary Sue. They were the absurdly beautiful, legitimately traumatized newcomer everyone was talking about, the violet-eyed mystery girl who stood dead-center of the metaphorical screen, innocently flaunting their generous curves, shyly hiding their single terrible scar, pouting and flipping their hair and effortlessly capturing the attention of every male in the vicinity. Easy to spot; easy to avoid.

Now, however? Now, things are a little different. Suethors are getting more savvy as regards common Sue traits, but not savvy enough to avoid creating Sues altogether. The result? More Sues - but Sues it's harder to call their authors on.

The gorgeous, legitimately angsty girl with curves in all the right places is an ever-present annoyance, but she's had to step back a little. She's having to make way for a new breed of Mary Sue, who may be far less obviously Capital-P Perfect, but is every bit as infuriating. Very often, it seems, new authors are being told that their Sues are unrealistic because they don't have any flaws. The solution, in the eyes of an author who doesn't know better? Paste on some flaws - nothing too bad, of course, just enough to stop people complaining already - so then nobody can claim their neat new character is a Mary Sue any more.

The problem for them is, it doesn't work that way.

The problem for us is, because so much of the criticism leveled at Suethors is that their character is too perfect to be believable, it gets a lot harder to explain why a 'flawed' Sue is still a Mary Sue. Well-rounded characters, they have been told, have flaws. Well, their character has flaws! Mary Sues are perfect, and their OC is no longer perfect, so she's safe, right?

Well, no. Partly because it's often easy to spot a Mary Sue with pasted-on character flaws. The 'flaws' that tend to be attributed to Mary Sues are sometimes supposed to be seen as more cute than anything, are usually minor, and are almost always treated as entirely excusable by everybody but the Sue herself. Typically, they'll include such traits as clumsiness, naivety or shyness, or claim that the character is mistrustful and withdrawn because of [insert the cause of her Totally Legitimate Angst here] - until people get to know her, at which point she's suddenly the life of the party. The problem? None of these are actually character flaws. Naivety, for example, is not a flaw if all it means is the character is cutely shocked by sexual innuendos and blushes a lot. If the character goes on to suffer serious negative consequences as a result of their naivety - if, for example, it means they're easily led and easily deceived - then and only then does it become a genuine character flaw.

Genuine character flaws only remain genuine flaws, too, as long as the character has to deal with their consequences. A hot temper would usually be a flaw: too bad that a 'flawed' Sue with a bad temper is often allowed to lash out at anyone she wants and is legitimized or exonerated by the other characters present. If nobody seems to react to a mean-tempered OC in the way they genuinely would to a bitch on wheels like her, her bad temper is no longer a flaw. If the character never suffers as the result of a pasted-on flaw, it's not a real flaw. It's just there so that her author can point to it and say 'look, a flaw! She's not perfect! Not a Sue, you guys!'

The other thing Suethors who create 'flawed' Sues don't realize is that the growing numbers of 'flawed' Sues out there have done nothing but expose the fact that a character who is stunningly beautiful, awesome at everything and unbelievably sweet and charming is only exhibiting a certain set of symptoms of Sueishness. Readers aren't seeing the disease itself - just a common way for it to manifest.

So, what makes a Mary Sue if it's not unrealistic perfection? Well, to me a fan character who falls into the Mary Sue trap has fout features that remain constant:

• They become the center of attention no matter what.
  
  
• They warp canon and characterization the better to stand right at the very heart of things.
  
  
• Their actions, whatever they may be, are presented as either justified or excusable.
  
  
• Their viewpoint is the same as absolute reality.

What we're seeing here is the inevitable result of a symptomatic cure. Getting rid of the stunningly beautiful Sue and replacing her with a plainer, more average-looking model gets rid of some of the outwardly noticeable signs of the disease, but it doesn't actually change the prognosis: curing someone's smallpox lesions doesn't change the fact they've got smallpox.

The perfection, the sparkly, soulful eyes and the curves in all the right places are the symptoms, not the disease. They're not, when you get down to it, core traits of the Mary Sue, they're not why Mary Sues are so annoying, and their absence doesn't mean a damn thing about how well-rounded or otherwise the characters are. A Mary Sue can be the most boring, useless, ordinary girl ever and still be a Mary Sue, because it's not about what she is so much as it is how the rest of the cast react to her. If they're still reacting like this ordinary girl is the most important thing to happen to them ever, the character is still a Mary Sue. If they're still barely getting a word in edgeways because the author presumes that this ordinary girl is going to absolutely fascinate her readers so much they don't care about the rest of the cast, the character is still a Mary Sue.

This 'flawed' Sue is, in fact, often even more infuriating than the stunning beauty with the angst and the curves. At least when the girl is notably extraordinary, there's a flimsy half-justification for the regular characters to find her utterly fascinating. With the flawed Sue, the characters have no reason to pay attention to her over any other girl out there - and yet they still do, for no reason whatsoever except that she's there.

Mary Sues, and it doesn't matter how perfect or otherwise they are, take an established canon and warp it until it's All About Them - their struggles, their triumphs, their dreams. Nobody else's story is of any interest any more, and it doesn't matter what the rest of the cast may be striving toward. It's like the regulars have become the new, as-yet-uninteresting faces in the Sue's little world, not vice versa. That's what makes them Mary Sues, and if the universe they've been dropped into is still treating them like the most fascinating thing ever and the exception to every rule, no amount of pasted-on flaws will change that. They'll still be Mary Sues at the end of it, and that's all that matters.