So basically they aren't really "faults" at all.

I agree that they're not faults, but they are obstacles that he has to overcome. Surely, part of a main character's drive has to be a desire to overcome obstacles, including those that come from within him-/herself. I'm not quite sure that I understand why having those attributes detracts from the character. (And, incidentally, he does have "real" faults, such as when he pursues a personal vendetta against Blofeld, after the latter kills his wife at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.)

All fictional characters are larger-than-life to some degree, even those who purport to be everyday people. (For example, how many people, in real life, could cope with as many personal tragedies as befall the average soap character, without having a mental breakdown?)

I also think that, during the timeframe when the Bond stories were being written, most fiction had characters like him. The insistence in filling in back-stories so as to justify a character's general behaviour is a recent phenomenon. Watch, for example, an episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Avengers, or any of a number of similar TV series or films from the 1960s. Almost without exception, characters, both heroes and villains, were presented as-is, without any attempt to explain their motivations beyond those related to the immediate plot.

Finally, a question back on thread: If a flawless character is a Mary-Sue or a Gary-Stu, what is a character who has no redeeming features? I can think of plenty of fiction in which the villain is portrayed as 100% evil, and everything he/she does is bad or else has a bad motive behind it. Nick Cotton, in EastEnders, is an example that comes to mind. In real life, no one is pure good or pure evil, even if they are often portrayed as one or the other in the media.

Alex

Well I think it boils down to whether the character works or not - and that's entirely subjective.

So for readers who like him, Bond is a complicated, conflicted, real character with real feelings and a real life, independent of Fleming.

For readers who don't like him, he's a shallow, one-dimensional example of classic wish-fulfilment on Fleming's part.

A Mary-Sue is just an aspirational character who has irritated the reader once too often. But one person's Mary-Sue is another person's heroine - the question is how many people are in each camp.

I actually love the James Bond books and I think they are extremely clever - so please don't be offended by my using him as an example. I was just trying to show how a character who ought, by all rules of thumb, to be a Gary-Stu, can in the execution still be a huge success and an immensely popular hero.

And yes, I agree that one-dimensional villains are just as irritating.

Of course there are genres (and I think spy thrillers are one example) where the requirements for pace, excitement, action, and so on just don't leave much space for reflection on why characters are the way they are. They are presented as-is because of the demands of that kind of story, rather than because the author hasn't worked out their back-story.

(But this brings me to an aspect of Fleming's writing that I do find slightly irritating. Many of his villains have their back-stories told to us in a couple of pages of very detailed prose, almost like a brain-dump of Fleming's notes about them. This is the way Blofeld is introduced, for example. If the pace of the story doesn't allow for much reflective back-story, it's probably better to leave it out completely rather than dumping it on the reader in that way.)

In real life, no one is pure good or pure evil, even if they are often portrayed as one or the other in the media.

I agree with this statement. In fact a lot of drama's by HBO play on this kinda archtype. Like in The Wire and (to a more extreme intent) The Sopranos. Those characters can be horrible, sadistic, even downright cold-blooded - but they also have a lot of other human flaws, paranoia, depression, desire and all that. For me, this makes them extremely well rounded and developed characters. They aren't good or evil for the sake of being good or evil, it's often their upbringing and way of life that determines them.

Funnily enough, I actually found an example of a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu if you want to get technical) is actually a benefit to the story rather than a detterance. It's a manga called Fist of the North Star. In that, the main character (Kenshiro) is an invincible martial artist that cannot be hurt and can kick the crap out of people many times larger than him. He even is able to pull of a special move to help him out of any situation - oh, and he can make his opponents explode just by touching them (it's a manga, go with it).

By all accounts, that makes him a Gary Stu, however, the villians that he fights are so horrible and wicked (in some cases they murder children) that you actually WANT them to be killed off horribly. So in that instance, I guess we can forgive Kenshiro for being so damn perfect. And, to be fair, there are a FEW enemies that have almost killed him in the past so that balances it out.