Rebuking James Bond
Rewriting the past isn’t moving forward.
So I read the piece in The Guardian about Ian Fleming Publications Ltd re-editing the James Bond novels to alter or omit content deemed offensive to modern audiences. This comes on the heels of Roald Dahls’ estate doing something similar with his work. Some people are in favor of this, and I see their point of view. Others are against it, and they make good points as well. I’m not going to pretend to have the correct answer, but I will tell you where I land on this, based on both personal experience and my own sense of ethics.
People ask me Bond questions all the time because I wrote a roleplaying system that was kinda-sorta inspired by another game that came out forty years ago. I wrote it because I wanted a system that allowed me to create the sorts of experiences my friends and I had over the decades. That didn’t need to be a faithful retro-clone, because while Victory Games’ James Bond 007 Roleplaying Game was groundbreaking and innovative for the time, it hasn’t aged well. Its dependence on tables is so dire, they’re printed on the character sheets!
Like the game, the Bond legacy hasn’t aged well, either. I know that the film franchise has tried to course-correct, or so I’ve heard; I haven’t seen the last few installments. Yeah, there’s smoking and sexism and racism and all manner of toxic masculinity. There’s the fetishization of cars and guns. We also have things like the slide whistle during the car-jump stunt in The Man with the Golden Gun, where Bond invokes Evel Knievel while driving the coolest vehicle ever conceived of, an AMC Hornet hatchback.
It’s cringe, and the people that continue to defend it as anything other than, at best, a corny remnant of the past are cringe. Yes, Bond movies and even the Ian Fleming novels were an important part of my past. I grew up, my tastes changed, and I moved on. To me, there are so many other things to explore that I don’t need to cling desperately to something that I used to love, even something that was and to some degree always will be part of my identity.
And this is why DoubleZero is a generic modern roleplaying system. It’s why even though there are three espionage setting books out right now, it’s not purely an espionage game. I have other interests. I just released a setting inspired by the dark academia fiction subgenre. There’s a setting inspired by my favorite parts of Stephen King’s doorstop of a novel The Stand, the parts of The Walking Dead that I liked, and the HBO adaptation of The Last of Us.
I understand that the corporate entity controlling the Bond IP needs to keep it relevant, because capitalism. That doesn’t mean we have to ignore the flaws, embrace the edits, and try to rewrite the past into something more palatable. We can just let those things go. There are struggling authors writing spy thrillers for modern audiences that are inclusive and not problematic. We can seek them out and support them, rather than reinventing Bond for a new generation. There are genres other than spy thrillers that we can look to for modern roleplaying inspiration, just as not every fantasy game needs to be like D&D or adhere to its particular styles and modes.
Rewriting the past isn’t moving forward.
It was an amazing stunt ruined by that goofy sh!t.
I've never seen any of the Roger Moore Bond movies, and after seeing that slide whistle stunt, I think that will remain the case.