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Why is so much 00Q fic so bad? Half the ones I try to read are all mushy and sappy and cutesy. James Bond does not do sappy and cutesy. Especially not Craig!Bond. Connery!Bond did groan-worthy one-liners, but he didn't do cutesy. Roger Moore!Bond did flirtatious and suave, but not sappy and cutesy.
It's because half of 00Q fandom have never watched a Bond movie other than Skyfall, isn't it? (You can tell by how the "Alec Trevelyan/006" they keep sticking in fic bears zero resemblance to the guy Sean Bean played in Goldeneye, sometimes to the point of being named "Alex Trevelyan" instead)
Also, why does Felix Leiter never show up? I know I'm biased by virtue of being a book fan who ships Bond/Felix, but come on, guys, he was in two of the three Craig bond movies. Throw me a bone here and give him a cameo once in a while.
It's because half of 00Q fandom have never watched a Bond movie other than Skyfall, isn't it? (You can tell by how the "Alec Trevelyan/006" they keep sticking in fic bears zero resemblance to the guy Sean Bean played in Goldeneye, sometimes to the point of being named "Alex Trevelyan" instead)
Also, why does Felix Leiter never show up? I know I'm biased by virtue of being a book fan who ships Bond/Felix, but come on, guys, he was in two of the three Craig bond movies. Throw me a bone here and give him a cameo once in a while.
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As a writer, I can understand wanting to tell a story and realizing it hinges on Bond having a BFF to counsel him, but as a reader, I am totally only interested in Bond being stoic and aloooooone, or snarky and detached and screwing everyone but Q, or just as a totally opaque box for Q to puzzle out, in which case who cares if he's got a friend or not?
If only Felix had been played by a dude who smoldered tragically through several blockbuster films. We could have had it alllllll.
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I was just pleased that he showed up in two movies in a row played by the same actor, really, even if his role in Casino Royale was smaller and a lot less Bond&Felix=BFFs5ever than it was in the book. The actor didn't fit my mental version of Felix, who ought to be leaner and snarkier/more cheerful (the guy who played Hardison on Leverage would have been great, or Don Cheadle, who also has good comedic timing), but the very fact that it was the same guy in both films is more than Felix sometimes gets.
If only we'd had a remake of Live and Let Die instead of Skyfall, this time leaving out the racist crazed-mob-of-black-people-try-to-voodoo-sacrifice-the-white-girl thing the 70s movie made up* and including the part where Felix gets captured by the villain and mangled and Bond sits by his bedside and pets his hair, we could really have had it all. I defy anybody to not ship them after that.
*When your 1970s movie manages to be even more racist than a 1950s novel written by an imperialist white guy who was born in the Victorian era, you have a problem, Hollywood. The voodoo bits were already pretty groan-worthy in the book and the book had a distinct lack of human sacrifice.
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(I'd say the ruthlessness/coldness was more because of training and years spent as a 00 agent basically murdering people for Queen and country until he's desensitized to it rather than something innate/inherent, though.
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It doesn't help that I have Opinions on who the proper person to whump/beat-up in hurt/comfort fics for that fandom ought to be, and it isn't Q. I know new!Q is very pretty and young-looking and therefore total h/c-bait, but I spent some quality time rereading all the hurt/comfort (and just straight-up hurt) scenes in Ian Flemming's novels as a teenager and imprinted.
(The one fic where Bond destroys his Q-branch issued equipment by using it to derail a train when a rock would have done the same thing and then gets issued a rock stamped with a serial number for his next mission and brings it back to Q covered in mysterious bloodstains and informs him that it was very useful was awesome, though. That's what Bond/Q-branch interactions should be like, not babysitting cutesy robot children)
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I haven't minded the odd H/C fic where Q is injured but I absolutely agree, if someone is being injured in general it should be Bond.
(... I have not read that one and it sounds awesome, link me?)
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A sappy Bond? Really? Really? The man who kills the majority of his sexual partners or at the very least cheerfully uses them as a body shield. I think Dalton's Bond was the most mature and if any version was going to be romantic it would be his, but sappy is stretching suspension of disbelief to the max. I always thought for James and Felix "I love you" meant you can play with my toys and we can kill people together.
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