#rambles tag

Hello everyuma! Today we're talking about Suzuka's nightmare racers!!

“Shut UP,” he hisses, eyes darting around. “I JUST told you that we’re trying to stay safe here and you IMMEDIATELY come back to me? Frick off.” He looks horribly upset, and Roman tugs at his brother’s arm.

“We’ll go find someone else then,” he says hautily. “Since you clearly aren’t going to tell me anything.”

“Us,” Remus corrects. “Besides, we haven’t asked that guy at the front desk, right? What was his name? Curtain?? Packing???”

“Patton,” Virgil says, sounding more afraid then before. “Leave him out of this, I don’t want him hurt. I don’t want ANY of them hurt, please-“

Remus glared. “And we want to know if we’ll be hurt, so do us a favour and, how did you phrase it? ‘Frick off’ if you’re going to be no help.” He took a step down the hallway, then looked back. “Unless?”

Virgil stayed quiet.

Roman huffed. “Of course not.”

:3 ~Rambles

!!!!!! I’m looking!!!

And yes, Patton is just the front desk attendant (and a concierge with Logan but his main post is the front desk, cuz he’s the friendliest of the four of them ajsjdkfll)!!

Not really a fan and I don’t think that’s gonna change. I don’t have much experience with the character to begin with, I watched the Daniel Craig movies which bored me to death. I watched Goldfinger, which I remembered as being fun the first time I viewed it as a kid, but I find it hard to stand as an adult because Sean Connery was an awful man and oh yeah, that’s also the movie where James Bond rapes someone (I get that it was supposed to be a slap-slap-kiss thing but that is very much not what it’s in the scene). And I read the original Casino Royale novel, which is a must-read largely for it’s importance in pop culture and has some interesting aspects to it but, again, nothing that really got me to seek out the character.

Look, I get why Bond has become this huge cultural institution and the spy of popular fiction ever since his debut, why the 60s was the era of “Bond, Beatles and Batman” and why he’s kinda become the new standard for non-superhero action protagonists. I am extremely fond of that particular style you see in media like The Incredibles and Team Fortress 2, and that style owes a lot of it to the Bond films, hell I just posted above a screencap of Venture Bros, my favorite cartoon series. I’m certainly not gonna knock on popular enjoyment of a morally dubious man of action in a slick suit who charms and shoots his way through problems, after writing my most popular posts on my unabashed worship of Vincenzo. 

The things I like the most about Bond’s character in Casino Royale and the Bond of the original novels are largely the ways in which he almost betrays the impossibly competent image he’s been set up with later. I like that he gets picked specifically just because he’s the Service’s best gambler and not because he's the best everythint, I like that he’s uncomfortable with killing and especially the targeted assassinations, I like that he has vices and struggles because of his job. His job kinda forces him to be by default an unfeeling asshole who exploits people, and I think that’s an interesting perspective to develop, even without the context of it being James Bond before “being James Bond is the coolest thing ever” was the driving thesis of the franchise.

Thing is, I never really found any reason to give a damn about anything in Bond, other than enjoyment of the stylistic trappings and absurdities which just get kinda old after a while. I don’t enjoy the titular character or the hordes of largely one-dimensional "Bond Girls”, I don’t think the villains are interesting despite their supposed reputation in pop culture, I don’t get that much enjoyment out of death traps and car chases and gun fights if I don’t have anything at all to care about in the situations. I don’t think characters inspired by Bond tend to be interesting and even Bond parodies have gotten largely old and stale (I do like Johnny English but that’s solely because Rowan Atkinson is my favorite comedian and I’ll watch him in anything, and even then I didn’t even remember there was a third film).

As a kid, the idea of being a secret agent in service of the government has never really been terribly appealing to me, and as an adult it appeals even less. I don’t entirely dislike government agent characters by default, I really like Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks and An Gi-Seok from Vincenzo and agents of fictional organizations like Hellboy’s BRPD and Carmen Sandiego’s ACME, but I can’t shake off the stink of imperialism off my perception of Bond in particular. Again, I know it’s fiction, I know I talk about morally dubious protagonists I love all the time, but it’s the fact that Bond is so closely tied to his role as a government-sponsored murderer, my disdain for real-life governments and secret services being depicted in fiction as a swell and cool thing and not at all what they actually are, and the fact that I do not find Bond at all convincing or interesting enough for me to overlook that and buy into the fantasy, all blends together to make me dislike him.  

And yeah, Ian Fleming had utterly wretched views on gender and race and that bleeds a lot into the stories. People knock on pulps for racism and sexism a lot, and it's not undeserved, but even then I’ve seldom read anything in them as appallingbas the kind of shit you get on the Bond novels, and it’s harder to separate those from the character when so much of it is framed as the thoughts and opinions and attitudes of the character to the world around him. I would still not like James Bond even if I could put aside all the racism and sexism, and I very much cannot, but the fact that they are there, atop everything else, atop the character being an actual rapist at worst and his most iconic actor being unabashedly proud of being a wife beater and somehow still remembered fondly as a pop culture badass, and you end up with the one time Alan Moore did a comically grotesque exaggeration of a character in LOEG and I thought “you know what, I acknowledge that this is overblown and stupid and immersion-breaking but fuck it, I can’t blame you for your thoughts on this particular character manifesting with such bile”.

I know there’s good stuff in James Bond novels and films, I know why the character is super iconic and popular, please don’t misconstrue anything I’m saying as me thinking James Bond fans are horrible or something, because I don’t want to get that across at all. But I personally do not like Bond, and I don’t think I have to force myself to when there’s so many other types of characters and even spies that I prefer so much more. I don’t think I’m ever really going to be a Bond fan (I do like Timothy Dalton as an actor though, and if Sam Neil ever got to play Bond like he auditioned for, I probably would have at least some affection for the character since I really like him). 

I do like Austin Powers also. A lot of the jokes have aged really poorly and apparently Mike Myers is kind of an ass on set, but I think the concept of the eternally outdated parody spy still works, the films still have pretty funny scenes, and most importantly, he spoofed the concept to death so hard that even Daniel Craig said “Mike Myers fucked us”. Austin sucked out and absorbed all the fun parts of James Bond and then made them so funny and ridiculous that the Bond franchise has never again been able to have too much fun with itself, and if I gave a shit about Bond I would probably dislike that, but I don’t so, you go Austin.