Hexiva read every single one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and wrote this extensive list of things you will encounter in the books. And wow, there’s a lot to unpack here, wtf James:
Source: Hexiva
(via: r/CuratedTumblr)
List of Things in Ian Fleming’s James Bond Novels
I like him
“that you didn’t even know one COULD be racist against… Bulgarians”
Spoken as someone who has never been to Europe nor knows pretty much anything about European countries. It’s like someone in Europe saying “…that you didn’t even know one COULD be racist against… Latino people.”
British newspapers call Bulgarians animals and sparked the idea of Brexit when Bulgarians and Romanians joined the EU. Please, educate yourself a little bit more on politics outside the US before making sweeping statements like these.
It’s rather ironic to see this author complain about Bond being “racist” against other Europeans and then concluding that the British are horrible people that should be hated. Sounds like you’re an anti-British racist now! It’s a shame when people can’t see their own racism. My guess is that you’ve got the typical snotty hipster privilege that makes it a-okay to hate an entire island full of people based solely upon what you dig up in some old book.
It’s not just okay, it’s a good thing to be intolerant of intolerance. Tolerance is a social responsibility, and if you don’t want to join in you don’t get to try to hide behind the thing you’ve abandoned.
So refreshing. I wish Broccoli would commission a Bond movie more in keeping with the books. They would be such a breath of fresh air.
Aw babe!, it’s so sweet that you think being racist to Bulgarians is weird, because pretty much the entire basis of European civilization is being racist to people in the next country, or the next county, or the next town.
No seriously it’s like an unbroken run of three thousand years of everyone trash talking everyone else about their culture, their language and their appearance. The The Athenians did it about the Spartans and the Spartans about the Athenians. The Romans about how effete the Greeks were and about how provincial the rest of the Italians were. The rest of the Italians about how the city dwellers were a bunch of poseurs and had lost touch with their roots. The English ragged on the French, the French on the Germans, the Germans on the Italians. North Europeans thought South Europeans were lazy hicks, South Europeans thought North Europeans were tight asses. On the Eastern Front the Germans had to make sure Italian units were stationed between Hungarian and Romanian ones because soldiers from those two countries would much rather be fighting each other than any of Stalin’s ravening red hordes.
And that was pretty much how it went until 1945 when people in Europe decided that if we keep on with this sort of BS we’re gonna run out of people, and since then things have been pretty quiet on that front apart from a few assholes who enjoy being assholes or who think there’s political mileage to be made out of it.
What I find more interesting is this. During WW2 Ian Fleming worked in intelligence and special ops, which at the time could be said to boil down to “gather the biggest lunatics out there, give them guns and transport and point them in the direction of the enemy”. Best case scenario being that they’ll do a disproportionate amount of damage to the other side, worst case being they’ll get themselves killed and at least we won’t have to worry about them shooting pineapples off people’s head during dinner parties.
So when Fleming writes about Bond throwing up on a regular basis, or switching sides due to torture he’s quite probably speaking from personal experience, either his own or someone he knew. The same with the PTSD thing. Fleming would have been around a lot of death and killing and would have seen the aftereffects on people and on himself and would have known that it’s not something you just walk off. It’s a shame we don’t get to see that in the films.
Also there’s one certain way to check if M and his longtime companion are gay. Just reread the books and see if they ever whistle.