Think it’s pretty weird if anyone has strong views that James Bond must be white, tbh. Why would you give a shit either way?! It hardly matters in the scheme of things.
People are passionate about things.
I personally couldn't give a shit what race James Bond's actor is because I'm not particularly a Bond fan.
However if Luke Skywalker was in a new film and he was a black-Japanese woman then I'd probably give it a miss and think they're taking the mick. I remember when WWF "re-cast" Razor Ramon from Scott Hall to Rick Bognor for a couple of weeks and it irritated the hell out of me.
Fictional characters are admittedly fictional, but the reason why their movies sell is because people form some type emotional bonds with them. You care about your protagonists which is why drama in their character arc and danger in action scenes matter. Without the emotional connection you're just watching some fast moving photographs.
People have an idea of what James Bond is in their head and they've formed some sort of emotional connection to that ideal. One of the ways in which we describe fictional characters is by how they look - now Bond is an exception here as he has been played by numerous actors but they're all vaguely middle aged white males with an air of sophistication and a glint in the eye for comedy puns. It's a blurrier image but it's still an image.
I don't care if they're changing the image of a character that I don't particularly care about but I'm not going to say I can't understand it. If City changed their playing strip/main colour to green instead of blue, would that matter in the scheme of things? Well probably not. But I'd be pissed off with it because the visual image in my head of what Man City looks like is tinted with blue.
People don't like other people fucking about with the visuals of symbols that they care about. It's not even a race thing - numerous people have given up on Doctor Who because they changed her into a woman. They changed the main character in Ghost in the Shell from an Asian woman to a white woman and it wrecked the film for people. They completely fucked up Deadpool in the Wolverine movie and it led to an outrage large enough that they managed to turn this into a Deadpool movie.
It's understandable.
