Well, I wouldn’t say “brave”. Severine´s past, despite being mentioned, is not really given attention. Drop it and it wouldn’t matter. As for Lucia´s widow status: “Can´t you see I’m grieving?” - “No.” (Fantastic dialogue, by the way) - That immediately does away with all moralistic concerns because neither can the audience see Lucia´s sadness. In fact, we know she doesn’t care, and her late husband was a killer anyway.
And we also musn’t forget that some people have the scars exactly because they are villains. Waltz’ Blofeld would still look perfectly nice, had he behaved nicely and not try to rule the world or get into Bond’s head.
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I would, as I said, considering the climate we’re in these days. It’s a balancing act. The themes the PC crowd would take issue with are still under the surface.
Sometimes I wonder if that really is a question of “social climate”. I believe there always was a group of people who feel offended by anything. But in the age of the internet their voices are heard immediately and their impact gets blown out of proportion.
As for Bond, he is at his core a character who offends people. A slightly sadistic macho assassin. If people take offense at the villains he kills or the women he beds they should hate him first. 
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Mary Whitehouse
For those who remember her…
Should say, she died before I was born, I’m just well read enough to know she was the loud person given a voice/platform before the internet handed that to all, consequence be damned.
Hey you Whitehouse… ha ha, charade you are.
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I agree, but you can’t deny that a (small) group of, let’s call them complainers, can have a considerable impact, even if they’re being blown out of proportion. The BFI just decided to change it’s funding rules. To me, that’s impact. I’m not saying it will have an impact on the next Bond movies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a villain with a facial scar or disability is something we’ll see less and less in the future.
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Bond has more villains without any physical alterations than it has with. You wouldn’t notice any change, and people are still going to whinge about the Bond film with the bimbo in a bikini where he has a jet pack in his shoe and faces off against a villain with an eye patch and a robot hand inside a his private volcano island.
Trademark; false idea of Bond movies for almost 60 years.
Lots of buzz and smoke here as I awoke to all this. But, where there’s smoke…
As I’ve filtered all this I am hopeful of quite a few aspects regardless of nothing official, my thoughts drifted to FRWL and the SE documentary of how it was nearly a disastrous situation but brilliantly came about in both rewrites and post production to what it is.
I think this is coming together and has the potential to be something grand.
I’m not quite ready to go “All In”, but I do think I won’t be needing buy back either.
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Isn’t that “guilty until proven innocent” 
Something like that but yes.
I agree, that’s impact. But while I don’t mind a Bond movie or any movie depicting a villain with any physical, psychological or what have you special trait I don’t see a problem if things like disfiguring scars will be dropped from Bond films.
Let’s face it (sorry for the pun), the idea of deformed outside appearance as a sign for a villainous mind is rather cardboard and dumb. And we had those characters in so many Bond films I would not miss that at all. Just as I won’t miss any female character portrayed as weak, constantly crying out “Oh, James, I´m so afraid!”
That doesn’t mean I want every female character be “Bond´s equal”, nor every villain to look handsome or bland. But I would prefer characters whose motivation is made clear by their actions, not by their looks.
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Other than Jaws, are any Bond villains first defined by their physical appearance rather than their actions?
I was going to say Oddjob, but he knocks out Bond before we see him properly.
Tee Hee maybe? But I think the rest, you see their actions first. Very fond of hiding faces is Bond.
I´d say: Dr.No, Oddjob, Largo, Pleasance-Blofeld, Wint/Kidd, TeeHee, NickNack, Jaws - the list is endless…
Dr No is heard first and has killed both Strangways and Quarrel as well as attempted murdering Bond with a spider, and we see MANY of his actions throughout the film before he comes on screen. Odd Job is shown silhouette and with music cue first and, indeed, no has physical deformities, he’s mute. Blofeld his voice and many murders first only his face in the final act, Wint/Kidd have no physical deformities, Nick Nack is immediately shown paying a gangster to try and kill his boss. So, Tee Hee and Jaws. The rest are shown doing things in the case of the main villains LONG before we see their faces.
As for Largo - his first appearance is a SPECTRE staff meeting. It’s not like he was there to take the minutes.
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That´s all true - but their physical traits are definitely there to signal: BADDIE ahead!
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Who else but the Bond fan community should know how these things go. We had it over a decade ago: Craignotbond. The origin of this was a group of not more than maybe a dozen people (or less) who knew exactly how to play the game. And until this very day, you happen to read in articles that “most fans” didn’t like Craig in the beginning. When I look at things going on around the interweb and its impact on the daily news, I still feel reminded of that bunch of wankers. It all follows the same pattern.
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So true. And to think how much trouble the press gave him at that first conference, reinforcing the idea because he wore an obligatory life jacket.