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He retires/is kicked upstairs, and the new agent takes on the code name "James Bond" and number 007. (That seems to be how they explain change of actors in the films and why he is always late 30s to mid 40s, and why he's not immediately recognised on sight by enemy organisations).
They take over the number, but not the name. In No Time to Die Bond (now retired, but called back for one last mission) and 007 are different characters.
In so far as the filmmakers bother to maintain long-term continuity, Bond from Dr No to No Time to Die is a single character played by multiple actors, who never retires before being de-canonised. Casino Royale is a reboot, with Craig's Bond being a different character in a different continuity, who has a career of a realistic length before retiring and being replaced as 007. There is no suggestion that either Bond was a pseudonym, although it wouldn't be surprising given the nature of spycraft.
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Yeah giving a bunch of your spies the exact same name over the course of decades is a great way to maintain secrecy. They should just go one better and name him British Spy. He can just go around introducing himself as "Spy, British Spy" while performing all the patented British Spy Mannerisms they carefully instruct every one of these guys to indulge in as publicly as possible.
It's all fantasy, and trying to fill in the holes in continuity is more of a game than anything. Someone as notorious as "James Bond" is going to be found out, so the idea of him doing undercover work just doesn't fly from the start.
Yeah it's all in good fun, half of all fandom consists of making up rationalizations for stuff like this.
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See, they also give the same training and the same name to every technician and accountant.
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That's not really how "they explain it." In fact they don't explain it. Bond remains Bond throughout the series. His one wife (Traci) was seen married and murdered in the one Lazenby film, then in the subsequent film Connery is out for vengeance for her murder. Later, in a different film, Roger Moore lays flowers on Traci's grave. And then even later in License to Kill Dalton is said to have been "married once, but that was a long time ago" (notably this is said by Felix Leiter, played by an actor who played the same character for both Moore and Dalton, though only in Dalton's second film--in his first, Leiter was played by someone else.) There's no explanation. For stupid reasons they played around with the double oh seven moniker in the most recent (and final) Bond film, but that's another issue.
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Is that actually the explanation or is that (the oldest) fanon?
Obviously 007 is a codename but "James Bond" being a codename (is "Felix Leiter" also a codename? Do all Bonds and Leiters end up as friends?) doesn't seem to have ever been canon AFAIK. The Craig Bond films certainly reject it.
It just seems like canon just doesn't matter that much to Bond. New actors allow soft reboots and that's that. Getting tangled up in the history is how you get a mess like Spectre or the need to give a definitive ending in No Time to Die. I'm not sure that form of modernization is actually better. That's how you eventually end up with MCU kudzu-canon.
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