Fandom wheeeeee (Jeremy Renner is not an egg edition)
YOU GUYS GUESS WHAT! Somebody (
jessalae) made me a preeeesent! Well, I suppose it's not technically a present because I commissioned it in a fandom fundraiser (I'm a patron of the arts!), but IT IS AWESOME NONETHELESS. It's called Multiverse Criminology and it is a Community/Fringe crossover in which Evil!Abed and Troy create a Fringe event crossing into the Redverse, and are promptly rounded up by Altlivia & crew (including Altstrid, wonderful Altstrid), and it is pretty much perfect. The first sentence made me laugh out loud and it rolls along from there.
With that important bit of squee out of the way, I shall move on to the double crux (crotch?) of this post, to whit:
So I've sort of inadvertantly fallen in fandom love with the Avengers Movieverse. I have a vague idea how this happened--I watched and enjoyed the Iron Man movies, and then Thor, and then Captain America, and by the time Avengers trailers started showing up I was SO READY FOR THIS, and I keep wandering across various happy-making fanworks and hype, and by the time the last Porn Battle happened I was scooping up prompts with greedy badger hands and now I'm kind of all over it (the positive reinforcement of immediately getting lots of hits and kudos on works posted to the AO3 doesn't hurt, even if I do know that it's an artifact of timing, participating in a big fandom while it's growing). It's a little intimidating because it's not a new fandom, not really, there are people who've been in it from the comics and animated serieseses for ages and I'm not one of them (I did have a comic book collecting period in the 90s but when I said "Make Mine Marvel" I meant X-men), and I don't want to disrespect those decades of collected canon and more established fans by overwriting that history, but I also a) don't know where to start educating myself (other than, y'know, random web searches) and b) enjoy the comparatively fresh sandbox of the movie reboot world.
[Tangent #1: To people who frame fanworks within the Marvel Avengers Movie Universe that feature characters from the different films interacting, e.g., Tony/Steve or Clint/Natasha, as crossovers, I give you the WTF face. That's not a crossover, it's a shared universe, just like Buffy and Angel or Doctor Who and Torchwood. I can kind of see calling something that uses both Avengers and X-men or Spider-Man characters a crossover, even if the Marvel comicverse doesn't work like that (Wolverine and Spidey were Avengers for a while) because the movie franchises appear thus far to be discrete beyond the omnipresence of Stan Lee, but if your Tony/Steve fic is a crossover then so is the Avengers movie itself.]
Anyway, at some point while I was falling in love with The Avengers, probably while I was working on my first Porn Battle fic, I also started to develop a massive crush on Jeremy Renner. I was loosely aware of him previously as "that guy from" The Hurt Locker and the still too-far away Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (which I was already excited about because Gemma Arterton! Zoë Bell! Fairy tale adaptation in which people wear leather and fight in forests!), and would concede that he was a rather attractive human being, but I think the real tipping point was this video, and particularly the bit around 1:10, which I first encountered as gif (if you want to skip right to the most relevant bit) courtesy of
katemonkey's delightful tumblr (the perusal of which as research for writing for her in this year's
ante_up_losers exchange may have had a great deal to do with my sudden Avengers obsession, and she posts a lot of other fascinating and hilarious stuff too--were it a newsletter, I would subscribe!):
(interview clip in which Renner and Scarlett Johansson are cutely dorky [and possibly drunk or very tired] and Renner claims to "sleep with ALL OF THEM"--I actually recommend watching all the clevvermovies interviews from this event, particularly the one with Tom Hiddleston,in which he is erudite and sweet and which Renner and Johansson crash with cuddles and temporarily hijack, although Johansson does misuse the word "ambiguous", and the one with RDJ and Chris Hemsworth, in which RDJ endorses polyamory [I know he's supposed to be joking, but I choose to hope he's not], and basically I want to pet them all for being goofy dorks.)
[Tangent #2, because I just mentioned Chris Hemsworth: one thing I don't understand about Thor (besides the brain-breaking bewilderment of BRANAGH?!?!) is, Thor is a Norse god. If you are going to cast a lovely tall Euro-Australian (not a bad move) and give him a long, lingering shirtless scene (also not a bad move, and I add my thumbs to those already raised for the erotically androcentric/'female' gaze contributing to this film's unexpectedly high feminist score), why on Earth would you wax him first? (and if you are going to wax Hemsworth, why have I not seen videos of the process?) Seriously, Thor. Allowed to be hirsute.] ETA: WTF self fix-it fic? Srsly?
So that led me from "hello Jeremy Renner" to "HELLO JEREMY RENNER" and into exploring his back-catalogue. I watched The Hurt Locker. I watched The Town. I even went to the theatre to watch Tom Cruise Learns the Power of Friendship aka Tom Cruise Puts His Persistent Insecurities Regarding His Masculinity on IMAX just to watch Renner and Simon Pegg be lovely (Paula Patton seems okay too but I hadn't heard of her before). I will probably rewatch 28 Weeks Later (I know) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford for the Renner content. I may or may not watch Dahmer, because I think I prefer this shiny object when he's not a rapey necrophiliac serial killer. I will probably watch North Country, but get the feeling that he plays a rapist in that one too and would prefer to know before I try whether that's true?
I also started to get the feeling that he was stalking me back (across time and space!), in that he started showing up even in places I did not expect him, like the music video for Pink's "Trouble" that I looked up for completely unrelated reasons, and then. Um. HI.
Black t-shirt. Eyeliner. Cowboy hat. Leather cuffs. Wallet chain. Handcuff key between teeth. Fucking BULLWHIP.
Anyway, the fandom paydirt of my Renner obsession was hit when I discovered The Unusuals, a tv show he made in 2009 about how cops are seriously messed up people. IT IS KIND OF GLORIOUS. Renner plays Detective Jason Walsh, a former baseball player (I don't give a crumb of cat litter about organized sports, why do I love fictional ex-athletes?) who owns/lives in a diner even though he appears to have a very loose grasp on what other people consider food, and who becomes the new partner of Casey Shraeger (Amber Tamblyn), who in turn became a police officer against her rich parents' wishes, when she gets transferred from Vice to Homicide to replace/investigate the killing of Walsh's old partner. Their colleagues at the 2nd precinct include Leo Banks (Harold Perrineau), who wears a kevlar vest everywhere because he's convinced he's going to die before his next birthday; Eric Delahoy (Adam Goldberg), quietly nursing a brain tumour; self-important "lone wolf" Eddie Alvarez (Kai Lennox) who refers to himself in the third person; badass Allison Beaumont (Monique Gabriela Curnen); clean-living born-again Christian Henry Cole (Joshua Close); and long-suffering Sergeant Harvey Brown (Terry Kinney).
The show has some flaws: the actual police/legal/medical procedure details are kind of terrible, and the excuse that it's not that kind of cop show (much more of a character dramedy, like due South, than a procedural) only goes so far; dialogue can be hard to follow because cast skews towards the marblemouthed; there are intermittent representation issues especially around non-recurring characters and it takes a while for Allison to feel to me like a distinct character rather than just "stock sassy Latina/chick who isn't Casey" and I roll my eyes at the Northeastern North America-large urban centre perceptions of the rural/South performed through Cole and Frank; the teasing/pranking/noncon humiliation stuff, especially directed at Alvarez, sometimes tips from funny/in-character to embarrassment squicky; and I'm not sure I buy the "it's so hard to come from money, I just want to do good so I became a cop as an act of rebellion" privilege-bending thing they're trying to do with Casey? But mostly it is clever and different and sad and hilarious and deeply, magically weird, and really good about crafting realistic, sympathetic, profoundly dysfunctional characters, and making it feel like they're each sort of living their own very different story. The fact that it only ran for 10 episodes I count as a plus, not a minus, because I like manageable volumes of source and I'm glad it ended before it had a chance to let me down hard.
Because it is often better (easier, more fun) to show than to tell, here is a lovely explanatory fanvid (explanvid!) from this year's
festivids: Sabotage, highlighting many good reasons to watch The Unusuals, and here is a scene I uploaded because it made my head go boom, highlighting one:
THAT'S NOT EVEN THE TOPPIEST THING HE DOES ON THE SHOW.
(clip from the end of episode two, "Boorland Day", throughout which Walsh and Beaumont have been announcing ascending numbers to each other without explanation, so spoilers for that running gag, but not for any plot stuff prior to this point; you can also download the clip here)
Anyway, if you want to know more, it looks like the whole series is up on Crackle.com and I think, now that I'm staring at the cover of the DVDs I found at Sonic Boom, that I saw some copies in the cheap movie rack at the No Frills at Dundas and Lansdowne? If anyone wants a copy and they're still there let me know and I'll mail them to you at cost. (The title of this post, before I forget, comes from a review blurb on the DVD case saying that Renner "has the classic hard-boiled looks of a pulp-fiction hero"--"But!" My brain helpfully supplies, "Jeremy Renner is not an egg." "True," agrees another part of my brain, "but he looks like a good thing for birds to sit on.")
I think it's time for more icons. There, icon'd.
Cross-posted from Dreamwidth, where there are currently
comments. Please comment there using OpenID.
jessalae) made me a preeeesent! Well, I suppose it's not technically a present because I commissioned it in a fandom fundraiser (I'm a patron of the arts!), but IT IS AWESOME NONETHELESS. It's called Multiverse Criminology and it is a Community/Fringe crossover in which Evil!Abed and Troy create a Fringe event crossing into the Redverse, and are promptly rounded up by Altlivia & crew (including Altstrid, wonderful Altstrid), and it is pretty much perfect. The first sentence made me laugh out loud and it rolls along from there.
With that important bit of squee out of the way, I shall move on to the double crux (crotch?) of this post, to whit:
So I've sort of inadvertantly fallen in fandom love with the Avengers Movieverse. I have a vague idea how this happened--I watched and enjoyed the Iron Man movies, and then Thor, and then Captain America, and by the time Avengers trailers started showing up I was SO READY FOR THIS, and I keep wandering across various happy-making fanworks and hype, and by the time the last Porn Battle happened I was scooping up prompts with greedy badger hands and now I'm kind of all over it (the positive reinforcement of immediately getting lots of hits and kudos on works posted to the AO3 doesn't hurt, even if I do know that it's an artifact of timing, participating in a big fandom while it's growing). It's a little intimidating because it's not a new fandom, not really, there are people who've been in it from the comics and animated serieseses for ages and I'm not one of them (I did have a comic book collecting period in the 90s but when I said "Make Mine Marvel" I meant X-men), and I don't want to disrespect those decades of collected canon and more established fans by overwriting that history, but I also a) don't know where to start educating myself (other than, y'know, random web searches) and b) enjoy the comparatively fresh sandbox of the movie reboot world.
[Tangent #1: To people who frame fanworks within the Marvel Avengers Movie Universe that feature characters from the different films interacting, e.g., Tony/Steve or Clint/Natasha, as crossovers, I give you the WTF face. That's not a crossover, it's a shared universe, just like Buffy and Angel or Doctor Who and Torchwood. I can kind of see calling something that uses both Avengers and X-men or Spider-Man characters a crossover, even if the Marvel comicverse doesn't work like that (Wolverine and Spidey were Avengers for a while) because the movie franchises appear thus far to be discrete beyond the omnipresence of Stan Lee, but if your Tony/Steve fic is a crossover then so is the Avengers movie itself.]
Anyway, at some point while I was falling in love with The Avengers, probably while I was working on my first Porn Battle fic, I also started to develop a massive crush on Jeremy Renner. I was loosely aware of him previously as "that guy from" The Hurt Locker and the still too-far away Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (which I was already excited about because Gemma Arterton! Zoë Bell! Fairy tale adaptation in which people wear leather and fight in forests!), and would concede that he was a rather attractive human being, but I think the real tipping point was this video, and particularly the bit around 1:10, which I first encountered as gif (if you want to skip right to the most relevant bit) courtesy of
katemonkey's delightful tumblr (the perusal of which as research for writing for her in this year's
ante_up_losers exchange may have had a great deal to do with my sudden Avengers obsession, and she posts a lot of other fascinating and hilarious stuff too--were it a newsletter, I would subscribe!):
Click to view(interview clip in which Renner and Scarlett Johansson are cutely dorky [and possibly drunk or very tired] and Renner claims to "sleep with ALL OF THEM"--I actually recommend watching all the clevvermovies interviews from this event, particularly the one with Tom Hiddleston,in which he is erudite and sweet and which Renner and Johansson crash with cuddles and temporarily hijack, although Johansson does misuse the word "ambiguous", and the one with RDJ and Chris Hemsworth, in which RDJ endorses polyamory [I know he's supposed to be joking, but I choose to hope he's not], and basically I want to pet them all for being goofy dorks.)
[Tangent #2, because I just mentioned Chris Hemsworth: one thing I don't understand about Thor (besides the brain-breaking bewilderment of BRANAGH?!?!) is, Thor is a Norse god. If you are going to cast a lovely tall Euro-Australian (not a bad move) and give him a long, lingering shirtless scene (also not a bad move, and I add my thumbs to those already raised for the erotically androcentric/'female' gaze contributing to this film's unexpectedly high feminist score), why on Earth would you wax him first? (and if you are going to wax Hemsworth, why have I not seen videos of the process?) Seriously, Thor. Allowed to be hirsute.] ETA: WTF self fix-it fic? Srsly?
So that led me from "hello Jeremy Renner" to "HELLO JEREMY RENNER" and into exploring his back-catalogue. I watched The Hurt Locker. I watched The Town. I even went to the theatre to watch Tom Cruise Learns the Power of Friendship aka Tom Cruise Puts His Persistent Insecurities Regarding His Masculinity on IMAX just to watch Renner and Simon Pegg be lovely (Paula Patton seems okay too but I hadn't heard of her before). I will probably rewatch 28 Weeks Later (I know) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford for the Renner content. I may or may not watch Dahmer, because I think I prefer this shiny object when he's not a rapey necrophiliac serial killer. I will probably watch North Country, but get the feeling that he plays a rapist in that one too and would prefer to know before I try whether that's true?
I also started to get the feeling that he was stalking me back (across time and space!), in that he started showing up even in places I did not expect him, like the music video for Pink's "Trouble" that I looked up for completely unrelated reasons, and then. Um. HI.
Black t-shirt. Eyeliner. Cowboy hat. Leather cuffs. Wallet chain. Handcuff key between teeth. Fucking BULLWHIP.
Anyway, the fandom paydirt of my Renner obsession was hit when I discovered The Unusuals, a tv show he made in 2009 about how cops are seriously messed up people. IT IS KIND OF GLORIOUS. Renner plays Detective Jason Walsh, a former baseball player (I don't give a crumb of cat litter about organized sports, why do I love fictional ex-athletes?) who owns/lives in a diner even though he appears to have a very loose grasp on what other people consider food, and who becomes the new partner of Casey Shraeger (Amber Tamblyn), who in turn became a police officer against her rich parents' wishes, when she gets transferred from Vice to Homicide to replace/investigate the killing of Walsh's old partner. Their colleagues at the 2nd precinct include Leo Banks (Harold Perrineau), who wears a kevlar vest everywhere because he's convinced he's going to die before his next birthday; Eric Delahoy (Adam Goldberg), quietly nursing a brain tumour; self-important "lone wolf" Eddie Alvarez (Kai Lennox) who refers to himself in the third person; badass Allison Beaumont (Monique Gabriela Curnen); clean-living born-again Christian Henry Cole (Joshua Close); and long-suffering Sergeant Harvey Brown (Terry Kinney).
The show has some flaws: the actual police/legal/medical procedure details are kind of terrible, and the excuse that it's not that kind of cop show (much more of a character dramedy, like due South, than a procedural) only goes so far; dialogue can be hard to follow because cast skews towards the marblemouthed; there are intermittent representation issues especially around non-recurring characters and it takes a while for Allison to feel to me like a distinct character rather than just "stock sassy Latina/chick who isn't Casey" and I roll my eyes at the Northeastern North America-large urban centre perceptions of the rural/South performed through Cole and Frank; the teasing/pranking/noncon humiliation stuff, especially directed at Alvarez, sometimes tips from funny/in-character to embarrassment squicky; and I'm not sure I buy the "it's so hard to come from money, I just want to do good so I became a cop as an act of rebellion" privilege-bending thing they're trying to do with Casey? But mostly it is clever and different and sad and hilarious and deeply, magically weird, and really good about crafting realistic, sympathetic, profoundly dysfunctional characters, and making it feel like they're each sort of living their own very different story. The fact that it only ran for 10 episodes I count as a plus, not a minus, because I like manageable volumes of source and I'm glad it ended before it had a chance to let me down hard.
Because it is often better (easier, more fun) to show than to tell, here is a lovely explanatory fanvid (explanvid!) from this year's
festivids: Sabotage, highlighting many good reasons to watch The Unusuals, and here is a scene I uploaded because it made my head go boom, highlighting one:
THAT'S NOT EVEN THE TOPPIEST THING HE DOES ON THE SHOW.
(clip from the end of episode two, "Boorland Day", throughout which Walsh and Beaumont have been announcing ascending numbers to each other without explanation, so spoilers for that running gag, but not for any plot stuff prior to this point; you can also download the clip here)
Anyway, if you want to know more, it looks like the whole series is up on Crackle.com and I think, now that I'm staring at the cover of the DVDs I found at Sonic Boom, that I saw some copies in the cheap movie rack at the No Frills at Dundas and Lansdowne? If anyone wants a copy and they're still there let me know and I'll mail them to you at cost. (The title of this post, before I forget, comes from a review blurb on the DVD case saying that Renner "has the classic hard-boiled looks of a pulp-fiction hero"--"But!" My brain helpfully supplies, "Jeremy Renner is not an egg." "True," agrees another part of my brain, "but he looks like a good thing for birds to sit on.")
I think it's time for more icons. There, icon'd.
Cross-posted from Dreamwidth, where there are currently
comments. Please comment there using OpenID.