#i'm not tagging this ryan reynolds nobody innocently looking for like shirtless pics of him needs to see this

[cyclogenesis]

im so curious what drew you to ryan reynolds was it an immediate upon watching thing or did it develop through time. honestly you've just about convinced me to also be weird about him

I love this question anon, yes please make me explain myself 🥲 I also have been looking at myself like "what are we doing over here guys" for the past few months so it's fair to ask. Doing the fic commentaries recently has reminded me that I really missed just writing down my thoughts Livejournal-style, so. In this essay I will, but it's actually going to be an essay (no, I'm serious) and I in fact will. 😭

I left DP&W thinking I was walking into a Hugh Jackman phase but instead we got home and rewatched Wolverine: Origins and then DP1 and Ryan's big brown eyes and murder twink smirk/sad boy journey enchanted me irreparably. And I absolutely had seen both of those movies before! And thought he was hot, you know, and liked him as an actor dating back to I think Blade: Trinity (which is a masterpiece if your qualification for a masterpiece is Ryan Reynolds shirtless and shackled to the floor. and that's my qualification for a masterpiece. can someone please gif the horny parts of that movie I Need them). I think probably the fact that he was a co-writer on DP&W is what tipped me over because writing talent is tremendously hot to me but also I don't know. You know? Sometimes the hyperfixations make sense and you're like of course, this is catnip to me, I am physiologically inclined to roll around in it, and other times you're like this? This? Are we sure? And the dopamine gremlins running around in circles in your skull are like "yeah! yeah! yeah!" and you gotta just be like okay. Alright, I guess we're gonna think about this and giggle a lot.

But I've had many an actor crush and few of those have resulted in deeply sincere RPF. So I went looking for Ryan/Hugh fic after watching a little bit of stuff with the two of them and being like oh there is a Dynamic here. And there wasn't much so I just kinda kept reading Wade/Logan but also like watching/rewatching Ryan's older stuff and looking at Ryan/Hugh things until like...

Just, okay. Here are a bunch of facts: The story is that Wesley Snipes and Ryan had disagreements on the set of Blade: Trinity because Ryan would ad-lib lines a lot and Wesley found that annoying. But Ryan's talked before about not actually being an ad-lib guy really - he just comes up with different things for his characters to say and like keeps these options back of mind while working, which is interesting. And the thing about the character of Hannibal King in that movie is that his like first line is about liking older men. And then for the rest of the movie he just gets beat up a lot (awesome!) while making these gay little comments like an aggro murder twunk. (Masterpiece.)

And then - then - he wrote the entirety of Wade's lines for Wolverine: Origins! Of which there are famously few, so they had to count. And I guess that's why one of those lines is about how if they get stuck in that elevator, all of his fellow team members are going to fucking gangbang him. Girl, are you good. 😭

Just wild to walk away from that and then spend the next several years working to get real Deadpool onscreen so he could continue to play and eventually write this bisexual-ass character, complete with all the horny Wolverine references even as he's locking Hugh down into a common law friendship marriage. I'm too lazy to grab the source but there's this one interview where Hugh talks about how he was filming in Atlanta one year (2018? maybe?) and had no plans for his birthday so Ryan flew down to Georgia from New York to take him out for a steak dinner. Like...like. I don't know. I'd do crazy shit if I were rich too, but. I mean. I don't know, I had to learn about this and now you have to deal with it too. GOD.

Listen, I don't really know how friendship works between men. I don't know what the hell boiling in the societal stew of toxic masculinity and compulsive heterosexuality does to a man's brain. I just think it's interesting to be really close friends with a guy for almost two decades, dreaming all the while about getting to work with him again, finally convincing him to do it, and then proceeding to co-write a script where your character flirts constantly with his, the two of you get to pounce aggressively onto each other over and over again in an extremely confined space in the most fighting as a stand-in for sex scene I've ever seen in my life, and then at the end your characters basically get a Happily Ever After.

And then you can't wait two fucking seconds before writing another project so you can work with him again, like!!! Am I making this up?? Am I tripping balls over here??? God!!!!

Have they tried kissing? Just to see what it's like??? Like at what point is it more awkward not to?

Jesus. Okay, I'm fine. Anyway, as I've said before, I walked out of DP&W asking myself and everyone else the question: Does Ryan Reynolds know it's legal to just be bisexual? And I still kind of think the answer is no. Somebody needs to tell him.

I also (and this is somehow more embarrassing than all of the preceding paragraphs, believe it or not) have a lot of sympathy for him - a guy who, I recognize, has a pretty great life! and does not need my sympathy! - because he's clearly really sensitive, in this way that has me like, oh honey no you don't have to respond to people picking on you, you're never going to convince them to be fair to you because they don't want to be fair to you. I have had bad times in my life where some people (strangers!) have just been fucking desperate to dislike me - to mischaracterize my actions, to deliberately misinterpret things I say, to belittle my work - and I am so familiar with how defensive that can make you feel, like if you just explain where you're coming from well enough you can make these people see that you're a human being just like they are, that you can make them understand. (And then quit picking on you. Because it sucks when people are mean.)

In a lot of understandable ways Ryan is so guarded but then also just this raw nerve! It almost seems like he's gotten more delicate as he's gotten older which is incredible. He makes his vulnerabilities so apparent in this brutally sincere way. I feel like usually when celebrities get shirty about something they sound like assholes but Ryan just sounds pleading. Like, the sort of desperate way that he talks about the movies he's been in that he knows are bad, because if you get out in front of it then it's like haha! You can't tell me I was in bad movies because I said it already! So it won't hurt my feelings now if you say they're bad!

I don't know, again it's just like I get it! It was a hard lesson for me to learn that some people are just never going to like you, and it's often going to be for completely unfair reasons that are based more on their own projecting than on anything you've actually done. It's frustrating as fuck. And if it is for things you've done, even something as morally benign as being in a bad movie, you have to let everyone know you're aware of it so they can't strike first. It's a lot to carry, that insecurity that no matter how successful you are, and how many people like you - maybe the assholes are right. So if you can convince them that they're wrong, and they're being unfair to you, maybe you can convince yourself too.

(Sidebar to explain myself because I have obviously been hurt before um lol: As a fic writer I approach characterization the same way whether it's media fic or RPF - I look at the canon, which in the case of RPF is interviews/social media/whatever art they make, and I extrapolate character based on what's in front of me. So whether the characters are fiction or not there's always going to be elements of projection/what I want to see as I filter things through the lens of my own experience. Please go ahead and bask in the irony of me, right here, trying to get out in front of any criticism I might get for projecting or being parasocial here or whatever. Sure I am. Guilty as charged. Love me or leave me. GOD lmao)

Also honestly watch or read any longer interview (the Actors on Actors with Andrew Garfield is fantastic, as is this one with Shawn Levy) and it's like immediately clear that he is REALLY smart and thoughtful - I just have to excerpt a bit from the latter sorry -

And going into the movie, we felt we had a lot to prove to Marvel and Disney. It’s the first big Fox property, after Disney bought the studio, to be R-rated. We had to write a movie that was a four- quadrant R-rated movie. That’s a hard thing to do. In order to do that, I’m not a big poetry person, but Keats talks about all the stitching and unstitching you do to make it feel like a moment’s thought. And that’s what is.

"Not a big poetry person" totally has a Keats reference off the dome like okay...but anyway. It's so enthralling to me how much of him is like right there on the surface for longer interviews like these. He's talked about having to put on a character to get through things like junkets, talk show appearances, stuff like that, and he's great at turning on the charm. But outside of that this guy is serious, and clearly feels the weight of various expectations like, all of the time, and puts a ton of consideration into his work and what he's creating.

He wants to make things people like and he wants people to like him and there's, to me, this really refreshing lack of ego in that, especially for someone in the position that he's in. And the people that he's worked with, from co-stars on down, have nothing but good things to say about him. (I read way too much celeb gossip on Reddit and I swear every time some rando hater wants to talk about how they think he's secretly a dick or whatever you'll see at least a couple of people pop up who've actually worked with him or know people who have and every time they're like No actually he's really nice. Great guy. And I knowww it's dangerous to ever believe a famous man is Pretty Good but, you know. Not idolizing, just hornily appreciating. In exhausting detail. I cannot stress this enough: You asked.)

So. Like. Okay. *falls over* Obviously he's been hot for decades (late 20s/early 30s being a highlight, but honestly the grey hair when he lets it happen now works for me baaaad), and his naturally lanky/never too over-the-top muscular body turns me into a slavering feral dog, but I also find him psychologically fascinating and I want to study him in a lab. I am deeply flattered that I've even almost convinced you to be weird about him too because I recognize that I'm reaching new heights(/depths??) of...whatever the hell I've got going on over here. Absolutely a part of this is me clinging to anything that occupies my brain in a positive way after the worst five months of my entire life. (Look at me! I'm like so don't be mean to me please 🥺. Sigh of determined self-acceptance.)

This will continue indefinitely. I'm having a ball in this bitch tbh, I love loving things, especially men with hipbones carved out of marble who look hot when they're sad. Please tell me if I've been in any way convincing. Thank you for asking and I'm not sorry this is so long. I had a good time.