Saw Iron Man 2! Enjoyed it, but someone sometime is gonna have to write some meta about the weird philosophy behind Tony Stark's universe.

Also, Terrence Howard remains my Rhodey, but I have plans to resurrect my Rhodey fanworks list this weekend. Oh internet research, I suppose we will have to be civil to one another for a few weeks yet.

Recently, I posted wondering where all the Jim Rhodes love was, which led to interesting discussion and a global increase in Rhodes-fic! You guys are the greatest.

A couple people stumbled on that post looking for Rhodes stories (I am currently at the top of Google for "Tony/Rhodey fic." It is wacky.) and that is sad because I have not written any and could not help. So I've done a bit more digging and made a list of everything I could find. There've been a few more stories since last time I made a tally, which is encouraging.

The dates beside the links indicate when I added that link to this post, which I hope will make updates easier all around. Also, you should know that this is meant to be an exhaustive list, rather than a recommendation list, but on average I think the stories are pretty good.

 
( Pretty words and pretty pictures in here. )

Anyone got anything else? I will add it!

For the record, Iron Man was a great sexy explosion of a movie, and the Tony Stark/Pepper Potts subplot was well done and one of the very few romance storylines I've actually enjoyed sitting through. I am glad that Pepper is getting so much love from fandom; she is awesome.

But. There's a lot of awesome in that movie to go around.

The other member of Tony's support team is Jim "Rhodey"* Rhodes, who gets labelled as Tony's best friend more or less by default. I assumed fandom would latch on after his... second?... scene, when ( Spoiler! )

. Although I guess you could wave that off as Tony being an asshole, but then ( More Spoiler! )

and it is very manly, I assure you, for whatever definition of manly you prefer. And then, later, ( Maybe you should go see the movie and then come back? It is great. )

And then there's that time in the hangar when... well, I think you see the picture I am trying to paint here. The shapes are helpfully numbered.

I'm not following any Iron Man Movie comms - my weakness for CGI machines is not quite a recipe for fannishery - but I'm subscribed to the LJ comm comicstore_news, which has been collecting Tony Stark related fan-output. There's been quite a bit already, but running over the descriptions the last few days I found myself dwelling on the lack Tony/Rhodey fic. It's kind of perplexing, considering normal fannish behaviour in the face of a viable slash possibility. In fact, there's all but no Rhodey fic at all.

It'd be silly to compare character-love with Tony himself, but a quick count over the comicstore_news posts since the movie gives 26 Pepper centric stories, maybe two or three of which are not Tony/Pepper.

For Rhodey? I've come up with 4. One Rhodey/Pepper, one and a half Rhodey/Tony, and one where he's a voice over the phone.

Considering what a presence he is in the movie, that is sad. He's pretty and kickass and wanders around in a military uniform! What will it take to win you over, you guys; maybe if he borrows Pepper's seventy-two inch heels for the sequel? (That... actually? I wouldn't mind to see that.)

I do, obviously, have a theory, but it'd be nice if I was wrong.

[Poll #1679]

*Best I can tell, all Tony Stark's extra smarts are built out of brain cells meant to remember things like *names*. It's not his fault names are hard? Obie-blah-blah-something is excessively rich in syllables... and "Pepper" is way better suited than whatever Mr. and Mrs. Potts *actually* picked out of the baby book... and in Ton*y*'s opinion adding a "y" to someone's name is a deep sign of respect and a huge compliment about their facial profile, but strangely Rhodes threatened violence when Tony tried out "Jimmy" for a few weeks...

**There's actually an interesting echo of this bit near the end, when ( spoiler )

***well, okay, mostly Tony, but 4srs Tony brought enough emotional intimacy issues to share with the class.