sophie✨🦋

Take Me Or Leave Me - Idina Menzel and Fredi Walker

Because, what’s homophobic???? Flynn just opened up the fridge and ketchup fell out??? What does that have to do with homophobia???

Julie: *gets a paper cut on her sheet music* Wow the homophobia

Luke: *looks back and forth at her and the paper* *chucks it out the door*

-expect your emotions to be more intense you're exhausted and poorly rested you may be more irritable or easily upset so be patient with your emotional rollercoaster after

-when you do have free time be sure to not do anything too vigorous, let yourself rest and take a nap if you are able [search for a guide on how to take a healthy nap] If you can't nap at least let your body rest

-make sure to eat something if you're hungry. You used excess energy last night being awake and you may be extra hungry as a result

-take a shower/bath it just helps you be somewhat alert if you need to be or at least helps you feel less gross after being awake all night

i want to preface this by saying that i hoped as much as everyone else that the screenshots were fake. i honestly debated even posting about it at this point because everyone seems to have made their peace that they’re fabricated and moved on, and i don’t want to start or rehash anything. i promise you, i hated making this post as much as you guys are probably going to hate reading this. but i feel like we as a fandom deserve to know and address the truth, and choosing to ignore this will only do more harm than good.

there are two tiktoks showing proof of the messages: here and here

it’s pretty clear imo that charlie sent those messages in that group chat. there’s publicly available information proving a lot of what i’m going to talk about, but i’m not going to expose anyone especially since a lot of the people involved are minors. if you want to talk more about it, feel free to dm me but i’m not going to post anything publicly beyond those tiktoks. 

so yeah. charlie talked about smut in a group chat with at least one confirmed minor as far as we know. in the screenshot you can see that someone explained what smut was to him, and then he continued on talking about the explicit fic. 

i know that a lot of us on here, myself included, love to harp on l*lex shippers, and while the racism involved with the ship should by no means pushed aside that’s also not my biggest concern at the moment. a lot of these people are young teenage girls and there’s a clear power imbalance involved. they’re fans, and he’s an adult man who they look up to. yes, they shouldn’t have sent the fic to him in the first place, but charlie’s an adult and should have known better than to encourage this. this is on him. he really can’t see that interacting and talking about sexually explicit material with minors isn’t alright??? is he that scared of his fans turning on him if he doesn’t act like he’s their close personal friend???

he needs to realize that he’s not going to lose his fanbase if he establishes boundaries with them. honestly, there’s more of a chance that he’ll lose them if he doesn’t establish boundaries. other people said this better than me (i’d like to link chloe @willexx’s post here which makes a lot of really important points regarding this as well as discussing madi, and this post by @reggieshairflip which goes really in depth into a lot of great points), but this is really concerning. 

i also went on twitter last night to see what people were saying on there, and i’m beyond words. the majority of the commentary seems to be along the lines of “protect charlie from the smut!!” 

y’all. charlie isn’t the one who needs protecting. regardless of the legal situation, if he wants to read fanfic he’s gonna find ways to read it. he’s a grown man, he’ll be fine. that’s so far removed from the actual point, i don’t know how else to explain it. charlie will be fine. we don’t have to be worried about him. 

maybe people should focus on the fact that he’s talking about smut in a group chat with minors on it? like first off, don’t be in a group chat with fans of your show, but especially don’t talk about smut with minors, what the fuck. and the fact that he doesn’t even seem to realize the issues with what he’s doing is troubling in and of itself.

charlie has been involved in various other groupchats with fans for a while (this isn’t a new thing by any means), and i will admit that most of those interactions thus far have been innocent and harmless. regardless, the fact that he’s in group chats with fans at all worries me. these people are largely young, teenaged girls who idolize charlie–they’ve practically developed a parasocial relationship with him, and that’s not healthy in the slightest. 

he’s not their “bestie,” he’s a celebrity. he keeps up with the innocent and harmless things, and encourages them, but doesn’t establish boundaries–and that’s what leads to people thinking that doing more is okay because he hasn’t said otherwise. people meeting him at the airport at 2am, fans showing up to owen’s house at midnight and then charlie entertaining them. that’s what this kind of behavior leads to, and i fear that it will inevitably lead to much worse in the future. i’m not trying to take blame away from the people who did these things–fans have to respect boundaries, set or not–but as a public figure charlie has a responsibility to set clear lines.

the point of this post is absolutely not to “cancel” him or anything. that wouldn’t be productive at all, and one of my favorite things about the jatp fandom on tumblr is our ability to have actually constructive conversations about things like this. this is tumblr, and i know i’m basically speaking to an echo chamber here– but i feel this is important enough that it has to be said, even if nobody outside of this site will probably see it. 

he needs to be held accountable and made to realize that what he’s doing isn’t okay. i get that this is his first experience being at the center of a large fandom like this, and i understand that he’s probably really excited about all the fans and wants to connect with them as much as possible. but he would do well to take notes from jeremy (and hell, madi, and she’s sixteen and didn’t have any prior acting experience at all), and engage in a healthy, responsible way like they do. i’m not going to speak about owen because i don’t really have much info or knowledge about how he interacts, but this potentially extends to him as well.

this is a really complicated and messy situation, and i get that. feel free to share your thoughts, but please be respectful. sending love to all of you guys rn 💜💜💜

there is literally so much wrong with this. as @wlwcarries put it “there is a parasocial relationship and a power imbalance”. they idolize charlie. he is not their friend, he is a celebrity. they look up to him, they listen to him, and it is dangerous. he could say one thing, even jokingly, and a million things could go wrong. i am just very sick over this and cannot wrap my brain about charlie talking about a work that has sexual content with 16 year olds (according to one person’s public instagram story that is in the group chat).

this isn’t even mentioning the fact that charlie said “lalex is a yes” and not clarifying if he meant 90s lalex or modern lalex. he listens to madison speak about how hard it is for a person of color in the industry, then says something that will make a lot of people erase willie just because he said it. he just needs to realize the weight his words hold.

here we have a screenshot of a tumblr post by readyrogueone (which i cant link for some reason) to which she has the caption ‘the majority of people in my lalex gc are poc...trust me we don’t care they’re white.’ but you do. saying that you don’t care means nothing when you repeatedly bash willie, as both a love interest for alex and his mistakes, calling him the selfish version of willie, while praising luke, who is actually selfish in more than a single episode. you consistently praise owen for doing the absolute bare minimum while taking what booboo has done out of context to further villainize willie, because you can’t fucking separate the character from the actor. you say that you don’t like juke because of the age gap of the actors and use that as your sole reason to hate on the ship, yet say that people who don’t like latex are the ones who are bashing an inherently racist ship that is fetishizing white mlm. i’m not going to skate around anymore, not going to say it’s borderline, or there’s a portion of latex shippers who do fetishize them, it is fetishizing them. if you genuinely ship alex and luke, in the present, to the point you want them to become canon, you are fetishizing white mlm. you are taking the friendship between two attractive white men playing canonically gay & queercoded (to an extent) characters and forcing it to be romantic. going back to the screenshots you posted, one of the messages read ‘i can’t think of any [alex and luke fanfictions] without smut’. that is the result of fetishizing. oh also you missed the whole fucking point.

the second tiktok was with the screenshot of ani’s post, where she clarified that there were no minors in the group chat, as she herself was not in it. she went on to say, and im quoting as closely as i can, ‘charlie can be friends with anyone he wants to. especially if they’re adults. they can do whatever they want.’

so in short, no. that’s not how it works.

charlie is a celebrity, and there is a difference between the relationship that for example, her and madi (a minor) and he and a fan, have.

there is a difference between parasocial relationships and actually knowing someone, the way that he does madi or owen or the rest of the cast.

the jatp fandom has an EXTREMELY interactive cast, who constantly like, comment and share fan content, but that does not mean that we know them. the cast are not our friends.

talk to any of the instagram accounts that madi follows, and they’ll tell you this: yes, they interact with madi, but they are still fans, and not friends. just like julie molina said, boundaries. there are boundaries and limitations in their relationships that a lot of the fandom, and charlie, fail to recognize.

being an adult does not give you a free pass in this situation. it does not magically make everything ok. also, sending a few messages into a groupchat doesn’t mean that you are friends. just for the record.

i just think that there would be so many opportunities to show teenage experiences, through so many perspectives and to commentate on hollywood and the music industry.