I love good movies. But my soft spot for bad movies is perhaps softer than it should be.

Enter After, and a bestie who loves bad movies as much as I do. After originated as a Wattpad fanfic about Harry Styles and his 1D brethren. Much like Fifty Shades of Gray, it took the world by storm, got its author Anna Todd an actual publishing deal, and now it’s a smash hit movie.

Well. I mean. It’s a movie.

Full disclosure, I DID read a fair amount the original After story. I lost interest during the sequel, but I got through the first one. It’s better than you would think a Wattpad fanfic about Harry Styles and his 1D brethren could ever be. Anna Todd has a knack for pacing and while the relationship depicted is hella toxic and should not be portrayed as a romantic ideal to young women, damn if it’s not an entertaining read.

Jess A. is someone who the fates introduced me to freshman year of college when she and I were assigned to the same third floor dormitory. She helped teach me to approach movies as an academic pursuit and not just a thing to do to entertain yourself when you’re bored. Today, we live four hours apart and those academic pursuits oftentimes take the form of “Textflix and Chill” meaning we’ll put on a movie (preferably a bad one), and text our thoughts as we do. So when we learned that the film adaptation of After had made it to Netflix… there was only logical choice to make.

Blue = My texts.
Grey = Jess’s texts.