Oh Charlie Harper we love you get up

oh Charlie Harper we love you get up by spitkitten first appeared in issue Issue 96 in 2022.

Creator's Notes

Firstly, a pretty mild CW for disordered eating and body image issues, within the context of the Movie Star Industrial Complex :/ It’s not really gone into in detail but is present so proceed with slight caution.

Secondly… haHA can you tell which issue this was originally meant to be a pinch hit for? The second chance is for me, a certified flake. I won’t get all dramatic over what is essentially a rather silly rom-com, but I was saddened not to get this one together in time in February, and very happy that I pushed through and finished it in the end. I typed out a whole thing about what the ~ themes ~ are — authenticity, the importance and limits of professionalism, the intersection between insecurity and self-absorption — but basically it boiled down to: We can’t all be Meryl Streep. And that’s okay! Maybe that mass-appeal-oscar-nominee standard we’re holding ourselves to is a very narrow, normative idea of “success”. Maybe we’ll never achieve it; maybe we never could. Maybe it’s possible that we still deserve love — or a chance at something like it — anyway. Maybe what we authentically are is enough.

Or something like that. It was also an excuse to write quite a lot of porn!

Thank you so, so much to my lovely betas, especially Sinezona, and to our wonderful Editor for all your kind feedback and assistance. Thank you both particularly for helping me with the Americanisms! Any remaining goofs are entirely my fault. If you spot anything egregious, please kindly pretend that the Brits are just rubbing off (lol) on Charlie more than he realises.

The title is a paraphrase of a line from Frank O’Hara’s seminal “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)”. I love Frank more than I can say, and I hope to God I earned the homage. Lana, Charlie, we’ve all been there. Here’s to collapsing! Here’s to getting up! <3