themarinaalexis:

I made a video on this a few weeks ago, but I’m bored, tired after traveling all day, and in the mood to rehash some drama, so I figured I’d make a post here for anyone who’s interested since it seems that Ashley recently unfollowed Lucy on Twitter. *Disclaimer: Obviously there’s no way to know the real story between them (if there even is a story at all), but it’s kind of interesting to go back and revisit what might have been the biggest drama in the PLL fandom.

- Ashley and Lucy met at 15 years old through MySpace: “I’ve known Lucy [Hale] since I was 15. We met on MySpace! We messaged each other because we had mutual friends, and we just started talking every day.“ (source)

- They were good friends prior to the show, and were often seen together before it began airing in June of 2010. (source)

- They appeared to keep up a close friendship during the filming of the first several seasons of the show. This behind the scenes video gives a good look at their relationship.

- The first sign of (very debatable) trouble took place in 2012. Lucy was the only one of the girls to attend Coachella that year. Around the same time, Ashley, Shay, and Troian posted a video on set in which they appeared to poke fun at Coachella and claimed that they could not attend the event because of filming. There was some speculation at the time that the video was targeted specifically at Lucy, although this has never been confirmed.

- Later that year, Lucy and her boyfriend, Chris Zylka (in the picture above) broke up. Chris made the breakup public with the following nasty tweet:

- Just several months later, somewhat intimate photos were released of Ashley and Chris. Allegedly, Lucy briefly unfollowed both Shay and Ashley on Instagram around this time, although I could not find confirmation of this.

- It was around this time, 2013, that rumors began to swirl about a possible rift between Lucy and the other PLL girls, which prompted Lucy to tweet the following:

- Rumors continued to grow, however, as more and more photos emerged of Troian, Shay, and Ashley, with Lucy conspicuously absent, including at events such as the 100th episode party. This lasted through 2013 and into 2014.

- At one point, Ashley posted a picture on Instagram of her and Shay, captioned “#buttahbenzo forever” (unfortunately Ashley has since deleted many of her photos from PLL and I could not find a screenshot). The very same day, Lucy posted this (source):

- It was also in 2014 that Lucy began working on her country album. The rest of the PLL girls were very noticeably silent on social media. There was no support for her music career or promotion when her album came out. This was particularly conspicuous coming from Ashley, who was otherwise very vocal on Twitter about her costars’ other projects around the same time. The latter two tweets refer to “Dancing with the Stars” and “life.love.beauty” respectively:

- The silence regarding Lucy’s album (and the speculation that jealousy/resentment was the reason for it) caused the feud rumors to explode. Soon after, nominations were released for that year’s Teen Choice Awards, in which Lucy and Troian were both nominated for Choice TV Actress in Drama. Ashley and Shay tweeted the following, likely in response:

- The rumor of a Lucy/Ashley feud was finally addressed when Ashley tweeted out a screenshot of a sweet text conversation between her and Lucy.

- In the months following (end of 2014 into 2015), Lucy and Ashley were noticeably inclusive toward each other on social media:

- Since then, things have seemed relatively peaceful between them. It’s clear that the close friendship they seemed to have back in 2010 - 2011 is likely gone for good (remember that they were only around 20 then, and friendships often change!), but up until this latest unfollowing, it seemed as though any possible feud between them was over.

Congrats to anyone who got through all of that! I wasn’t actually part of the fandom until around 2015, so I missed most of this drama. It was definitely interesting to look back and speculate on the story between them. I’d love to read others’ thoughts! If there’s anything you know that I missed, I’d be happy to add it in! And let me know if there’s any other cast drama you’d like me to research and write about, this was strangely entertaining.