A/N: This fic is the direct result of a request from fyeahclassofthetitans; "Can you write a fic about the team discovering tumblr?" So, I've tried to do that, and also fit as many headcanons in as possible. Thank you again to fyeahclassofthetitans for help with the url's and inspiration for each of the team's blogs.
This was also, as so much of my writing is, procrastination from writing Series Three. I'm still working out some character stuff for various canon characters and some OC's but I'm pretty solid with where I'm taking the episodes. Thank you for bearing with me.
I apologise in advance to anyone reading this who has no idea about Tumblr, because most of this will not make any sense.
Enjoy!
EDIT: Fix ups completed.
Follow Forever
The first time Odie discovered Neil's blog was completely unintentional. He'd been reading up on various internet theories about strange weather patterns when he followed a link to a photoset of the planetary rings caused by Cronus a few weeks earlier. What he hadn't expected to see was Neil in the foreground, posing from the same photo shoot when they'd first met the blonde.
The blog wasn't all that surprising, really. Pages of endless puns, sassy text posts and selfies, which was hardly out of character for the descendant of Narcissus. Neither was the theme, which was half Neil's face, half Neil's name.
"You should start a blog," Neil said when Odie mentioned it at training a few days later – a suggestion that Odie quickly shot down with a quirk of an eyebrow. "No, seriously. You can reblog my selfies to boost the note count, start a shipping war, troll some tags…." He trailed off to glance at his mirror. "Cat GIFs," he said, more to his reflection than Odie, pronouncing the word with a definite "f" sound.
Odie had simply shaken his head and gone back to lifting small weights.
That night, his PMR beeped out the message tone. Neil had sent him a link to a post on his blog featuring a little brown animated kitten donning green tinted glasses, with a captain reading 'SMART KITTEH IZ SMART'. Odie laughed a bit, though he wasn't sure if he liked the thought of Neil likening him to a feline on social media.
#join me, the tags read, #you know you want to#and frankly I'm surprised you aren't on here anyway#aren't all the nerds here?#but seriously#you don't want to be the last one without Tumblr#Theresa's already here#join us
So Odie sighed, rolled his eyes, and signed up, because it was that or endure months of nagging and dozens of links clogging his messages. He pretended he wasn't being snarky when he chose a nerdy theme, and spent a good hour or so reblogging all of Neil's cat GIFs just to be annoying.
HA, Neil wrote in his Ask, I KNEW YOU'D MAKE A BLOG. HAHAHAHAHAHA
About an hour later, Theresa tapped on his door and, after striding in without invitation, wordlessly typed a URL into his search engine.
"I follow back," she said, smiling wryly.
Theresa's blog was about as surprising as Neil's. Pictures of tanned women in bikinis, muscular men in minimal clothing, Lana Del Ray, Lorde and something called lux fashion dominated the gold and rosy pink pages of her blog. Often, there was sassy correspondence with Neil. Various selfies and text posts about mall visits and training were dotted around each of their archives.
It wasn't long after Theresa had convinced Archie to start a Tumblr for his poetry that Odie found the Titan tag. He'd managed to scroll down a bit before he'd had to exit the tab entirely and check online science journals to calm himself down, and he hadn't been back. Neil and Theresa would occasionally post and reblog things with cheeky insights into the "Titans of New Olympia", as the unknown seven vigilantes had been dubbed by the internet, but their posts were always innocuous and never gave away more than what a bystander would know.
After that debacle, he should have known better than to delve into anything to do with the team on Tumblr, but even brilliant people made mistakes. The first thing he posted on his own was a text post, a direct result of seeing a newspaper article about the so called Titans of New Olympia taking the law into their own hands and dealing with the weird influx of violent stray dogs. It was terse and opinionated (the police drawing emphasised his glasses to being the size of his head!), true, but since he was one of the said Titans, he had figured his opinion mattered.
According to what seemed like far too many people, his opinion was offensive and unwanted, and there was soon a long column of blue stripes on his Activity page containing snippets of people's comments on his post. It wasn't a nice column, more often than not, and the people who did agree with him tended to be just as hateful and caps-happy as those who disagreed.
Then a new little strip of blue appeared had appeared.
neil-before-the-sexy reblogged your post: So, is no one going to mention how th…
OMGWTFF11!1 U GUYS R ALL WRONG THIS GUY IS TOTES RIGHT & HE IS DA BEST WTF U ALL MAD ABOUT LOLZ LOSERS GET A LYF & …
The post was then reblogged by Theresa, who added her two cent's worth.
Exactly! We can't just assume they're lifeless, lawless vigilantes with no respect for civilised society. Maybe they just want to do good? How about you all stop hero-shaming the Titans because a) you don't know their story b) they're doing more than you are and c) maybe they're just trying to help.
Which was then followed by Archie adding a Supernatural GIF. Odie laughed and reblogged the whole thing.
It hadn't even been a month since he'd started his blog (and about a week since Atlanta had joined the blogging platform) that he found out what "trolling tags" actually entailed.
The first was a candid photo of Jay (snapped by Neil, of course, when the leader was otherwise occupied with a work out), beneath which many teenaged girls had typed "OMG HOW HOT", "OTP: ME AND HIM" and "DARLING!". At the bottom, Neil had captioned it "LOL HE IS TOTES HOT 10/10 WOULD BANG". Odie had snorted, his mouse hovering over the little reblog arrows for a moment before he decided that you only live once and clicked.
As though he'd only been waiting for the invitation, Odie's Dashboard was soon overflowing with trolling. It got to the point where he couldn't see a picture of Jay (who, thanks to the combined efforts of Neil and a surprisingly internet-savvy Atlanta, had become the memic son of Ridiculously Photogenic Guy) without bursting into laugher. Then it migrated to others.
On any of Neil's selfies, he would see comments from Atlanta and Theresa professing their love for blondes. Archie's poetry blog was overrun with cats GIFs that all had a striking resemblance to the warrior. Herry hadn't needed much convincing to join Tumblr after that, and had happily joined the trolling. In the Greek Mythology tag, pictures of statues of Heph were inexplicably inundated with pictures of Gimli in Lord of the Rings, and Heracles with HULK SMASH references. The poor Artemis fans were subject to Brave GIFs in the comments of all their posts (Ares fans were similarly wondering why they had so many GIFs of Li Shang from Mulan at the bottom of their beloved Ares posts).
It wasn't until a few days after Jay finally (after weeks of suggestion and careful prodding from Theresa) gave up and created his own blog that Odie discovered Neil's tag. As it turned out, the blonde had something of a small army of teenage girls who dedicated hours of their days to the worship of the Tumblr famous Neil. There were fanfics, fanblogs, videos and art. One depicted him as Loki from The Avengers, with the caption of "KNEEEEL". Another involved him dressed as Rocky – except much, much skimpier. He hadn't blushed so much since he'd read the one and only fanfiction written about Neil's favourite "fan" (Theresa) and the son of Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, which featured more adult content than Herry's not-safe-for-work sideblog. Odie hadn't been able to look at either Theresa or Jay for quite some time afterwards.
It was about at that point, when he'd changed Neil to 'KNEEEEL', Archie to 'Catchie', Jay to ' ✧ follow for more grunge ✧ ' in his contacts, when he started printing out Atlanta's photography and sticking it on his bedroom wall and when he and Theresa were making a batch of cookies from one of Herry's recipes that the seven heroes weren't just his teammates anymore. Somewhere between YOLO and SuperWhoLock, they had all managed to become more than just teammates and allies. They had become friends.
And then he knew what he had to do.
The next time he sat at his desk with Tumblr open, he clicked the button for a new text post and started typing.
Jay and Theresa were lying on her bed, back-to-back, blogging intently. Jay was off somewhere in the depths of the Cronus tag, as was his usual approach to most things, while Theresa was nonchalantly dash-diving through the day's posts. It was when she finally reloaded the page that she first spied the new text post from Odie. She clicked the 'read more' to open it a new tab, and after skimming the short list, she smiled.
"Look at this," Theresa murmured to Jay, passing him her laptop. He glanced at the post, and then back to her.
"Well, how about that," he said, the corners of his mouth turning upward.
Atlanta had just finished editing a photoset of various pictures from her latest outing with Archie in the park. It was to be her newest post on Tumblr. Her blog was mainly landscapes, animals, Greenpeace posters and PSA's, but every now and then it was nice to have a few posts of Archie. Purple went nice with green.
She sighed and closed Photoshop, opening Tumblr robotically. She went to click the button to post her photos, but saw a post that Theresa had reblogged from Odie – a simple 'read more'. Knowing that those things normally meant bad news, she clicked it hesitantly.
She read the post, her face flickering from uncertainty to delight as she went.
Her photos were forgotten when she finished.
She had never clicked reblog faster.
Archie and Herry were engaged in a vigorous game of foosball in the living room when Jay sent them a message on Archie's PMR with nothing but a link to a certain post on Odie's blog. They stopped their game and clicked the link, which brought them to the sci-fi-esque theme that Odie hadn't changed since first creating the blog. The picture accompanying the post was one of all the team, taken on the same PMR that they were looking at then.
They read together, smiling at the words.
Neil hummed to himself as he scrolled through his dash, wondering idly if neil-have-my-babies had gotten around to posting that Neil/Mirror drabble they'd promised. It was his OTP, after all. Then he paused, blinking at the screen, before a wide grin stole across his face, his eyes lighting up gleefully.
odie-wan's follow forever:
neil-before-the-sexy
psychic-lux
thepurple-prose
protecttheplanetorelse
i-could-eat-a-h0rse
welcome-t0-my-life