Author's Note: At the end of the first chapter, Robin was handing out "guidelines" for dealing with fan mail. In the gap between that chapter and this one, the other Titans have all read their copies. However, I don't plan on sharing them with you just yet. My current plan for "organizing" my ideas about this is to have each of the next few chapters (after this one) concentrate on how the five Titans each deal with fan mail of a particular "type" mentioned in those guidelines; one type per chapter! Or something like that. Stay tuned!
Chapter Two: The Size of the Job
A few minutes later, all five Titans were down on the ground floor of the Tower, staring at six huge plastic "bins," each of which contained a vast quantity of unopened envelopes (leavened with colorful advertising material and the occasional postcard). From left to right, the bins were labeled in alphabetical order: Beast Boy, Cyborg, Raven, Robin, Starfire, and Teen Titans. Starfire's was nearly full; Robin's was running a close second; each of the other four was just about the same—roughly two-thirds full.
The Tower's occupants walked past these bins each time they used the main door to go in or out of the building, but they had spent the last two years learning to ignore the silly things.
Soon after the completion of the Tower, the Titans had been faced with the problem of how to handle a growing torrent of unwanted mail arriving at the front door each day. Mostly mass-produced junk mail at first—but with a trend of more fan mail in the mix each week, after their new home became famous in the national media as "the ultra-modern residence of Jump City's superhero protectors!"
Robin had set up a system with the post office, carefully modeled on arrangements which he learned some of the older generation of superheroes had already worked out with other branch offices of the United States Postal Service. The USPS agreed to sort through anything addressed to any occupant of Titans Tower when it arrived at their main facility in Jump City. The sorting process involved six piles: One stack for each of the five Titans and a last one for anything addressed to the entire team.
(If a piece of mail was addressed to more than one Titan, but not the entire team—"Attention: Robin & Starfire, c/o Titans Tower," for instance—then it was automatically added to the stack for whichever addressee was listed first.)
According to the new routine, just once a week a postman delivered bulging bags containing the last seven days' worth of mail, already sorted and labeled. The postman would leave the bags just outside the door and then leave. Eventually someone (usually Cyborg) would open the front door, examine the labels on the bags, and empty each one into the matching bin inside the Tower, just on the off chance that someone might actually want to investigate some of the latest crop of letters and postcards from people frantically trying to get his or her attention.
(As far as Cyborg knew, none of the Titans had ever bothered to skim through their own mail bin since the system began. But they always had the option!)
Eventually at least one or two of the bins would be overflowing, and Cyborg would place a call to a service company which took tons of old paper away to shred and recycle. All five bins would be emptied out at once. It had been just over a month since the last emptying. At least the Titans were doing their bit to keep several tons of paper each year going back into general use, thereby saving the lives of a few innocent trees somewhere!
This was not to say that it was impossible to successfully communicate with the Tower's residents from a long distance away. Actual friends and/or allies of the team—such as Batman, the Doom Patrol, Titans East, and the Jump City police (along with various other law enforcement organizations)—knew how to send messages by other means so that they would actually be noticed by the intended recipients. For instance: Encrypted calls if the matter was urgent enough to merit interrupting whatever a Titan might be doing just then. If it wasn't, then things could be emailed back and forth between addresses which were kept secret from the public. Cyborg was in charge of keeping the software up-to-date on that sort of thing; any incoming emails which did not use the Titans' latest encryption codes were automatically blocked as spam!
(Ergo, any fan who wanted to send unsolicited emails to the Titans was completely out of luck even if he learned one of their current addresses; no one would ever notice the message had existed, much less be tempted to open it! With snail mail, at least he had a tiny chance that someone would eventually read his epistle!)
"Okay, here's what I didn't write down," Robin said while his buddies were still staring at the bins with expressions which suggested a certain lack of enthusiasm. "I want each of you to select 500 envelopes, open them, examine the contents, and respond to at least some as you go along. Sure, 500 apiece is just a drop in the bucket of what's piled up in each bin—but it's a start!"
"Excuse me, Robin," Starfire said dubiously. "But a few weeks after we moved into this Tower, did you not say that fan mail was a waste of time? That once someone has gained a reputation as a 'superhero,' he will receive far more mail than he could possibly answer in detail even if he worked at it every day? And did you not also say that much of it will be requests for special favors the hero should not grant; perhaps even for things which are impossible for him to accomplish?"
"Sure," Robin conceded. "I said that! But I was what, fifteen? I didn't have all the answers at that age! All I knew was that Batman never reads fan letters from law-abiding civilians. Since the Batcave doesn't exactly have its own mailbox out front, most of the items addressed to 'Batman' end up at the Gotham police HQ. Their mail room filters it along with the thousands of other items they get each day. All Batman wants them to save for him is the really weird stuff that might be from the Riddler or Two-Face or someone else who likes to play mind games in advance of his next big crime."
"That sounds sensible," Cyborg said pointedly. "But as soon as Superman mentioned a different approach, you decided to follow his example? You do remember that he can read things super-fast whenever he has a spare minute? None of us can!"
"That's why we're not going to do this every week," Robin said patiently. "We'll try it for a few days, and see how it goes. Maybe we'll do fan mail binges once or twice a year in the future, but that decision can wait."
Beast Boy heaved a sigh of relief. "So after the next couple of days, most of this stuff will still be taken away for recycling, same as before? You aren't planning to make us do, like, a steady quota?"
Robin looked innocent. "Wouldn't dream of it! Most of what I said a couple of years ago still looks pretty good. I know we can't answer all of it, and I'm not proposing to try! But it won't hurt us much to find out more about what a fair number of ordinary people really think of us!"
"Not much?" Starfire inquired, startled by the implication that there would be some pain involved.
"Some people send 'hate mail' to celebrities, with or without provocation," Robin explained. "We call these our 'fan mail bins,' but I bet a significant percentage of the contents didn't come from fervent admirers. Our feelings may get bruised, but I'm sure we're all tough enough to handle it!"
(Raven certainly wasn't worried about that point. After you've spit in Trigon's eye, a few nasty words in a letter from a complete stranger aren't going to break your spirit.)
Beast Boy scratched his head. "So wait—if someone says all sorts of scathing things about me in a letter, what am I supposed to do about it if I think most of their gripes are wildly exaggerated or just plain wrong?"
Robin spread his hands. "I didn't write any special guidelines about that. If you think someone is unfairly criticizing you, then you can write a reply trying to set the record straight . . . if you happen to feel like it. If you think it's a lost cause, don't bother!"
"Hold on," Raven said, her attention captured by that "don't bother" comment. "Your guidelines do list some things you figure we're better off throwing away—but just how much of the other, relatively harmless stuff do you actually expect us to reply to? I gather we're allowed to ignore some of it on the grounds of personal taste?"
Robin paused. "I hadn't come up with a hard number—heck, let's say we're supposed to compose and mail a dozen replies apiece, minimum, by no later than Saturday night. That shouldn't be too stressful."
Raven had always had a gift for imagining worst-case scenarios. "What if I look through my quota of 500 items and don't find a dozen pieces that are worth replying to?"
Robin shrugged. "Then you'll just have to go back and open a few hundred more until you do find enough material to inspire twelve replies. Or until your bin is empty, as long as you actually looked at everything in it hard enough to give the writers a fair chance to get you interested in whatever they had to say."
Cyborg was reexamining the list of guidelines with a jaundiced eye. "I suppose you'll want to look at our replies before we mail them, to double-check that we're not accidentally spilling anything that would look awful in the media?"
Robin stared at him. "Why would I do that? Either I believe you guys have some sense of discretion—and will actually pay attention to my basic guidelines after I write them down for you—or else I don't. And if I don't, then this team is in terrible trouble. We've all known each other for two years. We've all been living under the same roof for two years. We've all been taking turns saving one another's lives for two years! Anyone can make an honest mistake occasionally—and we all have!—but at the end of the day we still trust each other's good intentions. For instance, I think you guys trust me not to be constantly violating your privacy by spying on everything the rest of you say and do, any time, any place, that might conceivably be embarrassing to the team. So if you ever caught me censoring your personal correspondence, then you'd be justified in throwing me out on my ear!"
He paused, struck by a new thought. "Well . . . unless for some reason we had agreed in advance that we could tolerate mutual censorship in extreme circumstances—such as when there was something so dangerous going on that having our communications with the outside world say exactly the 'right things' about certain subjects looked like a matter of life and death. In that case, double-checking the wisdom of each other's letters and conversations with outsiders might feel more urgent than rigorously respecting 'personal privacy' for the next day or two."
Robin waved that last bit aside as he finished up his lecture. "But that was just speculative. In practice, we've never agreed to such rules, and that scenario would have nothing to do with this mission anyway! Any other questions? If not, let's start counting out our 500 apiece! And remember, obvious junk mail doesn't count at all—it won't tell us anything about our own public images!"
(Until a minute ago, Beast Boy had been chewing on the idea of sending out one friendly form letter to any writer who sounded like a cute teenage girl with a proper appreciation of his cool green suavity, and just ignoring everything else. Now he was forced to modify that plan. After Robin's big speech about mutual trust, it just wouldn't feel right to type out one generic letter, print it out at least twelve times for different girls, and claim that this constituted meeting the quota of twelve. Beast Boy might still use the form letter idea for some fans, but he now realized he'd have to type out at least eleven other, more personalized replies, in order to feel he'd lived up to Robin's expectations without cheating. What a dirty trick for their leader to pull, putting it all on their own consciences!)
Author's Note: Just in case you were wondering: My comments about how our heroes have handled mail delivery "normally" (until Robin got this wild idea about answering some of it) are drawn entirely from my own imagination. Offhand, I don't recall any TV episode that really addressed the point of how likely Starfire would be to actually see a letter from a random admirer who was frantically begging her to send him an autographed photo, for instance. So I had to improvise something on the spur of the moment, for the purposes of my own plot.
Although I admit the Titans obviously sometimes paid attention to an "unexpected delivery"—such as those puppet replicas of themselves which The Puppet King used in his first appearance. But he may have simply hand-delivered the box and left it sitting outside the front door waiting for someone to find it. There was no clear sign that the box had definitely arrived through normal channels—the Titans apparently didn't find that package inside a bag containing a hundred other items of daily mail. Perhaps that episode (in Season One) happened very early on, before the USPS had actually added the newly built Titans Tower to somebody's regular mail route, and thus before (in my reconstruction of events) Robin ever found it necessary to make special arrangements for dealing with a flood of unwanted mail?