The Irony of Spending All Your Life on Tumblr

When Alex first made his tumblr, he’d had no intention of lying and hiding his identity. He simply decided that before he tweeted the url for all the kids to follow, he could have a little fun, see who could find him first. He’d write a simple paragraph or two about what the guys were doing, and put his phone away for a few hours.

But then he got his first anon.

And it wasn’t just an anonymous message – it was anonymous hate.



Alex, needless to say, was pissed. But once he got over the atrocious grammar and spelling and the use of homosexuality as an insult, he managed to find humour in his situation – not only did people think his life was fanfiction, but it was bad, unrealistic, and clichéd.

So maybe he got a little too caught up in the humour and published the message with a frowny face and tagged it as out of character. It was all in good fun, right? And the fake “about the admin” was, of course, just for laughs. But, somewhere along the lines, people started following this tumblr. And Alex became Lexy, and Lexy became a barista, and Baltimore became LA, and soon he was in too deep to fix his 3k situation with one tweet.

When he realized just how deep he was, Alex chose to do the obvious thing. He wrote a text post apologizing to his followers and explaining everything – he’d gone through a really tough breakup and wasn’t going to be posting imagines for a while. Earthtoalex, of course, would become a regular fandom blog, instead – he figured people would forget about him and he could erase the entire mistake with no consequences.

A few of his most loyal followers were quick to protest, however, and protest they did. After the seventh message telling Lexy to “at the very least” make a compilation fanfic of all the blurbs (and he could even add some Jalex smut if he wanted!), Alex decided to seek help from the most helpful and least likely to judge person he could find. After realizing that none of his bandmates or crew fit that description, he settled for Jack.

“Dude! This is fucking unreal. You’re a fanfic writer! Oh my god, Rian’s gonna flip a shit when he hears…”

“Jack!” Alex protested weakly. “First off, it’s not fanfic if it actually fucking happened, you dickwad. Second, you absolutely cannot tell anyone. Or I’ll – I’ll–” He knew if word got out, he’d never live it down. In hindsight, he probably should’ve picked someone other than Jack to ask for help – he had no friendly blackmail to use. The Lebanese guitarist had no shame whatsoever.

Jack grinned stupidly at him, and Alex felt a little bit guilty for thinking he’d need blackmail when he heard the next words out of his best friend’s mouth.

“Alright, man, don’t get your banana hammock in a twist, I won’t tell. But if I’m getting dragged into this whole mess with you, I wanna make it fun, with, like, a competition or something.”

“Competition?” Jack’s idea was not immediately clear to Alex.

“Yeah, imma make an account, too. And when everything bubbles over or whatever the hell that saying is, whoever has the most followers or readers or shit wins.”

“So we’re competing to write better fanfiction about our own lives? Isn’t that kind of fucked up?”

Alex wondered, before shaking off the idea for a much better question. “What are the stakes?”

Jack’s smile should have been more than enough to keep Alex from agreeing to the bet. “I dunno…how about, loser has to do whatever I – sorry, “the winner” wants for a day. Ohh, and they take the fall for getting caught writing fanfiction.”

“You are so on.”

“Wait! Dude, not done yet. You have to help me get started, because it’s so not fair if you have like a gazillion followers and I have like one.”

Alex rolled his eyes, but logged out and hit the join button anyway.