Picture this: Bollywood’s favorite youngsters Aneet Padda and Ahaan Pandey wake up embracing in a luxury hotel room. He is openly sharing his anxieties about winning the Filmfare Award for Best Debut for his hit film Syayara. This may look like leaked camera footage. but it’s not like that. This is the storyline only for Aneet – Still a few moments left, Wattpad’s #1 trending fan fiction story for Saiyara, created by user @AneetWrites.
A click away, a story by @ChaiiCoffeeeeCupp takes the same film’s plot into new territory. Pandey’s character Krish is suffering from fever, due to which Padda’s character Vani is adopting him as if he is a patient with early amnesia. There are other outrageous stories. Bhor: Her Time Has Risen, by @Glory534, focuses on Dawn Thakur, a rebellious young woman based on actor Shraddha Kapoor, who seeks to avenge the murder of her parents at the hands of an evil uncle. And who else but fellow actors Tiger Shroff, Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif should join him on his deadly adventures?
Fan fiction (fanfic, to use insider shorthand; FF, to use even shorter shorthand) has been a user-generated alternative universe to pop culture since 1967. That’s when the magazine Spokenalia launched its fan-made, Star Trek-themed stories, artwork, and commentary. For three decades, FF has been where the Internet has shared its fantasies about current affairs. On platforms like Wattpad, Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Fanfiction.net, it’s enjoying a resurgence, even as AI continues to irritate creative people.
It used to be that fan fiction was the preserve of the amateur writer, a place to hone one’s skills before bringing a novel out into the world. EL James’s 50 Shades of Gray started as the Twilight FF. Chetan Bhagat’s new novel, 12 Years: My Messed-Up Love Story, an age-gap romance, seems inspired by indie-fiction tropes. Now, with AI mingling with actual writing, and originality in actual movies and shows being largely diminished, where else can the unlikely genre go to see some brave fiction, anyway?
meet the authors
Retired software professional Sitaram Jayakumar started writing late in life. He began with fanfic in 2017–18, with stories based on characters he loved as a young boy: Tintin, Captain Haddock, Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers. He published them on his WordPress blog, JessWriteUps. Then, he told a story about a scientist named Andre who creates a tennis-playing robot that refuses to play until the scientist creates a female bot, Steffi, to compete. “I enjoyed putting these characters in a science-fiction setting,” says Jayakumar. “The Switch gave me more room for creativity.”
This is largely why most writers create FF: writers jump in to change an unsatisfactory ending, to re-imagine the setting of their favorite novels, to fill the void that comes after a beloved adventure ends, to re-imagine characters with different genders or sexual identities, to give an underdog some main-character energy. But most of all, the genre reminds us that we have been building on stories since cave times. “You can experience love and happiness with an anonymous community online simply because you like the same characters,” says author Suchita Agarwal.
Aggarwal, who heads operations of BlogChatter, a type of social-media platform for indie authors and their blogs, has been publishing fiction on AO3 since 2020. She says it more accurately reveals young people’s preoccupations than mainstream pop culture. FF explored mental health, sexuality, racial inclusivity, and neurodivergence long before it appeared on HBO and Netflix. Aggarwal currently has two fandoms: Merthur (a romantic pairing between Merlin and King Arthur) and Holanove (the lead pairing in Rachel Reed’s hockey romance Heated Rivalry). He’s not too worried about the bots taking over. People who spend so much time and effort creating art and prose for free aren’t looking for outsourcing, she says. Additionally, dedicated FF platforms now require users to label their work if it has been created with the help of AI.
know the tropes
As anyone who has followed the Mahabharata, Shakespearean tragedies and Disney fairy tales knows, a good story can be told again and again. The 2025 edit: A revival of the worried-man-meets-trembling-girl formula, courtesy of this year’s sleeper hit, Saiyaara.
Shravani Kini, who writes on Wattpad as @Shay_Wrts, often uses it in her FF. “I love heart-warming romances and am interested in stories that provide warmth and an emotional feel,” she says. Her story is based on his wife, rugged businessman Rudransh Rathod, and sweet teacher Shivanya Chauhan. They are chalk and cheese. Their chemistry is off the charts. This is an arranged match. Love blooms later. Cheesy? Perhaps. But it has received four million views.
Jayakumar regularly inserts himself into his novels. In one story, the Five Find-Outers have planned an elaborate picnic in a park, and she is there, getting writing tips from Enid Blyton. Dear! Other popular storylines include homoerotic slow-burns inspired by Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff’s War franchise. One hilarious picture is of Roshan and Shroff, the two hotties IRL, talking on the phone and eating ice cream together while crushing on each other. Student-teacher romances abound. This is a world where Aryan Khan can fall in love with a regular college student; Where wife swapping with missing ladies results in unexpected romance. It’s like sharing someone’s daydream – starting without the IV.
track changes
Wattpad’s top 10 Indian stories (as upvoted by users) show how much is changing. Interspersed with enemy-to-lovers tales are stories involving romance between older couples, hardcore sexuality, and BDSM. Stories by Jagriti Singh (@Tara_Wrts) are often trending. The 22-year-old student from Ayodhya incorporates mystery and supernatural elements into her love stories. No simpering maidens. There is no heroine who bites her lower lip (we’re looking at you, Bella from Twilight and Anna from 50 Shades…). Instead, as the Leo women fight for love amidst social rejection, they fall in love with ghosts in old castles. She says, “Indian FF used to focus on the arrogant male main character (MMC) and the vulnerable FMC but this dynamic is slowly changing.”
Mona Curtis, a Delhi-based teacher who writes on Wattpad, Goodnovel and Moboreader, says that when fans drive the narrative, they are not bound by market requirements and the commercial obligation to tie every loose end into a neat bow. It gives fictional space for “flawed characters, past trauma, healing, and genuine emotional depth”.
But where there is creativity, there is corruption also. What happens when the college kid next door starts writing creepy-violent stories about you online and passing it off as fan fiction? What happens when disturbing sexuality is crafted out of underage actors and even animals? AO3 has a no-moderation policy in order to maintain a censorship-resistant space for authors. There is an entire category dedicated to RPF (Real Person Fiction). This is a defamation case waiting to happen. And in 2020, it ran into a monster of its own making, when authors began publishing pornographic fanfics of popular actors Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo and depicting underage prostitution. The site was blocked in China.
Critics believe this is where AI can really help. A trained bot can instantly scan thousands of stories, and flag narratives that compromise real-world people, while leaving other creative works intact.
see the future
Meanwhile, FF has a new format: video. On TikTok and Instagram, millions of people follow @JennaLu and her friend as they pretend to be Hogwarts students, rolling their eyes at petty Quidditch politics and Yule Ball BTS drama in AMA-style videos.
Unlike writing, it’s all fun and games until it becomes very successful. In 2013, YouTuber Melissa Hunter began filming herself as the adult Wednesday Addams, imagining the character as someone who grew up in L.A. (black frocks, dark humor). It was such a hit with audiences that Amazon MGM, the owner of the Addams franchise, flagged it as a copyright violation and forced him to end the series.
This is where AI will falter. Actors and studios are already protecting their likenesses and their IP from digital scraping. Filming a fan-made Saiya sequel or spinoff won’t be as easy as writing it. This means that, for a truly fundamentally untouched story, we are back where we started, with words and the spells they cast in our minds.
From HT Brunch, December 06, 2025
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