Plot twist: Fan fiction is back. But will writers win against AI?
Where to go when your favourite movie, show or book just doesn’t hit the spot? India’s fan-fiction writers are spinning old plots into new. Would you upvote a crossover into the canon?
Picture this: Aneet Padda and Ahaan Panday, Bollywood’s favourite younglings, wake up cuddling in a luxury hotel room. They’re openheartedly sharing their anxieties about winning Filmfare awards for Best Debut for their hit film, Saiyaara. This might seem like leaked camera footage. But it isn’t. It’s merely the plot for Ahneet – Abhi Bhi Kuch Pal Baki Hai, Wattpad’s #1 trending fan fiction story for Saiyaara, conjured up by user @AneetWrites.
One click away, a tale by @ChaiiCoffeeeeCupp steers the same film’s plot into new territory. Panday’s character Krish is down with a fever, allowing Padda’s character Vaani to baby him like he’s an early-onset amnesia patient. There are other outrageous tales. BHOR: Her Time Has Risen, by @Glory534, focuses on Dawn Thakur, a rebellious young woman modelled on actor Shraddha Kapoor, out to avenge the murder of her parents at the hands of an evil uncle. And who should join her deadly adventures, but fellow actors Tiger Shroff, Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif?
Fan fiction (FanFic, to use the insider shorthand; FF, to use the even shorter shorthand) has been the user-generated alternate universe for pop culture since 1967. That’s when the magazine Spockanalia launched its fan-created, Star Trek-themed stories, artwork and commentary. For three decades, FF is where the internet has shared its fantasies about existing fantasies. On platforms such as Wattpad, Archive Of Our Own (AO3) and FanFiction.net, it’s enjoying a resurgence even as AI is making creative folks jittery.
It used to be that fan fiction was the preserve of the amateur writer, a place to sharpen one’s skills before unleashing a novel on to the world. EL James’s 50 Shades of Grey started out as 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 pitching in with the actual writing, and with actual films and shows largely falling short on originality, anyway, the unlikely genre is where to go to see some brave fiction.
Meet the writers
Retired software professional Sitharaam Jayakumar took to writing late in life. He started with FanFic in 2017-18, spinning 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, JaisWriteUps. Then, he levelled up with a tale about a scientist who builds a tennis-playing robot called Andre, who refuses to play until the scientist creates a female bot, Steffi, to compete. “I enjoyed putting these characters into science-fiction settings,” Jayakumar says. “The switch gave me more room for creativity.”
It’s largely why most writers create FF: Writers jump in to change an unsatisfactory ending, to reimagine the setting of their favourite novels, to fill the void that enters once a beloved adventure has ended, to reimagine the 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’ve been building on stories since cave times. “You can experience sheer love and joy with an anonymous community online simply because you love the same characters,” says writer Suchita Agarwal.
Agarwal, who heads operations at Blogchatter, a kind of social-media platform for indie writers and their blogs, has been devouring fiction on AO3 since 2020. It reveals young people’s preoccupations more accurately than mainstream pop culture, she says. FF explored mental health, sexuality, racial inclusivity and neurodivergence long before they showed up on HBO and Netflix. Agarwal is currently into two fandoms: Merthur (a romantic pairing between Merlin and King Arthur) and Hollanov (the main pair in Rachel Reid’s hockey romance Heated Rivalry). She isn’t too worried about the bots taking over. People who spend that much time and effort to create art and prose for free aren’t looking to outsource, she says. Besides, dedicated FF platforms now require users to label their work if it has been created with AI’s help.
Know the tropes
As anyone who’s followed the Mahabharata, Shakespeare’s tragedies and Disney fairytales knows, a good story can be retold over and over. The 2025 edit: A resurgence of the brooding-man-meets-trembling-girl formula, courtesy this year’s sleeper hit, Saiyaara.
Shravani Kini, who writes on Wattpad as @Shay_Wrts, uses it often in her FF. “I love heart-melting romances and I’m keen on stories that offer warmth and emotional feeling,” she says. Her story, His Wife, follows rugged businessman Rudransh Rathore and the sweet teacher Shivanya Chauhan. They’re chalk and cheese. Their chemistry is off the charts. It’s an arranged match. Love blossoms after. Cheesy? Maybe. But it has racked up four million views.
Jayakumar routinely puts himself into his fiction. In one story, the Five Find-Outers lay out an elaborate picnic in a park, and he’s right there, getting writing tips from Enid Blyton. Cute! Other popular storylines include homoerotic slow-burns inspired by Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff’s War franchise. One hilarious one has Roshan and Shroff, both muscled hunks IRL, chatting on the phone and eating ice-cream together, crushing on each other. Student-teacher romances abound. This is a world where Aryan Khan can fall for a regular college student; where the wife-swap from Laapataa Ladies results in unexpected romance. It’s like sharing in someone’s daydream – Inception without the IV.
Track the changes
Wattpad’s Top 10 Indian stories (as upvoted by users) show how much is changing. Amid the enemies-to-lovers tales are romances among older couples, hardcore erotica and tales involving BDSM. Jagriti Singh’s (@Tara_Wrts) stories are often trending. The 22-year-old student from Ayodhya throws in mystery and supernatural elements in her love stories. No simpering damsels. No heroines who bite their lower lip (we’re looking at you, Bella from Twilight and Ana from 50 Shades…). Instead, Singh’s women fight for love amid social disapproval, they fall for ghosts in old palaces. “Indian FF used to focus on the arrogant male main character (MMC) and weak FMC but this dynamic is slowly changing,” she says.
Delhi teacher Mona Curtis, who writes on Wattpad, Goodnovel and Moboreader, says that when fans drive the plot, they’re not bound by market requirements and the commercial obligation to tie every loose end into a neat bow. It gives fiction room for “flawed characters, past trauma, healing and genuine emotional depth”.
But where there’s creativity, there is also corruption. What happens when the college kid next door starts to write creepy-violent stories about you online, and passes it off as fan fiction? What happens when disturbing erotica is conjured out of underage actors and even animals? AO3 has a no-monitoring policy, so as to maintain an anti-censorship space for writers. There’s an entire category dedicated to RPF (Real Person Fiction). It’s a libel case waiting to happen. And in 2020, it ran into a monster of its own making, when writers started publishing pornographic fanfic featuring popular actors Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo and featuring underage prostitution. The site was blocked in China.
This, critics believe, is where AI can actually help. A trained bot can scan thousands of stories quickly, and flag the plots 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 follow @JennaLu and her friend, as they pretend to be Hogwarts students, hilariously rolling her eyes at petty Quidditch politics and Yule Ball BTS drama in AMA-style videos.
Unlike writing, it’s all fun and games until it gets too successful. In 2013, YouTuber Melissa Hunter started filming herself in and as Adult Wednesday Addams, imagining the character as a grown-up in LA (black frock, dark humour). It was such a hit with viewers, the Addams franchise owner, Amazon MGM flagged it as a copyright infringement and forced her to end the series.
Here’s where AI will flounder. Actors and studios are already protecting their likenesses and their IP from digital scraping. It won’t be as easy to film a fan-created Saiyaara sequel or spinoff as it is to simply write one. It means, for a truly original unhinged story, we’re back to where we began, with words and the spells they cast in our minds.
From HT Brunch, December 06, 2025
Follow us on www.instagram.com/htbrunch
