7 Best Romance Books That Started As Fanfiction
Beatriz (Bea) Valero de Urquia is a Books & Literature author at Collider, where she focuses on Lists surrounding recent bestsellers, classical novels, and everything in between. She is a historian by training and a bilingual reader, moving between English and Spanish literature.
Beatriz began her career as a technology writer at a startup in the UK. Almost a decade later, journalism has taken her to five cities across three continents and into business reporting, cultural criticism, and live TV commentary. She joined Collider in 2026.
Beatriz has a passion for travelling and loves keeping an eye on the books headed to the screen. One of her favorite pastimes is critiquing the historical accuracy of period movies. She also once volunteered for the Charles Dickens Museum. Beatriz also has a core belief that a book is always better than the movie, but she has been happy to have been proven wrong in a couple of occasions.
When she isn’t reading, Beatriz is watching musicals, stage managing Shakespeare plays with a local theater group or doing historical research. She enjoys tracing family trees for her history and genealogy TikTok, creating databases for historical analysis and sifting through 17th-century stories for the novel she is currently in the process of writing.
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Fanfiction is one of the oldest genres out there. Classic authors like Ovid and William Shakespeare often took existing characters or rewrote existing stories and myths. It was a clever move, since audiences would already be familiar with the characters and the story. The same is true today, to a certain extent. Websites like FanFiction.net, Wattpad, and Archive of Our Own (AO3) allow users to write amateur, unauthorized fiction based on existing copyrighted works. Sagas like Harry Potter, Twilight, and Star Wars have inspired many popular fan stories. For fans, it's a fun exercise that keeps them connected to a world they love. For a few writers, it can become a new and highly successful path to publication.
Retellings, reboots and yes, fanfictions, are so successful because they come with a built-in audience. The same is true for fanfiction. Although fans might have first started reading a fanfiction because of their love for the original characters, they stayed because of the new story. With some smart editing and tweaking, these works can stand as their own books and stories. Here are the most popular ones.
'Fifty Shades of Grey' (2011)
Famously inspired by Twilight, the book series written by E. L. James might not have been the first fanfiction to be professionally published, but it did make the most noise. This is probably due to the contrast between the genres and themes of the original story and its retelling. While the original Twilight is a YA series written by a Mormon author, Fifty Shades of Grey is an erotic romance that delves into the world of BDSM. Yes, naive Anastasia Steele is clearly inspired by Bella Swan and controlling billionaire Christian Grey takes its personality from that of Edward Cullen, but their lives are very different.
E. L. James originally posted what would become Fifty Shades of Grey with the title of "Master of the Universe" on FanFiction.net. Following complaints about the story's explicit content, she then took it down and rewrote it as original fiction. Once it hit bookstores, it became an instant success, selling over 150 million copies across the trilogy and being adapted into a movie franchise starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan. Looking back at the story, it has not stood the test of time well. The prose and the portrayal of BDSM and consent has been widely criticized. However, its role as the fanfiction trailblazer is impossible to deny.
'After' (2014)
One of the more controversial forms of fanfiction is that based on real people. The boy band One Direction was one of the most popular inspirations for these types of stories and, specifically, Harry Styles. The book The Idea of You, which became a popular Prime Video movie, is another example, although it was never published on a fanfiction website. The book After by Anna Todd is the most famous of all.
Anna Todd wrote After under the name of imaginator1D, updating the story almost daily. Marketed as a "Wattpad sensation," the story is set on a fictional American college campus, where sheltered freshman Tessa Young, played by Josephine Langford in the movie, meets Hardin Scott, inspired by Harry Styles and portrayed by Hero Fiennes Tiffin. Hardin's friends, inspired by other One Direction members, also make appearances, although the plot is entirely original. Nonetheless, many readers have criticized the toxicity of Tessa and Hardin’s relationship, both on the page and in its movie adaptations.
'Game Changer' (2018)
Here comes an original story that became fanfiction before it was published as first intended. Rachel Reid, angry at the homophobia in the hockey world, wrote the first Game Changers novel as an original gay romance. The story follows Scott Hunter, a New York hockey team captain, and Kip Grady, a smoothie-shop employee. The first two books in the series have now been adapted into the hugely successful TV series Heated Rivalry. The series stars Hudson Williams as Shane Hollander and Connor Storrie as Ilya Rozanov, two professional hockey players who maintain a secret relationship while playing for rival teams, and the protagonists of the second book in the series.
The story was never intended as fanfiction, but it has deep connections to the genre. In 2016, looking for an audience for her story, Rachel Reid published the first book in the series on the website Archive of Our Own. Thinking the site only accepted fanfiction, she reworked the story to fit the Marvel universe, with a focus on Captain America, making Steve Rogers captain of the New York Rangers. The author has since said she regrets it and that her characters were never really Steve and Bucky. The published version is what she always intended. Without it, readers would have never met Shane and Ilya, and the romance that is now a cultural phenomenon.
'You, Again' (2023)
You, Again is the only book on this list inspired by two different fandoms. The first origins of the story were as fanfiction inspired by the romance between Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) from the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Goldbeck eventually rewrote the story and turned it into a gender-swapped retelling of the movie When Harry Met Sally. The publisher's tagline and main question that surrounds the book, however, is still more reminiscent of that original pairing: "Can they stop hating each other long enough to fall in love?"
In this version of the story, Ari, inspired by Harry (Billy Crystal), is a stand-up comic living in New York. She first meets the earnest and ambitious Josh, inspired by Sally (Meg Ryan), in an unconventional way: they both happen to be sleeping with the same woman. The two hate each other instantly. As it turns out, Manhattan is much smaller than it seems, and the two keep running into each other across the years. It is a version of Nora Ephron's story that incorporates open and queer relationships and dating apps, but keeps its humor and charm.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Star Wars Faction Do You Belong To? Rebels · Empire · Mandalorians · Crimson Dawn
Eight honest questions about how you actually are: how you feel about rules, where your loyalty goes first, what you do when somebody criticises you in front of other people. Answer them and we will tell you whose side you would really have ended up on. Four factions are recruiting: the believers, the organisation, the ones with a code, and the ones with a price.
✊Rebel Alliance(Andor)
🛰️The Empire(Original Trilogy)
🪖Mandalorians(The Mandalorian)
🌅Crimson Dawn(Solo)
01
How do you feel about rules at work? This one sorts people faster than anything else.
02
What is your relationship with money? Nobody answers this the way they think they will.
03
What makes you respect somebody? Whatever you pick, you apply it to yourself too.
04
How do you behave under real pressure? Your friends would probably answer this for you.
05
Where does your loyalty go first? Everybody has an order, even if they never say it out loud.
06
Somebody criticises you in front of other people. What happens? Be honest about the first thing you feel.
07
What does a good life look like in ten years? Pick the one you would actually be happy with.
08
What do you want more than anything else? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your side.
The Transmission Is Decoded Your Faction Is…
Four sides, four completely different answers to the same question about how a galaxy should work. Here is where you would have signed up, what it would ask of you, and what it would give you back.
Rebel Alliance
You belong with the side that has almost nothing and keeps going anyway. The Rebellion is not a glamorous posting, and anybody who tells you otherwise has not seen what it actually costs the people inside it.
- You are wired to notice when something is wrong and to say so, which makes you useful here and awkward almost everywhere else.
- Andor is the best thing Star Wars has made in years precisely because it shows the unglamorous half, which is the meetings, the paperwork and the people who never get a medal.
- Your kind of courage is the ordinary kind, done repeatedly, by somebody who is fully aware of the odds.
- The Alliance wins because enough people decided separately that they were finished being quiet about it.
The Galactic Empire
You belong to the machine, and the uncomfortable truth is that the machine mostly runs on people who are competent, orderly and convinced they are doing their job properly. Very few of them think of themselves as villains.
- You want structure, clear expectations and a way to measure whether you are doing well, none of which the other three factions can offer you.
- The Empire is frightening because of how ordinary it is on the inside, which is the single smartest thing Star Wars has ever done with it.
- Your risk is the quiet one, which is looking at something wrong and deciding it is somebody else's department.
- You would be genuinely good at this, and that is exactly the part worth thinking about.
The Mandalorians
You belong to the people who lost their planet and kept their code anyway. Mandalorian culture is not a nationality so much as a promise, and anybody who makes that promise and keeps it is one of them.
- You are loyal to people rather than to institutions, which is why an organisation chart has never once told you who you actually owe.
- A code only counts when it costs you something, and you are the sort of person who would pay rather than bend it.
- Mandalorians spend the whole saga arguing about what being one even means, and that argument is far more interesting than the armour.
- The Mandalorian and Grogu took the creed to cinemas over Memorial Day 2026, the first Star Wars film in seven years.
Crimson Dawn
You belong to the syndicate, where nobody wastes your time pretending the galaxy runs on ideals. Crimson Dawn deals in leverage, and it is the only faction on this list that would tell you so to your face.
- You read a room for who owes what, and you are usually right, which is a talent that makes people slightly wary of you.
- Qi'ra is the most interesting thing to come out of Solo, because she is the one character who learned the actual lesson about power.
- You would rather be the person setting the terms than the person being told what the terms are.
- The catch is simple enough. In a syndicate, everybody is leverage, including you, and the smart ones never forget that part.
'Alchemised' (2025)
Originally a Harry Potter fanfiction, Alchemised is a book that has taken the literary world by storm, The dark fantasy story was first published online with the title "Manacled," and it was one of the most popular fanfiction stories on Archive of Our Own, featuring a forbidden romance between Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger, in an alternative version of the J.K. Rowling novels in which Voldemort has won the war. In this version, which also borrows themes from The Handmaid's Tale, Hermione is imprisoned, and Draco is her captor.
The author of the story, SenLinYu, took it down from the website in January 2025, ahead of publication. The published book did more than just rename the characters (which became Helena Marino and Kaine Ferron). SenLinYu also replaced the magic of the Wizarding World with one based on alchemy and necromancy, and created a new backstory to explain the war. The author has discussed the process of removing all references to Harry Potter and The Handmaid's Tale as "liberating" but "definitely hard". It is a book with dark themes, but that has not kept it from reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
'Not Another Love Song' (2024)
Picture the fiery rivalry of Rey and Kylo Ren from Star Wars, but a musical version. The two main characters of Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto are musicians. They are both prodigies with very different backgrounds. Xander Thorne is a cellist and comes from a family of musical royalty. Meanwhile, Gwen Jackson is an orphan raised in Queens. She is mostly self-taught, and her path to making money from her talent with the violin has been long and tiring. Gwen catches Xander's attention when she performs at his friend's wedding, although the two have been working together for a year at a professional orchestra. Then, Gwen gets offered the role of First Chair over Xander.
Julie Soto is an expert on turning fanfiction into commercial novels. Her debut, Forget Me Not, was also inspired by the Rey and Kylo dynamic, while her fantasy novel Rose in Chains started as Harry Potter fanfiction, featuring a romance between Hermione and Draco. Soto has been open about her inspirations and mentioned Reylo's influence on Xander and Gwen in her author notes. The plot is entirely Soto's and the version of the characters that she created has undeniable chemistry, both on and off the stage.
'The Love Hypothesis' (2021)
The Love Hypothesis is funny and greatly endearing. The story follows the romance between Olive Smith, a Stanford PhD candidate, and Adam Carlsen, the department's most feared professor. But before it was a BookTok favorite, the book was "Head Over Feet," a fanfiction published on Archive of Our Own by Ali Hazelwood, using the handle Ever_So_Reylo. The story was obviously inspired by the romantic relationship between Star Wars' Rey and Kylo Ren. But it is more than that. The story offers lots of banter, a fake-dating scenario, and a competitive academic setting, inspired by Hazelwood’s own career in neuroscience.
The story caught the attention of Amazon MGM Studios. The 2026 movie adaptation of the story stars Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman. Bateman also has a personal connection to the book. His casting caught readers' attention, as he is the real-life husband of Daisy Ridley, whose portrayal of Rey inspired the character of Olive. Moreover, fans have noticed that the book's antagonist, Tom Benton, shares his first name. A coincidence? Even without knowing the story's origins, The Love Hypothesis is a book no reader can put down.
The Love Hypothesis
- Release Date
- September 23, 2026
- Director
- Claire Scanlon
- Writers
- Sarah Rothschild
- Producers
- Elizabeth Cantillon
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Lili Reinhart
Olive Smith
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Tom Bateman
Dr. Adam Carlsen
-
Rachel Marsh
Anh Pham
-
Jaboukie Young-White
Malcolm Browne
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.