After We Collided

Wattpad is a media platform on which users can read or publish original written works—a place where aspiring writers can get feedback on their work and occasionally find interested publishers, and where readers can interact with established writers, such as Margaret Atwood.

One popular genre on Wattpad is fanfiction. Fanfiction, fiction inspired by or featuring existing characters and worlds, has several subgenres. Some simply continue movies, TV shows, or novels where their original authors stopped. Other fanfiction works create interstitial adventures for characters, mix characters from several different properties together, and imagine author stand-ins interacting with fictional characters. Often, fanfiction fills in gaps deliberately left behind by the mainstream representation of characters, typically with a focus on romance or sexuality. Some of the most famous fanfiction inventions transform presumptively heteronormative characters to be on the LBGTQ spectrum. The After series is one of several novels that have originated as fanfiction. Another famous example is E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy, which began as fanfiction based on characters from Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

A newer version of fanfiction features real people instead of fictional characters, imagining adventures or romantic encounters with many different kinds of celebrities, from musicians, to actors, to sports figures. Todd modeled the characters in After on the band One Direction: In her original fanfiction, Hardin Scott was called Harry Styles, a former member of the band, while some of the other characters were named after other members of One Direction. These names were changed when Todd received a publishing contract from Gallery Books.