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What got you into reading this much? How do you finish a book in a single night? What’s your actual reading speed? These questions follow me everywhere, usually right after I mention that I once finished a 450-page book by six in the morning while watching the sunrise. How do I explain to these people that it’s more of a muscle memory than a skill? And like many other Gen Zers and younger millennials, I owe this superpower to an orange app that occupied the bottom of my screen for most of my teenage years: Wattpad. Yes, Wattpad, the platform that recently turned nineteen.
The Orange App That Raised a Generation
Nineteen years of fanfiction-induced insomnia, of cliffhangers that shredded our sanity, of authors who stopped updating for the most bizarre reasons, and of readers who sacrificed their grades, sleep cycles, and, occasionally, their morals for fictional men written by teenagers in bedrooms across the world. And if you look around today, you’ll find people everywhere who grew up exactly the same way.
Back when I discovered Wattpad, it wasn’t the polished global platform with film deals and publishing arms it is now; it was simply the place we went to escape. It claimed to be a reading and writing community, but that’s far too sterile a description for something that felt alive. Wattpad had a pulse, more than 94 million users now, but even in the early years, it felt like a massive dorm room buzzing with ideas, fan theories, and unhinged creativity. Unlike other corners of the internet, which thrive on cynicism and cruelty, Wattpad was bizarrely optimistic. Authors wrote one chapter at a time, usually at 3 a.m., and readers responded by cheering them on like sideline coaches. There was something radically earnest about the platform: people weren’t trying to be cool; they were simply trying to tell stories and feel something.
LOL! You're not Harry Styles
And if you were there during the golden age of pop culture fandom, you know exactly what I mean. This was when the One Direction industrial complex ruled our lives, and an entire generation genuinely believed they had a chance with Harry Styles and Zayn Malik because Wattpad said so. Harry wasn’t just the king of the app, he was practically a religion. Every third story began with Y/N (Your Name! Yes, please be delusional here) bumping into him outside a café, being assigned to tutor him in algebra, or, in the truly unhinged stories, being sold to the band. And, if you are in Larry Stylison's black hole, you were brave.
Meanwhile, on the K-pop side of the internet, BTS fanfiction had its own gravitational field: Jung Kook was in the mafia nine days out of ten, which at this point feels so on brand with his aesthetics. Taehyung was the quiet billionaire with a tragic past, and Jackson Wang was permanently hosting parties on rooftops in some vaguely described bar. And then there was the Harry Potter fandom, a lawless land if there ever was one. Dramione shippers ran entire nation-states (Ron was never invited here). Regulus Black fans behaved like they’d seen God and lived to tell the tale.
These stories were more than entertainment; the plots shaped our humour tropes and the way we understood relationships. Most importantly, the app gave us the ability to read 300k words in two days because we had to know if the girl would finally break the mafia prince’s emotional walls. It’s easy to laugh now and cringe, but those stories felt therapeutic. They were messy and occasionally grammatically concerning, but they kept us in a chokehold. And sincerity is something the internet rarely allows anymore. P.S.: If the author's first language isn't English, they are going to serve you some of the best narration of your life.
A Queer-Friendly Haven Before Mainstream Publishing Caught Up
Wattpad was also one of the earliest genuinely queer-friendly literary spaces online, a refuge when mainstream publishing still gatekept anything beyond the “standard market.” Here, queer romances weren’t subplots or metaphors; they were front and centre, written by young people exploring identity without shame. The platform fostered community-led queerness long before the industry bothered to make room for it. For so many teenagers, Wattpad was the first place they recognised themselves in prose.
How Wattpad Rewired Our Reading Habits
For all the elitism that continues to simmer within the book community, the “real literature” debates about what counts as good writing, Wattpad quietly did the opposite, making reading accessible and exhilarating. The orange app encouraged millions of teenagers to read more than they ever had, not because a syllabus demanded it, but because the stories felt alive. And the truth that few critics admit is that some of those stories were genuinely better than traditionally published books, with an instinctive understanding of what young readers actually wanted. This app dismantled the notion that great storytelling had to pass through publishing houses or academic approval.
From Bedrooms to Box Offices
Then came the era of adaptations, when Hollywood and publishers finally realised something we had known all along: the kids on Wattpad had better taste than the executives in boardrooms. After becoming a multi-film franchise. The Kissing Booth found its way to Netflix. Say thanks for Jacob Elordi!
Countless titles landed book deals and film deals. Studios now scan Wattpad rankings the way talent scouts browse SoundCloud. Suddenly, writing fanfiction stopped being a “guilty pleasure” and became a pipeline to screenwriting and publishing. A generation once mocked for reading “cringe stories” ended up defining global pop culture.
The Secret Lives of Teen Readers
Of course, Wattpad also gave us its very special brand of smut — let’s call it what it was: pure brainrot. The kind you couldn’t unsee, no matter how much you tried. We read things at fourteen that we absolutely should not have been reading, but the chaotic charm was part of the experience. These stories came with blueprints of billionaire penthouses, knife collections in mafia basements, and tattooed bad boys whose ink symbolised their childhood trauma. Wattpad invented half the tropes that TikTok and Instagram now believe they created. Enemies-to-lovers? Wattpad. Bad-boy-with-a-soft-heart? Wattpad. Mafia AU? Wattpad motherhood. The list is longer than your imagination.
Everyone who grew up on the app also has a secret story about how far they went to hide their reading habits. Akanksha, a dentistry student and artist, told me she used to remove her phone case, place it upside down on the table, and hide her phone inside her textbook so her parents believed she was studying. “Little did they know what I was actually reading,” she laughs. Another friend, SriParna, a Social Media Strategist, described those years as the time she felt like a “celebrity,” chatting with author friends, reading fanfiction late into the night, and waiting for new chapters with an intensity “Netflix could never replicate.” For Debodipta, an IT professional, Wattpad was the reason she sneaked her mother’s phone at midnight, reading under the covers, the fear of getting caught heightening the drama of every chapter.
“I discovered fanfiction when one of my favourite book series ended so disastrously, and the sequel was unceremoniously cancelled, that the entire fandom collectively spiralled into disappointment. But instead of giving up, readers turned to their own imagination for closure, writing the endings we felt we deserved. For fifteen-year-old me, this ‘by the fandom, for the fandom’ storytelling felt extraordinary. It was my first real encounter with self-expression, and it was oddly productive too. My fanfic-writer era shaped the way I think about narrative, pacing, and character development, and it definitely helped me during my story and script-writing projects in college,” says Riddhi Mishra, Project Co-ordinator, ELLE India.
Nineteen years later, Wattpad remains a cultural artefact, a place where millions of young people discovered their love for reading. For a lot of us, this was our unofficial library and creative writing course.
Also Read:
Why India’s Queer Community Is Rewriting The Rules of Sex Education
