Aisata Ba, who writes under the handle Sxnnystudio on Wattpad, was one of those inspired by this season of Love Island USA. Ironically, she’d never watched the show and didn’t consider herself a fan before this summer. “I can’t stand suspense,” she tells me over Zoom. “Whenever they have those long pauses, I get so irritated. I’m like, No, I can’t watch it.”
But the algorithm always provides. Ba started getting served fan-edited videos on TikTok of Nic and Olandria—a.k.a. Nicolandria—back when the Islanders were still just friends. Despite the fact that the two were exploring connections with other people, many viewers were convinced they had chemistry and so started shipping them as a couple. Wait, they’re cute, Ba thought. Intrigued, she started watching the show with her friends and found herself “catching any crumb” she could.
“It was the longing gazes,” she says. “I was like, They want each other. Why are they playing too hard? Why don’t they get together?”
Her desire to see them turn their friendship into a romance was so great that she decided to make it happen herself—fictionally, of course. “I was like, If the producers aren’t going to do it, and Nic and Olandria aren’t going to do it, then in my universe, that’s going to happen,” she says. “I’m going to play into every trope I can, and I’m going to make this as yearning and romantic and as angsty as possible.”
She started writing and posting her FF, Kiss & Tell, around episode six. By the time the real-life Nicolandria actually kissed—in episode 21—Ba had already planned out a whole plot line and developed something of a following. “When I first posted, I got maybe 300 views,” she says. “I was like, Okay, cool; this is actually a good amount. So I just kept going and kept going, and then it kept building. Every single day I would blink, and it would go from 500 to a thousand views, a hundred to 10,000.” (According to Wattpad, Nicolandria content engagement nearly doubled before and after their recoupling episode.)
Ba’s TikTok views doubled too. “Everyone’s like, ‘You manifested this,’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘No, I didn’t. They just caught up with the program.’”
Nic and Olandria kiss on Love Island USA season 7
Peacock/Getty Images
It turns out the Love Island extended universe offers a lot of inspiration beyond the real-life Islanders. Ariendiel, real name withheld, based their AO3 story, The Triumph of Time, on Love Island: The Game. “I have never been comfortable writing about real people,” Ariendiel says. “I’ve also barely watched the show!” Their fanfic follows two Islanders—who scandalously were not coupled up during filming—deciding to make a go of it beyond the villa.
Ariendiel says it was the structured format of both the game and the show that made for a fun creative exercise. “It had very compelling characters that were still open for interpretation—things us fanfic writers love,” they tell me. Because the game allows the player to create a main character who follows a set plot structure, Ariendiel says it made the threshold for writing fanfic relatively low and beginner-friendly. Don’t forget the built-in stakes, either. “The quest for love, combined with questionable motives, makes for compelling watching and gameplay.”
