Vaniloom is an AI platform for fan fiction, built for readers and writers whose tastes are too niche for the mainstream: the rare pairing, the obscure fandom, the trope nobody else is writing.

Under the hood is FicQuill, a system that breaks a story idea into modular, reusable “assets” (characters, tropes, settings, beats) that snap together like building blocks. The team’s core insight was a good one: writing is rarely starting from zero. It is choosing, combining and inventing within constraints.

The first version misread its users. It treated women who write fan fiction with AI as people who just want spicy content on demand, and it optimized for output.

That isn’t what they want. They don’t want more content, and they don’t want explicit content. They want writing itself to be more fun, with AI making the process richer, not doing it for them.

Two more problems sat on top of that: a product that looked like any other AI writing tool, with no reason to choose it over a general chatbot, and a widespread belief in fandom that AI writing is plagiarism.

Fan fiction has platforms, like AO3, where people read, share and gather. AI fiction has tools, which generate text and stop there. Vaniloom shouldn’t pick a side. It should merge the two.

The tool is the front door: it’s useful on its own and travels well to other platforms. The platform is where the value lives. Think of how Soda Music combined a short-video feed with a music player.

That also settles the question of how to compete with ChatGPT: we don’t. The money isn’t in the tool, it’s in the community, through a positive loop closer to tipping a livestreamer, which fits a fandom culture where people already create out of love.

The fix for the stereotype and the plagiarism stigma isn’t a slogan. It’s the process. Instead of a blank box where you type a prompt and get a finished story back, writing becomes a node-based game.

Each node is a creative decision the writer makes: who the characters are, which trope, what setting, what happens next. The AI fills in around those choices, and the writer’s hand stays visible at every step.

Writing this way feels less like asking a machine to write and more like building something. That makes it more fun, and it makes the work clearly the writer’s own.

Design principles

Fans already share everywhere, so the product should help them do it beautifully.

“The Itch” turns the events idea into a daily ritual: one line of premise, like a single-sentence trope, and the community turns it into full stories before midnight.

Good writing from a model starts with good structure. I designed the model’s input and output structure and the data behind it, so that what the AI writes holds up: in character, on voice, and worth keeping.

In Advanced mode the structure is visible to the writer: each field they fill in maps to a part of the model’s input.

Screens by the Vaniloom team, shown for context.