Sworn enemies who sign a marriage contract. Rivals who huddle together in a narrow lane to hide from the security guard. Newlywed strangers sharing a bed. These aren’t the plotlines of the hottest new fanfics, but a new trend sweeping Indian Instagram: AI-generated romance comics.
The reels feature static images and speech bubbles with popular desi songs playing in the background to match the flavour. And the view count can be anywhere between 5 lakh and 25 lakh. Call it what you will — romance slop, soft porn, or template tales — but these AI comics have Indian girlies in a chokehold.
“These guys literally making me blushhhhh,” read a comment on a particularly heated edition of The Oberoi Empire, the most popular in the genre.
More than half the comments are impatient requests for the next part, which lands after a day. Predictably, a viewership raised on AI content and speed wants all its guilty pleasure in one go. Some also want their slop to be tasteful.
“The content is good but u need a QC,” read a comment requesting quality control from the handlers of The Cozy Comics, whose offering Reunion of Scars just completed its run.
The audience is a firm believer in the power of feedback. “While praying make sure chappal is removed,” a commenter responded on the first episode of Two Years Later, when the salwar-kameez-wearing heroine was shown wearing shoes in the pooja room.
Big-brained humans borrowing wholesale
The more things change, the more they stay the same—if the things in question are romance tropes. By resurrecting Photoromance Darling and Manohar Kahaniya for the internet generation, Instagram’s AI-armed “authors” are scratching a familiar need. But I prefer to get my fluff fix straight from the source: novel-length fanfics on AO3. And yes, my divorcees-to-lovers slowburn beats your sloppy soft porn any day of the week.
In the Viral Spiral of desi AI romance slop, artificial intelligence has done its very best copy-paste job. When the images are not a shoddy trace job of spicy manga, they’re taken straight out of the MCU series What If… Sometimes, the art style mutates midway through a reel. The AI especially adores glossy lips, anime faces, and whiter skin shades for spicy scenes.
While the graphics are a mix-and-match of art scraped from across the internet, the storylines are stolen from Star Plus and Zee TV. The Oberoi Empire features a rivals-to-lovers pipeline. The lead pair meets on the first day of college when rich heir Abhay barrels through a puddle and splashes an unrealistic amount of mud on poor student Shikha with his fancy red car. The real ones will know that this is lifted from Star Plus’ ambitious show Ishqbaaz, where the main jodi—Annika and Shivaay Singh Oberoi—first met in a similarly disastrous encounter.
One Minute Love Comics is the latest entrant in the market. Episode 6 of its Rivals to Partners series dropped Thursday, and the newlywed rivals who were beginning to warm up to each other have just had a fight over a misunderstanding. Watch as they sleep on opposite sides of the bed in the next episode and wake up tangled together.
On the other hand, The Cozy Comics ended a two-month run of Reunion of Scars this week. The happy couple has a baby now.
“I so want to see baby Arya grow up,” said the top comment.
If the creator is smart, they’ll binge-watch all 4,300 episodes of Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai and get on the generational rom-con bandwagon for their new copycat series of AI slop.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)