Prologue
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How Wattpad Came to Be
Wattpad started in 2006. Wattpad was a result of collaboration between Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen. Since then it had published stories by undiscovered writers and popular authors alike, allowing them to make a wider audience read their works. In 2007, they included 17,000 books from Project Gutenberg, also developing a mobile application, allowing mobile users in the fun.
In the Philippine context, Wattpad has become something for Filipinos who wanted to share whatever their lives bring them, in the form of stories. Wattpad boomed in the Philippines in 2010, and from there, many stories, high-good-low quality stories, and the writers of this article themselves, had been into them for a few years. In fact, one of them had published a story that was viewed for a few thousand times.
But why were people so into it? And more importantly, why would the Philippine Show business industry even turn them to movies? Let’s find out together in this article.
Chapter 1
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Screens to Prints
The year was 2013 when the first published stories were printed and sold to the Philippine masses. Bearing the titles “Diary ng Panget,” and “She’s Dating the Gangster,” people were amazed to see their favorite stories online finally be held in their hands and shared easily to people with no access to the internet. A classmate of one of the writers had a former classmate-seatmate who was a big fan of “Diary ng Panget” (written by haveyouseenthisgirl), and bought a copy of the first volume. He borrowed it, and laughed at the first sentence of the first page. He read the rest of it, and was impressed. This classmate bought the other volumes of the story, and had an unexplainable feeling of bliss.
Bringing Wattpad stories into mainstream publishing seemed to be the best idea at the time, so the stories just kept rolling in. It seemed at the time that the printed stories rolled in every month, and much to people’s dismay, some of the stories printed were low quality, and was edited exclusively for printing. Some edits were for the better (Alyloony’s Operation: Break the Casanova’s Heart) and some were unnoticeable and didn’t add anything at all to the printed version (Filipina’s He’s dating the Ice Princess).
One of the writers himself bought quite a few of this printed stories, and so far had noticed one common thing about them: they were all posed to make people laugh, feel good because of love, and generally leave a good impression.
Chapter 2
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Prints to Big Screens
The year 2014 saw the release of the first wattpad story turned movie: “Diary ng Panget,” written by haveyouseenthisgirl. It was a success, considering the fact that it was an immensely popular story insaid platform, then a bestseller when it was turned into a book (or books). An added factor is that VIVA films casted two fresh faces: Nadine Lustre, and James Reid. Though these are not their first ever showbiz projects, it could be clearly seen that through the movie they became as popular as they are now.
In the same year, just a few months after the first wattpad story-turned-movie, “She’s Dating the Gangster,” by Bianca Bernardino, followed suit. The movie casted two popular actors at the time: Kathryn Bernardo, and Daniel Padilla. This added greatly to the marketing of the movie, though much to the disappointment of many fans of the story, the characters were portrayed poorly.
As a treat to many fans, “Talk Back and You’re Dead,” by Alesana Marie, was turned into a movie as well. The movie was the last wattpad story turned movie which was released in 2014. The movie starred James Reid and Nadine Lustre again, with the welcome addition of Joseph Marco. The movie was once again a success. This, in the author’s opinion was partly because of the budding popularity of the love team composed of James and Nadine (dubbed Jadine), also partly because of the popularity of said story, and partly because of the new flavor added to the romance-comedy of the story: gangsters. Gangsters are obviously intriguing for some people, seeing as they fawn over James and Joseph while they were clad in leather jackets and were generally bad boys.
In the following year, 2015, more wattpad stories were turned into movies. Some were even turned into miniseries. A noticeable trend is that the stories turned into movies are the popular ones, while the less popular are turned into miniseries. This brings us back to the question: Why did the Philippine Show Business even bother to turn these stories into such media?
Chapter 3
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Wattpad and Philippine Pop Culture
Consider this: There’s a number of Philippine Literature turned into movies. Some examples include Eros Atalia’s “Ligo Na U Lapit Na Me,” Lualhati Bautista’s “Bata, Bata Pa’no ka Ginawa?” and Bob Ong’s “Aba Nakakabasa na Pala Ako?” among a few notable others. Wattpad, as it is but an online platform for stories written by people from around the world, and is not considered as a driving force of Philippine Literature, is constantly degraded by some people.
But it almost seems like some wattpad books sell better than other Philippine Literary works, consequently some of their movies were watched by a wider audience. With that, I think this is one of the many factors that some wattpad books offer: people can relate to the characters, and some even want to be like them. Face it, though, who wouldn’t want to be liked by a gorgeous, rich, and not to mention hot boy when you’re just a plain, poor, and not to mention ugly girl? Have two bad boys fight for your love? Have a so-called gangster change his ways because of his love of you? Any girl faced with that scenario may even exchange their very reality for any of that. In a nutshell, this is what makes them popular, not only for girls, but also to some boys.
Another factor is this: these wattpad books cost less expensive than other Philippine Literary works, they make you able to read stories you may have missed from said platform, and is on the level of many teenagers undergoing puberty. It’s true that nothing could be said much about wattpad books, but they do offer many explanations to something teenagers are ever so intrigued about: the feeling of being in love. These books tell teenagers that love is not always dependent on outside beauty, rather love could occur between two very unlikely persons, and they teach people that people who love should look through superficial imperfections--in short--it encourages and empowers them. Because of this, they try and create their own stories, but the topic that they base their stories around with is still love.
Since it is popular with teenagers, it’s about time that someone create a story that opens the eyes of the readers. Perhaps stories that are not overly romanticized but something that truly represents Filipino sensibilities. If this could be achieved, maybe this could level up further and be about not only their fantasies but also about the harsh reality we live in. Wattpad, in reality is a great force to consider, if one is aware to harness it properly and effectively.
Wattpad books become popular not only because they are easy to understand and considerably cheap; they get turned into books also because the publisher believed in these stories, to get across a certain message maybe. They also get turned into movies not only because they are popular: they get turned into movies also because all throughout the cheesiness and corny pick-up lines, there are still so many takeaways that make people get, although some people are too blinded by their beliefs that wattpad and wattpad books in general are no good.
Maybe instead of degrading this emerging form of literature, we could raise discussions to not only focus on its bad qualities, but also look at the many things that make them perfectly acceptable.
Writers:
Jacinto, Abrigo, Reyes N, Octaviano
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