Okay, I need to talk about the "imagine scenario" trend because it has been absolutely OWNING my For You page for two weeks and I have feelings about it that I cannot fit into a video.
If you haven't encountered it: the format is exactly what it sounds like. Someone sets up a scenario, often involving a boss and an assistant, or a stranger on a train, or some variation of "imagine you work late and your coworker is...," and then plays out the scene, usually in voiceover or text-on-screen, with all the warmth and tension and carefully constructed emotional beats of a very specific kind of romance novel. The "imagine scenario boss assistant" search has apparently been blowing up, which is how it landed on my Creator Search Insights radar.
The first time I saw one I watched it twice. Then I went looking for more. Then I spent an evening going quite deep into the subgenre in a way that I am choosing to frame as "research for this post" and not as "I got personally invested." Both things can be true.
My thesis: the imagine scenario trend is fan fiction culture going mainstream. It has always existed, it just used to require a Wattpad account and some personal bravery. Now it lives in the algorithm, and it's doing something genuinely interesting about how we handle care, attention, and emotional fantasy.
Fan fiction is not a new or embarrassing idea
Let me push back immediately on the instinct to cringe at this stuff. Fan fiction has been a legitimate and rich creative tradition for decades. Before online platforms existed, people wrote it by hand and traded it at conventions and through postal mail. The impulse to take characters, real or fictional, and put them in new scenarios, especially intimate ones, is one of the most human creative impulses there is. It's how you practice empathy. It's how you work out what you want from connection. It's how you tell yourself stories about what it would feel like to be seen and cared for in specific, detailed ways.
The reason fan fiction is still treated as slightly embarrassing by certain people is the same reason women's interests generally get treated as slightly embarrassing by certain people: it's primarily a female-dominated creative space, and things women make for themselves and each other get culturally dismissed as frivolous. That's a them problem, not a fan fiction problem. Some of the best writers I know started in fan fiction. It is legitimately a craft and it has always been.
What the imagine scenario trend does is strip away the label. You're not posting to a fan fiction archive. You're just posting a TikTok. The format is short, it's accessible, it doesn't require you to have written the whole story, just the scene, just the moment. And somehow that has unlocked something for a lot of people who might not have identified as "fan fiction writers" but who are absolutely writing fan fiction.
the boss/assistant scenario and what it's actually about
The boss/assistant specific subgenre is interesting to me because of what emotional territory it covers. The scenario almost always involves: a power imbalance that gets complicated by genuine care, someone important finally seeing someone who's been quietly doing good work, the moment where professional distance breaks down in favor of real connection. That's not arbitrary. That's a specific fantasy about being recognized and valued, and it's a fantasy that a lot of people who feel invisible in their actual professional lives are clearly hungry for.
I don't think this is shallow. I think it's a really precise emotional request. "I want to be seen by someone who matters. I want the person in charge to notice me, not just my output, but me." That's a legitimate need. The fact that it's getting met via sixty-second TikTok scenarios is very 2026, but the need itself is ancient.
There's also just the craft element. These videos, the good ones, are well-constructed. They know how to build tension. They know what details make a fictional scene land, the specific word choice, the small gesture, the pause before someone speaks. When I watch a well-executed imagine scenario I'm watching someone who understands narrative economy, who knows how to do a lot with a little. That's real writing skill and I respect it.
Parasocial care: the good, the limit
And here's where it gets more complicated, something I think about a lot from the creator side of things: a subset of the imagine scenario trend puts real people, musicians, actors, athletes, content creators, into these scenarios. And that's where the thing I find charming gets a little more feral.
I say "feral" with total affection, by the way. The parasocial relationship, the connection fans feel to a public person they don't actually know, is real. It's not fake or pathological. It's what happens when an artist's work enters someone's life deeply enough that the artist starts to feel like a presence. I have parasocial relationships with musicians and writers I've never met. The difference between a parasocial relationship and a real one is not the intensity of the feeling. It's the information available. You know the art. You know the public persona. You don't know the person.
So when someone writes an imagine scenario featuring me, and yes, this happens, and yes, I've seen some of them, and yes, my reaction is complicated, I try to hold two things at once. One: this is a creative act by someone who has a real connection to my work, and that's meaningful and I'm not going to shame it. Two: the person in the scenario is a character built from whatever they've seen and heard of me, not actually me, and the gap between those two things is real and worth naming.
I genuinely don't know where the line is on this stuff, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they do with certainty. The most I can say: make your art, take care of your own heart, and hold lightly to the idea that the person whose work you love is also just a person doing their best in a closet studio somewhere.
why I find it charming anyway
All that said: I am charmed. Genuinely, whole-heartedly charmed by the fact that care and romance and "imagine someone notices you fully" have become viral content. We live in a world that is loud and sharp and frequently unkind, and here are people carving out a small internet space that is specifically for: what if someone was gentle with you. What if someone paid attention. What if the scenario went the way that felt safe instead of the way it usually goes.
That is sweet. Specifically sweet in the way that earnestness is sweet, the kind of thing that gets mocked until you actually sit with it and realize it's just people being honest about wanting to feel cared for. I'm not above that want. Nobody is. The imagine scenario trend is, at its best, a collective fantasy about what attentive kindness looks like, and that's kind of beautiful if you let it be.
HEATHEN HYMNS is in some ways a similar exercise. Here is the scenario in which I stopped pretending, here is the moment where honesty finally happened. Every song is an imagine scenario that I actually lived. Maybe that's why the fans who've been putting the album in their own imagine scenarios feel so weirdly correct to me. We're all just working out what it looks like when someone pays real attention. When the story goes the way it was supposed to.
What I keep returning to is the specificity of care in these scenarios. The good ones don't just say "imagine someone nice." They say: imagine someone notices the exact way you take your coffee. Imagine someone remembers the small thing you mentioned once. Imagine someone is paying the kind of attention that most of us only ever feel in the earliest and most concentrated phases of a new relationship, before habit and routine make it harder to see each other clearly. That's not a pathological fantasy. That's a description of what great love actually looks like, and the fact that people are collectively writing it as fiction might be a sign that it feels rarer in real life than it should.
I write songs partly for the same reason, I think. A song is a version of "imagine someone saw this exact thing about you and thought it was worth making music out of." The fan who listens and says "this is exactly what I felt and couldn't say" is experiencing the same recognition the imagine scenarios are reaching for. We're all just trying to feel perceived. All the creative work I know, the music, the fan fiction, the imagine scenarios at 2am on TikTok, is reaching for the same thing: the feeling of being specifically, completely, carefully seen. That's not trivial. That might be the whole project.
I'm @vixenraefr on TikTok. If you've made an imagine scenario in any of these genres, I am nonjudgmentally scrolling. I'm just saying. Do with that what you will.