Webnovels are creating a new platform

 

    Top left- Webnovel

     Below left- Tapas

      Right- Wuxiaworld

Webnovels have been surging in popularity since the early 2000s.

For those who don't know, webnovels are novels that originally published online. We will not be looking into webnovels only published by the "Webnovel" site

They have led to fandoms and analyses.

And how far does it go?

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Why it is happening

Webnovels are a fresh medium for consumers and a break away from movies, shows, anime, manga, manwha or video games. A lot of webnovels are Chinese and they give a vista into Chinese life and culture, similar to how anime lets viewers peer into Japanese life, albeit not fully accurate.

Readers all around the world are being introduced to new tropes and techniques which are being widely loved

Wuxia and Xianxia are famous Chinese fantasy genres, dealing with advanced martial artists and cultivators(practitioners who cultivate qi cores for immortality). It is not unlike how anime introduced viewers to the Harem genre and Shounen, Shoujo and Seinen demographics. 

                A Wuxia illustration

Many readers love webnovels like Reverend Insanity, Release that witch, The Homeless Millionaire etc. They dive into various topics like morality, everyday life, philosophy or just plain fun.

There are books like "The Mother of Learning" which have the reputation of being on par with offline novels. 

Not all webnovels are good, like in any medium. However, it is not hard to find good ones, because of the active community. Many authors form discord servers to get feedback and talk with the fans. It is more interactive than simply publishing and getting slow feedback from various outposts. It has some negative sides as well, being that- I) Inappropriate or useless comments are more likely. II) Not everyone who reads will be an intellectual. 

But despite the ills, webnovels are persevering to go ahead, like Fang Yuan from Reverend Insanity

             Fang Yuan( Reverend Insanity)

Webnovels are easier to access, as nowadays nearly everyone has an electronic device and this provides way for gathering readers. This also provides competition

Possibilities

Novels have long been the source material for movies and series, to the point of some novels written exclusively to be become movies. It often leads to readers demanding a movie adaptation for their preferred books. With effort, a movie or TV show adaptation can be as good "Misery" and "Game of Thrones"(atleast till the fourth season) or as bad as "Eragon". Some movies like "Children of men" sometimes surpass the quality of their source material.

The same is slowly starting for webnovels with amazing adaptations of novels like- "Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation", "The King's Avatar" and "Heaven's official". It is much more common in China and seems to be influencing Chinese media. USA has had a Wattpad story adaptation of "The Kissing Booth" but adapting webnovels is still scanty. 

Webnovels are a great medium to adapt and could lead to greater quality of work being produced (or worse, if people rush things

Understanding

So far, most of the webnovel readers are young people in their teens or early twenties

With passing years, the demographic could change, with nearly everyone reading webnovels

There is a lot of discussion of how the younger generation is not reading nowadays, but webnovels can be a change in the direction. Attention spans are decreasing, but the usually large amount of webnovel chapters calls for dedication. An average webnovel may reach about 300 chapters, no matter the length ,individually. And some go as far as 5000 chapters, which may scare some readers

    

Super Gene(cover)
3091 translated chapters

Speciality

Experience of webnovels are a mixture of old and new.

Instead of the finished and published format of physical novels, we can read chapters as they are serially released. This is new, however it is also a return to the days when novels were originally released serially, chapter-wise in magazines and collected in volumes when finished. Due to how long webnovels usually are, they are bound to be collected in volumes if published physically

It creates a feeling of epics, like the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Gilgamesh, Odyssey and many others. Reverend Insanity is already considered by many to be a modern classic

Unlike the magazine publications, webnovel can be directly reedited and corrected, which is a huge advantage for the author. It can cause accidental deletion, though the frequency of such events are rare

Overall understanding

Webnovels are a fairly young medium so it is taking time to grow and spread

It has many features and possibilities with it's increasing fandom and author styles

In the future, perhaps there will be countless webnovel adaptations