If I could offer some critique, this feels very much like a summary written by a typical ratfic reader, i.e. someone who started out with HPMOR, or maybe Scott Alexander's fiction or perhaps Worm, and then spread out from there. You've correctly identified the major Western, male canon, but I'd argue this is going to be the smallest part of any overall webfiction canon.
First I think leaving fanfic as a mere mention cuts out a huge quantity of female-focused romance fiction. While it's fair to put fanfiction as a separate thing, a ton of original fiction has arisen from fanfic routes. Harry Potter fanfics produced a bunch of authors, Cassandra Clare being an early example with her original work published in the 2000s. 50 shades of grey was notably a Twilight fanfiction. And more recently, "Romantasy" as an independent genre has emerged, with Sarah J. Mass beginning her series on fanfiction.net.
I'd also argue that not mentioning webcomics leaves out a vast array of fiction, both female- and male-oriented. I personally know little about the webcomic world, but from what I've seen the amount of content is just as large as that available on sites like RR or Fanfiction.net.
Second, and far larger, is webfiction originating from East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea. You touch on Xianxia, but I'm surprised you don't mention that even in English webfic sites, a huge chunk of popular stories are just translations of East Asian web fiction. In Japan it's really quite a mature market, with a number of popular IPs going through the Webnovel -> Light Novel -> Manga/Anime route to mainstream success.
Just for reference, numbers 2 and 4 in the highest grossing "book" apps on Google Play are Goodnovel - which appears to be a Singapore based team - and Webnovel - which is Chinese.
The original version of this post had a lot more of the stuff that you mentioned, and in particular we were quite unsure about how to handle fanfiction considering its scope. Ultimately, we decided to treat fanfiction more as a tag than a fully-fledged scene, with the majority of it not intended to be consumed outside of the core fandom itself.
I will concede that the omission of Online Romantasy as a scene is a fair critique; I was aware that some mainstream romantasy got its start as fanfiction online, but I didn't realize quite how much. I guess we saw it as a category that is already quite legible to the literary mainstream, but it would have made sense to add considering its origins.
We also should have been more explicit about this being restricted to the Anglosphere; obviously Eastern web fiction is bigger than Western web fiction, but it is also *so* big that any "fair" taxonomy would leave our current categories as minor entries. We plan to write a lot more about the Sinosphere in particular in the next couple months.
Regarding webcomics / webtoon— webcomics are very close to my heart, but I consider them as well as other more graphic-focused stories to be their own thing. Once the scope opens up to comics, it becomes hard to justify excluding things like certain video games, ARGs, etc. But I would be interested in writing a webcomics / webtoon write-up in the future if that is something that interests people!
Fair, I certainly understand not wanting to explode the scope and length of this article by having to delve into fanfic or foreign language fiction.
On your point on romantasy already being literary mainstream, I wonder if this is a core difference in how men and women consume online fiction. I certainly can't think of any western webfics that have had big publishing pushes like the works of Mass or others; perhaps generic litrpg stuff is limited to audible and kindle unlimited, while for more female oriented works there is always the hope of a physical release and subsequent "booktok" explosion.
Yeah, I’m guessing that that’s mostly just downstream of men not reading that many books! Women’s fiction is a lot more financially lucrative, so I figure publishers are more willing to take a chance on web fiction.
(Although Dungeon Crawler Carl seems like it’s doing pretty well right now, so maybe that will change.)
I was struck by the brush-off of romantic (fan)fiction in particular. Whether you consider this stuff to have literary merit or not, it’s a massive chunk of the webfiction landscape
real that you missed webnovels 4 women. like if you dont read them you wouldnt know abt them. i myself hadnt heard abt ratfit until this post.
but i have some thoughts.
1) isekai novels have a big fan translation community where fans (illegally) translate asian works into english. there are a LOT of subgenres within isekai novels. you mentioned system novels with video game inspried mechanics. but there is also a bunch of novels written for women, often more inspired by dating sims than fps games. r/otomeisekai is a decent hub. they tend to revolve around a woman getting isekaied from the modern world to a generic western fantasy world and falling in love. i could write a whole article on villainess manhwa so i will stop myself here. just know it is an extremely rich genre.
2) webnovels are often turned into webcomics. this can be an light novel -> manga --> anime --> live action adaptation pipeline. westernly, i know webtoon has turned wattpad novels into webtoons. or sometimes movies. (see: 50 shades of grey.)
3) you fail to cover romance novels in depth enough. wattpad novels can have a lot of fandom overlap but often take on lives of their own. a lot of harry styles fanfic are really good on their own and get turned into movies. again, 50 shades of grey is famous for starting as a dramionie fanfic but taking on a life of its own.
4) fandom is also very complex. wattpad tends to have straight romance, while archiveofourown has more queer works. wattpad is famous for harry styles x reader fics, while ao3 is famous for destiel, which is a gay ship between two characters from supernatural. i cant stress this enough: ao3 fanfics are good without even being in the fandoms. i know a lot of queer fantasy authors have come out of ao3, like naomi novik and tansym muir.
Did you notice this blog post getting crossposted to /r/rational? Some interesting discussion going on there, though a lot of it is about the omission/dismissal of romantic webfiction and fanfiction and other fiction geared more towards female readers.
A category which frequently melds interactive fiction and web serial progression fantasy is the 'Quest', a term primarily associated with the last of the great web forums: the deeply interconnected trio of SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing. (Also with 4chan, and occasionally reddit and elsewhere.) In this, the story is initially and primarily a forum thread, in which most or all story posts end with a choice for the readers, who vote on options, or in more sophisticated instances propose complex options for the authors and other readers to consider (and usually then proceed to a vote). The omission would stand out less if it wasn't for Forge of Destiny, which began and still runs as a quest on Sufficient Velocity, with an edited version on RoyalRoad and in book publication.
Related mixed interaction formats: a premise that goes by 'CYOA', and resides on reddit.com/r/makeyourchoice, the same aforementioned forum trio, and 4chan /cyoag/. The full stories which come out of it look something like https://recordcrash.com/shill/1/...And+I+Show+You+How+Deep+The+Rabbit+Hole+Goes, but it is primarily a format where one author writes a premise, with a world and positive/negative choices and usually an explicit point system, and then readers/players/users make a series of choices, creating a character and/or situation, and write short form descriptions of their choices, their reasoning, and how they expect the results to progress.
And probably the newest variant of partially-interactive web serial fiction: the 'Celestial Forge' premise where the progression of the character's abilities is directly linked to the increasing length of the story, typically somewhat randomized. This one hasn't had a standout example that escapes containment, and if I'm honest I don't think it ever will, but Dickens was enormously popular despite his considerable wordiness so it may happen.
This is a good summary. Unfortunately, due to succession issues the XYZZYs have been dormant the last few years, but historically they've been pretty big.
I hadn't considered Worm as a rationalist fiction before. It's an interesting angle, and I think you're on to something here. Years ago my friends were all getting into fantasy series with "hard magic systems", like Brandon Sanderson's work. The appeal seemed to be in the author setting up rules and then creatively working within those constraints, and I see stuff like Worm as scratching a similar kind of itch for some people. Each fight is a puzzle.
Before I mention any specific works, I have a genre/format recommendation, which is Quests (or Forum Adventures, or a few other names theyve gone by in various locations). I actually thought you were leading into mentioning them in the interactive fiction section, though that was wishful thinking born of my desire to see more people know and care about Quests lol.
Quests are, in short, stories written in small 'updates' which readers then submit suggestions for, describing what should happen next. Depending on the site they're hosted on and audience they collect, they can be a comic or purely textual, they can have strict game mechanics or be completely freeform, they can have readers carefully strategise and vote on actions or have every single suggestion be acted upon, and their actual plot can be pretty much anything. Homestuck itself originated as a Quest in this way, as the previous MSPaintAdventures were, and of the many works inspired by it, Quest-like stories number in the thousands, many of which are wholly original beyond the format of single panel+text underneath.
This is the best existing essay on the subject of Quests, going into their origin and spread in the internet, and the places theyre currently found https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/interactive-fiction-a-history-of-questing.19687/ For a form of storytelling with multiple websites dedicated to it, Quests remain very niche, but I do think they're worth noting when it comes to the 'canon' of web fiction, as they make for some of the most interesting and unique stories I've been a part of online.
There isn't really much of a 'canon' since Quests rarely ever break waves outside of their own small community, but I'd suggest a few that can be found on their own websites:
-Awful Hospital. https://bogleech.com/awfulhospital/intro A woman wakes up in a strange hospital, where nothing feels real. She quickly finds out there's a very good reason for this. Almost all characters are manifestations of abstract concepts, in an incredibly bizarre and well-developed setting.
-Blood is Mine. https://bloodismine.com/ A woman wakes up in a strange hotel where everything wants to kill her, and discovers she can control her own blood just in time to defend herself. The comic has somewhat clear 'arcs' compared to many quests as the characters set goals or time passes.
-Prequel. https://www.prequeladventure.com/2011/03/prequel-begin/ Based on The Elder Scrolls, featuring a khajit trying to make her way in the world, and mostly failing. There's a lot of failing in this story. It's more 'open world' in terms of the story than others, fittingly enough.
Fortuna. https://cosmosdex.com/fortuna/p/0 A person receives a video game from their friend and starts playing it. The story swings between the in-game sci-fi story of a spaceship crew trying to reach a rumoured treasure, and the out-of-game story of the player becoming increasingly obsessed with this video game and the seemingly-sentient AI characters inside it.
Honestly there's a lot I could say about quests and a lot of ones I'd like to recommend, but I've already been indecisive enough in writing this out, I probably won't finish if I actually try to write more of an essay on them. I'll just say my favourite quest ever is a short completed textual one called Ghostwriter, found here https://eagle-time.org/showthread.php?tid=3265, but I think it's better as a work to read after you already know what to expect with quests, as it plays on the typical dynamic between story and audience.
Thanks for the thorough reply! We actually did talk a bit about Quests, but we couldn’t quite figure out how to make them fit into the taxonomy. Like, on some level, they’re a type of interactive fiction because of the participation by the reader. But then the way that they operate is more akin to web serial fantasy with input from Patreon patrons (and they feel especially more similar to web serial fantasy demographically).
So we couldn’t figure out how to fit them in without making them their own thing, and we didn’t think Quests were notable enough to split them off on their own. But clearly it didn’t take long for fans of Quests to find us, so perhaps we should have chosen differently. Sorry to disappoint!
interesting article, glad I saw this.
If I could offer some critique, this feels very much like a summary written by a typical ratfic reader, i.e. someone who started out with HPMOR, or maybe Scott Alexander's fiction or perhaps Worm, and then spread out from there. You've correctly identified the major Western, male canon, but I'd argue this is going to be the smallest part of any overall webfiction canon.
First I think leaving fanfic as a mere mention cuts out a huge quantity of female-focused romance fiction. While it's fair to put fanfiction as a separate thing, a ton of original fiction has arisen from fanfic routes. Harry Potter fanfics produced a bunch of authors, Cassandra Clare being an early example with her original work published in the 2000s. 50 shades of grey was notably a Twilight fanfiction. And more recently, "Romantasy" as an independent genre has emerged, with Sarah J. Mass beginning her series on fanfiction.net.
I'd also argue that not mentioning webcomics leaves out a vast array of fiction, both female- and male-oriented. I personally know little about the webcomic world, but from what I've seen the amount of content is just as large as that available on sites like RR or Fanfiction.net.
Second, and far larger, is webfiction originating from East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea. You touch on Xianxia, but I'm surprised you don't mention that even in English webfic sites, a huge chunk of popular stories are just translations of East Asian web fiction. In Japan it's really quite a mature market, with a number of popular IPs going through the Webnovel -> Light Novel -> Manga/Anime route to mainstream success.
Just for reference, numbers 2 and 4 in the highest grossing "book" apps on Google Play are Goodnovel - which appears to be a Singapore based team - and Webnovel - which is Chinese.
The original version of this post had a lot more of the stuff that you mentioned, and in particular we were quite unsure about how to handle fanfiction considering its scope. Ultimately, we decided to treat fanfiction more as a tag than a fully-fledged scene, with the majority of it not intended to be consumed outside of the core fandom itself.
I will concede that the omission of Online Romantasy as a scene is a fair critique; I was aware that some mainstream romantasy got its start as fanfiction online, but I didn't realize quite how much. I guess we saw it as a category that is already quite legible to the literary mainstream, but it would have made sense to add considering its origins.
We also should have been more explicit about this being restricted to the Anglosphere; obviously Eastern web fiction is bigger than Western web fiction, but it is also *so* big that any "fair" taxonomy would leave our current categories as minor entries. We plan to write a lot more about the Sinosphere in particular in the next couple months.
Regarding webcomics / webtoon— webcomics are very close to my heart, but I consider them as well as other more graphic-focused stories to be their own thing. Once the scope opens up to comics, it becomes hard to justify excluding things like certain video games, ARGs, etc. But I would be interested in writing a webcomics / webtoon write-up in the future if that is something that interests people!
Thanks for reading!
Fair, I certainly understand not wanting to explode the scope and length of this article by having to delve into fanfic or foreign language fiction.
On your point on romantasy already being literary mainstream, I wonder if this is a core difference in how men and women consume online fiction. I certainly can't think of any western webfics that have had big publishing pushes like the works of Mass or others; perhaps generic litrpg stuff is limited to audible and kindle unlimited, while for more female oriented works there is always the hope of a physical release and subsequent "booktok" explosion.
Yeah, I’m guessing that that’s mostly just downstream of men not reading that many books! Women’s fiction is a lot more financially lucrative, so I figure publishers are more willing to take a chance on web fiction.
(Although Dungeon Crawler Carl seems like it’s doing pretty well right now, so maybe that will change.)
agree^
I was struck by the brush-off of romantic (fan)fiction in particular. Whether you consider this stuff to have literary merit or not, it’s a massive chunk of the webfiction landscape
great post. very male centric tho.
real that you missed webnovels 4 women. like if you dont read them you wouldnt know abt them. i myself hadnt heard abt ratfit until this post.
but i have some thoughts.
1) isekai novels have a big fan translation community where fans (illegally) translate asian works into english. there are a LOT of subgenres within isekai novels. you mentioned system novels with video game inspried mechanics. but there is also a bunch of novels written for women, often more inspired by dating sims than fps games. r/otomeisekai is a decent hub. they tend to revolve around a woman getting isekaied from the modern world to a generic western fantasy world and falling in love. i could write a whole article on villainess manhwa so i will stop myself here. just know it is an extremely rich genre.
2) webnovels are often turned into webcomics. this can be an light novel -> manga --> anime --> live action adaptation pipeline. westernly, i know webtoon has turned wattpad novels into webtoons. or sometimes movies. (see: 50 shades of grey.)
3) you fail to cover romance novels in depth enough. wattpad novels can have a lot of fandom overlap but often take on lives of their own. a lot of harry styles fanfic are really good on their own and get turned into movies. again, 50 shades of grey is famous for starting as a dramionie fanfic but taking on a life of its own.
4) fandom is also very complex. wattpad tends to have straight romance, while archiveofourown has more queer works. wattpad is famous for harry styles x reader fics, while ao3 is famous for destiel, which is a gay ship between two characters from supernatural. i cant stress this enough: ao3 fanfics are good without even being in the fandoms. i know a lot of queer fantasy authors have come out of ao3, like naomi novik and tansym muir.
Thank you so much for this post, I had no idea how to get into this subculture and this is perfect.
Heads up: you didn't finish the thought in the sentence starting with "However, the modern style takes advantage of"
Thanks for the heads up! Don't know how I left that in there, but updated now.
Did you notice this blog post getting crossposted to /r/rational? Some interesting discussion going on there, though a lot of it is about the omission/dismissal of romantic webfiction and fanfiction and other fiction geared more towards female readers.
A category which frequently melds interactive fiction and web serial progression fantasy is the 'Quest', a term primarily associated with the last of the great web forums: the deeply interconnected trio of SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing. (Also with 4chan, and occasionally reddit and elsewhere.) In this, the story is initially and primarily a forum thread, in which most or all story posts end with a choice for the readers, who vote on options, or in more sophisticated instances propose complex options for the authors and other readers to consider (and usually then proceed to a vote). The omission would stand out less if it wasn't for Forge of Destiny, which began and still runs as a quest on Sufficient Velocity, with an edited version on RoyalRoad and in book publication.
Related mixed interaction formats: a premise that goes by 'CYOA', and resides on reddit.com/r/makeyourchoice, the same aforementioned forum trio, and 4chan /cyoag/. The full stories which come out of it look something like https://recordcrash.com/shill/1/...And+I+Show+You+How+Deep+The+Rabbit+Hole+Goes, but it is primarily a format where one author writes a premise, with a world and positive/negative choices and usually an explicit point system, and then readers/players/users make a series of choices, creating a character and/or situation, and write short form descriptions of their choices, their reasoning, and how they expect the results to progress.
And probably the newest variant of partially-interactive web serial fiction: the 'Celestial Forge' premise where the progression of the character's abilities is directly linked to the increasing length of the story, typically somewhat randomized. This one hasn't had a standout example that escapes containment, and if I'm honest I don't think it ever will, but Dickens was enormously popular despite his considerable wordiness so it may happen.
This is a good summary. Unfortunately, due to succession issues the XYZZYs have been dormant the last few years, but historically they've been pretty big.
I hadn't considered Worm as a rationalist fiction before. It's an interesting angle, and I think you're on to something here. Years ago my friends were all getting into fantasy series with "hard magic systems", like Brandon Sanderson's work. The appeal seemed to be in the author setting up rules and then creatively working within those constraints, and I see stuff like Worm as scratching a similar kind of itch for some people. Each fight is a puzzle.
Before I mention any specific works, I have a genre/format recommendation, which is Quests (or Forum Adventures, or a few other names theyve gone by in various locations). I actually thought you were leading into mentioning them in the interactive fiction section, though that was wishful thinking born of my desire to see more people know and care about Quests lol.
Quests are, in short, stories written in small 'updates' which readers then submit suggestions for, describing what should happen next. Depending on the site they're hosted on and audience they collect, they can be a comic or purely textual, they can have strict game mechanics or be completely freeform, they can have readers carefully strategise and vote on actions or have every single suggestion be acted upon, and their actual plot can be pretty much anything. Homestuck itself originated as a Quest in this way, as the previous MSPaintAdventures were, and of the many works inspired by it, Quest-like stories number in the thousands, many of which are wholly original beyond the format of single panel+text underneath.
This is the best existing essay on the subject of Quests, going into their origin and spread in the internet, and the places theyre currently found https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/interactive-fiction-a-history-of-questing.19687/ For a form of storytelling with multiple websites dedicated to it, Quests remain very niche, but I do think they're worth noting when it comes to the 'canon' of web fiction, as they make for some of the most interesting and unique stories I've been a part of online.
There isn't really much of a 'canon' since Quests rarely ever break waves outside of their own small community, but I'd suggest a few that can be found on their own websites:
-Awful Hospital. https://bogleech.com/awfulhospital/intro A woman wakes up in a strange hospital, where nothing feels real. She quickly finds out there's a very good reason for this. Almost all characters are manifestations of abstract concepts, in an incredibly bizarre and well-developed setting.
-Blood is Mine. https://bloodismine.com/ A woman wakes up in a strange hotel where everything wants to kill her, and discovers she can control her own blood just in time to defend herself. The comic has somewhat clear 'arcs' compared to many quests as the characters set goals or time passes.
-Prequel. https://www.prequeladventure.com/2011/03/prequel-begin/ Based on The Elder Scrolls, featuring a khajit trying to make her way in the world, and mostly failing. There's a lot of failing in this story. It's more 'open world' in terms of the story than others, fittingly enough.
Fortuna. https://cosmosdex.com/fortuna/p/0 A person receives a video game from their friend and starts playing it. The story swings between the in-game sci-fi story of a spaceship crew trying to reach a rumoured treasure, and the out-of-game story of the player becoming increasingly obsessed with this video game and the seemingly-sentient AI characters inside it.
Honestly there's a lot I could say about quests and a lot of ones I'd like to recommend, but I've already been indecisive enough in writing this out, I probably won't finish if I actually try to write more of an essay on them. I'll just say my favourite quest ever is a short completed textual one called Ghostwriter, found here https://eagle-time.org/showthread.php?tid=3265, but I think it's better as a work to read after you already know what to expect with quests, as it plays on the typical dynamic between story and audience.
Thanks for the thorough reply! We actually did talk a bit about Quests, but we couldn’t quite figure out how to make them fit into the taxonomy. Like, on some level, they’re a type of interactive fiction because of the participation by the reader. But then the way that they operate is more akin to web serial fantasy with input from Patreon patrons (and they feel especially more similar to web serial fantasy demographically).
So we couldn’t figure out how to fit them in without making them their own thing, and we didn’t think Quests were notable enough to split them off on their own. But clearly it didn’t take long for fans of Quests to find us, so perhaps we should have chosen differently. Sorry to disappoint!