[BlueTankEngine]

Yeah I agree with you on all the way down to the very foundational fiber of my being. Luckily though Japanese publishers will at most just add webtoons on top of their current operations and that will be that. Jpop still more or less exactly the same as before YG and Hybe made Idols universal, Japanese games are for the most part still as unique as the were before Mihoyo and Smilegate changed the ARPG industry landscape. I sincerely believe that Shueisha, Kodansha, and the broader manga sphere will remain largely the same as we move in to the future.

I work in Media merchant banking (Investment Banking + Private Equity), so what webtoons will possibly allow me to do is show Western-raised or older generation generation capital holders another vector by which Asian literary media is a worthwhile investment. I'd walk a mile through broken glass to funnel 100 mil USD into the manga industry, but obviously the amount of opportunities that arise where I can attempt to push the needle in that direction is slim. Webtoons might be a viable vector in some cases where manga isnt financially, and I've seen enough relatively impressive webtoons to feel that money is better spent there than most other places.

[shubb]

Are you following what's going on with these online serial novel platforms like Qidian and Japanese equivalents? They seem to be the wellspring for a lot of the IP recently but penetration to the west still seems kinda low.

It's really interesting how authors use these kind of narrative dark patterns to keep readers buying chapters and the effect that has on the story they end up writing.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Like Shousetsuka ni Narou? I've actually seen novels originating there in an English small-town HMV with surprisingly prominent placement, and a similar amount of shelf space as Marvel and DC comics combined. Listed as "Manga Novels" for some reason. There were a few xianxia-looking titles there, but I don't follow Chinese media so I don't know whether they were originally web novels or not.

Given that HMV is a huge chain that mainly sells records and BluRays, they'd have to be pretty established to be there and not in a specialist bookseller or comic shop.

On the last paragraph: With how frequently audiences end up being dissatisfied with the endings of popular serialised works, I'm quite close to just giving up on serialised fiction entirely, or at the very least only considering reading or watching something once it's over. Whether it's manga (good anime adaptations avoid this problem, bad ones exacerbate it with filler arcs), US seasonal TV, live-service games, or novels that have "Part 1" in their title, the problems all end up being the same. Either it's unpopular and has to wrap up in less time than planned, resulting in aborted arcs and contrived endings, or it's popular and the author decides (or is encouraged by big piles of money) to drag it out beyond the original planned run, resulting in poor pacing, retcons, dubious plot twists, re-treading old narrative points and filler arcs.

[BlueTankEngine]

Yeah I've been hip to the web novel stuff for the last 5 years. The stuff has an absolute death grip on Chinese fiction, and some of it is really quite spectacular. On a whole I consider it to be a very Chinese development, but some titles get surprisingly large global readership. It's a clever modernization of the Japanese light novel industrial complex, but I think fictional literature as leisure is just not practiced enough in the West for web novels to ever have a similar type of impact.