8 Tropes of the Webfic Age
The Internet has democratized fiction publishing, allowed teenage writers to set new standards, and delivered a bunch of cool new failure modes. Here's a list of them!
Epistemic status: I’m just having fun here. Potentially more to come.
Depressed Writer Protagonist
It was simply a fundamental nature of the way he went about life. He wasn't good at writing, so he stopped writing. He wasn't good at socializing, so he stopped socializing.
You want To Have Written a Story, but you’re ultimately a boring person. The only traits you can find interesting about yourself are negative, not at all conducive to the story you’re about to write. Despite that, you can’t escape your artistic narcissism. You now have a Depressed Writer Protagonist.
The literal phenomenon isn’t exactly new (you can’t drive a hundred yards in the Stephen King Multiverse without hitting a writer), but it’s more frequent nowadays, with different roots:
Self-inserts are more common. The writer outright putting themselves in the story, flaws and all is kind of the point.1
Web fiction writers don’t have real-life experience. This is a Venn intersection of many factors: they tend to be nerds, they tend to be younger (younger people no longer go outside), and even their chosen genres of fiction are often written by people who touch even less grass.
This doesn’t always lead to a bad story. If you’re a funny asshole, your flaws can make the story better. But certain ones—like depression or social anxiety—are nigh universally inimical to good storytelling, especially if it’s your first novel. Look in the mirror and repeat to yourself: You Are Not Kafka.
Selected works
Vast Error: Arcjec is depressed, stays in his room and whines, but he was originally the author self-insert down to his name, so he receives the brunt of the screentime… as opposed to the eleven other main characters actively trying to make shit happen.
Another Shitty SI Fic: Lia is so awkward and neurotic that despite going to school with two Canon Protagonists she’s unable to leverage that for plot progression. Instead, she fills the story with gender drama and circular “maybe next time we’ll team up” garbage.
First Novel Cool Idea Compendium Syndrome
An overworked archangel tries to debug the laws of physics. Henry Kissinger transforms the ancient conflict between Heaven and Hell into a US-Soviet proxy war. A Mexican hedge wizard with no actual magic wreaks havoc using the dark art of placebomancy. The Messiah reads a book by Peter Singer.
Small fragment of Unsong’s synopsis
You’ve always wanted to actually write a book, but the right time never came. Family trouble, a healthy social life, Bible Camp… there’s always something. On and off over the years, in between underwater welding jobs, you’ve been noting down some good if disparate ideas. Maybe they’ll serve as inspiration for a few short stories someday.
Okay, good news, prisoner #612413: a new witness has come forward and you’re free to go. Pick up your personal belongings and don’t forget your laptop—you can actually write something now!
…no, what are you doing? Magical girls and superheroes and pastiches of Evangelion and Realms of the Unreal??? Stop! Don’t use ALL the ideas you’ve ever had in the same book!
This trope is very common now that the figure of the Editor is disappearing. Even if we don’t count people who post their novels straight to AO3, Amazon is now the biggest platform for books, and they allow self-publishing. HarperCollins would tell you “dude, this story is very confused, stick to one or two themes and remove the part with the Nate Silver hagiography”. Amazon tells you “fine, whatever, we don’t have a reputation to burn”.
Selected works
Floornight: the example given above wasn’t an exaggeration. Someone really did put Evangelion and outside artist Henry Darger’s body of work into the same novel.
Fine Structure: this is somehow both about superheroes and non-linear time-travel science-fiction exploring the low-level nature of the universe.
Potemkin Story
Reviving the movie night discussions:
Do you think the Remnantians would appreciate Equilibrium (2002) starring Christian Bale?
Comment #39,453 for Hunters of Justice (page 1579)
Your fanfiction might even be good, but that’s not why people are posting on your forum thread.
Maybe your story is heavy with references to other media, or you’re focusing on worldbuilding, or you’re the only KanColle fic in the game… whatever the cause, your story has become an offtopic comment generator.
Most of the activity around your work isn’t about the work. People discuss their own worldbuilding ideas, the source material, their favorite movies, or even their personal lives… but almost no one is talking about the plot or wondering what happens next. You’ll get over one thousand pages and no usable feedback.
This only happens within writing forums like Spacebattles, Questionable Questing and Sufficient Velocity, obviously. Mods may try to stop this, since it leads to seemingly successful and active façades of a story and little, if any, actual productivity. Sometimes the author is involved and encourages the phenomenon. All replies are good replies, or something.
Selected works
Ghost in the City: a good 90% of the 2361-page thread is people powergaming the protagonist, making crack omakes, or talking about Ghost in the Shell.
Nin-to-Five: you could change the thread name to “discuss how dumb the Naruto world is and how you could write it better” and not a soul would be able to tell anything changed.
Celestial Event Horizon
Thanks to my latest gift from the Celestial Forge I had another option when it came to my costume. My Engineer Class skill provided me with a seriously advanced armored spacesuit complete with life support, power generation, and integrated shielding. The localized reactor would be a serious boon to some of the more advanced tricks I could manage with my omni-tool. The fact that it provided a sealed environment with a regenerating oxygen supply addressed one of my remaining vulnerabilities. Unfortunately there were two problems with just going out in my new armor.
First, despite the advanced material and integrated shielding it actually provided less protection that a set of clothes under the effect of my Fashion reinforcement power. It would have been borderline before I included the additional pieces I had made to protect me from life fiber testing, but with those included it was miles ahead—
Brockton’s Celestial Forge, Chapter 16 (it goes on for around twenty paragraphs)
You’re at the vanguard of literary experimentation. You’ve decided to write a Celestial Sysfic, specifically one with a word count rule. Every 1000 or so written words, you roll a die and your character gets a new power.
Your new power this time is for a franchise your character knows nothing about. Time to show him figuring it out.
Oh, you’ve now written a thousand words of exposition and experimentation… I guess those words call for a new power? Time for another thousand words of narration, which leads to…
Wait, when does your character get to do anything?
This is a frequent problem with the “genre”. There’s the rare writer who simply doesn’t count words unless they advance the plot, or uses an achievement-based power system. But many celestial protagonists simply don’t advance the plot, staying within their labs or thinking about their new goodies for thousands of words and never getting to use them.
This is ironically inversely correlated with writer skill—lengthy exposition is not really a common failure mode for truly beginner writers—so it means you can pick your poison between a story that’s too fast-paced or a frozen one, no in between.
Selected works: virtually every Celestial fic ever written.
Crowdfunded Mall Trip
[Super Supportive] has gone Slice of Life recursive. Instead of being annoyed at too much SoL getting in the way of plot progression, these days many soup readers get annoyed at too much SoL preventing other SoL from happening
Super Supportive comment
You’re writing what you hope will be your magnum opus. You have designed a path from the start to the finish line, going through eventful story arcs, character development, peaking at the climax, followed by a satisfying denouement. People are loving it so far.
HOWEVER, halfway through, you start earning ten thousand dollars a month from the story thanks to Patreon and SubscribeStar.
What if your next work isn’t so popular? You gotta eat daily, and you’ve somehow convinced yourself the profession of “internet writer” is a reasonable way to achieve that.
You know what you must do: drag it out. Introduce a million subplots like fetch quests, tournament arcs, or even your blorbos going out to buy clothes for an entire chapter. Anything that doesn’t resolve mysteries or move the plot forward qualifies.
Selected works
Delve: should Rain do something productive, or spend yet another chapter explaining how his spreadsheet helps maximize his aura cleaning gains by 2%? Sorry, he just fell inside another hole, maybe he’ll get out in a couple months, he has to Meditate first.
Mother of Learning: despite previously having a clear road to the finish line, it turns out Zorian can’t escape the loop without first retrieving several artifacts hidden all over the world, which leads to unique action adventures! I guess the author has no choice but to write out those additional two years of chapters. Keep paying him, thank you.
Slumpchain
"Two! TWO INSIGNIFICANT JUMPS! That is ALL that you have had, and you think that makes you WORTHY of opposing me?" he roared.
You’re at the vanguard of literary experimentation again, and decide to write a Jumpchain. The point of this genre is exploring a variety of fictional worlds, getting new powers and weapons from each.
You stop moving forward after the first or second world.
Fixing a novel’s problems usually takes a novel’s word count, and you don’t want to say goodbye to the characters you’ve developed throughout it.2 You’re using 0.001% of the bonuses and 100% of the maluses of the gimmick in order to end up with a regular fanfic.
Selected works: virtually every Jumpchain ever written.3
Stub-in-the-back
(This description has been stubbed due to Kindle Unlimited exclusivity policies)
—poor fans aren’t even able to get into a work if they weren’t there. Even the ones who did support the work can no longer reread it, since the first few books are no longer online.
This splits the fanbase even worse than the Spoiler Babel Curse of Patreon-tier-based early chapters. At least that problem goes away when the story is over.
Selected Works
Dungeon Crawler Carl: the first mainstream example, before it became the usual, “The first several chapters of DCC are now off of Royal Road because the book is on Amazon. I want to thank all of you for 9 months of amazing support. [RR] and Patreon will always be the place for the newest chapters and content, but to comply with Amazon's Kindle Unlimited policy, I can't have more than 10% of the story up here”.
The Primal Hunter: two failure modes conspire to make this readable—the story is so stupid that I’ve read that it’s possible to pick this up at chapter 907 and still follow the plot just fine, even if Books 1-12 are stubbed. The story is currently earning $70,000 dollars a month on Patreon alone.
Audience Blind Spot
Wow, what a review. Its [sic] not a problem if its [sic] 3 stars or whatever for my poor grammar or I get that the whole first person thing throws folks off. But So [sic] many if not all of the .5-1 star reviews stem from the chapter with [trans character]. was [sic] super pumped about posting today too.
You’re writing a highly popular story, which always comes with very annoying fans. For a long time, you’re able to keep them happy and target their wants and needs. Usually, this is a power fantasy where numbers go up.
Then, at some point, you lose track of who you’re writing for—or never learned the Official Web Fiction demographics in the first place—4 because you make the ultimate mistake and put out a chapter targeting a different one.
Fans don’t forgive and don’t forget, like the mythical Four Chan, and once your core fanbase is gone, it’s hard to recover. Royal Road—the most profitable host—has a very strict leaderboard system, where a single 1 star review can knock you down a hundred places in the rankings.
Remember, authors, keep your eyes open. Don’t Wile E. Coyote yourself off a cliff.
Selected works
The Daily Grind: the quintessential example. A story about a guy, his male best friend and a girl. The fans ship the main viewpoint and the girl together, of course. The story falls from #1 to #500 when the two men kiss. The author doubled down and eventually turned the whole affair into a bisexual polyamorous relationship, which if anything made the fans angrier.
The Simulacrum: a rare reversal, in that the story pandered to a smarter audience to begin with (some say it even included Rick and Morty fans). It was a deconstruction of harem video game-type stories, with the hero trying to get the NPCs to “wake up” and become real people. After book 1, the author immediately opens a Patreon and turns the story into the genre he was parodying. The protagonist has special powers, every female character fawns over him… The readers wait for a “sike” they never get, review bombs ensue.5
Have YOU noticed any patterns? Let the rest of us know.
Of course, OC (original character) SIs (“self”-inserts) exist to mitigate this problem, but that’s only if your priority is the “canon knowledge” aspect of the gimmick and not the “live vicariously through your writing” one.
Many Jumpchains include the possibility of taking a couple companions along, but not everyone.
Though hilariously, I checked this blog and I’ve never reviewed one that fits this trope. I guess that’s already a subconscious quality filter.
It has a decent score nowadays, but if I remember correctly it was largely due to crying to the admins with messages like:
I still can't get over the pettiness of some voters here on Royal Road. As in, I was once again getting so close to top 5 on the rankings, and then, like clockwork, three 0.5 star votes drop and pushes The Simulacrum back into the 20s. So annoying...
What is going on in these comments?? Acknowledging that the royalroad userbase is baseline homophobic (and mod team too, lmao, look at the endless stink whenever anyone asks them to add an LGBT tag to the site) and majority straight guys is kinda a statement of fact that has nothing to do with Makin or the story mentioned. If you are writing on that website, that is the audience you've got. (Because you can't even add an LGBT tag to turn homophobes away at the door, because the mod team on RR sucks lmfao.)
I have reread the section of this post in question and do not understand what people are mad about here.
I thought you had to be joking with that 70k/mo on patreon. And then i checked and you were actually lowballing it by almost 7k 💀 Literally how does someone do that?
The hot dog gif slaughtered me lmfao