Ehhh.
Maybe it is satisfactory by long strip web comic standards, but the thing is, almost all of them are kind of mind numbingly stupid. I read (or try to) all new yuri releases, and I can name just a few long strips that actually have good plot and non-stupid characters. This isn't one of them, sadly.
That is not to say that I think authors of these are all really bad (though some of them are), but that the format in which these works are published is extremly detrimental to their quality. Authors have to very frequently publish new chapters, and most of the time they have is spent not on improving the story, but on producing the damn thing. If they mess something up, they don't even have any time to fix it. Also, since releases are so frequent, they can't be long, which introduces my biggest gripe with almost all web published stories: you can't coherently tell a story in such small chunks.
Sorry for the rant, just had to get this off my chest, lol. You were way too convenient of a target...
Yeah, I've been reading a Chinese web novel that's about a web novel author (kind of like all those manga about mangaka), and the way it talks about the commercial reality of being a web novel author in China is pretty disheartening - it's honestly surprising that
anything vaguely decent ends up being written. If that story's depiction is reasonably realistic, and similar logic applies in the manhua industry, it goes a long way towards explaining a lot of the issues that people end up complaining about.
I've thought for a long time that the best way to think of a typical web novel is that it's a first draft, and often a rushed first draft. You can get away with a lot of things when you're writing a first draft - work on it obsessively every day, write thousands of words in a few hours with only minimal editing, and ignore the fact that you only just realised you wrote yourself into a corner fifteen chapters ago and you'd have to scrap the last fifty thousand words to fix things, because getting words on the paper is the whole
point of a first draft, even if they're crap words. But a first draft is always going to feel like a first draft - there's a
lot of work required to turn it into a polished piece of writing, and that work really needs to be done in light of the
whole piece, not in little dribs and drabs the way that a web novel gets published. You see at least some of this with Japanese light novels - the original web novel goes through a lot of changes and reworking as part of the publication process. You also see the problem with doing it in bits and pieces rather than as a whole - how many long series really start to suffer once the stuff that was already drafted in the web novel runs out, and there's less time and editorial feedback between the drafting process and the final publication?
Making an entire industry out of publishing rushed first drafts as serialised novels is really doing everyone a disservice - the authors don't get to turn their ideas into the kind of polished and complete works that would satisfy their creative urges, the readers don't get to see fully developed stories, and the industry itself burns through talented authors, leaving nothing but dross for posterity.
About the only good thing all that has going for it is that the sheer volume of stories means that there's plenty to pick from, and that fan translations of the good ones end up being such a small thing in the broader scheme of things that they're generally not being chased off the Internet . . .
Heh - a rant of my own, I guess.
