Are novels getting worse or…

[MintiLime]

So, I was wondering why there’s so much perceived negativity surrounding current writing and reading. I’ve seen it on here, on my otome reading sites, etc: readers feel like quality is decreasing.

I’ve been assuming that it’s really just genre fatigue, where you have already read the masterpieces and are now reading many similar novels/mangas, often now pushed into your recommendations due to those masterpieces.

Then I considered that it may be due to militant contracts where authors and artists are forced to churn out work constantly in order to pay bills, and they make popcorn and potato chip stories since they sell.

…which means the readers are reading it regardless of whether they like it, meaning there is no reason to shift towards a different style or plot.

speaking of readers, are the things they are reading getting worse? Are they fatigued? Or… are they just older?

I started reading light novels and manga and every variation of it because it wasn’t blocked by my public school’s website restrictions. I was bored, it was there. Now that I’m writing on here, I’m old enough to legally drink in the U.S.

I was thinking maybe it’s like rewatching an old kids movie you loved. Some just don’t hold up in comparison to the media consumed since you were a kid. Sometimes you are no longer in the target media (think like the whole coco melon thing: you aren’t a preschooler or whatever).

what do you think is responsible for this phenomenon?

 

[MajorKerina]

I watched an interesting video recently about storytelling entropy and something I'm trying to be very cognizant of. It was primarily focused on Marvel product in films and television. The dilution of central simple ideas. One example was the simplicity and story structure of a light saber and how even in the prequel films they had to one up at oh now there's two and now it's a crazy weird sword cross thing and now it's black and so forth. Trying to surprise an audience but also diluting a focused idea into some thing reaching for that initial surprise without having the same effect.

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

I don't think novels are getting worse. There are just more now then ever, and when there are more of something being made there will be more lower quality.

 

[SailusGebel]

Don't know about novels, but if I had to make a guess it's because authors don't balance professionalism and being a fanboy.

 

[Tempokai]

You had a just a coincidence of reading too same novels. There are countless out there and you'd read the copy of the copy of the copy–

Ahem, it's just a cycle, a trend, temporary cash cow, and it will exist in different forms of "I read this collection of tropes disguised as a novel" rhetoric until the webnovels suddenly die in the year 5832.

 

[Nahrenne]

So, I was wondering why there’s so much perceived negativity surrounding current writing and reading. I’ve seen it on here, on my otome reading sites, etc: readers feel like quality is decreasing.

I guess some of the recent negativity could be partially influenced by the influx of AI-generated stories.
I'm not saying that is the entire cause, just a partial influence.
As for other potential reasons: oversaturation and ease of access into the market; genuine lowering of writing quality due to those authors not learning enough about grammar/techniques and the like; reader fatigue - "Been there, seen that, this is a trope that's been overused," kind of mentality; etc...

…which means the readers are reading it regardless of whether they like it, meaning there is no reason to shift towards a different style or plot.

People are desperate for some kind of content to stimulate themselves in this overworked and stressful world we find ourselves in.
With how much short-content has been pushed lately, people's attention spans have taken a nose-dive, thus the quality of writing has in order to be able to churn out the content - to some degree.
It's not all because of that, though. Just a partial influence.

speaking of readers, are the things they are reading getting worse? Are they fatigued? Or… are they just older?

A mix of all those things?

I mean, there are more restrictions on certain things than in previous decades, which inevitably then restricts the content being created.
You can get into reading slumps - much like for anything else if you overconsume it - and with how content-hungry people have been influenced into becoming, it's not completely surprising that they don't feel as much of the spark when looking at content anymore.

As for being older...well, I mean, your tastes do/can change as you mature/get older. Some tastes will stay the same while others will feel immature/cringey. It's possibly a sign of having grown out of the genre/style they were reading before.

what do you think is responsible for this phenomenon?

Many things, as stated before.
There isn't one main reason for it.
'-'

X

 

[John_Owl]

I'd have to agree with @RepresentingEnvy. I don't think it's that quality is lowering necessarily. It's just diluted due to the multitudes of stories being publish now. There are more authors now than any other point in history. So you take what you'd call a 10 and toss it into an ocean of 3-7's the chances of you ever actually finding that 10 are very low. This is somewhat balanced by the internet, since you can read reviews and browse more and more novels before deciding on one to buy.

The flipside of that is that the internet also introduces new formats - such as the webnovels you'd find here on SH. Why go through the trouble of finding and buying a novel that may or may not be a 10 when you could instead just read two 5's for free?

 

[Succubiome]

Three things come to mind for me here:
1. As you read more and more, your standards tend to get both higher and more specific.
2a. There's far less gatekeeping than there basically ever was getting a novel/manga/whatever out in front of a wide audience. This can mean good things in more variety/less censorship/etc, but it can also mean that things that'd be weeded out for absurdly low quality, instead aren't.
2b. People who are unhappy about something tend to be way noisier than those who are content with it, on average. And it's not like you have to be a professional reviewer to get your viewpoint out there! The internet has made it easier to complain and be heard by large numbers of people, for good and for ill.

 

[TotallyHuman]

you're just gettig old. Wait till you hit 200 and you'll begin to slowly understand how this great witch feels all the time about everything.

 

[Rhaps]

Its bound to happen, not just novel but all markets to be oversaturated. The best example is Chinese novels, you can read two story and see that they have to exact same plot with nothing unique, just trash and trash, to the point where finding a good one isn't worth it at all.

Primarily reading otome isekai manhwa, I stopped looking for unique story a long time ago, I'm just here for the art and not so much the story.

Though their opinions are bias af, try finding subreddits and they will filter out the good and bad ones for you.

 

[Kalliel]

Primarily reading otome isekai manhwa, I stopped looking for unique story a long time ago, I'm just here for the art and not so much the story.

I used to read them all the time too, but after a while I just stopped looking for the good ones altogether. It's all the same frustrating tropes now.

 

[Rhaps]

I used to read them all the time too, but after a while I just stopped looking for the good ones altogether. It's all the same frustrating tropes now.

I feel you, dude. But some of the new releases are pretty good, just for the art alone like Trapped as a NPC in a Cursed Game

 

[Generic.Archdemon]

One thing, sometimes people take for granted that your taste change, nothing to do with time or age, its to do with living life, as you live, the things you want out of life changes and that changes what you want from your fiction and fantasies.

That said, to me a masterspiece is something that at the very least transcends this 'taste'.

 

[SternenklarenRitter]

I expect it is mostly that the readers are getting older. Once you pass about 25 years old or so, you stop appreciating new things as much. Often this means nothing seems able to stand up to your old favorites. Personally I find that when my impression is so I'm not actually making a fair comparison upon closer inspection. While there are trends with what genres are popular or what is popular within any genre, diversity is typically high enough that any person can find something they like in any genre at all. Lately there is also just a lot of tension in the world more generally, so some of that does come out as style shifts over time of longer running creative works, or a change in how they are perceived.

 

[Paul_Tromba]

There is a lot less quality but it's partially because of the increase in quantity. 20 years ago there were a lot less people writing because it was so difficult to do without modern aids or required expensive editors. Even if you did write something, it was very unlikely that it would be published due to what the publishers required. Now, anyone can be published and it's super easy to get it out there. As a result, there has been a flood of low quality works that drown out the quality amongst the quantity. You make something easy and everyone + their mother will try and put something out, good or not. The quality has been overshadowed by the sheer amount of quantity. Though it does make those quality works stand out more, it makes it significantly harder to find those quality works. I may be against gatekeeping but the whole point of gatekeeping in publishing was to prevent this from happening... And also to have a monopoly but that's not the point.

 

[Evil-Empire]

8 trillion 'I was kicked from the hero party' or 'I was born as the otome villainess' isekai stories later you get the feeling that just maybe it's all crap recycled to nth degree. For a fairly recent genre isekai has become extremely unoriginal quite quickly. Can't think of an actual plot for a story? No problem, just write some isekai story and rip off the most ripped off plotline ever to show up in the fantasy genre since vampires.

Not saying it's impossible to find or write decent isekai stories but what can a writer possibly do that hasn't already been done to death? This probably won't make me very popular but at this point isekai has to be the laziest genre of manga, and stories in general, to ever exist.

 

[Succubiome]

you're just gettig old. Wait till you hit 200 and you'll begin to slowly understand how this great witch feels all the time about everything.

pls give me immortality so I can understand :3

 

[Jemini]

Well, in regards to the overall trend of writing in general, I'd have to say that the "highs," referring to the absolute best in writing, is getting better ever since the internet and webnovels became a thing. People are just learning from all previous works and using it as a basis to improve their own work, applying all the lessons learned, and producing true masterpieces way beyond anything that came before.

Also, as for perceptions that it may be currently not so good of quality, there's an answer to that as well. Good work usually comes in cycles. It seems seriously good work tends to come out in clusters for whatever reason, and each cluster of goo work takes place every 6 to 10 years. Or, 4-8 depending on whether you count beginning to beginning or ending to beginning.

The last two major high-quality periods for good works coming out were 2011-2013, and 2017-2019.

2011-2013 saw Mushoku Tensei, Re:Zero, Shield Hero, and Overlord coming out in Japan, and Mother of Learning and Worm coming out in the English webnovel community.

2017-2019 was the period where Ascendance of a Bookworm came out in Japan, and in the Western webnovel community we got Ward (sequel to Worm.)

Going by this general time schedule, we're about due in for another serious gem to come out. I may have even already found one of them for the English webnovel community. Deathworld Commando: Reborn is rather recent and of good enough quality to easily compete with some of the heaviest hitters among the titles I mentions above there.

 

[TotallyHuman]

pls give me immortality so I can understand :3

Sorry this great witch don't do charity. Unless it's used to evade taxes. But rn I don't

 

[Jemini]

8 trillion 'I was kicked from the hero party' or 'I was born as the otome villainess' isekai stories later you get the feeling that just maybe it's all crap recycled to nth degree. For a fairly recent genre isekai has become extremely unoriginal quite quickly. Can't think of an actual plot for a story? No problem, just write some isekai story and rip off the most ripped off plotline ever to show up in the fantasy genre since vampires.

Not saying it's impossible to find or write decent isekai stories but what can a writer possibly do that hasn't already been done to death? This probably won't make me very popular but at this point isekai has to be the laziest genre of manga, and stories in general, to ever exist.

I'd say, for Isekai, rather than trying to "do something that hasn't been done before," you first need to study and REALLY understand what made the best examples in the genre actually successful. It turns out, all the ones that did REALLY freaking good are NOT the ones that tried to come up with some gimicky twist to make it feel "new." Instead, it's the ones that start off by playing their isekai really serious and straight, and maintain a high degree of fidelity and realism in their tone.

Mushoku Tensei would be the crowning example of this. That one played it about as straight as it gets, and that's a very large part of why it gained just so much success.

The stuff that makes your story unique will naturally flow from the world-building that is naturally going to be a part of that kind of really high-fidelity work. Thing is, the uniqueness has to come secondary. You first have to decide to take the genre seriously, then everything else flows from that.