yeah, overall quality is dog shit. Doesn't mean there aren't gems if you dig long enough.
Am I the only one who thinks this?
Yep, there may be some quality gems here that were written with fewer raging hormones and calmer (more logical) brain cells.
Daoist011627 i'm not sure if the filter function of webnovel is the same as NU, so I just go to NU and unchecked those genres I deemed unworthy of my time.
Daoist011627 Agreed. These types of novels are a disease. This is because it infects other stories with the same drivel.
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I totally agree with you.
First, i precise that i'm not against smut stories. Porn with plot is exciting in its own way and it has the right to exist as long as there is a demand for it. And honestly some of them are not bad at all if that's what you're looking for.
However, i can say that i've seen for myself how garbage stories in the new ranking especially can get hundreds of thousands of views and many power stones/reviews just by adding a r-18 tag. They don't need to have a crazy release speed, nor a good grammar. Heck, they don't even need a plot. There's something borderline insane to give all power stones and doing fake reviews to help stories like those to earn more attention.
The truth though is that such stories can't bring money to their authors without a real plot behind. The few smut stories contracted that are well-ranked have in fact very few R-18 chapters and keep the interest in with their plotline.
For serious stories, 'r-18' should never be an enticement or be written for fan service. Otherwise, readers skip the plot, to go to the next sex scene. All your efforts have gone for naught then.
Described erotic scenes should only be to depict an atmosphere or to increase the readers' immersion. Nothing else. For example sex scenes in Spartakus or Game of Thrones contribute a lot to the mature , crude atmosphere of these series.
I would even say that if an author really want to write these fan-service chapters, it should be in a separate webnovel, to avoid contaminating the main story.
It happens on the 'romance side' too, when romance authors insist that putting meaningless R-18 smut is good for their book's popularity. It probably is, because their novels suck at keeping readers the other way.
But, the only ones who can buy the mostly badly written smut out there are people who never had the real stuff in life. Seriously, if you are a virgin don't try writing it. It smell fake and cringe from kilometers.
Immersive porn, or smut, or just a light tillitating scene is 1000 better than reading sex as if it's describing the functioning of a moto-continuum piston.
There's a lot of ways of using sex for moving your plot forward. Don't use it in meaningless ways, please.
People who are not practiced in a creative skill often lack the ability to perform that skill well.
The majority of people on this site are not writers with experience. Of those with experience, the majority on this site do not actively attempt to improve at their craft because they don't have to to get readers and praise.
The majority of readers here are children and young adults with relatively immature reading tastes who expect content catered to their immature tastes. Please note that immature does not equal "bad", but rather lacking in subtlety and nuance. I personally LOVE a lot of immature media. But I recognize it for what it is, and don't expect it to be high-brow. I think you would enjoy being on this site a lot more if you held this point of view.
There are a handful of authors on this site who are actively writing solid work filled with nuance, depth, and subtlety (like myself), but we are definitely the minority. And that's fine. We aren't writing for the majority. We are writing for ourselves and people with the same taste, and that's also okay.
If you look for authors who write like writers, you will find them. And should you need suggestions, I will be happy to suggest some names to check out.
a month later
Clowniac I agree with what you're saying but calling my tastes high-brow is a bit of an overstatement, I understand there are different genres and reading preferences and I understand inexperienced authors are on this site.
What I can't comprehend is why people praise these novels as works of a literature God (exaggerating here) when they're porn with a plot at the most, I don't have a problem with these types of novels but I don't want to have to wade through gallons of this type of writing while looking for a few amazing novels that aren't full of smut to the point that they should have an age restriction because every couple of chapters has a sex scene. You can't really call people that don't like this stuff high-brow because they actually want to find something to read with substance that actually fits within the genres they want to read (and I'm mainly talking about romance because I'm pretty sure that genre has been ruined on this site by these types of novels).
Daoist011627 I don't want to have to wade through gallons of this type of writing while looking for a few amazing novels that aren't full of smut to the point that they should have an age restriction
So... you want them to hand to you all the good novels on a platter?
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RABBITICOL it sounds more like they want less full of smut/pornographic (say, sex every couple of chapters quoted from their last post) novels on the site to have to dig through. sounds like a tough ask on WN so far though, given there are so many novels and there's not a thing users can do about that. though surely we can't really say most novels are smut.
s e x sells bruh.