WORST TROPES IN WEBTOONS

i've been a webcomic girlie since 2010 i think...sheesh
(my villainess-sona would be reborn as the tyrant's portrait painter)

∆ My book Unfamiliar is available here! -
∆ Thank you to Amarante for providing a good portion of the music! Listen to them below:

[BitterBrains]

I particularly find that pasting patterns onto fabrics and not adding any wrinkles or dimension to it is such immersion killer for me.

[someuncreativity]

"off-brand europe" is now my favorite way of describing every isekai world ever

[vurrunna]

If I had a nickel for every webtoon I read about a young orphan girl adopted into a noble family to replace their dead daughter only to be harassed and abused by her new family until they eventually kill her resulting in her regressing to the midpoint in her relationship with that family and allowing her to change the future while also uncovering her magical abilities and pursuing a dark haired love interest, I'd have two nickels. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but I need you to understand that I have seen that exact plotline used twice and variations from it used dozens of times and I've read all of them because I have a crippling shoujo manga addiction.

[lemonhail]

“My in-laws are obsessed with me” is literally the PERFECT description of the first trope

(Go read it’s amazing)

[violet_rush]

Webtoon is like a win lose situation. You get to find these absolute masterpieces of comics and then the next time you find those traumatizing back of the alley comics that straight up should not exist.

[beller]

I will never forgive WebToon for putting daily passes on the completed webtoons because back in 2017-18 my favorite pass time was binging stories and noW YOU'RE TELLING ME I CAN'T EVEN BINGE ORANGE MARMALADE ???!!! this is madness !!! nowadays I stick to finding good canvas stories lmao 💀

[lilblueberry]

Can you please include one with the girl-on-girl hate?? I’ve seen so many where it’s like “my stepsister stole my fiancé” or “my boyfriend cheated on me with my best friend” and I really want someone to bring that to light

[snowyroxx]

My biggest pet peeve in Webtoons are 3D backgrounds that are clearly from those CSP assets 😭 I UNDERSTAND why artists use them (time constraints and details) but so many times they don’t blend well with the art aaaa

[ari_ismynameee]

The worst trope for me is when the male love interest is jealous and gaslights the dumb female lead into falling in love with them.

Being jealous is okay in a relationship, it just becomes a problem when your jealously destroys you to the point where you can’t have your lover live their life without you breathing on their neck

[kittypost]

“This man has murdered people, but why do I only see his sad face?” is a sentence that just made me stop suspending my disbelief and drop the story entirely

[maryandflowers]

I actually liked the "dead protagonist reborn again" trope in "marry my husband", simply because it's not isekai, it's a slice of life comic of a woman relieving her life and trying to make the most of it...
By getting revenge on her backstabbing friend by making her marry her abusive husband...

[buzzy]

As a korean who read webtoons for 10+ years now most of this really has to do with the fundamental 'weekly' system. The artists are expected to draw 50-80 colored panels every week. It's known that they are always overworked even if it's a team of artists and it leads to boring compositions, angles and similar story arcs imo.
Also, webtoons used to be completely free but now it's more normalised to pay for the episodes, which I respect. Ads were not enough to give artists salary. And as a comment to people complaining about paying at all, let's not go there... There are numerous resources, not only the artist but editors, platforms etc and if u somehow can read it free at least once that's already a big deal.

[wellokthen]

As for the "scroll comic" issue i definitely agree, but i really love when there are webcomics that use this to their advantage, kinda like one o read a while back called "Don't Click" which uses the white space to exemplify a sense of quiet and loneliness, which is super important to the plot.

[ever_squish]

As a Korean it is so hard to find good Korean webtoons when one half is 'reborn as the villainess and I made the toxic bad boy fall for me' and the other half is level sorcerer in a game/simulation world fighting monsters in dungeons'. I know that there are some really good webtoons of those genres out there but it just feels way too generic. My personal favorites are Tomorrow(내일), Blood of the Butterfly(피와 나비), Surviving Romance(살아남은 로맨스), and 오른눈이 보는 세계 and 어글리후드 but I don't think those have English translations.

[crazypegasie]

I actually read a villainess isekai that I absolutely LOVED. The main character was pretty much a normal person and the story was kinda her realizing that most of the love interests for the heroine are either creepy, toxic or both. And the best part was she forced the male leads to take accountability for their behavior and SHE DOESN'T FALL IN LOVE WITH THEM but instead finds her own love interest that wasnt even a part of the 'original plot'.




I really liked it since it was pretty funny, interesting and sweet. Its called Beware the Villainess and its so good.

[pinpiu]

Scroll comics actually have the potential to be beautiful, like there’s really cool things you can do patterns and dynamic poses with a scroll

[safabekr]

I got so tired of the intense unwarranted bullying in many webtoons featuring high school 😭 It may be a cultural thing because I noticed this in a lot of Korean webcomics? But I got really tired of this in unOrdinary. There’s no justification for the bullies to go to the lengths they do.

[curiouschicana]

As someone who predominantly reads comics & novels on my phone, I absolutely love the vertical scroll format! Especially when it's used well. Since it forces you to have to go panel by panel rather than page by page, there's no way to accidentally look ahead, so I think it makes big reveals/surprises/jump scares so much more impactful. The scrolling format also allows creators to have fun with top-down perspective changes. Honestly, I prefer vertical scroll comics over traditional.

[eden-elysium]

I want to see an isekai webcomic that has a woman in an abusive relationship get transported to a world that has nothing to do with any media she has consumed, and then she sort of learns to live there over time and has to deal with her trauma. No random spontaneous love interest bs. Only a love interest if they’re completely non toxic and help her learn to love herself

[stayinneverland]

the "vilainess" trope is my guilty pleasure, I've read so many of thwm but I'll always read a new one bc I love it 🤷‍♀️