One factor you may be missing in the prevalence of Isekai/LitRPG/Progression Fantasy novels on RoyalRoad is that the original purpose of the site was to translate Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, a novel about a Virtual Reality MMORPG called Royal Road which was emblematic of the genre. From there, people started publishing fan fiction of the story, then their own similar novels, and more. The audience for the genre never left and is still the largest on the site, even if now there are other genres as well.

yeah important detail.

like the site was created for and named after isekai, you're gonna get a lot of it

LitRPG fans aren't all young people, it's also weirdly popular with middle-aged women with fond memories of playing World Of Warcraft.

I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy power fantasies.

I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes, because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.

Hey now, I'm 42 and like some LitRPG / progression fantasy (only read Dungeon Crawler Carl, Mother of Learning and Cradle, though).

As a (perhaps not-so-young) consumer of several RR stories in those exact genres, yes. It's a fun genre that really tickles the same part of my brain that building munchkins in D&D does. Progression fantasy is just very satisfying to read.

(In case anyone is looking for recommendations, Mother of Learning is the best all-around, Delve is probably my favorite, and Worth the Candle is incredible if you can stomach how much of a crapsack world the protagonist is dragged through)

If we're doing recommendations I would like to add my own, which are:

- bog standard isekai - isekai with numbers, but it's more of a horror story, at least for book 1

- hope - which actually isn't isekai, nor litrpg, but still fantasy about a young protag

- death by chocolate - a detective cyberpunk story

That's genre fiction - a formula, with some reader-insert gratification. A site like RR is specifically aimed at readers who want those kinds of stories.

Other fiction markets are the same. Mysteries, fantasy, thrillers, romance, all have their tropes and sub-tropes. Most don't have an RR equivalent because they're marketed through other communities, like TikTok for romance.

Original fiction that doesn't follow strict genre rules and expectations is a very hard sell today - but I'm not sure that's ever been untrue.

I'm sure you are right but it didn't use to be this bad - I remember a couple of years ago I tried to familiarize myself with the old fantasy classics, most of which certainly weren't considered respectable literature back then.

By far the worst offender of the bunch was Lin Carter's Under the Green Star - in which the sickly protagonist has his mind transported into a body of a powerful hero of legend, in a faraway realm, and rescues a beautiful princess who falls madly in love with him - at which point the teenage boy pandering became so unbearable, that I had to put the book down. This is exactly the tier wher most RR books stand at.

Other books, such as the Elric books by Moorcock, or Leiber's Fafhrd books would still qualify as genre fiction, but have far more depth and nuance to them and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.

I wonder, what other sites are there for online fiction?

I only know of Wattpad, which seems to largerly focus on romance for teenage girls, and AO3, which seems to focus on smut/fanfiction.

While all 3 sites have hidden gems, it's too much of a bother for me to wade through the typical faire to bother looking for them.

Progressive fantasy is what RR is known for, and many series like that launch from there. There are others that are progressive fantasy adjacent. Progressive fantasy covers litrpg (and its many variants including 4x rpgs), so-called “cultivation” fantasy (wuxia, xianxia, etc). It shouldn’t be surprising since fighting animes have been around for a long time, and now isekai animes are now the rage, and those all overlap into progressive fantasy. There is a subreddit for this.

Other platforms will have other types of serials. I just don’t know them off the top of my head. My wife reads a romance serial somewhere else.

>Is this what young people want nowadays?

Yes, but it's not just young people.

>The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.

You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back to anime/manga/light novels. (Maybe the reason is that in Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.)

However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these more modern stories do.

I read a few of these on kindle, some are ok, but some are just not very good at all.

and they seem to seamlessly run into another genre called haremlit where the main character easily collects partners left and right.

Now I tend to shy away from kindle unlimited and books with warnings about "unconventional relationships" (in my experience both mostly mean poor writing quality)

If anyone has their own tips for picking not-a-waste-of-time books, I'd like to know.

I had found a few I like on RR. The authors will sometimes do a shoutout for ones they liked, or promote. That gets me a fairly good variety.

Isekai (e.g. wish fulfillment + power fantasy) is absurdly popular in the anime/manga industry so I guess I'm rather unsurprised that its leaking over to more traditional novels as well.

As an anime fan, I wish there were more series that strayed from this formula. So many are either isekai, "protagonist has an ultimate power/entity inside them they can't fully control", or both.

You mean like Fieran? That is something author Blaise Corvin calls “exploration fantasy” and inspired him into attempting a new serial along that line.

There is also Your Lie In April. Not a fantasy or reincarnation. There are few other exceptional ones here and there.

Funnily enough I was actually going to write "Frieren is the only one that comes to mind that doesn't follow this formula", but I figured it would sound way too myopic since surely that can't be the only one.

Honestly I was just thinking about this - there have been many manga series (which get turned into anime eventually), that started out with an interesting premise that can be taken into many directions, only to turn into a cookie-cutter shonen battle manga.

I think I know the reason for this - shonen is a relentless popularity contest, where magazines only feature the most popular works and will quickly drop your series once it starts losing readers.

The way to consistently stay on top is to appeal to the biggest demographic - that is shonen battle/isekai fans by making your stuff to be exactly like the other stuff.

But doing so makes you lose the readers who were interested in the thing that made your manga unique in the first place. And after a time, these people will stop reading the publication altogether, skewing fan demographics even more towards genre fiction, making it even more impossible to create something unique.

I have seen this happen multiple times.

Anime/manga are pretty strongly intertwined with (web) novels in Japan. Those same novels are fan translated into English (Chinese and Korean too). This has created a kind of fanbase for web novels/self-published novels.

Japanese companies starting to send copyright claims against fan translations probably opened the door for Chinese, Korean, and English web novels like that.