Especially when you compare them to Chinese novels. Even the most basic Korean romance novels have world building and, I don't know, a plot? Compared to Korean ones, Japanese and Chinese ones feel like they're done for the heck of it. Is it because they get paid to do it? Do web-novel companies hire authors to write novels? What goes behind the scenes for Korean novels to turn out so great?
Isn't it simply that the translator korean english are few so the novel picked are always the top one? There used to be a time when JP novel were always high quality; but it was simply that the amount of translator available were really few; golden age of baka tsuki for example. Now there are more translator, and since nobody want to cover with another one, a lot of trash get translated.
There's that. And since Korea is pretty strict on copyright laws, I don't think this golden age is going to go away soon.
Nah, as a Korean I can tell you that translators often have to shift through piles of shit to find a decent novel. It's just that a lot more Chinese are translated, I think.
Yeah , I think translators just try to find more average / above average and stick with that , btw if you haven't then you should read Kidnapped dragons , it's just *chefs kiss*
I've read some bad Korean novels. If I we're to make a ratio I would say the amount of good vs bad novels is pretty similar. The best novels are usually translated first. I don't think copyright has as much to do with it as the amount of translators for the available language. The biggest factor that I find that make people think Korean novels are more interesting are the cliches. Japanese and Chinese cliches are a pretty well known whereas Korean novels are newer to some. If you are finding Chinese and Japanese novels boring or of low quality try switching genres. A different genre might break , the monotony and bring a new selection of titles.
Apart from the amount of translators there is also a lot more quality control too. When it comes to Chinese novels they trash on a lot of other countries (America being the most frequent) because they need to show nationalism so that their novels get published faster or something. Japanese novels usually like to ride the train first it was action from 70s-80s anime mostly action in the 90s action/romance 2000s ecchi harem was probably the most prominent even their anime and manga had become mostly ecchi and harem too. 2010-2019 isekai novels with harems or mmorpg novels where the character get stuck in the game or goes into the game world.
The cliches can also be applied with ore variance and are not inherently breaking the world building, as many of the chinese (and japanese) tropes are. Not that K-novels are completely safe against this problem...
On this index, Korean and Chinese have the upper spectrum of novels in terms of quality. I've found that I generally avoid Japanese novels because they're just unreadable. Even the so called golden age of web/light novels for Japanese novels are pretty substandard imo. There are pretty bad Korean novels as well on this index. Just search around and you'll find them. Tbh, most of the novels are stale nowadays. When is the meta going to change from other world/transmigration/rebirth? I'm pretty sick of it. (Narnia is best isekai, prove me wrong)
The reason for this can be argued to come down to market flexibility. If you compare Korean Action Novels (I'm choosing this because I primarily read action-orientated novels) to Chinese, or even Japanese, Action Novels, they have a lot more free room to experiment with. The Chinese Novels always have to be bound by restrictions imposed by the Chinese Government, and often by what the Chinese Public are expecting, resulting in numerous stories that are very similar in scope or initial world. The Japanese, technically, have more freedom to play with, but if they want to get published by a Japanese Book Company, they'll need to market themselves to the Otaku Market, causing them into a set form that we who come here to NU have come to understand and get bored with over the last, what, decade+? Korean Novels, however, aren't being written for a future market like the Japanese Stories, nor are they subject to heavy regulation like the Chinese Stories. This gives them room to move, but also requires them to actually explain things that the other nation's stories can gloss over. Japanese Protagonist getting hit by a truck became a trope because they don't want to bother explaining how MC ended up in another world, and it was easy to explain how the world worked and make shorthand references to it if you did this. Cultivation Novel's typically have Foundation Building and Nascent Soul levels, as well as Heavenly Tribulations, but they never actually explain what they are until they get to them, and often not even then (eg, the number of cultivation novels that have Foundation Building without explaining what's being built apart from "one's foundation" is not only significant, many of them have MC's that "strengthen their Foundation" at higher ranks, all without ever actually explaining what one's Foundation is). There hasn't even been any true deconstructions of otherworld/transmigration/rebirth, unless you count the stories where the "deconstruction" is that the summoner's (*cough*kidnappers*cough*) turn out to actually want to take advantage of their situation and exploit the summoned. Combine that with the vast amount of variants that have been created, and I doubt it's going away anytime soon. I mean, there is the "reincarnated into the future, why has the world's knowledge gone to sh** and I can crush the strongest in a country while sick enough to be bedridden?" stories that are starting up, but they're not really all that different from standard "Isekai". As for Narnia, I didn't enjoy the book/s that much, and sometimes it felt less like "I'm in another world" and more like "traumatised family members tell each other/themselves stories in order to hide from their trauma". Seriously, the number of times that the character's "found their way to Narnia" where they're capable of all sorts of things that they can't do in the real world (even after they return), because they were in some sort of trouble or being chased...
The quality of these books is dependent on the quality of the translations, the kind of books being translated, and quality of the books themselves. All of these factors favor Korean web novels so it's not surprising that some readers think that they're the best. Are they? Probably not, but I also don't think this really matters. Why do people believe this kind of thing? Wouldn't it make way more sense for Chinese writers to put this stuff in their books because they believe in it, and that their readers like it?
I'm not really convinced that the average translated korean webnovel is particularly high quality, even if the average might be higher than for chinese or japanese ones. It is however pointless to compare averages between their native countries when you only go by what has been picked up for translation, as translated works say more about the translators and readers of translated novels than they do about the novel industry in any of the native countries for these novels. It could be that korean translators have higher standards for what they pick up and/or simply that there being fewer translators give them more choices to pick from, and that also somewhat depends on what actually gets readers in english. Also I don't think it is all that helpful to focus just on the language/country averages, as there can be big differences between what gets translated from different genres as well from each language.
All of the most popular Japanese web novels are translated so what we have access to should be representative of what's out there. It should be noted though that this doesn't include the Japanese print industry and that these books tend to be much better than the web novels. But as only a small range of Chinese and Korean web novels get translated, what's available isn't going to be representative.
Most Japanese webnovels are done for the heck of it. Those authors don't get paid anyway. Even if they can make a book, there's an editing process and the story that ends up on the market can change a lot from the serialized version. In good ways and bad. Personally I feel like most Korean webnovels tend to get weaker faster as the story moves along - there'll be a few great arcs, a good arc or two, and then it just goes into freefall until the ending, which is the worst part of the novel. Much like CN webnovels, but the bad part is shorter because the overall novel length is shorter.
I've always attributed it to the number of available translated novels. The scarcer it is, the more unique you would think it is. Just like how Quick Transmigration was a new concept to me in the beginning but after binging a lot of novels related to the genre, you'll soon get tired of the same trope or have higher standards. I don't read much KR novels since there's not a lot that are completely translated but I do read a lot of KR manhwas, and considering the proliferation of them, you can already start to see which ones are trash, which ones are boring and which ones are just a copy paste version of some other manhwa but with duller plot. If the number of completed KR novels increases in the future (if that ever even happens), your standards for these novels will shoot up and you won't think of them as higher quality anymore but of course, that always depends on whether the market supply of kr novels (and easily obtainable raws) will forever stay low in the first place.
I don't think this has much to do with why Japanese web novels are so bad. A lot of them don't even have the basics of good writing like characterization and world building. It's really easy to do a much better job with many of these books but the authors just aren't interested. When I read a book with a competent writer the difference in quality is shocking.
If it was just a few writers then yes, but we are in an information age where writing something like that seems more ignorant and dumb in general that to let other ppl know. it just feels too stupid for all these writers to be that level of nationalistic.