Has anyone noticed this about Korean webtoons?

[akitsukino]

I recently made a post lamenting how sad I was that 20ish me didn’t enjoy anime and manga as much as teen-ish me did. I wondered why I started feeling this way and I think it might have something to do with all the shoujo manhwa I’ve been reading.

I’ve had some extra money so I decided to try out some of the stuff on Tapas and other places that’s been behind a paywall. A lot of what I’ve found has been pretty good, but after a while I started to notice something. A lot of the comics available in places like Tapas and Tappytoon seem to be targeted at female audiences.

Female protagonist, bunch of pretty boy male supporting characters, not to mention the endless amount of otome isekai stories. I think the reason I was lamenting my old watching habits is because a lot of these manhwa have been reminding of all the shoujo anime I used to watch. Full color, wacky situations, female leads, friendship. (“My Life as an Internet Novel” feels kinda like “Ouran”). And a lot of them seem to even be devoid of some of the things that drove me away from shoujo in the first place (doormat female leads, a-hole male love interests, maxed out melodrama). It’s kinds nice to read something that makes you feel like a kid again.

But the main reason I’m pointing this out is this; it feels like the primary audience for so many Korean webtoons is mostly female, as opposed to Japanese manga which is primarily targeted to male audiences. Of course any gender can reader either genre, but it just feels like for every one action manhwa I find with a shounen-esque tint, there’s about ten other romance webtoons with dukes and duchesses. Not to mention that most manhwa adaptations are live action and most manga adaptations are animated.

What is going on here? Has anyone else noticed this? Could it just be that manhwa reach more of the mainstream audiences that romance brings in and that’s why so many of the adaptations are live action as opposed to manga which fits more of a niche and that’s why manga adaptations are usually animated? Could this whole thing I’ve noticed about romance manhwa simply be because those are the one’s being translated and there’s whole lot more variety of manhwa that just aren’t being liscenced? Has anyone heard anything else? I’m really interested if anyone knows anything?

[Mxhannadi]

Noticed that too. I'm not really sure as to why tbh. I guess "some" creators just want to stick to the genre that attracts the most readers? I'm pretty sure there're thousands of interesting stories out there on Webtoons that deserve more love and appreciation.

[rokudoku]

Most of the paywall online webtoon and novel readers are women, maybe that's why? In my country, women willing to pay lots of money to their favourite paywall webtoon, also they love to promoting their favourite webtoons on their social media too. Men....not so much.

[ble]

Yes, while japan anime, mostly shonen anime is the biggest thing (just look how much money the demon slayer movie made), in Korea / webtoons/ Tapas, romance is the biggest category. Most fans of romance/Bl comics are women.

[darthmongoose]

Blame the publishing industry. Basically the print publishing industry has been excluding female and LGBTQIA+ creators for over a decade, insisting that there's no audience for our work, that comics for a majority female audience or featuring LGBTQIA+ rep is "niche interest" and favouring male creators while similarly talented female or nonbinary ones had to just peddle our wares as small press hobbyists.
Then along comes the internet. People put work on there to fill this "small niche" because you can get free worldwide distribution with little to no gatekeeping and wow, it turns out if you make comics for this content-hungry audience who like reading (women statistically read a lot more books than men, millennials read more books than boomers or gen x-ers, so millennial women? We read a lot.) in a place where they can find and access it that it's not a small niche after all!

Basically there's a huge audience who are used to engaging with content on mobile devices who are hungry for works relevant to them that print publishing had been catering to less and less over the decades to the point of largely abandoning them, and a bunch of creators who want to be able to make content like that who can't get work from publishers but who now have means to work independently by directly monetising their audience. Perfect meeting of supply and demand, basically, that publishers were too set in their ways to capitalise on.

[kkaawmics]

This is interesting! I think it's also worth noting though that korean manhwa prior to webtoons was also heavily romance leaning. I'm just speculating but it's possible that's the style that gained traction in South Korea historically so it's just continued in webtoon form. They also have a rich modern history of romance K-dramas which has a huge in-country and globally expanding market. This may account for live action adaptations being more prevalent.

Japan has a different history with manga, dating back to post-WII and early creators were influenced by Walt Disney. The works that transformed the landscape were action-adventure stories or comedies so it kind of makes sense their anime/manga are skewed toward that. Animation is also more likely than a live action because of the prevalence of anime in their media history.

As for the reincarnation/isekai shoujo stuff is super recent but stems a lot from the isekai action stories from the early 2010s (e.g. Sword Art Online) I actually love the shoujo heroines in these new isekai romances despite the multitude of copycat storylines! I won't go on a tangent though about the fascinating trends in japanese anime/manga

[skicoak]

Blame the publishing industry. Basically the print publishing industry has been excluding female and LGBTQIA+ creators for over a decade, insisting that there's no audience for our work, that comics for a majority female audience or featuring LGBTQIA+ rep is "niche interest" and favouring male creators while similarly talented female or nonbinary ones had to just peddle our wares as small press hobbyists.

To jump onto the end of this, at least here in the States, the direct market distribution system helped strengthen this self fulfilling prophecy. The brick and mortar shops were widely and notoriously built as a "Boys Only" clubhouse. It wasn't until bookstores started carrying product that publishers realized how off their assumptions were.

In my teens, the only place to even get Elfquest graphic novels was the GROCERY STORE! My comic shop at the time acted like they were impossible to procure.

[aqua03]

Meanwhile I could only get my favorite comics by subscribing to a LEGO Magazine....

(Seriously though, Bionicle comics were the bomb as a kid._

[skicoak]

Meanwhile I could only get my favorite comics by subscribing to a LEGO Magazine....

Yeah, the direct comic book market has always been a mess.

It seems tailored more to collecting than reading.

[aqua03]

I mean, thankfully the LEGO magazines were free, so there wasn't too much of a barrier to get the Bionicle comics. (Until they made the comics exclusive to the short-lived "Brickmaster" magazine that you actually had to pay for...)

[akitsukino]

That issue of people using the Internet to get their stuff out there is also something I was thinking about in terms of Korean comics. I looked it up and there was a really bad wave of censorship going through South Korea in regards to comic books being bad for kids, like, book-burning type of bad censorship. And it apparently got bad to the point that a lot of Korean artists ended up going to Japan to find work. The ones who didn’t go to Japan just started putting their stuff on the Internet. And apparently that’s at least why most of the Korean comics industry is primarily online right now.

As far as female audiences go, if people were using the internet to get around country wide censorship, it’s probably not too crazy to think people also used the internet to escape gendered publishing practices.

[bakasama25]

Oh that censorship happened back in the 1970's when S. Korea was under a dictatorship. It was so bad it damaged the manhwa industry for decades and it never recovered. When webtoons started to be a thing, artists had a platform mostly free of gatekeeping and it had minimal trouble getting their work to the masses. Right now S. Korea might be one largest webcomic markets.

The reason Korean costumed romances seem very popular is it's what's official publishers/scanlators are pushing. I mean there's a certain logic about going to where the money is.

I've seen webtoons aimed at adult men (but not porn) else where and it seem to sale but you'll have to go other publishers to see it. Like Lezhin or Toomics to see it.

[Teddy-Stonehill]

I think a big part of what you're noticing is just that Tappytoon and Tapas specifically are generally more targeted at female audiences. If you go to other websites you can find content, even webtoons, more catered to other demographics.

As for manga and anime, there actually IS a ton of incredibly good manga and anime catered to female audiences, you just have to know where to look for it. It doesn't tend to be as popular in western markets so you're unlikely to run into it organically like you will with whatever the new big blockbuster shonen title is. But if you seek it out, it's there.

[thedude3445]

Just like everything else, the 50s ruined anything cool in American pop culture for several decades

[skicoak]

Not to diminish the impact and legacy of romance comics in general but there's so many variables when comic historians try to set the romance boom and bust into the wider history of American comics.

Fredric Wertham, and to a lesser degree other critics like Dr. Hilde Mosse, did take romance comics to task during the lead up to the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings but during the actual hearings...romance comics weren't even discussed despite numerous titles being reviewed by the committee.

And when the Comics Code dropped it wasn't until part C of the General Standards provisions before anything that looked directly aimed at the genre of Romance were regulated.

As a result, it's hard to paint a picture where the Code was ever fully aimed at Romance comics.

[Nugtown]

Historically speaking, shojo and girls manhwa have been their big sellers since they discovered their demographic decades ago. They ended up with a whole black market industry just to publish those books in a time when not only was japanese media VERY strictly banned, but the manhwa reading rooms of the time (60's, 70's) were dominated by boys and therefore manhwa for boys. It's no surprise it would continue to be a mainstay, even just culturally speaking.

[NickRowler]

I know this is an old thread, but I think a lot of it has to do with the difference of how men and women consume media.

Studies show that women and teenage girls use smartphones more than their male counterpart. Mobile games are dominated by female players. Social media apps like Instagram and Tiktok tend to be used more by female users. So it makes sense that female readers would also use their phones to read webcomics.

I think for manga print, there is also some bias of Shojo and Josei being less likely be imported to the West. And when they were, most of them might have never had much traction. It doesn't help that Westerners tend to seek out manga of anime on TV. When the only anime being broadcast on major channels are "for boys", then it makes it harder to learn about the stuff targeted at girls.

[RedLenai]

I've noticed that too. But I think that the reason why there is so much of a certain genre is because of the actual popularity it has? More demand, more product.

Is like even to this day there is so much isekai novels, anime and manga that for me is the equivalent of the korean story of the girl reincarnated as part of royalty surrounded of many hot guys.

Not very different from 2019 where alla you could see were korean comics about sadistic romances with CEO or having affair babies with the Boss just like how japanese BL exploded in the Omegaverse genre. So I believe it'll change with time