Okay So Spill; What's Your Beef With Webtoon?

[Content Warning for mentions of racism, grooming and pedophila.]

As you may or may not know, my comic, Captain Jellyfish, used to be hosted on Webtoon/Tapas before I moved it over to it's own site on Neocites. I’ve had my share of problems with the two platforms(although mainly Webtoon) for the past couple of years now, but I didn’t want to just ignore them anymore. For starters, I don’t like how Webtoon ignores most of their creators in favor of one or two series. There are so many incredible and talented authors all over their platform, but instead they choose toonly advertise Lore Olympus, a series whose numbers have been going downhill since Season 2 ended. A series that I would argue is morally bankrupt and has been since the very beginning. A series that they’re so protective over that they’ll copyright strike videos of small creators for “daring” to criticize their flagship series that struggles to break 100k likes per week on the new chapters.

The creator of Lore Olympus, Rachel Smythe, has a history of reacting with hostility/passive aggressiveness to any criticism of her webcomic, deleting any within her discord and the official Facebook group for LO. She’s gone so far as to go to fan facebook groups to complain about them allowing criticism for her webcomic, and getting upset when they boot her out for her shitty behavior. Webtoon tacitly encouraging Smythe’s behavior doesn’t end there however, as they have also allowed Snailord’s (creator of Death:Rescheduled) harassment towards someone who is likely a child (based off the demographics of people who read/use Webtoon), yet in both instances(and probably more) they have remained silent. While I understand that they cannot control their creators, they should not be turning the other way and twiddling their thumbs while their employees shit over their company’s reputation.

Real quick before I go onto my next point, I need to explain how these creators make money off of Webtoon. To those who don’t know, Originals creators make money off their fastpass episodes after the “minimum threshold” of coins used to buy one of their episodes is met, with the coins used to purchase the episode before the minimum threshold going into the pocket of Webtoon. What is this “minimum threshold” you ask? Good question! Nobody knows! The people who need to know when it’s been met so they know that they’re being paid don’t know. Originals creators have had to regularly fight just to know what their analytics are, and even then they don’t get a fucking response. I know that as a(now former) Canvas creator that Webtoon deletes the data for your analytics/performance every month, so if it’s August 1 and you forgot to record the data from how your comic performed in June, you are plain out of luck because you’re never seeing that data ever again. This isn’t even mentioning how Webtoon underpays their Latin American and South American creators, and how there’s vast differences in the payments per chapters for each of the Originals creators.

This leads us to today: the recent controversy surrounding the Webtoon Original, Get Schooled, and how it should have never made it this far. For those of you out of the loop, I highly recommend viewing this post here as the reddit post by Kendrillon summarizes/recorded just what the Hell happened with episode 125 and how webtoon/the author responded to the backlash far better than I could. I’m not here to say how betrayed I feel as a fan of the series, I’ve never read it before and I only just learned about what the plot for the series pertained, and to be honest I don’t think that it would be my cup of tea. What I am here for is to ask just how the editor didn’t shut this episode down when it was still in the scripting and storyboarding phase? While I understand that most of the editors are overworked with all the comics they’re managing, I don’t see how something this huge could’ve been missed. The editor should have said something when the N word showed up, but instead they let it slide and now they have this whole mess on their hands with Get Schooled being pulled from the platform.

While it’s good that for once Webtoon took accountability for their actions, this brings up another question: why aren’t they deleting other series on their site that also have harmful content? The Fate by AirisKiahin/YumiCH is a comic where the teacher is in a romantic/sexual relationship with his 17 year old student that he groomed. It is labeled as romance/slice of life. The story does not acknowledge how fucked up it is that he’s grooming his student. At the time of writing it has over 11 million views.

Despite videos covering this comic gaining views in the millions(even if you can’t really tell at the moment due to one of the authors copyright striking them/getting them taken down)the story is still up. Now in general I’m anti-censorship. In a way I sort of have to be as a queer person, as many cries for censorship(EX: Kink, drugs, violence) quickly leads into the censorship and erasure of discussing/talking about things like LGBTQ identity, racism, criticism of government, etc. That being said, there still needs to be some form of censorship as to avoid harm from happening to vulnerable peoples(there’s a reason “Mein Kampf” generally is no longer in circulation(no I am not saying The Fate is on the same level as a book used as reasoning to push propaganda/commit genocide, it is just being used as an example)), and I believe The Fate falls under this category. The webcomic pushes the idea that it’s “cute” and “romantic” for an adult to have inappropriate relationships with a minor, which is especially concerning when you factor in that Webtoon’s main audience is comprised of 13 - 24 year olds. This romanticization of grooming and abuse shouldn’t be shown to such a vulnerable group of people, and it’s shameful that Webtoon has yet to take down such a vile series on their platform.

I’ll admit that I have other qualms about Webtoon(lack of customisation options, inability to view/create comments on the website, clear favoring of their Originals creators, etc), but they all seem so dumb to me in the face of all the other things they’ve done and continue to do. In the beginning I almost didn’t want to even publish Captain Jellyfish on Webtoon because of their shady practices, but I knew that I would be missing out on the largest comic website due their monopoly over the webcomic scene. I eventually settled on updating on both Webtoon and Tapas, but even then I felt unsatisfied. Many of the same base, quality of life things about Webtoon carried onto Tapas, and even though I don’t hear nearly as much drama coming out of Tapas as I do Webtoon, I’ve still heard about them doing shady things in the past like trying to have the power to control when/if a series gets a physical release and “losing” track of where the money from the ink used to purchase episodes went. Webtoon and other sites fumbling with their user bases has made me paranoid that Tapas will be the next website to make a dumb change that no one likes but we’ll all be stuck with because the people running the site don’t care.

With all of this in mind I was a bit shocked when the possibility that I could host my comic on Neocities came up With Neocities I could fully customize the entire website for my comic, I could include gifs, music, author updates, truly whatever I wanted! There was one thing stopping me initially from jumping right in to learning how to code so I could make my dream a reality: the fear of missing out. I was afraid that when I moved websites that no one would want to read my comic anymore, or that by moving sites that I would miss out on my “big break” on Webtoon. In a way I’m still scared of those things, but I have to move on. I had already completed the bulk of the website, but I had sat on it for a few months before I went all in, and the longer that I sat on it, the stronger my desire to move websites grew. I could literally have everything that I wanted, who cares if my reader count or whatever grows a bit slower than before? I was already buried under all the other Canvas series, I might as well just move on from the bridge and step on the island already. I won’t be deleting the series off Webtoon and Tapas, not only for archival purposes, but I have a bunch of posts linking people there. While I'm thankful for the readers I've gained pn their platforms, it's time to move on from Webtoon and Tapas.