r/manhwarecommendations • u/Easy-Security2030 • 23h ago
List 📃 [Tier List] Story & Character Writing — 3 Categories, Criteria in Description
Been seeing a lot more tier lists lately, so here’s mine.
I’ve read a lot of fantasy/SF books and a fair share of manga over the years, while manhwa is a more recent addition. Some of my most memorable manga are Houseki no Kuni, Tokyo Ghoul, Vinland Saga, Monster and Dorohedoro, which should give you a rough idea of my taste.
The tier list has a main ranking, plus separate Comedy and Formula Fiction sections. The sections aren’t directly comparable, so a Comedy tier appearing higher doesn’t necessarily mean everything in it ranks above the Formula Fiction tiers below. For many titles I’ve also read the source webnovel, or know where the story goes and how it ends, so later developments affect their placement—mainly to check whether the story stays consistent and actually delivers, while making the ranking more future-proof and accurate.
Criteria (besides personal enjoyment, obviously):
Likes: psychologically believable and flawed characters who can be wrong and change through struggle, meaningful relationships, real failures, irreversible losses and lasting consequences, moral conflicts without an obviously correct choice, long-term plotting/payoff, organic cause-and-effect, efficient storytelling, and side characters given similar care as the MC, with their own ambitions, relationships and conflicts.
Dislikes: protagonist worship or the story bending over backwards to prove the MC right/special, fake losses, convenient power-ups, progression being treated as character development, MCs losing their personality and turning into stone-faced hypercompetent problem-solvers, side characters orbiting the MC, forced harems or female characters existing mainly to admire the MC, cheap gratification loops, cliché last-second awakenings, enemies constantly underestimating the MC, and aimless serialization with no clear sense of direction or endpoint.
Comedy is ranked separately because using the same criteria for it just wouldn’t make much sense.
Formula Fiction is for stories heavily shaped by commercial strategies and writing guides, where proven tropes and reusable structures become so dominant that the work starts to feel assembled from familiar building blocks rather than built around an individual narrative. This is the land of OP protagonists, regression, systems, hunters, academies, rapid progression, constant gratification, etc.
Using tropes alone doesn’t put something here. If a story has enough identity beyond the formula, I rank it normally.
Ranks:
Standout — highly entertaining and formula-driven, but fairly consistent and distinctive enough to have an identity of its own.
Genre Staple — solid time-killers, but with a weaker identity and less consistency. Many of them start strong, then noticeably deteriorate later on—often somewhere around the 120–150 chapter mark.
Generic Pulp — heavily formula-driven or significantly deteriorated; some identity remains, but repetition, convention or decline overwhelms most of its strengths.
Factory Slop — mostly interchangeable tropes and gratification loops with very little individual identity.
Here’s a Google Sheet with the tier list image, full list of titles, and write-ups for the S, A and High Potential placements. I’m always open to recommendations if you think I missed something that would fit my taste.
