The medium of expression in TV/film is different from the medium of expression in webtoons. What you can do with the fixed page is different from what you can do with a moving sequence of frames matched with sound. Neither is "better" or "worse" than the other--some folks will prefer the way one of these media operates to tell a story over the other, and particular artists will certainly have more facilitiy with one than the other.

Whether or not there are stories that are better expressed through graphic means or through film/TV--or as a novel!--is probably not a worthwhile debate at a high level of abstraction, as the success of these works of art will depend too highly on the particularities of the specific instantiation.

Meaning--it might just be that any particular webtoon-story-sourced drama had too much going on (or more likely too much hidden/unspoken/assumed between the frames) for film to do it justice, or alternatively, there were too many calls on the drama production team's attention for it to have been a been an overall success. Dramas require a much larger team of (highly opinionated) people to produce than webtoons.

But then again, someone always loves each drama/webtoon for what it is--so garnering a large audience is not always the best measure of "success."

What I don't particularly like to do, personally, though...is talk about any such dramas as webtoon adaptations. It suggests that the drama is trying to "adapt" one way of expression into another, when I think what is going on is that there is--at best--a story shared between two ways of telling.

AND, frankly, let's be honest, when the drama folks get their hands on a webtoon, it actually rarely even ends up being the same story!!! So "adaptation" is again perhaps the least useful word to describe what is going on. How about thinking of it as webtoon-affiliated re-branding?? 😉

as with most things, I think there isn't a rule. some stories can be well-adapted and some not. but what I can say, as my personal experience, is that I still need to watch a webtoon adaption from a fantasy-based story that works for me. just like I prefer watching time travel stories to reading them for example, I think fantasy might be the opposite, even though most people might say the visual effects would work in favor. I think it becomes too corny lol more slice of life, everyday drama webtoon stories have given me amazing dramas, with topics that I haven't seen in this medium before so there are wins and losses as with anything

It is a double-edged weapon. While I welcome some changes to the original material, sometimes they butcher the story into something not fun at all. And taking it copy paste might not be the best option.
If fellow beanies have enjoyed a webtoon adaptation, I am welcoming recommendations here.

Adaptations of webtoon, novel, book or remakes are risky and require a good writer. Someone who understands what are the strengths and weaknesses of the original material and know what she/he needs to keep or discard.

After they are no winner, they will always be people who prefer the original source.

Unless it is an original movie/TV script, producers "adapt" any form of story (novels, webtoons, comics, news stories, folk tales and other popular works changed enough to avoid copyright issues). And adaptation come from multiple sources: the producers who pay for the licensing with a vision of how they want to make it; the writer(s) hired to create the vision; the director who has to brings the words/scenes to life though his artistic vision; the cast (especially top stars who want to bring "their" character to life in their own way); the studio who wants to make money (inserting PPL into scripts); the networks/platforms who want a "hit" so their show notes tend to be mirroring other hit shows of same variety; and finally public reaction to the pre-production news, premise and casting (with or without headline scandals).

A novel tends to have more information to work with since the writer has to give the reader enough description to form images and scenes in the reader's mind. A webtoon/graphic novel is a based more on visual representations so the narrative is secondary to action. Depending on the unique characters, world building and plot twists, any source material can be made into a movie, a short series, a normal TV series or franchise property.

I don't read Korean webtoons to make comparisons to the original material in k-drama adaptations. But again, I strongly believe that any adaptation needs to stand on its own artistic merits.

One really nice thing about adaptations is that many webtoons are very slow paced or even dragging. Dramas often cut the fat

The problem for me is that dramas often change the tone or themes of the webtoon. 19th Life and Kiss Sixth Sense are good examples of this. They often will also outright change the ending, like Doona and the one with the playboy ML that I can't think of the name right now, lol. Not always a bad thing for purpose of the drama, sometimes it's even an improvement, but with that many changes can you even say it's the same story?

Lindsay Ellis has a great video about stage musical to movie adaptations that talks about how changing from one medium to another is challenging, and shouldn't be done just for the sake of it. I think kdramas often are doing it for the sake of it.

There's a reality to the differences in the mediums that comes along with the territory of turning source material into screenplays. In most cases, I do believe that production teams are doing their best to bring these stories to life in a way that makes sense for how stories are told in live-action dramas.

On the other hand, I do get it when webtoon fans are upset with changes to their favorite stories. I've had similar experiences watching favorite western books be turned into shows and being really frustrated when the source material wasn't followed. (*cough* Outlander *cough*)

I know it can be hard, but the solution with the least mental and emotional duress is to just accept each version as independent representations of the same overall story and judge each on their own merits rather than agonizing over comparisons.

It's a choice to watch, it's a choice to drop. It's really no different than a highly anticipated series based on an original screenplay turning out disappointing. We've all had THAT experience.

I don't mind adaptations because sometimes that's people's introduction to the content.

And that's fine; live action can do different things with the material.

I think one of the bad things is the inevitable comparisons. I'm guilty of doing that with Weak Hero Class 1 even though I understood why some of those choices were made.

Some people seem to just want a 1:1 exact carbon copy of the webtoon and then get mad when those things don't play out in the same ways.

Not gonna go very deep for once, so let me just voice what everyone likely has on their mind - do we REALLY need that many of these at the same time?

When I watch an adaptation of something I already know (and especially that I love), I understand that some things will be different. Most books/stories/webtoons are not really written like screenplays are, and I get that some things will work better for a specific medium. What I hope the creators get across is the same feeling I had while interacting with the original source material. I want to swoon during the romance, I want my heart to swell at a passionate speech, I want to hold my breath during the tension, and at the end of the story I want to feel the same sense of satisfaction/unsettlement/nostalgia/sigh of happiness/whatever that I felt when I first encountered the story.

I think this happens most often when the themes of the story remain intact, so changes to the story can be totally acceptable to me as long as they don’t undermine the central points that the story was exploring. As kind of a microcosm of this, I also tend to dislike it when characters get changed to have different central motivations.

Beyond that I mostly don’t mind changes. I also think that making an adaptation is a chance to improve aspects of the story that didn’t work as well in the original material. For example, in A Good Day to be a Dog (the webtoon) I didn’t think that the mountain spirit’s motivations for continuing to torment the leads after the curse was broken were very compelling or believable, so I had hoped the drama would make that clearer or more realistic. In the end, they seem to have gone in the opposite direction, which is one of the reasons I feel confident in my decision not to finish that drama.

What do you think about webtoons as a source for K-dramas?
I've never read any webtoon so I have the privilege of seeing every adaptation for the first time with no way of ever going to read the webtoon no matter the buzz around it.
Webtoons turned into dramas are adaptations. Having them as source material is fine with me. They have their own style of storytelling and world building, aesthetics and the likes so I guess they have imaginative flexing of what their worlds will look like. But then, webtoon setting is not easy to recreate in real life, so watching the drama adaptation add and delete what it feels fits into it's world is another beauty of its own.

What do you see as some of the benefits or weaknesses of this as a creative process, or as a fan?
I can't speak as a fan. But as someone who's an observer of fans, I don't exactly like it when people who are familiar with the source material make constant comparisons with the choices of the writer or the directions of the director. The constant comparisons of My Dearest with Gone With The Wind was distracting and a bit predictive. So whenever the writer does the opposite, I could see beanies go paragraphs on how and how not it should have been. It seems like as viewers one forgets that it is an adaptation, and there's creative license. If it is that the webtoon writer is collaborating with writing the drama writer, then I understand their perspective. But in a case where it is a different person entirely adapting, I find it stifling when beanies makes comparisons or predict what happens next or say this is how it also was in the webtoon or this was handled differently.

Bottomline: Treat both pieces as one when they are one and different when they diverge, especially in a way that doesn't sit well.

Benefits of webtoon adaptation...
It offers a fresh perspective or broadens the perspective on how a story can bold. As I said in the first paragraph, the setting of webtoons allows for all the aesthetics and creative choices to come in when telling a story, and sometimes in way that can't be told in a drama. So when webtoons tell their dramas in difficult-to-set-up drama settings, I believe it will give a drama writer more perspectives on how he will reincorporate it into the real world. Like taking a real world problem, convert it into a mathematical problem, find the solution and create a mathematical model that solves it, and then integrate that solution model into real life. The process of reintroducing the webtoon will provide insight on what needs to stay, go, or freshly introduced to make it more feasible to create in a drama.

I know I'll be contradicting myself with this paragraph after my comments about the weakness, but knowing about the ending in some webtoons helped me to know if indeed a drama did well. I thought Business Proposal ended well until I learnt about the webtoons ending and the halfbaked decisions the writers made on the...

I am excited to see my fave webtoons/novels adapted to the small screen. Its for me to see if what I imagined it was is the same for how it was portrayed. Like for example Spirit Fingers. I love that webtoon and excited to see its live action version.
We can already see the weakness of this in the recent adaptations were the drama made changes that the fans of the original webtoons hated. Since the screenplay writers made liberal changes which impacted the core message of the webtoon's story. Imo, if they will adapt a webtoon to the small screen, the screenwriter must be faithful to the original story as to not alienate the webtoon fans. Otherwise they should not make any adaptations at all.

I have tried to "read" webtoons online and that medium of story-telling doesn't work for me.

It doesn't matter to me if the Kdrama is true to the original webtoon because adaptations can be better than the original material.

I would love to see an adaptation of a Kdrama into another medium, like the musical theater production of "Crash Landing on You."

"Life imitates art" may be true, but actually "art imitates art" is also true.

Webtoons are a lot freer to explore what might be too taboo to pass in an original drama script. For example, characters can have premarital sex, they can be gay, there can be explorations of bullying... Webtoons can also be both less and more formulaic. They go on as long as the audience expresses interest, sometimes hundreds of episodes. They are the ideal source material for dramas, because the drama writers do not have to prove to the producers that people will tolerate whatever transgressions happen in the comic and whatever crazy plot devices are used. But they are really difficult to adapt!

It's not just that people in comics can be drawn however the artist likes, while humans have to look like humans on some level. Korean drama actors are more beautiful than normal humans anyway. I've stopped even noticing that it's hard to relate to a person who looks that pretty. The issue is really pacing. The pace of a webcomic is slow, because people can just read as fast or as slow as they like. A drama has to have a good pace. That's why some adaptations are so great and some suck. I would love to write dramas, wouldn't you? Though I see that another big problem is, people don't want too much realism in k-dramas. The emotion has to feel real, but the story shouldn't be too real.

I think right now there is a very wide variety of stories that start as webtoons, so it's a plus on the creativity side. I come to stories through book publishing, and there have been times in the industry where the gates are relatively open and many, many different kinds of stories are being published. And there are also times when that goes the other way, and publishers are scared to invest in anything that isn't a sure deal, so the variety really narrows down to the same sure-bet story, just in different shades of beige. I feel like currently, the gates for webtoons are open, and so you are getting that lovely variety which drama producers then can pick from. This gives us a lot of really creative dramas to watch. I like it.

The place where the webtoon adaptations fall down for me is really at the feet of the drama producers. Look, the story has already been told once. There is no need to mess up a well told plot, and likewise, if there are hmmm some elements that didn't quite all fit together in the original webtoon, now is the time to fix that! I've watched several webtoon adaptations where the plot really did not hold together, and I was highly unimpressed, because the drama had the chance to fix the issues--and didn't.

Yes, webtoons are, and have been, made into dramas, but that goes for (printed) mangas/manhwas, too. [b]Boys over Flowers[/b] was a (Japanese) manga, [b]Goong[/b] was a (Korean) manhwa.

Compared to an original screenplay, a webtoon/manga/manhwa that is (already) popular can be a safer choice to start a drama with.

So I'm weird about things like this, you know?

I'm 'If I watched the movies/drama first, I can't read the book' kind of weird 😩

Same thing for Harry Potter, Divergent, Percy Jackson, The Bridgetons and Vampire Academy (it's my teen all over again 😮‍💨).

I truly don't know how webtoon fans do it, but kudos to you guys.

I remember trying to read Cheese in the Trap after watching the drama... What a mess that was for me.

Anyways, hard pass for me. I also plan to boycott the new Avatar:TLA movie/series