The best web serial of 2025 was Super Supportive, and I don't think the race was close. But the year earned a fuller accounting than that: 2025 gave us superhero feelings, vicious progression arcs, cozy farms, and cosmic horror with a warm heart. These thirteen are the serials I'd actually press into a friend's hands, and every one is free to start online.
Quick picks if you're skimming on your phone:
- Best overall: Super Supportive
- Best completed: Mother of Learning
- Best comfort read: Beware of Chicken
- Best pure spectacle: Dungeon Crawler Carl
- Best sci-fi: The Last Angel
LitRPG and progression fantasy
1. Super Supportive
Sleyca. Royal Road. Ongoing. Alden Thorn gets superpowers in a world where powers are work visas issued by aliens, and his class is the one everybody jokes about: support.
The pacing is glacial and proud of it. Sleyca will spend an entire long chapter on homework, grief, or alien etiquette, and those are somehow the chapters people quote at each other for weeks.
Skip it if you need a dungeon by chapter five. Read it if you want the best character work currently on Royal Road.
2. Dungeon Crawler Carl
Matt Dinniman. Started on Royal Road, now on Kindle and Audible. Ongoing. Aliens repossess Earth, collapse every building, and funnel the survivors into an eighteen-floor dungeon that doubles as the galaxy's favorite reality show. Carl goes in wearing boxers. His ex's cat, Princess Donut, goes in talking.
Book seven, This Inevitable Ruin, landed at the end of 2024, and it's the series operating at full power. Dinniman plays the comedy loud and the grief quiet, which is why the jokes land and the losses hurt. Longer thoughts in our Dungeon Crawler Carl review.
3. Beware of Chicken
Casualfarmer. Royal Road, with published volumes. Ongoing. A transmigrator wakes up in a cultivation world, takes one look at sect life, and leaves to start a farm.
Volume four arrived at the end of 2024, and the series has settled fully into what it actually is: a warm story about building things, anchored by a rooster named Bi De who takes his moral education extremely seriously. The genre's reigning comfort read.
4. Virtuous Sons
Ya Boy. Royal Road. Ongoing. Greco-Roman cultivation. Sol, a Roman captive, and Griffon, the young aristocrat of the cult holding him, end up walking the path to power side by side.
The banter is the hook and the philosophy is load-bearing rather than decorative. Nothing else in progression fantasy sounds like this.
5. Mother of Learning
nobody103. Royal Road. Complete at 108 chapters. Zorian, a prickly teenage mage, gets stuck in a month-long time loop and has to earn his way out.
Still the safest recommendation in web fiction, and the published editions kept pulling in new readers all year. Foreshadowing from the early chapters pays off dozens of chapters later, on purpose. Full write-up in our Mother of Learning review.
Fantasy
6. Pale Lights
ErraticErrata. Free web serial. Ongoing. Tristan is a thief whose only patron is a goddess nobody else can see. Angharad is an exiled noblewoman whose honor keeps making promises her situation can't keep. Both are trying to earn a place in the Watch.
The author's follow-up to A Practical Guide to Evil hit its stride in 2025: tighter prose, meaner plotting, chapters built like heist scenes. We wrote a full Pale Lights review making the deeper case.
7. The Wandering Inn
pirateaba. Own site. Ongoing, heroically. Deep into Volume 10 and past sixteen million words, Erin Solstice's inn is still the warm center of the most sprawling fantasy world currently being written.
This is a lifestyle decision, not a book recommendation. Sample volume one, and if the slice-of-life chapters hit as hard as the battles, you're set for years.
8. Katalepsis
HY. Own site. Ongoing. Heather Morell has spent a decade medicated for visions of impossible things. Then one of the impossible things turns out to be real, and so does the friend who comes with it.
Lovecraftian horror with a queer found family at its center, written in prose that's genuinely literary by serial standards. The rescue mission for Heather's twin sister gives the cosmic dread a human spine.
9. Godclads
OstensibleMammal. Royal Road. Ongoing. In the megacity of New Vultun, dead gods are hardware. People graft Heavens onto their minds and become something between cultivator and war machine.
The most original setting in the medium and the steepest learning curve. The opening arcs throw invented vocabulary at you like shrapnel. Stay with it, the density becomes the appeal.
10. The Last Orellen
Sieley. Royal Road. On hiatus. A prophecy makes every child of the Orellen family a target, so the family scatters its children to the winds. Kalen grows up hidden, far from anything resembling a fast power curve.
Quiet, patient, and beautifully written. The author paused the serial to focus on other work, but the archive is substantial and reads beautifully on its own. For readers who wish progression fantasy would take its time more often.
Sci-fi
11. The Last Angel
Proximal Flame. SpaceBattles. Original story complete. The sequel wrapped in 2025. Red One is an AI warship, the last soldier of a murdered humanity, waging a grudge war thousands of years long against the empire responsible.
Tactical, vast, and furious in a controlled way that sneaks up on you. The single best argument that forum serials deserve a slot in your rotation.
12. First Contact
Ralts Bloodthorne. Reddit's r/HFY. Complete, at well over three million words. What began as military sci-fi about humanity terrifying the galaxy mutated into one of the strangest and most sprawling projects in web fiction, written at a pace that shouldn't be biologically possible.
Tonally unpredictable, structurally chaotic, weirdly moving. Do not try to read it in order of quality. There is no order of quality.
13. Trailblazer
3ndless. SpaceBattles and AO3. Complete. A Worm and Gundam crossover in which Taylor Hebert builds mobile suits and, more improbably, hope.
Fanfic megaprojects almost never finish. This one wrapped its multi-year run with an actual ending, and it stands with the best work the Parahumans fandom has produced.
The list will age. That's fine.
Half of these serials will have grown by the time you read this, and the completed ones will still be complete. Add the ones that grabbed you to Storywatch and let 2026's chapters come find you.