A monster taming story is web fiction about a human who captures, bonds with, raises, and battles monsters, building a growing team of creatures instead of leveling a single hero. It runs on the collect-and-train fantasy that Pokemon made a global reflex in 1996 and that the bonded-companion tradition of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern and Christopher Paolini's Eragon gave a literary shape, and in web fiction it usually wears LitRPG clothing, with tamed monsters shown as an evolving roster of stat blocks and skills. Its defining pleasure is not the protagonist's own power but the relationships and the team you assemble.
What is a monster taming story?
A monster taming story is web fiction whose protagonist is a person who captures, bonds with, raises, and fights alongside monsters, so the story's engine is the team of creatures rather than the hero's own arm. The tamer might be called a beastmaster, a monster trainer, a beast lord, or a summoner-style handler depending on the setting, but the shape is constant: the protagonist finds a creature, wins it over or breaks it in or hatches it from an egg, and then invests in it the way a normal fantasy hero invests in a sword, except that the sword has a temperament and can love you back. Over a long serial the tamer accumulates a roster, a stable of monsters with names and personalities and quirks, and much of the reading pleasure comes from watching that roster grow, from the day the protagonist has one half-starved beast to the day they walk into a city with a small monstrous army at their heel.
The genre sits inside the collect-and-train fantasy that Pokemon turned into a global reflex when it launched in 1996, and I think it is honest to say that most English-speaking readers who reach for a taming web serial are reaching, consciously or not, for the feeling that game gave them as children. But the roots go deeper than the games. The bonded-companion tradition in fantasy prose is old and respectable, and it runs straight through Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight in 1968, where a dragon imprints on its rider at hatching and the two share a lifelong telepathic bond, and Christopher Paolini's Eragon in 2002, which handed the same dragon-and-rider partnership to a generation of younger readers. Those books are not taming stories in the Pokemon sense, because the bond is with a single creature rather than a collected team, but they are where the emotional grammar of the genre comes from, the idea that the deepest relationship in the book is between a person and a beast that chose them.
How is a monster taming story different from a monster MC story?
The cleanest way to place the genre is against its mirror image, the monster MC story, because the two share a bestiary and could not be more different to read. In a monster MC story the protagonist is the monster, told from inside the slime or the goblin or the young dragon as it evolves upward from the bottom of the food chain. In a monster taming story the protagonist commands the monster, and the point of view stays with the human trainer while the creatures are companions, party members, weapons, and children by turns. A tamer collects the slime; a monster MC is the slime. My feeling is that this single axis, whose head the reader lives in, decides almost everything about the experience, because the taming story is fundamentally about relationship and stewardship, the pleasure of raising something, while the monster MC story is about identity and survival, the pleasure of being something.
It is also worth separating the tamer from the summoner, since the two get shelved together and the distinction is the kind of thing readers argue about happily. A tamer captures and raises creatures that already exist in the world, and the team is persistent, traveling and growing and evolving alongside the protagonist across the whole story. A summoner calls beings forth, often from another plane or through a contract, and the summoned creatures are frequently temporary, conjured for a battle and dismissed when it ends. The line blurs constantly in practice, and plenty of web serials run a hybrid where a bound familiar is both summoned and raised, but the emotional center is different. The tamer's heart is the standing roster of companions you built; the summoner's is the act of reaching out and pulling power into the world at the moment of need.
What makes the taming genre work
What makes a monster taming story satisfying is that it externalizes progression into a set of relationships, so growth is something the reader watches happen to a team rather than to a single stat sheet. In most LitRPG and progression fiction the protagonist's power is the spine of the book, and the tension lives in whether they level fast enough, but a taming story spreads that tension across a cast of creatures, each with its own arc, its own evolution, its own moment of nearly dying and coming back stronger. The best entries lean into this hard, giving individual monsters the kind of characterization a lesser book would spend only on human party members, so that when a companion the protagonist raised from an egg finally reaches its adult form and turns the tide of a fight, it lands the way a coming-of-age beat lands, because the reader has been there since the creature was small and useless.
The second engine is the collection itself, the acquisitive pleasure of a growing roster, and there is no shame in naming it plainly because it is the same pleasure that made Pokemon and its 1997 sibling Digimon into cultural machines and that Capcom's Monster Hunter Stories later rebuilt around bonded eggs. Readers of taming stories genuinely enjoy the inventory, the sense of a stable filling up, the strategic question of which monster to bring to which fight and how the team's abilities interlock. This is where the genre overlaps most with tactics and team-building, and a well-run taming serial often reads a little like a strategy game novelized, with the protagonist solving encounters through composition and synergy rather than raw force. Having said that, though, the acquisitive pleasure curdles fast if the creatures are only line items, which is why the writers who last are the ones who remember that every monster on the roster has to be a character before it is a tool.
How taming shows up in LitRPG and web fiction
In web fiction specifically, the taming genre almost always dresses in LitRPG mechanics, because a collected team of monsters is one of the easiest things in all of fiction to render as a system, and a healthy corner of the Royal Road monster-taming tag runs on exactly that scaffolding. Tamed creatures show up as stat blocks with names, elements, and evolution trees; capture is often a skill with a success rate; the bond itself gets quantified as loyalty or affinity that unlocks new abilities as it climbs. This is a genuine strength of the form, because the reader who wants to track a growing roster is well served by a system that lays the roster out clearly, and it is one reason the genre thrives in serialized form, where a long runway lets a stable of monsters fill slowly and satisfyingly over hundreds of chapters. Honobonoru500's The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash, a well-known web-novel example, gets a lot of mileage out of a protagonist whose taming aptitude is graded near the bottom, turning the mechanical rating into the emotional premise.
The practical challenge a taming serial creates for its own author is bookkeeping, and this is the part I see writers underestimate. A single-hero progression fantasy has one character sheet to keep straight, but a taming story has a dozen, each with its own evolution stage, skill list, temperament, and history of who it was before it joined, and by chapter two hundred that is a lot of canon to hold in your head without contradicting yourself. This is the honest place a purpose-built tool earns its keep, and it is why I built the connected wiki on IlorisNovel to hold exactly this kind of roster, a per-creature entry with its current form and abilities, an @mention that pulls a monster's page up while you write a battle, and a relationship view that shows at a glance which companions trust the protagonist and which ones are still half-wild. If you want to see how it reads across a long series, the wider tour of the field lives in the web fiction genres guide, which places taming alongside its neighbors. The tamer's whole appeal is a cast of creatures the reader remembers, and a cast the reader remembers is a cast the writer first had to remember, chapter after chapter, without letting a single companion quietly drift out of character.
Common questions about monster taming stories
What is a monster taming story?
A monster taming story is web fiction whose protagonist is a person who captures, bonds with, raises, and fights alongside monsters rather than fighting alone. The reader follows a tamer, a beastmaster, or a summoner-style trainer as they build a team of creatures, and the appeal is the growing roster of monster companions, each one an individual you raised. It is the collect-and-battle fantasy that Pokemon made a global reflex, told in prose rather than played with a controller.
What is the difference between a monster taming story and a monster MC story?
They are two sides of the same relationship. In a monster taming story the protagonist is a human who commands and raises monsters, so the creatures are companions and the human is the point of view. In a monster MC story the protagonist is the monster, told from inside the creature as it evolves. A tamer collects the slime, a monster MC is the slime, which is why the two genres feel completely different to read even when they draw from the same bestiary and share the same evolution mechanics.
Is a monster taming story the same as LitRPG?
Not by definition, though most web fiction tamers are also LitRPG. Taming names what the protagonist does, capture and raise creatures, while LitRPG names whether game mechanics appear on the page. Most taming web serials show the roster as stat blocks, evolution trees, and skill lists because a collected team is easy to render that way, but a taming story can run on soft, wordless bonds with no numbers at all, as Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern does, and still be a taming story.
How is a tamer different from a summoner?
A tamer captures and raises existing creatures, building a persistent team that travels, grows, and evolves with them over the whole story. A summoner calls forth beings, often from another plane or through a contract, and the summoned creatures are frequently temporary tools conjured for a fight and then dismissed. The line blurs in hybrids where a familiar is both summoned and raised, but the tamer's heart is the standing roster of companions you built, while the summoner's is the act of calling power at need.
What are some popular monster taming stories?
The archetype is the Pokemon franchise, which began in 1996 and made the collect-train-battle loop a household template, with Digimon following in 1997 and Capcom's Monster Hunter Stories giving it a bonded-egg variant. In prose, Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight (1968) and Christopher Paolini's Eragon (2002) are the bonded-companion ancestors. In web fiction, the Royal Road monster-taming tag is a busy corner of progression fantasy, and Honobonoru500's The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash is a well-known web-novel example.
by Jacob Tam · September 18, 2026
I run IlorisNovel, a platform for web fiction writers. If you want to see what raising a stable of monsters on the page feels like, you can try the editor with no account.