This might be personal bias talking, but it feels like the majority of web novels come in the form of a progression fantasy. Both of the litrpg variety and its numberless cousins. It’s the usual system. Your protagonist (usually an orphan) starts off weak before receiving an opportunity to start getting stronger. This opportunity is usually from discovering some previously unknown magical ability or a chance encounter giving the protagonist a mentor or a chance to go to magic school.
One issue that I’ve found with a few of these stories, is that the author will give insufficient reason for the protagonist to want to get stronger. In the worst cases, it will be a “just because” mentality where there is no stated reason other than the fact that the book is a progression fantasy. There will be no enemies to defeat other than faceless monsters, no loved ones to protect, and no lofty goals to achieve. It’ll be like the protagonist is just kind of going with the flow. In less extreme cases, the protagonist will have incredibly generic reasons for getting stronger. They’ll want to help others or they want more freedom for themselves without really specifying what they mean by those things. Helping others and ensuring your own personal agency are noble goals, but I can’t help but feel like so many of these protagonists have them that it’s become a cliché.
It’s even worse when the protagonist gives some speech or monologue about their reasons for wanting to get stronger. It might be the whole telling vs showing thing, but it just comes off as a bit preachy when they give a whole speech about wanting to help others. I get it. We all saw you give food to that starving kid. It’s obvious you’re an altruistic soul and honestly the way the author tried to show that was already heavy handed. No need to make it worse.
I used to think that the obligatory scene at the beginning of a progression fantasy where the protagonist gets beat up was purely a “before” image before the training arc begins. Something to show the reader how far the protagonist has come in their training when they are able to dispatch the same threat later in the series. While I think this is still one of its purposes, nowadays I think it’s to give a big motivator for the protagonist. The question of “Why get Stronger?” becomes easy to answer when you plainly show what happens to those that can’t fight back.
The problem of protagonists whose only goal is to get stronger is worse in litrpg series. A big personal red flag I’m on the lookout for when starting a new litrpg is when the protagonist is obsessed with seeing their stats grow to the point of describing it as addicting. It’s almost like the author is outright saying that character and plot take a back seat to watching the numbers go up.
This kind of mentality can lead into endless training arcs where the protagonist wakes up, trains, and goes to bed. The protagonist will sometimes have friends to train with, but when character relationships and character development are left by the way side in favor of making numbers go up it can feel forced. Almost like the author knew that you need more than a character doing push ups to have a story, but decided to do the bare minimum to add something else.
A good example of a progression fantasy protagonist with good motivations is Catherine from “A Practical Guide to Evil”. Her reasons for becoming stronger are fairly simple. She wants to improve the lives the kingdom she lives in which is currently being oppressed by the evil empire which conquered it. A simple and noble goal with concrete objectives that requires the protagonist to become stronger in order to get anything done. Much better than a generic “I want to help people” motivation which can mean anything from saving the world to working in a soup kitchen. It also helps that the series treats power as something that can come in multiple forms such as political or military power which can’t really be obtained through an endless training arc.
Progression fantasy is probably the genre I’ve read the most, but it can be undermined by an obsession with getting stronger above all else. Strength being both the means and goal makes for a weak story. The protagonist of a story needs to have worthwhile goals to move towards. There needs to be a reason to have all that strength or else all that training becomes pointless.