Many anime viewers (understandably) complain about the results, but it’s certainly nice that amateur writers have a place to publish and read each others’ works. The normal pipeline there is that something will start as a web novel, and then if it’s really successful it’ll get picked up by a publisher like Kodansha to be sold as a light novel and then if that’s successful it’ll eventually get animated. There will often also be a manga adaptation. I’m not certain how different the web novel and light novel usually are; my impression is not very! There is some editing that goes in though, and the light novels also have a bunch of included illustrations. This is both a good thing and a bad one. The web novel will usually have no art at all, just text. When those illustrations are made for the light novel adaptation, they’re locking in character designs that they’ll have to stick with later if those books ever get animated. But at the light novel stage it’s still relatively low-budget so the amount of talent and effort that goes into making those character designs usually (in my opinion) doesn’t measure up to the talent and effort that goes into making character designs for manga-original or anime-original stories. So in addition to a generic RPG fantasy world, you (often) end up with generic RPG fantasy character designs.