Story structure
Bildungsroman
The coming-of-age novel: a genre focused on the protagonist's psychological and moral growth from childhood to adulthood.
A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age novel in the strict sense: a genre that focuses on "the psychological and moral growth and change of the protagonist" from childhood to adulthood. The German name joins Bildung, "formation" or "education," to Roman, "novel"; the philologist Karl Morgenstern coined it in 1819. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the founding example, and Tom Jones, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird extend the line.
The template arc: a naive protagonist, often shaken by an emotional loss, leaves home for experience and reaches maturity gradually and with difficulty, through conflict with society, ending accepted into it. That is a character arc stretched to book length, and web fiction keeps re-skinning the same growth promise, progression fantasy most visibly. The pattern is mapped beat by beat in the seven stages of coming of age.