salinea: (Default)
[personal profile] salinea
(See the last 2 or 3 [livejournal.com profile] metafandom editions if you wonder what i'm talking about)

The more I think about, the more I think that the categories of het, slash and gen, as categories, are mostly useless. In fact, I never actually included them in any fic I've posted myself (the information is usually contained in the "Characters/Pairings" line).

If we want categies denoting genres/focus, "Romance", "Drama", "Action/Adventure", "Character exploration", "Smut", etc. make much better descriptors, as well as some kind of descriptions about how the story stands vis-a-vis to canon (A/U, post-canon, missing scenes, just-like-a-canon-episode, retcon/canon-fix...)

I also think the issue is that we're thinking of these categories as mutually exclusive. What is gen cannot be het, what is het cannot be slash, what is slash cannot be gen. Which is bollocks. There's nothing saying a story couldn't focus on both a canon-like-plot and a non-canon Romance! Nor is there anything saying that a story can't be focussed on two couples, one het, one slash.

But yeah, people want to be warned against the pairings they dislike, in every cases, so warning for pairings all the time should be the best behaviour.

ETA : Okay, so non-exhaustive list of genres I can think of right now

- Romance / Smut (probably handier to merge them)
- Plot driven stories (with subcategories for things like action/adventure, mystery/investigation, war-stories, intrigue, Sci-fi...)
- Noromo relationships (a fic which focus on a relationship which is not explored as romantic, whether it's family, friends, partners, colleagues or people who hate each others)
- Character study (any fic which is about exploring a character's personnality, or their reaction to something)
- Comedy / Humour (need I specify?)
- World exploration (for fics that want to expand that little obscure corner of canon)
- Surrealism / Fairy Tale / Dreamscape (because I'm not sure where else this kind of stories fit)

any suggestions/criticisms?

Date: 29 March 2007 10:54 am (UTC)
ext_150: (Default)
From: [identity profile] kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com
I've started to bookmark all my to-read fic on del.icio.us and one of the tags I'm giving fics is length. I have suddenly developed a huge hate-on for people who don't include word count. :p Especially if a story is spread over multiple chapters. It's one thing for me to highlight and do a quick word count if it's on one page, but if your story is twenty chapters, no way. And I have no way of knowing if those twenty chapters are a thousand words each, or five thousand.

Date: 29 March 2007 01:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mnemosyne-1.livejournal.com
Or 10,000. *g* I've had that one happen before. And the story was lovely, but I would have liked to know that I was going to be up until 4am reading the darn thing b/c when I started it at 11pm, I had no idea how long it was! If I know, then I can bookmark for reading the next day, instead of getting sucked into a vortex of can't-stop-reading plot.

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