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 08:37 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Which means different things to different people, so unless I know for sure what kind of stuff that author writes, it's useless.

Date: 29 March 2007 08:48 pm (UTC)
ext_2023: (mikage)
From: [identity profile] etrangere.livejournal.com
I wasn't aware there were such confusion about the meanings of "implied", "background", "UST" or "if you squint". How many different definitions of each do you know?

Date: 31 March 2007 08:21 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] carmarthen.livejournal.com
Are you referring to pairing modifiers or to "gen" (which...well, fandom obviously doesn't agree on)? I don't see how pairing modifiers (and most of those are pretty unambiguous--UST is sexual tension that isn't satisfied; unrequited is unrequited, etc.) are any MORE ambiguous than slash/het/gen, which everyone in fandom is arguing about right now.

January 2025

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19 202122232425
262728293031 

Page Summary

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Tags

Powered by Dreamwidth Studios
Page generated 6 Jul 2025 02:59 pm

Style Credit