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I just switched the tags for my Avengers fic on Ao3 to the "character&character" format rather than the "character/character" format. No characters have sex, make out, or profess love for any of the other characters in these stories. Characters do feel lust and look at each other with longing

Comments

[sisi_rambles]

That's a very interesting question. And I don't really have any concrete thoughts. But here is my random input/opinion. For the most part, stories are either really obviously gen or really obviously pairing-focused. As for the ones that aren't as clear cut: as a reader, I decide if the story is gen or not depending on how much on an impact the pairing has on the story. Like, is there a pervasive sense of "these people are together and that's essential to this story" or is it almost an incidental thing where the focus is on something else. And also, I guess the ratio of romance-focused parts to gennish parts. HP has all the couples and the romantic subplots, but the overwhelming majority of the story isn't about that, it's about something else. So that makes it gen. Any romance novel, even if it has a solid actiony plot is still about the couple getting together as part of the plot. So that makes it het/slash. A lot of sex also tends to send things in a non-gen direction IMO.

I know that when I bookmark/save some stories I save them as gen or under a pairing even if the author tagged it otherwise, because that's how I read that story. And I've definitely skipped stories with heavy gennish elements because of a pairing tag, and read stories that turned out to be gen with a vague hint of a pairing that you'd need a microscope to spot because of a pairing tag. A story without any labels is almost always a back-button though. I'm not going to try to figure out the status of a story if even the author has no clue.

I guess the best option in a confusing case would be a gen tag with something suggesting that the pairing is more implied than outright stated? *is patently unhelpful after the verbal diarrhea*

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the story isn't about that, it's about something else

I think that this is where things get blurry for me. HP is very obviously about defeating Voldemort. I think it less obvious the Buffy is about slaying vampires, and then there's something like the tv show FRIENDS. I never watched it, but anyway, what's the show about? It's about relationships, people hooking up and breaking up etc. But despite numerous het relationships that go on in the show (I know because of my learnings), and despite the fact that the show probably became more about that than anything else, the idea behind the show is still a group of friends. The kind of stories I want to write don't have a lot of hooking up/breaking up, but in the end they're about relationships--about intimacy and friendship and even attraction, because I think some level of attraction is a perfectly normal thing to feel for someone you really only want to be platonic with. So if you're writing about that, do people consider that romance?

I save them as gen or under a pairing even if the author tagged it otherwise

Definitely. This is cool. I have my own definitions and things I want from stories. The problem is I don't write the tags for me; I write them for the readers.

if even the author has no clue

Though again, maybe she knows exactly what she would call her story if she were tagging it for herself on delicious; she just doesn't know what everyone else wants to call it.

suggesting that the pairing is more implied than outright stated

I agree, and that's the sort of thing I've done in the past. I think part of my problem is that on Ao3, you can search by tags. When I search by a tag, what I want is a fic about how Character A relates to Character B, and I don't care if they have sex or are epic BFFs or whatever. But there's not a way to do the tags that makes implied pairings show up with explicit pairings, so. . . idk. Thanks for taking the poll!