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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

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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!