labels

[pensnest]

I love metafandom, but sometimes my meanderings along its byways leave me bewildered. All this fuss about labelling a story... So many people demanding 'warnings' for such things as background pairings and mpreg. Such delicate souls. Why, I have achieved squick by means of teddybear abuse and unexpected Kevin, not to mention lava lamps, but my friends do not, I think, desert me. However, it does seem to be a topic that arouses unexpected passions in the mildest fannish breast, so I wonder.

My personal habit is to post fics in my own LJ pretty much randomly. If I've written a story, you'll usually get a sentence indicating that it was written for such-and-such a reason. If you are wise in the ways of LiveJournal, you may notice that an occasional story is tagged 'wtf', and you will approach with caution (or glee). I don't in general announce the pairing (anyway, sometimes the pairing is a surprise, and the surprise is part of the story) or the rating. I write with the expectation that if you've friended me, you will have figured out that I perpetrate popslash, including Lampfic, and will treat any LJ-cut entries with appropriate caution.

I don't think the lack of a label on popslash has ever deterred me from at leat *opening* the story. Would you, personally, be *more* inclined to read if I went the whole labelling route, and headed up stories with appropriate categorisation? Do you do that yourself? Do you care, either way?

Incidentally, I run a double index on my website, with pairings and degree-of-sex announcements on the Alternative Index, for those who are looking for something specific and don't care to be startled by, say, Kevin. I'm contemplating revising this to present the stories by pairing, given the startling *quantity* of the things. How do you like stories to be presented, if you're reading on a website? Any advice would be welcome.

Comments

[ephemera-pop.livejournal.com]

*reads comments with interest*

When I'm posting to my LJ, people get a title, most of the time a pairing or main character, and the first para.

When I'm posting to a community, I either use their format (and grind my teath about the 'ratings' line) or go with title, pairing, and either a snippet or a blurb - possibly I should be adding a length indicator.

I'd *love* to have a blurb, even a one liner, for each story on my index page, becuase that's awsome and tempting for a reader, but I doubt I'll ever be that organised seeing as I hate writing blurbs ...

I organise that by pairings because that just seemed easy. If I had some sort of magic database at my fingertip, I'd index by characters, and let people search for character x and chatracter y to find pairings, or just 'character x' etc etc.

I quite NoPseud's method of saying 'you might want to check the warnings for this one *link*' because I mostly *don't* want to check for warnings (the warning I'dd care about it 'this is badly written melodrmatic crap ion which people with names like the names of the people you care about act like badly programmed robots', but, funilly enough, I've never seen that warning).

I don't do warnings, but feel faintly guilty about it. If I had good blurbs, or could pick extracts for the index page I wouldn't feel guilty as that should give readers a good idea if they're getting into something ouchy or not.

(and I do forgive you for the plushy thing. Really.)

[pensnest]

Hee - I was browsing through past metafandom posts and discovered a list of 'The Ten Warnings I *do* want to see on stories', which incorporated such things as "I've never watched this show". Yes, indeed. I think summaries can serve as such warnings, quite often - anything with mis-spelled character names, or 'plz r&r', for instance, I will skip.

It would be cool to have a 'search for character(s) here' option, wouldn't it! In replying to turps33's recent questions, I realised that when I'm reading a previously undiscovered page (sadly rare, these days) I do look for my favourite pairing first, then all stories featuring Lance. But, in fact, those newly discovered pages have usually remained obscure for a reason - if I were to discover, say, a Torch or a Merry website, I'd probably just read the lot from top to bottom, because they'd all be good.

(hee. good)