Please limit your story identifiers. · 5:49pm Nov 20th, 2011
A fair number of people seem to be having this problem on Fimfiction.net where they seem to believe their stories need to have five or more genres attached, and they believe their story will actually involve twelve or more major characters.
When you mark a story as Romance, Tragedy, Sad, Dark, Crossover, Slice of Life, Alternate Universe involving the entire Mane cast, the CMC, Spike, Zecora, Big Macintosh, Braeburn, Derpy Hooves, Lyra/Heartstrings, Bon-Bon, DJ P0N-3, Octavia and the Princesses, then you know what you've done? You've rendered the search system useless.
The whole point of having those categories is to narrow search results. When everyone is marking with so many genre tags and characters no one is doing anyone a favor, not even themselves, because the audience is going to have trouble finding your story to actually read it in the search system.
When it comes to genre, I could not honestly see more than three genre tags, and two is probably far more realistic. Genre indicates things about the story--consistent and major themes of a story. No story, fanfiction or otherwise, has ever had four major, consistent themes. Length is irrelevant, no story does that.
There may be moments in a story that are outside of an indicated genre, but that does not count as a major theme, even if it recurs every once in a while. Fallout: Equestria and Fallout Equestria: Project Horizon having moments of humor does not in any way make the stories comedic, they are still grimdark.
Pick the major themes; picks the major ideas and moods in a story that you are or plan to return to consistently and mark them as your genre.
Characters are even worse off. Just because a character appears in your story does not mean you list them. You only list the major characters;the characters that appear often and have major story time dedicated to them. This should be obvious but it would seem it's not. In the Cutie Mark Clash, Gallanthad would not be marked as a major character, nor the CMC. Twilight Sparkle, Trixie, and Applejack would be. Major characters are the focus or filter of a story. In Fallout: Equestria, DJ P0N-3 is not a major character--appears very often yes, but not a major character--in no way a focus around which the story is centered, or a filter through which it is viewed.
Please limit yourself when it comes time to mark a story, be conservative in your selections. You will be helping yourself and you will be helping your audience.
Hmm. Now I have to pare my tags down a bit.