Story Tag Uncertainty, and a Small Update · 9:35am Feb 13th, 2016
It has been a particularly rough week for the Bugsydor. I won't bother you with the details (unless you ask me to, and my response would likely be in PM form), but I will give you a brief summary: The cops were at my place, I was neither a suspect nor a victim, some utterly unconnected things also sucked, and I was a nervous wreck for a few days as a result of all that. However, between the magic of friendship and the passing of time – along with a brief chat with a bishop – I'm feeling much better now. On the plus side, I had a job interview in the time before all that happened, so maybe I'll yet find some manner of employment before I head back to college in a couple months.
In short, I only ended up getting about a page of Monster Hunter: Equestria written so far this week. 
As for the real reason why I'm writing this blog post, you may be aware that Fimfiction has recently updated its tag description page. I gave it a read-through, and now I'm concerned that I may need to adjust the tagging on Tastes Like Heresy and Desert Spice. (I'm fairly confident that MHE is properly tagged, though.) For instance, the rating tag. For the Everyone rating, it says:
They should include no content that a parent would find objectionable for a child. The general idea here is “things that would be reasonable to see on the show itself.”
I don't know about you, but I don't think we'll ever see straight-up alcoholic beverages on the show. It does have things like Berry Punch appearing to be the town lush, though, along with a joke about "Spiked" punch, so I'm not sure whether Tastes Like Heresy would squeak under that one. And then there's Desert Spice, in which I have a main character casually dispatch a pony in the very first scene. Not sure how to rate that one, either.
Beyond that, I have questions about how I should apply the genre tags. Should I remove the drama tag from Tastes Like Heresy and apply it to Desert Spice? Does Desert Spice even deserve its dark tag? Is Tastes Like Heresy actually an adventure story disguised as slice of life?
While I'm pretty sure the mods (long may they reign) will not prosecute me for tag abuse anytime in the near future, I'd still like to portray my stories accurately to would-be readers so they know what they're getting into. If anyone either thinks my fics could be better tagged or thinks that they're fine as-is, please leave a comment to that effect.
...My. That, ah, does sound like an eventful week; sorry about that. Glad you're feeling better, though.
Good luck with the results of the interview!
Hm. You might want to bump the stories up to Teen, just in case.
The other tags, though, I'm afraid I'm not sure about.
Yikes. Well, at least there was something of a silver lining there.
In any case, unless you plan on the story taking... well, a dark turn, I'd say Desert Spice doesn't need the Dark tag. Maybe the Drama or even the Thriller tags, going by their definitions, but I haven't really seen anything dark. The closest thing would be Spicy's near death by dehydration, and no one really expects the protagonist to die that early.
Tastes Like Heresy may be one of the best arguments I've seen for proving that the Adventure and Slice of Life tags aren't mutually exclusive. Still, interpersonal conflict is clearly a central component of the narrative, and the problems are demonstrably life-affecting.
As for "show-appropriateness," it's hard to say. Besides Berry Punch, there's also been the salt bar from "Over a Barrel," the foaming cider of "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000," and the entirety of "The Cutie Re-Mark" when it comes to violence. Friendship is Magic can touch on surprisingly mature subject matter at times. I leave that one to your better judgement and knowledge of what else will happen in Desert Spice.
3751264
Thanks for the input, even if you're not sure yourself.
3751295
Tastes Like Heresy's content level is probably ambiguous enough that I could get away with an E rating. I should probably bump Desert Spice up to teen, though, given the nature of the concepts involved.
It's fairly likely I'll end up removing the dark tag here. My initial intentions may have better aligned with it, but I guess I was just too danged optimistic to pull that off.
The thriller tag doesn't really fit, in my opinion, as I'm hardly planning to keep readers on-edge throughout the story (aside from a couple of future events I won't spoil here). The drama tag, as described in the document, though, fits the story surprisingly well.
You likely have no idea just how tickled I am to see that sentence. I've always taken pride in people saying my writing is bizarre in a good way, without my ever needing to reach for the random tag. Since Tastes Like Heresy is mainly about leading up to a majorly life-changing event, adventure is probably the dominant tag of the two. Maybe I'll petition Knighty to let me have both tags, though, or throw a fake "adventure of life" tag into the top of the description.
Thanks for the input!
3751512
You're welcome.