Pairing labels

[bluflamingo]

So, I'm sitting here, all ready to draw up a header for the fic I've just finished, and I've got a problem. My header for fic in my journal includes, amongst other things, the pairing, or the main character(s) in a gen piece, because I personally like to know who I'm going to be reading about in a story and so assume other people like to as well.

This is the problem, however: there's a very brief, non-explicit sex scene in this story. It's maybe a couple of hundred words out of a fic that's over 5 1/2 thousand, and while it's an important part of the story, the story isn't about the pairing, the relationship, or sex/romance in any way. Even the sex isn't about those things, it's about comfort between two friends. The story is about John's relationship with his father who's just died.

So, the answer is probably It's your journal, it's your story, label it however you damn well please (or a more polite version thereof) but I'm curious to know how you'd label this in terms of pairings. I want to label it John-centric gen, which it is, but I think if I saw that, I'd be kind of surprised to see a sex scene later on. That said, if I saw a story labelled with a pairing, I'd expect the other half of the pairing to be around more.

Help me - my brain is no longer up to these kinds of complex and vital decisions!

Comments

[bluflamingo.livejournal.com]

More so if it was het, since I don't read that at all :) Actually, I'd expect to know whether it was slash, het, canonpairing, non-canon pairing, OC, whatever. But I accept that I'm possibly overly picky about what what kind of pairing I will and won't read about. Oddly, it's pretty much the only thing I want to know going in, beyond whatever the story tells me.

I suppose this is why I'm struggling to label this, because I'm used to knowing who's getting it on with who, even if it's incidental - there's a reaosn I don't read anything without a pairing label. And while I want to label mine gen because it mostly is, I know it's not gen in the sense that I use it *because* it has a brief sex scene. It's just not slash in the way I use it either.