Priority or level of genre

[Oobaka-san]

Let's be honest, some of the genres are used a little much. If I search for "romance" I'll get maybe half the works on this site. I particularly noticed with the "Mystery" genre, which includes things ranging from the story of a genius boy detective solving whodunnit mysteries with his friends to the story of a girl with superpowers working with her friends to defeat the monster of the week and find the identity of the Moon Princess. Sure, if I throw in a ton of specifications in the advanced search I may narrow it down, but it just feels like there should be SOME way to separate stories that could technically qualify as having the genre in places from stories where the genre is a definitive aspect of the plot, and those from stories where the genre in question is the actual central point. For instance, separate "romance" series where a guy has a love interest with a few scenes concerning their relationship from time to time, series where the relationship is frequent and plays a big role in the progress of the main story, and series where the main story IS the relationship.

As I said, throwing in a bunch of additional specifiers may narrow things down somewhat, but there's really no telling if it's eliminated good material. I don't know how any sort of prioritization could be established, but it would definitely make searching for works easier if we could specify that we're looking for something with specific focal genres.

 

[Oobaka-san]

Let's be honest, some of the genres are used a little much. If I search for "romance" I'll get maybe half the works on this site. I particularly noticed with the "Mystery" genre, which includes things ranging from the story of a genius boy detective solving whodunnit mysteries with his friends to the story of a girl with superpowers working with her friends to defeat the monster of the week and find the identity of the Moon Princess. Sure, if I throw in a ton of specifications in the advanced search I may narrow it down, but it just feels like there should be SOME way to separate stories that could technically qualify as having the genre in places from stories where the genre is a definitive aspect of the plot, and those from stories where the genre in question is the actual central point. For instance, separate "romance" series where a guy has a love interest with a few scenes concerning their relationship from time to time, series where the relationship is frequent and plays a big role in the progress of the main story, and series where the main story IS the relationship.

As I said, throwing in a bunch of additional specifiers may narrow things down somewhat, but there's really no telling if it's eliminated good material. I don't know how any sort of prioritization could be established, but it would definitely make searching for works easier if we could specify that we're looking for something with specific focal genres.

I will be serious though, Sailor Moon's genre/tag list shows all too well how these things need to have some sort of cleanup, either checking and removing genres/tags from items where they aren't really significant (such as mystery from a story where you simply have a minor "the villain is yet unknown" tension without any real effort to "solve" anything or "video games" in a work where the most you have is one or two chapters where a gamer makes a short-term appearance), or marking genres and tags that have little to do with the main story or only appear for brief periods so that the search engine can better prioritize series that are more in line with what readers are likely to seek out.