My latest pinboard organizing project

[sophia_sol]

I recently decided to start going through my pinboard and labelling fics according to ship type: gen, het, dudeslash, femslash, multi, poly, and other. And all of a sudden I am reminded why I haven't tried to do this before: because for some ships it involves gendering a character whose gender identity is not definitively stated in canon. For example: what gender is Albert of the film Albert Nobbs? I don't feel like I have any right to decide what gender Albert really identifies with! (...especially since I haven't seen the movie in question and am going solely by the wiki article and the fic I once read.) And other doesn't feel right either because what if Albert does identify as a gender that would then cause the ship to be categorized straightforwardly as het or femslash? I've had to create a ??? category, which feels like an annoyingly unbounded category.

(the "other" category: probably for anthropomorfic and genderqueer characters, mostly. Or does a ship still count as het if one of them's a dinosaur, or does that make it other?)

At any rate: I still have a long way to go with doing these pinboard edits. And once I've finished tagging all the shipfics, getting all the genfics will be really tedious because I won't be able to do things like go to the "arthur/eames" tag and mass add "dudeslash" as a tag to all hundreds of fics at one go. I will have to go through all my fics one by one to see which are gen. Ahahaha why do I do this to myself.