I initially had Action/Adventure paired together, but I think the deciding factor there is that FanFiction.net has separate Action and Adventure categories, so a person submitting a story from FF.net would instinctively just keep them separate (and most of the stories we've got are indeed from FF.net). Plus, I do think the two genres are different enough that it's worth it to keep them separate. Most Adventure stories are Action-packed, but there are a lot of Action stories that don't have any Adventure.

I also had Mystery and Suspense paired together, actually, and split them off for the same reasons as Action and Adventure. I don't see any similarities between Suspense and Horror that would provide a good reason to combine them.

I'm on the fence about Supernatural. It's a distinct genre, but I don't know of many stories that fit into it... it's sort of like having a Sci-Fi genre. It's definitely distinct, but whether it'd be used much is another question. My reasoning in creating a Supernatural category is mostly because if a story is described as Supernatural and there isn't a Supernatural category, then there isn't really any other genre that it could be categorized as (whereas if a story was described as, say, Hurt/Comfort and we didn't have a category for that, it could most likely be placed in the Angst category instead).

ff.net no longer has the action category, I think? I checked prior.

I was thinking a Mystery/Suspense combo too, but I guess it depends on what 'suspense' is, and I was never quite sure. I just worry about individual miscategorizing, since we leave contributers to wonder if it's more "mystery" or "suspense" when the difference is slight. I'm not a fan of ff.net's genres. EDIT: Actually, I just had an epiphany about suspense because I had to categorize a non-genred fic in that.

I think I understand the Supernatural category if it's a Sci-Fi/Supernatural combo, because there is definitely a subgenre of sci-fi flavor AUs, and supernatural also encompasses, well, the supernatural AUs!

Well, that's strange -- but we do have some stories that are Action-only, and certainly wouldn't belong in Adventure, so I'd still lean towards keeping them separate. Plus many people would likely just say Adventure when submitting a fic from FF.net, and it'd be a hassle to have to fix them all to Action/Adventure.

I'm banking on people just copying the genres from the fic they're submitting. Most fics are coming from fic sites, like FF.net or HPFF, which have genre descriptions already in place. The only place I can think of where a story might not have a genre given is, like, Livejournal or something. Typically a fic with no genres would just go into the General category, since we don't want people to just make stuff up unless it's super obvious.

We could always just make notes in Category:Genre: Mystery and Category:Genre: Suspense describing the difference between the two... Mystery is like a "whodunnit" where the point is to solve a mystery, and Suspense is more like "thriller," where the reader has all the information but are kept on edge by "will they catch them? will they survive?"

I guess we can just wait on Supernatural and Sci-Fi to see whether many stories come in which are described as such. I don't really read much of either, so I don't know if the categories would be wanted...

I guess I just really want to keep it intuitive. What would a person submitting a new fic naturally want to put in the "genre" field? And since that'd typically be the exact genres that the author provided, I think our system should be mostly based on the genres that authors tend to provide -- which are the genres provided as options by fic sites.