Our Shared Shelf discussion

I've been blogging for a couple years now, but with all this free time on my hands I've been thinking about re-tagging my posts with more detailed tags. I have tags for genres (fantasy, contemporary, etc.) and some of the common fantasy tropes (vampires, magic, elves, etc.), but I'm thinking about going back and adding some.

My first thoughts were about including a School tag for those that heavily feature school settings, since I know some people are really into those. And then I thought maybe doing a Kissing tag or Sex [implied] vs Sex [scene], but is that something people would be interested in?

And what about tags that contain spoilers? Like, I know the Divergent series is known to be dystopian, but that's not really revealed until later in the series, right? Is that genre tag considered a spoiler? What about for another series/book that isn't as popular or known yet?

I'd like to hear your thoughts about how detailed you like your tags/shelves on goodreads or other blogs. Do details help you find things, or do you feel like too much detail spoils things? I know there's a website dedicated to whether the dog dies in various media, but is that something you'd want for multiple subjects?

Dystopian, to my understanding, is widely applied to any rigid future society these days.
So's not wrong, but maybe not that helpful either.

For romances I personally do like to see tags for "heatlevel", e.g. sex, no-sex, closed door, explicit, clean, sweet... it helps me to decide if it may be worth my reading time at a given moment.

Gerd wrote: "Dystopian, to my understanding, is widely applied to any rigid future society these days.
So's not wrong, but maybe not that helpful either.

My understanding is dystopian societies are often pitched as utopian (how they came into rule in the first place) but are actually set up so that the people in power stay in power and the lower classes as a whole stays in line 'for the good of the whole'. Hunger Games (kinda), Divergent, and the Delirium books are prime examples of this. If everybody keeps in line, then bad things won't happen.

But what if you're not yet at the point where everyone knows the rules are only for the elite's benefit? Is it a spoiler to out a dystopian society before the main characters discover it's dystopian?

Like I said before, Divergent isn't as obvious when you first encounter it, but as it's been in the public eye (and with the help of the movies) most people know it's dystopian now. But what about a book that just came out this year that isn't nearly as obvious?

I would assume that readers go in expecting to read a dystopia anyways, when presented with a seemingly perfect society, if only because a utopia doesn't really present much of a possible conflict.