We already have meaning and symbolism tags, for questions about the meaning or symbolic significance of specific passages or objects in works of literature. After seeing the recent question What happens at the end of The Scar by China Mieville?, I've been wondering whether we need a tag such as plot-explanation to complement these, specifically for questions about the plot of a story, rather than e.g. the meaning of a passage or the symbolism of an object.
If we do want this tag, it will probably have to be added to quite a lot of existing questions - I haven't checked, but I'd guess perhaps a few dozen. Hence why I'm posting to meta rather than just going ahead and creating the tag - it would be a big enough addition to the system to not come under the "this minor tag is too small an issue to worry about at present" Standard Meta Answer.
**Context:** at least two of Literature's closest sister sites have experimented with a plot-explanation tag.
- On Movies & TV, despite the occasional burnination requestburnination request, it's currently the top tag on the site, with over a quarter of all questions.
- On Science Fiction & Fantasy, it was a frequently-used tag, despite the occasional burnination request, until the Great Tag Cleanup of 2016, when it was proposed for removal and ultimately burninated by staff.
SFF's argument for nuking it was essentially that it was being used inconsistently, and the community opted to remove it from the 500-odd questions with the tag rather than adding it to the however-many plot explanation questions without the tag. Note that Lit is a young enough site not to have this problem: adding the tag to as many questions as need it is a feasible endeavour, if we decide that this tag is worthwhile, so I can't see it going the same way as SFF's tag further down the road.