The earliest snapshot of the lemon tag on the Wayback Machine, taken on July 6, 2010, shows just 7 works in the tag. While "lemon" as a fan term evolved largely as a way to evade purges of explicit content on fan websites, making it unnecessary on a purposely inclusive site like AO3, the term is nevertheless used as a tag on a number of fanworks.Īs of July 7, 2020, a tag search for "lemon" turns up 9,496 uses in fandoms as diverse as Supernatural, Hey Arnold!, Undertale, The Hobbit and Venom. When you're young, you've got two never-ending resources: tenacity and time. The automatic filters got better and we later added volunteer moderators to seek it out and remove it, and that helped a bunch, but I can guarantee that people found ways around all of it. Then to "nomel", "lemonade", "limon", "lémón" and a dozen others I can't remember anymore. Thus, an arms race started: when I started automatically flagging quizzes if the title contained "lemon", they switched to "元m0n".
![undertale sex fanfiction undertale sex fanfiction](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a1/f3/02/a1f302a4aa6149096921028459de170e.jpg)
I think I learned what it meant when someone sent me a message asking me to "please get rid of all these lemon stories!" Thankfully, when I naively asked them what they didn't like about that particular citrus fruit they explained it all to me. let's just say that I, 24 years old at the time, was regularly being outsmarted by 14-year-olds. I dutifully removed it when it was reported or automatically flagged, but if nobody reported it or they used words I didn't know about, well. No bones about it, Quizilla had a problem with that kind of content.
![undertale sex fanfiction undertale sex fanfiction](https://a.wattpad.com/cover/59068682-368-k921589.jpg)
I will go one step further: I started the site in August 2002 and it wasn't until probably late 2003 that I learned what that meant.
![undertale sex fanfiction undertale sex fanfiction](https://a.wattpad.com/cover/57526369-368-k632830.jpg)
The popular quiz site Quizilla, which was home to a great deal of anime and manga fanworks, had a long and involved history of using lemon-related terms to avoid having explicit fanworks removed from the site.Īfter the site's official closure in 2014, a former Quizilla user created a Reddit thread to reminisce, and many fans fondly remembered the use of "lemon" to denote smut. lemons_and_desiresRK is one example of a Rurouni Kenshin Yahoo! Group, focused on discussion of NSFW fanworks, that used "lemon" in its name.įanfiction archives that used the "citrus scale" included Noire Sensus and other sites that included both anime and western fandoms. Some fan communities or fan sites have particular associations with the term lemon and related terms, due to either being anime-centric or hosting a high proportion of anime fanworks. Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.Īdd fanfic archives that used the citrus/lemon system.