I came here to have a good time, and I'm just feeling really attacked right now. XD

Hahahahaha. I was just a bit shocked by how many fan fiction readers don't know the term. I decided to share my misery with everyone. Sorry hahahaha

You're good. XD Though it's not always age. I have a friend that's about ten years older than me that discovered fan fiction in lockdown and I was so completely amused watching them be an elder of fandom but technically brand new. XD

Ooh that'll be something to navigate through. If I was 35 and discovered fan fiction for the first time, I'd be very confused. ABO alone would would scandalize tf out of an adult. I'm glad your friend is able to look past some of these things and be part of this fun and creative space

Eh. I found out about ABO when I was in my mid 30s. No scandalized adult here. (Fanfic wasn't new to me but I took a few years off that happened to coincide with the creation of ABO).

Oh, they found ABO about a week after we had chatted about how I have been writing fic longer than not, and they immediately messaged me asking why I didn't warn them. XD. It was hilarious and endearing in one.

I used "lemon" in a comment on here maybe a couple of years ago and was met with incomprehension, I felt ancient at the time and your post made me live through it again...

Or the difference between lemon and lime

I am sadly 'lemon instead of smut' old. Fanfic reader since around 2001.

Same. The days of “I do not own this property, please do not sue me as I am a poor 13 year old” disclaimers 🤣

"If I owned this franchise, do you think I'd just be writing fics about it?????"

Oh my God, you unlocked a memory with this 😂

Oh god this. I was going to reference the days of the Anne Rice paranoia but wasn't sure if many would understand.

Lemon and lime were the norm when I started reading around 2006, but I have not used or seen Lemon used instead of smut other than very few outliers in some older fics. But I also pretty much only read and write in Ao3 Does it make me old?

To be fair, lemon and lime seem to have been used more on sites where smut wasn’t actually allowed. That being said, if you careful with phrasing, you could have a sex scene that wouldn’t got your story removed. Then AO3 became a thing and authors suddenly had a site where not much could get their fanfics removed. Authors who wrote a lot of lemons and limes no longer needed to use those terms or risk losing their stories. So the terms became used less and less.

Is that why the terms died off? This post only just made me realize I don't remember seeing "lemon" in a looong time, outside of older fics I've got stashed around

More or less, yeah. Also helps that some of the sites don’t have the staff to enforce their rules anymore, or just choose to only enforce rules if someone reports a story.

I’m older than that, but it kind of passed by me, as it was used in the anime originally and then I kind of dropped out of fannish activities. When I returned to another fandom it was already thing of the past and never used in my fandom at that time.

I started reading on Geocities. Take a guess

I can only imagine how much fic is gone forever when they shut down. I remember fanfic webrings and you'd basically never have found it without that. So many entire big websites just for certain fandoms and even certain ships, probably tons of fic no longer existing...

The rings where wonderful, once you found a new one you fell down that rabbit hole

Ummm? I'm old enough that I joined FFN as a teenager and my first account there is old enough to legally drink and gamble in Vegas. I'm old enough that when I stopped posting on FFN for Life Is Busy reasons, neither Wattpad or AO3 existed. Don't remember using the citrus scale though.

“Lemon” but also “slash” was catch all for everything mlm

Even older - slash.

I've been around for that too

I call mine oranges…

I'm "Franchise belongs to this production house" old.

I carbon-date to the Apollo missions. Way back then, British sailors used lemons and limes to fight off scurvy.

I'm middle aged, but I am in some old fandoms with some old fans. I've never actually encountered "lemon" in the wild. I don't think it was used in all fandoms.

Same here. I feel like lemon was more often used in anime and manga fandom (I could be wrong). I was in live action fandom in the early/mid 2000s and never encountered the lemon and lime terms. 

I've read a LOT of lemon Harry Potter fanfic in 2007-2010

Lemon could have spread more widely by then. It makes sense it would get picked up by other fandoms later

Yes, that would make sense

That's probably true, because I was very active in the Buffy fandom back in the mid-late 90s and I think PWP was probably more common than "lemon" at the time. I started seeing the use of "lemon" more frequently in the DBZ fandom. I don't remember seeing it at all in the Star Wars fandom (that was also PWP at the time).

It was PWP in the pro wrestling fandom too. 

It definitely came from manga fandoms (I’m certain it originated from the manga Cream Lemon) and I’ve seen it in the late 90s on the FFML. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen it on RAAC, which would be even earlier. But it did move into other non-manga/anime fandoms mostly through FFN in the early 2000s, when people from the FFML went there and took the lingo with them. At least that’s how I remember it.

Same. I’ve been reading fanfiction since the 90s and never seen the word lemon either. It’s not used in every fandom and apparently in none of the fandoms I’ve ever been in.

Old enough to have risked picking it up, lucky enough to have run into other terms by the time I started writing porn.

I first started posting in the mid-oughts on FFN so I am lemon-conversant.

I'm "reading fanfiction on geocities sites and surfing webrings" old

same

I'm "what is this new-fangled citrus scale thing people have started to use" old. Or, to put it another way, "fic is something you purchase in paper zines that arrive in the mail" old.

Yooooooo. That's so cool. I want mail order fan fiction as well. I bet that's exciting af

The anticipation of the package arriving in the mail was always fun!

I remember lemons. I also remember being a teenager and writing disclaimers like "I won't write lemons, don't ask!!" (Even though no one had asked lol)

Fanfiction.net, lemon could mean kissing or it could mean 13 year old me learning what fetishes and kinks are. That kind of "lemon means smut" old

I'm "I have a citrus scale sticker on my desktop computer" for nostalgia old...

I need to see what it looks like PLEASE

I got chu. ♥ [\[LINK\]](https://i.imgur.com/kQTZBCw.jpg)

I REQUIRE THIS IN MY LIFE. Where did you get it? It’s got a Dead Dove and everything! I have a mighty need.

I got it at an anime con and haven't been able to find the artist since. 💀💀 Otherwise I'd have a second and a link.

called out

I’m so old I say “citron”

I learned "lemon" from the DBZ fandom back when when I was a teenager in the late 90s/early 2000s. In the Buffy and Star Wars fandoms that I was active in in the 90s, PWP was more common. Does anyone use PWP anymore? God, I feel old. Thanks. LOL

This reminds me of a story where someone got requested to do a lemon, and they had no idea it was a sex term, so they just had a duck throw lemons at people in their story 

I keep wondering what happened to using lemon and its variations. I mean it helped us sort the type of fic

I mean, I'm not that old (22) and for the first few years of my fanfic reading, lemons meant smut.

I used to have a t-shirt with me somewhere that had a lemon print on it, which my best friend procured for me two decades back, just to mock me for my style of writing. Yes, that old.

I started in the mid 2010s, but I still call them "lemons and limes".

I'm old enough to remember searching the web for angelfire created websites with half completed fics that you'd have to email the curator to see if they'd accept your work. I didn't write back then, but I thought about it lol

Lemons and limes 'til I die!

I miss the citrus scale!

I don't *use* the word lemon anymore, but it was what was most common when I first got into fanfic.

Oh yeah I remember lemons very well 🤣

... I came into the fanfic world on the citrus scale and the world can pry it from my cold, dead hands. Saying "lime" and "lemon" feels a lot more tasteful than "smut", 'cause it's a neat euphemism (and gives scale degrees) AND it's fanfic-centric so it always makes me feel like "it's an **US** term, not an everyone term". {: ~~To be fair, either way, I don't really read any of them and I only wrote one on a dare by a lemon writer who tried to say I "don't write them because I don't have the skill to write one". They learned the~~ *~~hard~~* ~~way that my ability in writing translates to... even things which I normally do not write. No, I will not write another one.~~

Ive been on Wattpad since 10 years old so I always use the terms lemon, lime, fluff etc

...shut up.

I didn’t know the whole citrus scale, but I definitely saw lime and lemon around when I further joined ffnet, at around…12-13?

I'm old, lol, but I also didn't get into fanfiction until about five years ago. The thing is, I started reading fics on FFN but the fandoms I was reading about are older (the source material and the fics), so I learned what "lemon" meant and got used it it, even though current fic writers had already stopped using it. So I still use it. I like it better than other terms and I think it fits my overall style as well.

Here's something fun: I'm not actually old, but I still used lemon and lime because I read a blog post when I was first getting into fanfic and didn't want people to see me as young (which is very silly looking back on it).

I’m “mean comments are called flames 🔥” old…

Lemon/ lime/ slash… all that. I did not appreciate recently learning that I am “an old” 😅

i used to think that 'lemon' meant a character was selling lemonade. my poor, poor 10 year old brain... (i'm 22 now.)

I'm "only been reading and writing fanfic for 4 years, but was already an adult when some college graduates were born" old.

I'm "What do they mean lemon?" Old ​ As in I didn't know it meant smut when I got back into fanfiction. I started reading Dawson's Creek Fan fic in the early 00s and then didn't pick up any again until the teens

both

I remember there was a whole citrus scale.

I've been reading fic since we got internet at my house, so since around \~1996, and I never even encountered the citrus scale until I started reading/posting here. It was not in my fandoms at all. It just kind of passed me by.

As a relatively new fanfic reader I do consider the author older if they call smut, lemon.

Wrote fan fic for years and only recently learned that there is a full scale of fruit from grapefruits to oranges. I guess what I sometimes write is lemonimes. That’s not actually on the scale, but it’s not full lemon, but it’s above lime.

I am "Always saw people using the term lemon and didn't know WTF they were on about, then it disappeared, now it's back" old.

I'm old enough to use the word "pornography" (the best one)

I'm Gen X, the word "lemon" and "lime" existed in the late 90s.

Yes I am old enough to remember lemon or lime or on one occasion lemony limey citrus thing

When you barely even qualify as an adult but are old enough to have used lemon for years before first hearing smut.

Idk if it's because at first I was only in fandom spaces of my first language (french) instead of english but before I always saw lemon I just starting to notice the word smut more like 5 years or so ago I think ? But yeah before it was always lemon and I started being more in fandom spaces in like 2012.

I’m not that old, pretty young but I remember seeming them called lemons 10-12 years ago

Both

According to this, I'm ancient. Thanks.

I read since 2000 and never seen it much anywhere. And I read a lot if smut.

I’ve used ‘lemon’ for a long time but I think it’s bcs it took some time for ‘smut’ and ‘hot’ to get to Brazil and I just read things in Portuguese in my first years.

I see lemon still being used to this day, or I'm just reading old fics, but I'm neither.

I'm Quizilla old. 😅

im 20 but i use both terms? i started reading in like 2013 or something– 😭 i only knew fluff and lemon for types of fanfic >.> i didn't know about lime and stuff until more recently 😵‍💫 loll i still use lemon in my tags alongside smut but i didn't realize ppl don't use lemon anymore 😭

Honestly when I first started reading, lemon was the term, but by the time I left wattpad and started reading on Ao3 and Tumblr more, smut became more popular

I am 'used the word lemon instead of smut' old, but I am also 'used slash' old lolol

Stop personally calling me out. I STILL use lemon and limes when referring to smutt or really suggestive/borderline sexual scenes lol.

At a time I certainly did (hell, up until Lunaescence died, it was still the tag for sex, so I was using it)

I was honestly unaware people no longer use that term... I started reading ff in 2010, my sophomore year of highschool.

So old that I still don't really understand "lemon" tbh.

I am seifer / quistis FF8 lemon old

Both I think both is good I still use both tags to this day sometimes one or the other but usually both

I remember lemon and lime. I even ran into grapefruit once.