Kids today, amiright?

[lizbee]

Finding myself awake at 4 am this morning, I checked my email. I had two pieces of anonymous feedback on an Avatar fic I posted ... last year? The year before? Anyway, when I woke up again at 7, I had two more reviews from the same anon:



They go from the bottom up.

First, I had to ask what "lemons" means. (It's a now out-of-vogue term for smut, apparently, mostly popular in anime fandoms.)

Sadly, there's no way of communicating with this anonymouse. Otherwise, I would say the following:

1. The fic is ended. It had a high rating for violence and an arranged underage marriage. Nowhere did I promise "lemons".

2. You're right, that was a weak ending. But not because of the lack of citrus fruit. Even if I did a "remake", it wouldn't be smutty.

3. I was not aware that having over 20 reviews meant I was now taking orders.

4. FF.net doesn't even allow explicit fic!

5. Aang is, like, 13 in this fic! Are you some kind of pervert?

Comments

[settiai]

Oh, wow. Lemon and lime. That's something I haven't thought about in years; it's honestly probably going on a decade at this point.

[lizbee]

Apparently there's also grapefruit, for your really hardcore stuff.

[settiai]

*nods*

And, if I'm remembering correctly, sometimes people would use orange if it was very mild kissing and the like.

[vass]

I'm an optimist, so I'm going to hope your reader is not some kind of pervert but some kind of teenager. One young enough to explain both the extreme rudeness and the lack of sense.

[lizbee]

It's FF.net, so that seems likely.

[frayadjacent]

How strange! Also, are the comments upthread about limes and grapefruits and oranges a joke? LOL I'm so confused!

[lizbee]

Nope! It was a real, though niche, ratings system.

[sabotabby]

Haha, entitled reviewers. Hopefully, they only want citrus fruit stories about 13-year-olds because they are close to that age themselves.

[lizbee]

Fingers crossed. Because the alternative is too awful to bear.

[wolfy_writing]

If someone was spamming me with requests for sexually explicit stories about a thirteen-year-old, I'd be kind of creeped out myself.

[melyanna]

I'd love to know how you implied that you'd implied something. That's some serious reading between the lines.

[lizbee]

I can only assume that anon thought the M rating meant there would be porn? And I did warn, at the beginning, for sexual references, but I was referring to the arranged marriage and pregnancy of a 15 year old. (Which was also not explicit.)

[xwingace]

Just because smut is not allowed at FF.net, doesn't mean it isn't there. And often given the M rating. Possibly, in some fandoms, just about the only things given M ratings are smut. So that's where the 'implied' may have come from. By giving it an M rating, you implied there would be sex.

And Avatar is often miscategorised as an anime, so that's probably where the citrus fruit came from.

From the POV of a twelve-year old, mind.
XWA

[purple_smurf]

I find it really fascinating when this culture is carried through to AO3, and smut is posted under a Mature rating instead of Explicit. At least I'm rarely offended by unexpected smut?

[nostalgia]

BUt you implied that you implied smut!

[wolfy_writing]

It's implied to be an implicit agreement! If the reader anticipates smut, that means the implications of how the story was presented must have suggested the possibility, so therefore it's mandatory to make the implicit explicit!

[umadoshi]

Awww, I still find myself automatically starting to use citrus as a labeling system. Now I feel vaguely sentimental.

I'd always had the vague impression that is was done more among anime fans than English-language media fans, but perhaps that's incorrect. ^^;

[amberfox]

To the best of my knowledge, that's correct. I mean, it's been a while, but that's how I remember it.

[geek_anachronism]

I've been reading a bunch of academic histories of fandom and yeah, it gets a mention as a ratings system in early fandom, but not a whole lot apart from that. I vaguely remember seeing it a few times in my early Potter/Stargate years (late 90s/early 00s) but not recently.

[delfinnium]

When I was in Gundam Wing, which is an anime, lemon and lime were ratings yes. And they were both to imply sex, violence was warned for separately, if warned for at all. If a citrus fruit appeared at all in the ratings it meant sex/makingouts/something was going to happen.

It still is visible in anime fandoms - (see the GWAddiction fanfic archive), and I do think that for fans who had come from those times and continue on in similar anime fandoms, they would continue to use that ratings.

Western type fandoms do not use it.

(Hi! reading from a friend of a friend's dwroll!)

[attackfish]

Western type fandoms do not use it.

Lies and slander. It was all over Harry Potter fandom once upon a time. Takes me back.

Dear God, ff.net reviewers seem to be uncommonly entitled as a whole.

[loopy777]

Wow, I didn't know that "lemon" and "lime" were out of vogue at all. My fanfic experience is limited to Avatar, Transformers, and Star Wars, and I still see Lemon and Lime warnings frequently.

I kind of wish that violence had such a nuanced labeling system. It's be cool, we could say "Warning for Pixie Sticks" when people in the story get stabbed, "Warning for Bubble Gum" when the story only contains Saving Private Ryan-type war violence, "Warning for Cotton Candy" when the violence is hardcore torture stuff, and even "Warning for Kit Kat Bar" when the violence is bone-specific martial arts injuries.