Lemon, Lime and other citric fruits

[kanshu]

To answer cesmith's question from the other thread, and toss up a question myself...

The 'citric fruits' are a grader for the sexual content of a story. The term derived from the reaction people have when biting into a lemon, which is equal to how a good amount ouf the readership react to sex stories.

Note: the grader can be used regardless of existing special terms, for all types of fiction that includes sex scenes.

lemon - pornographic sex scenes. All details, graphic. (Attention! Lemons are rated NC-17, per default of the rating description! You have to post them on a place that hosts adult fanfiction.)

lime - implicit sex scenes that don't show all the details. You know what's going on, but it's not going graphic. (Should be safe for a rating R.)

Additions? And I think there are more graders. Do you know any? Feel free to dd.

[KarotsaMused]

I always preferred this rating system to the big old blanket shounen-ai versus yaoi in a fic that wasn't a PWP. It's a fiction with a citrus scene, end of story. I mean, nobody does that with hetero-pairing fictions, right?

I know of one website (which I have so conveniently forgotten ><) that takes the ratings from lemon, lime, orange, apple...all the way down to...I think it was a pear. But search me for the specifics *shrug* I've got no idea.

[cesmith]

Does the lemon, lime, etc. ratings then leave it open to indiviual interpretation of what level you consider your story? Or is it so many of this, earns it this rating, etc? I remember someone once joking (?) about counting the swear words to know what rating to put. I also remember someone saying they had removed a lemon scene form their story but in the context of what they posted it's hard to imagine they removed a graphic pornographic scene.

[kanshu]

Do the ratings leave it open to personal interpretation?
I'd say Nes. Yes and no.

First of all, there is a definition, but that definition allows a small tolerance margin, which I think is perfectly okay. It's just like with everything, people see things slightly different from each other, even they agree in general.

Second, there's a huge crowd of people who don't know what the label means, and a very small crowd who knows what it means but delibertaly uses it wrongly.
The first crowd will place the wrong label on their story because they don't know the difference, but once they learn the difference, they use the labels properly. It would be a good thing if "recognized" authors in the fandoms would take the time to tell their "newbie" fellow writers the differences, if they see that the label is wrongly used.
A well worded, encouraging review can work miracles.

The second type of crowd I find disgusting. Because, purposefully wrong labelling of a fic has ruined more than one reading experience for me.

It's basically like with the G-NC 17 rating. The definition is up on ff.net for everyone to read. Still, you'll find a hue number of fics that would be R or even NC-17 rated if you followed the standards, with a PG-13 or even lower rating.
I sometimes wonder if those authors don't care at all that they will allow younger kids access to material meant for more mature readers.... But then, that's just me.

[cesmith]

Does ff post a list of definitions for readers to check out, so they know the meanings of the terms? I've never looked. Another thing that happens is that ratings can change for a story as it's being written. Some authors warn this might happen, but I would imagine you can't always control where your creative processes take you when you start a multi-chapter story. Hard to read six PG-13 chapters and then skip one that raised it to R, espescially when you're younger. Almost all of them wouldn't. Being older, I don't look at the ratings, but I will check out the warnings.

[kanshu]

They do have the guidelines lengthy and with geraniums in the "Create a story" section when you log in and try to post a new story...

As for changed ratings... sorry, but if I have just one R chapter and all the rest is G, that means that my rating has to go up to R for the entire story. Or other said... would you let a six year old watch a cartoon that has somewhere in the middle a steamy hot sex scene of five minutes, but the rest is harmless?
It is very easy to adjust the rating if you go to the story/chapter management...

[Me-Nuriko]

Oops. I was thinking about changing the rating for 'Cho Hakkai...' to R, because of the eleventh (last) chapter. First I wrote it very hot, but it became more NC-17, so I changed it and made it PG-13. But now I have changed it again, and I think the rating should be R.

Now I guess it's my turn to go and hide, but what is it about sex that makes it so taboo? It's something natural, isn't it? Actually I don't think it's wrong if a teenager that has reached puberty reads sex scenes. I was engaged when I was 17, married when I was 19 and had my first child at 20. I wouldn't mind if my children read sex scenes when they had reached puberty. Maybe it's because I'm Swedish? Maybe we have a different way of looking at things? I think violence is much worse. So maybe I should have changed the rating to R already because of the flogging scene in chapter 10?

So, time to hit the 'Post' button, and see if I'm getting banned from this MB. (Feeling nervous.)

[kanshu]

Ah, be gone! Shoo!!! Evil!!! ;D j/k


*sigh* I don't think I'll read the final chapter of your story, then, sorry. I don't think I can stomach any intense love scenes right now.

What makes sex 'taboo'... well, have a good look at the age of your adience. When you post something with an R rating, you can be certain that the majority of your adience is around 13.... And you also know very well how the 'usual' sexual encounter in fanfiction works... KarotsaMused picked up the topic of 'Is that actually anatomically possible' in the Breakroom. Do I need to say more?

Check out the defintions of ratings. Think movies. If it's okay to watch for a 13-year old...
I don't think that what you wrote so far (even with the flogging) justifies an R rating. But I have to admit that I would feel cheated if you had to up the rating for the last chappy. Ah well. My loss, I guess.

[Me-Nuriko]

Yeah, I was afraid you wouldn't want to read my last chapter. I had been thinking how to tell you so you wouldn't have to start reading it and then feel betrayed. On the other hand it's only part of the chapter that has a love scene, not the whole chapter.

But, I'm not sure yet, how to do the last chapter. As I said, I have rewritten it already a couple of times. (Oh, there are two chapters left, 10 and 11, and 10 is 'safe'. The flogging was in ch. 9, not 10 as I wrote above by mistake. )
Sigh, I really don't know what to do. I mean, different people thinks differently. What I think is acceptable for my children to read in their teens, is apparently not acceptable for everyone. I have to think about how to do ch. 11. Maybe I change it to PG-13 again, but there will still be kissing and a simpler love scene. Or maybe I keep it the way it is now. Haven't decided yet.

[kanshu]

Oi, you write the story as you seem fit. I'm not going to keel over and stick my cheese-smelling feet up in the air just because they kiss, you know.

Besides, I'm certain that you'll get tons of enthusiastic reviews for adding 'what everyone wants to read'. So, no worry there. I am grateful for the warning, though. If you had let me run into the open blade, it wouldn't have sat well. As it is now, I'm fine, whatever you do. *hugs*

As for what's okay... I'm afraid that things get measured with the US standard. Things here in Europe are much more liberal, in many aspects. In other things, we're more uptight, so...

[KarotsaMused]

Welp, therein lies the dilemma of writing to please your reviewers, huh? Good luck with the decision, Me-Nuriko... >< sheesh.

As for letting pubescent kids read sexual material, I say it's alright that they understand what sex is, but shouldn't stop with just the act. Someone has to understand the emotional implications of intimacy as well, and a good study of anatomy couldn't hurt Unfortunately, most exposure to sexual material (especially in fanfiction) careens over the edge of realism and into graphic idealism, which is not a good, solid foundation on which people can base their expectations. And, as OptiMoose says, monkey read, monkey want to write. ><

[kanshu]

Wow, KarotaMused... that was a nice way to put it. Hadn't thought of it that way, really.

Me-Nuriko: Write what you feel is needed to round up the story and give it a smooth and satifying ending. It *is* your story, and you have to be please with it. And I might not read the 'pepped up' ending now, but I might read it at another time, when I'm better able to handle thing. *hugs* You just do your thing, okay?

A general thought about 'pepped up scenes' vs 'moderate scenes': Maybe you look at the topic of your overall content, and ask "Does the scene fit? Or is it extra garment that the story wouldn't miss if it was not there? What does the scene do FOR the story and the characters?"
I know that quite a couple of scenes I wrote for stories fell to the "cutting floor"... because I loved them to pieces, but they didn't really help the story.

[Me-Nuriko]

Well, I have got a couple of weeks to decide. Thanks for your advice and kind words. *hugs back*
I promise I'll think about how I want it. I always give the advice to others, that they should write what they want to read themselves. Guess I have to heed that advice myself.
I don't know if the scene adds anything to the story but it seems natural that it would happen. As I said, I'll think about it a couple of weeks more.

[kanshu]

That's the spirit.

Mmm... 'Natural'... You know, I just had to think about the old movies, where you have them kissing, and hugging, and you see a piece of dropped clothing, and hear *that* type of giggle/noises... and then it just fades to black, or the bedroom door closes. And everything after that is left to the viewer's imagination. It always felt natural to me, because it told me that the story had ended, but things continued after the 'Happy End'.

Mhm... well. I'm silly, I know. I guess times do change, huh?

[iapetus]

I've seen a general rating system that spans across all of the fics that I've seen summaries for and their ratings. This means, het, yaoi and yuri. While I have yet to read any yuri, I've seen summaries for them while scrolling on fan fiction pages.

In this rating system, lime and lemon are both used, understandably. Of all of the ratings, they are the most common. However, I occasionally see "citrus" in and of itself as a writing. I have used it one myself in "Somewhere I Belong" when a scene ended up being suggestive but there was nothing that implied more happened. More DIDN'T happen.

When going between citrus to lime to lemon, one of the biggest factors is the wording. I know from personal experience - there is this lime piece I have that COULD have been a lemon had I chosen to describe some things differently.

As for the thing about teenagers reading lemons - whether it is right or wrong or not really depends on the culture they live in. Here in the US, while sex is talked about on TV and our society has generally taken on a laid-back view of it, it is still something that people have problems with. Nudity is not acceptable on daytime TV, although in other countries it is fine because they understand that not all forms of nudity carry a sexual connotation. It also depends on how religion affects a society, a person's personal views, etc.

I have several friends that do not read lemons because they don't want to. Many of these friends in question happen to like shounen-ai, but they just don't want to read an explicit description of it. This is understandable, and I'm not going to push it on them because I know it is a personal choice of theirs. Yes, I happen to like lemons and I read/write them. No, I will NOT ask those friends to read those stories. One of these people is my main prereader for "Somewhere I Belong" (and actually the person who encouraged me to start the story in the first place), but when I get to the lemon parts I know that I'm not going to be able to have her give her opinion on them. She doesn't want to read the lime or lemon, and I won't force it on her.

As for ratings, limes should definitely be R. No questions about it. Also, I believe it is impossible to mark a lemon (if it is truly one) as anything but NC-17.

Ok, that's my $.02.

-Iapetus