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what do you mean i'm patently insane for this

I made a super short uquiz. find out what mxtx main character you are today

jack of no trades. master of fuck all

Doing this to all of you

Fandom 101: The Origin of the Citrus Scale

A guest post by Aeryn Jemariel Knox. (@jemariel)

Ah, the citrus scale. It’s like a cryptid roaming the edges of modern fandom communities. Long-tenured veterans speak of it with affectionate mockery while newcomers google curiously. A relic from a bygone fandom era, the citrus scale saw a brief resurgence in 2018 during the Tumblr porn ban, suggested as a way to avoid the new bot censors trawling for posts with the NSFW tag—though never, I think, in seriousness. 

That may have been jocular and short-lived, but it does point to the reasons why the citrus scale was created in the first place. Certain fandom activities have always had to fly under the radar to one degree or another. Whether you’re trying to evade legal action or simply avoid deletion based on explicit content, a certain level of obfuscation is sometimes worthwhile.

It’s not hard to find the generally agreed-upon definitions of the citrus scale’s levels. According to Fanlore, KnowYourMeme, and others, this is more or less the “official” citrus scale:

Orange: Light stuff, kissing, nothing below the waist or under the clothes. 

Lime: Groping, implied sex without details, fade-to-black, no intercourse or intimate contact.

Lemon: Sex, in full detailed glory. Woo-hoo! Regardless of the actual acts performed, if you can tell who had an orgasm (or, perhaps, had an orgasm denied), how, and where, it’s a lemon.

Grapefruit: We’ll get into this later.

But these tidy categories are clear thanks to the benefit of hindsight. In the Wild West of the early internet, it was not so easy to pin down exactly what you might be getting into based on which term was used.

At its origin, the citrus scale wasn’t a scale at all. It has its roots in hentai (and was always more popular in anime fandoms), stemming from a specific early hentai film by the title of Cream Lemon (1984). Hentai being what it is, this led to certain subculture communities referring to any story with explicit sexual content as a “Lemon.” And for a while, that was the extent of it. Then came fanfiction.net purging explicit content (2002), Livejournal suffering Strikethru (2007), and other events that pushed burgeoning fandom communities out of their growing hubs and back into smaller, isolated communities centered on a single fandom or pairing. In the relatively sparse early ’00’s internet, anybody could spin up an Angelfire website, pass the link around to their friends, and get a reasonable amount of traffic.  Websites devoted to the works of a single author or small group were common.

I mention this to describe the landscape in which fandom lexicons grew and evolved in the early-mid 2000s. Each pocket community had its own rules, lingo, and expectations; venturing outside of your home pocket could lead to some pretty major miscommunications. 

“Lemon” was established early and its definition has hardly shifted. It means that the labeled content (art, fic, mood board, etc.) includes sex. Intercourse, bumping uglies, etc. However, some yaoi fandom niches used it specifically to mean gay sex of the male variety. In some communities, “lime” developed as a corresponding term for feminine gay sex, while other communities brought it up with the usage that eventually “stuck,” “not quite a lemon.” Given that lemon and lime often go hand in hand when discussing actual flavors, the fact that we had some divergent term evolution is not surprising. But coming in from a different pocket of fandom and seeing “lime,” thinking you’ll be reading semi-softcore sexual tension and instead being confronted with graphic sapphic antics? Bit of a shock, I’m sure.

A more dramatic example is the rating level of “Grapefruit,” which occupies two completely different ends of the scale. In some circles, grapefruit was defined as “less intense than lime,” G or PG-rated stories that were more soft or cute than sexy. In other circles, it was used to mean the exact opposite. Kinkier than kink, smuttier than smut, grapefruit art and fic was where you went to have your eyebrows singed off. Some communities were even more specific, using grapefruit for stories featuring non-consensual sex. This was where darkfic lived – in modern day parlance, your “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” works. To say that this usage difference caused some disagreements would be putting it mildly.

Nobody really worried about orange. Orange just existed, not bothering anybody.

When these terms were coined, the internet was not an assumed aspect of everybody’s daily life the way it is today. There was no Tumblr, no Facebook, no social media to speak of. There were no large repositories of internet lore and knowledge such as Urban Dictionary or KnowYourMeme. It was a playground. And what do you do on a playground? You make friends! The citrus scale, like so many fandom tropes and concepts, was defined by groups of friends that created them ad hoc to meet their own needs at the time. No one could have predicted that it would become so much a fandom history that it’d be enshrined, nor that I would be writing a blog post about it two decades later. From the common source of lemon, people extrapolated what the rest of the scale might look like, and there was no authority to tell them they were wrong. (Except other fans. That hasn’t changed.)

In conclusion, it’s best not to take the citrus scale too seriously. At best, it’s a cheeky way to avoid censors who try to bar a community from engaging with explicit works, but it’s also varied to a fault and open to interpretation. If you and your community have come up with a use for it that suits your needs, then congratulations: you’re part of a fandom tradition stretching back to the roots of the internet. Just don’t try and tell anybody else that they’re wrong. You might start a flame war.

References:

Prokopetz: Orange and Grapefruit

She’s Got Plans: What is the Citrus Scale in Fanfiction?

Unwinnable: Lemon and Lime

Past Fandom 101 Posts:

Everything About A/B/O Dynamics You Wanted to Know (but were Afraid to Ask)

How to Diversify Your To-Be-Read Pile

Recognizing AI Generated Images, Danmei Edition

Sorry for infodumping about my special interest out of nowhere, you said a keyword and it activated my unskippable dialogue

actually your characters should be pure wish fulfillment and your writing should be entirely self indulgent and it should all be very, incredibly, undeniably horny.

i had a request to share the ao3 skin i created for my wangxian college au (shameless plug), but ao3 no longer allows public skins, so if you're a fic writer who includes text conversations and wants them to look like this:

here's how you can make it happen!

go to your ao3 dashboard > skins > work skins > create

add all of this css to the doc, then save it:

#workskin .phone-wrap img { max-width: 200px; }

#workskin .phone-wrap { max-width: 400px; padding: 1em 1.5em; margin: 60px auto; border: 1px solid black; border-left-color: transparent; border-right-color: transparent; border-radius: 15px; background-color: #FFFFFF; display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: flex-end; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p { margin: 0em 0em 1em; max-width: 75%; line-height: 1.25; position: relative; padding: 0.5em .875em; border-radius: 1.15em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.sender { opacity: 0.7; font-size: 0.8em; font-weight: bold; align-self: flex-start; margin-bottom: 0; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.outgoing { background-color: #2a96f5; border-color: #2a96f5; color: white; text-align: left; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.incoming { background-color: #e2e1e6; border-color: #e2e1e6; align-self: flex-start; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.outgoing:after { content: ""; position: absolute; right: -0.5em; bottom: 0; width: 0.5em; height: 1em; border-left: 0.5em solid; border-color: inherit; border-bottom-left-radius: 1em 0.5em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.incoming:after { content: ""; position: absolute; left: -0.5em; bottom: 0; width: 0.5em; height: 1em; border-right: 0.5em solid; border-color: inherit; border-bottom-right-radius: 1em 0.5em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.title { font-size: 0.8em; color: #616161; text-align: center; max-width: 100%; line-height: 1em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap .chaticon p { width: auto; text-align: center; margin: 0; }

#workskin .chaticon { background-color: #e2e1e6; border-color: #e2e1e6; font-size: 1.5em; border-radius: 50%; margin: auto; margin-bottom: 1em; height: 60px; width: 60px; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; }

----------------

3. then, when writing your fic, wrap all text convos in a <div> tag with class="phone-wrap". that will create the phone screen-sized wrapper with borders. (wrapping it means that it opens with <div class="phone-wrap"> and everything else happens here, and then when you want the convo to end, you add </div>)

for every incoming message, add class="incoming" to the <p> and for every outgoing message, add class="outgoing" to the <p>. if you want your chat to still be distinguishable via alignment by someone who chooses not to use your skin, you should also add align="right" to every outgoing <p>.

for the chat icon on top of a chat, wrap the initials of the receiver in a <p> tag and wrap that in a <div> with class="chaticon".

for group chats, to add the name of a sender, wrap that in a <p> with class="sender". optionally, inside of that tag, wrap it in a <strong> tag. this will make sure it's bolded even without your skin.

to add a gif/image, wrap it inside the <p> tag with the outgoing or incoming class with <img class=“chat-gif” src=“[url goes here]” alt=“[description of image]”/>

example for a regular text:

<div class="phone-wrap"> <div class="chaticon"> <p>LWJ</p> </div> <p class="outgoing" align="right">hi</p> <p class="incoming">Who is this?</p> </div>

example for a group chat:

<div class="phone-wrap"> <p class="outgoing" align="right">hi chat</p> <p class="sender"><strong>Wen Ning:</strong></p> <p class="incoming">yoooo</p> <p class="outgoing" align="right"> <img class="chat-gif" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/b33161ba62441664ecf3ad647e8c980c/caff55261bba6810-25/s100x200/d8aa0dc5c68a7c22d3fd519687901536f51f38fb.gifv" alt="Oprah GIF" /> </p> </div>

so true

Must admit that one thing that changed the way I see fandom discourse is realizing that a lot of fandom is just… playing with dolls. We're playing with dolls. Shipping? Playing with dolls. AUs? Dolls. Darkfic? Dolls.

Lotta people very agitated about the other kids playing with dolls wrong.

creature in fiction: *is portrayed as bad and mean*

8 year old me: but what if there was a good and nice one :0

If reverting to a child, like Luo Binghe does, is one possible outcome of qi deviation, what if when he qi deviated, Nie Mingjue reverted to a child?

Jin Guangyao's been deviously playing him the bad music, hoping he'll die, but now he's got a murderously angry toddler on his hands.

Reblog this if you would not only accept, but welcome fan art, moodboards, etc. of your fics

All of these used to be so common for people to show their appreciation of different fics and authors, and I think it’s a shame people don’t do it anymore. I love seeing fan work for my fics!!

Because I am a silly goose who cannot remember that you can make a thread of things by reblogging the first one... I am going to make this post with a link to all the polls for the OHSHCxMDZS crossover. If you haven't voted in them yet, well... I want to know, if we put the MDZS people into the Ouran High School Host Club setting, who do you think would fill the role of the following:

Tamaki Suoh

Kyoya Ootori

Takashi "Mori" Morinozuka

Mitsukuni "Honey" Haninozuka

Hikaru and Kaoru Hitachiin

playing tumblr catch with the mutuals:

> see funny post on dash, add it to queue

> mutual reblogs it

> don’t remember reblogging it the first time so queue it again

> mutual reblogs it

Repeat after me: I draw so good. Not everything needs to be a banger. I'm not a content machine I'm a person who makes art and art takes time. Inspiration comes in waves and when it recedes that's when I should let myself rest

When you're in charge of the onboarding PPT in the jinlintai but all your employees are demonic cultivators

Wei Wuxian’s Countdown | Ep. 26

for @phantomdivine

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got kicked out of the time loop cause i wasnt learning any life lessons and was just using it to crank my thang crazy style

guy after having a completely normal social interaction: i made things weird again and they hate me