In the golden age of fanfiction, if you scrolled down the Wattpad search page or explored your carefully crafted Tumblr, you’d see a citrus scale of oranges, limes, lemons, and grapefruits.
I don’t know why such fruits were the chosen ones, but they were once indicators of explicit content – the archaic warning of ‘what you’re about to read isn’t entirely SFW’.
Oranges were safe. Nothing to worry about here, no romance at all. Maybe not even a handshake. This was Ye-Olde-Fluff, and the mildest of the citrus scale.
Limes were ever so slightly smuttish, but not so bad your mum would blush if she read it. They just had kissing, touching, or small sex references and implications. Not considered mature enough to be worthy of a full content warning. I suppose these days you might call it spicy.
Lemons were erotic literature – what the cool kids these days call smut. Sex scenes, porn with or without plot, Minors DNI. It was a sign to click off now if that didn’t float your boat.
Grapefruits were lemons times ten. Full-blown, kinky, graphic, dead dove content that only the bravest of souls wanted to read. This was 18+ stuff – way off the citrus scale.
These fruits were tags before tags existed. Filters and admins scanning for explicit content weren’t as effective back then, and the community decided to self-label their fics with a dose of vitamin C. And they were surprisingly effective. Pre-2016, if you went looking for lemons, chances are you’d click on a story and be called a pervert by the author with the Troll Face meme. Happy days.
I’m not sure when calling it smut became more popular. We reached a point when lemons and limes began fading into obscurity, and if I were to see a post tagged with either now, I’d find it weird. Old-fashioned. A fic written by a dinosaur who isn’t hip and cool and down with the kids because this is 2026. Yet, I still remember the old tags with affection and fondness.
Am I nostalgic? Probably. Those were the days of imagines, preferences, and reactions. Wattpad was in its prime. Tumblr was simpler. DeviantArt was booming. Polyvore still existed. We were cringe, but we were free.
However, the only languages that have stood still are dead ones. Time moved on, and so did we.
Fanfic sites are now much stricter about what content they allow, and they offer filters so users can curate their own safe space. Scroll through Wattpad or Tumblr now, and all you’ll see are smuts, fluffs, and everything in between – carefully marked as mature by built-in bots. Any reference to zesty fruits is dated a decade ago, or they’re actually talking about a genus of flowering trees and shrubs in the family Rutaceae.
But I remember, and I smile – the citrus scale survives in internet archives and the memories of veterans like me. I might have lost my lemons and limes, but I can still make lemonade. God, I feel old.