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"Lemon" vs "Smut" - a linguistic survey
Inspired by this discussion on tumblr, I wanted to see the trends in usage of the words "lemon" and "smut".
This post doesn't actually have any explicit details.
The first thing I did was test my hypothesis that lemon fell out of use in favor of smut. However, google trends (which shows the relative frequency of a search term over time) shows this is not exactly true.
There were some apparent grains of truth to my hypothesis: searches for "lemon fanfiction" were in decline from the very start of google's data (2004) until they flatlined out in 2008~2009. It is not clear, however, that the word "smut" took its place. While "smut fanfic" rises up in 2008, "smut fanfiction" is meandering around at more or less the same rate until all the porny fanfic search terms shoot up in 2011, probably in response to the publication of 50 Shades of Gray.
More likely than "lemon" falling out of use, my hunch is that the groups most interested in lemon fanfic in earlier days drifted away elsewhere, and when interest in porny fanfic revitalized, the new word--smut--was dragged back up with that revitalization.
But let's take a look at something other than just the graphs. Look at "Related Terms". I think those are extremely telling. "Lemon" seems very closely tied with anime: you have a lot of Naruto and a little bit of Inuyasha. Meanwhile, smut is associated with Western media, real people, and yaoi. (That seems a bit funny when you consider that yaoi originated in anime fandoms.) SNSD, by the way, appears to be a Korean band. You'll notice these are looser connections, however, dipping around in 35% relatedness whereas the naruto terms were over 70%. This suggests that while "lemon" is a highly Japanese-media-fandom term (and potentially even just a Naruto fandom phenomenon), the use of "smut" is widespread enough that the "Related terms" field looks kind of like a fandom size chart. Notably, given its association with (asian) real people and yaoi, we know it's not restricted to simply being a western counterpart to "lemon".
One might theorize that the decline of "lemon" had to do with the way the anime craze boomed then faded in the early 2000's... but it has to be something deeper, because searches for anime have remained pretty constant, and searches for Naruto peak around 2008-2010.
All right, but this is all pretty big-picture. What about the Fire Emblem fandom?
I searched for the keywords "Lemon" and "Smut" on FFN and AO3. (You must capitalize them on FFN or it'll refuse to search for some reason.) I coded hits for world, last update date, and made note of weird uses of the word and prolific authors. Here's my data.
"Lemon"
FFN
FE13 8/3/13 (Crossover with non-FE)
FE13 7/30/13
FE13 7/26/13
FE13 7/23/13
FE13 7/7/13
FE13 7/3/13
FE13 5/16/13
FE13 5/5/13 (French)
Tellius 5/1/13
FE13 4/14/13
FE13 3/13/13
Tellius 2/20/13
Elibe 12/30/12 ("no lemons")
Tellius 12/24/12 (Crossover with non-FE)
Magvel 5/8/12 ("no lemons")
Tellius 4/7/12 ("NOT lemon") FP
Tellius 3/26/12 FP
Tellius 3/5/12 FP
Not Distinguishably FE 3/5/12
Tellius 3/1/12 FP
Tellius 2/26/12 FP
Tellius 2/26/12 FP
Tellius 1/28/12 LL
Tellius 1/2/12 LL
Tellius 12/30/11 LL
Elibe 12/24/11 LL
Tellius 8/13/11
Tellius 5/18/11 ("half-peeled lemons")
Tellius 5/15/11 LL
Tellius 5/10/11
Tellius 4/25/11
Tellius 4/25/11 ("No lemons")
Tellius 4/6/11 ("half-peeled lemon" same writer as before)
Smash Bros 1/6/11 (used as pun in title)
Elibe 12/26/10
Elibe 11/29/10 (possible parody)
Elibe 11/23/10 ("Day of Lemons" used as parody)
Magvel 10/11/10
Tellius 10/9/10
Tellius 10/7/10
Tellius 8/6/10
Tellius 7/14/10
Tellius 7/12/10
Tellius 6/26/10
Tellius 6/25/10
Archanea 3/26/10
Elibe-Tellius 3/9/10
Elibe-Tellius 3/8/10
Tellius 2/27/10 ("Rated M for lemon")
Tellius 2/17/10
Elibe 2/9/10
Tellius 2/5/10
Tellius 2/3/10
Tellius 2/1/10
Tellius 1/22/10
Tellius 12/9/09
Tellius 11/27/09
Tellius 11/18/09
Tellius 11/18/09
Crossover 11/18/09 (With non-FE)
Tellius 10/18/09
Tellius 9/29/09
Tellius 9/20/09
Elibe 9/17/09
Smash 9/16/09
Tellius 9/9/09 ("Not a lemon")
Smash 7/16/09
Tellius 6/18/09
Tellius 4/1/09
Tellius 2/14/09
Tellius 10/11/08
Magvel 9/30/08
Tellius 9/12/08
Elibe 8/15/08
Elibe 7/28/08
Tellius 7/6/08
Tellius 7/5/08
Elibe 6/29/08
Tellius 4/23/08
Tellius 2/22/08
Elibe 2/19/08
Elibe 1/14/08
Elibe 12/23/07
Tellius 12/20/07
Magvel 10/27/07
Elibe 4/15/07 (this is the oldest actual lemon)
Elibe 12/22/06 ("NO LEMONS")
Tellius 10/27/06 (ESL, "lemon in further chapters")
Tellius 9/5/06 (checked the fic, no actual lemon)
Tellius 9/4/06 ("Possible lemon, in future chapters")
Elibe 1/20/05 ("lemon in the future")
Elibe 12/25/04 ("No Lemons")
Elibe 10/24/04 ("Future Lemons")
Elibe 9/2/04 ("LEMON in later chapters")
AO3
Smash 8/1/13
Smash 5/30/13
"Smut"
FFN
All-Series 8/15/12
Tellius 1/4/12
Elibe 4/26/11
Tellius 8/15/10
Tellius 8/3/09
Tellius 6/16/09
Tellius 6/11/09
Tellius 5/30/09
Magvel 9/30/08 (also lemon)
Tellius 2/22/08 (also lemon)
AO3
Smash 8/1/13
FE13 5/10/13
Tellius 9/18/12
Smash 9/9/12
Tellius 7/6/12
Tellius 7/7/11
I also flipped through a few pages of adultfanfiction.net. It's worth noting that everything on that site is explicit so people tend not to tag it as such, and by this point I was tired so I wasn't taking detailed notes on fandom and date, but there are 9 uses of "lemon" in 2005-2007 and 1 use of "smut" hailing from 7/1/05. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at the early dates in general, because AFF's heyday was back when FFN was actually purging content, but the fact that the only "smut" is from way back in 2005 is pretty interesting.
The results are immediately striking: the Fire Emblem fandom as a whole favors "lemon" significantly, and most of it is for Tellius.
The Tellius result may be biased for two reasons: One, FFN does not actually allow explicit sex on its site and used to enforce this strictly, but then got lax in its moderation in recent years. The oldest actual lemon I found, searching by the term lemon, is from 2007, which is the year of Radiant Dawn's release. Unlike Awakening, Tellius fandom has time on its side -- most fanfic for something gets written several months after its release. Although in Tellius's case, it looks like its lemon fic is spread out somewhat equally over the years. Given the tremendous surge in Awakening porn after its release, I expect it will be a pretty porny fandom in times to come. And it uses the word "lemon".
It's worth noting that, although nothing stands out to me chronologically, there's a hint of a demographic split. "Smut" on FFN is extremely rare compared to "lemon," yet the only FE porn on AO3 (that's not from Smash fandom) labels itself using "smut." Naively, it looks like there's not that much data to go by on the AO3 side, but the results are tremendously statistically significant. If we assume a null hypothesis that AO3 follows the 89-to-10 ratio of lemon to smut usage for non-crossovers, then its result of 0-to-4 gives a chi-square value of 36, which is far far beyond the 5% significance threshhold for one degree of freedom (3.84). Or, in other words, if on average one out of ten porny FE fics is labeled smut, then there's a one in ten-thousandth chance we got so lucky as to have all four of AO3's labeled as smut. This is not even remotely close -- we could toss out all of the fics by prolific authors on FFN and still end up with an incredibly strong conclusion. So -- we definitely have people who use different words over at AO3.
I mentioned earlier that the demographic that uses "lemon" is strongly Japanophile while the "smut" demographic is more widespread. So does the use of these words suggest more and less anime leanings on FFN and AO3? Since "lemon" is used much more often in FFN, we would be justified in saying that FFN is "more anime," though it takes more work to get a picture of just how anime that is. For what it's worth, in the present day, "lemon fanfiction" gives 168* non-redundant google hits while "smut fanfiction" gives 227, so the word "smut" appears to be used slightly more often. FFN FE fandom's prolific use of lemon, then, is a pretty distinct phenomenon and probably is support for a greater overlap with Japanese fandoms than Western fandoms -- though we knew that already. Perhaps more interesting is the observation that the AO3 FE FFN writers linguistically distance themselves from Japanese fandoms.
(* When you search these terms it'll try to tell you that it found millions of hits, but if you persistently click to the last page, you'll find that actual hit count is in the hundreds.)
And what does it say about me that I thought people stopped using "lemon" in 2007 when in fact it was being spammed right under my nose?
Well, it probably says I'm a snob. But we knew that already, too.
This post doesn't actually have any explicit details.
The first thing I did was test my hypothesis that lemon fell out of use in favor of smut. However, google trends (which shows the relative frequency of a search term over time) shows this is not exactly true.
There were some apparent grains of truth to my hypothesis: searches for "lemon fanfiction" were in decline from the very start of google's data (2004) until they flatlined out in 2008~2009. It is not clear, however, that the word "smut" took its place. While "smut fanfic" rises up in 2008, "smut fanfiction" is meandering around at more or less the same rate until all the porny fanfic search terms shoot up in 2011, probably in response to the publication of 50 Shades of Gray.
More likely than "lemon" falling out of use, my hunch is that the groups most interested in lemon fanfic in earlier days drifted away elsewhere, and when interest in porny fanfic revitalized, the new word--smut--was dragged back up with that revitalization.
But let's take a look at something other than just the graphs. Look at "Related Terms". I think those are extremely telling. "Lemon" seems very closely tied with anime: you have a lot of Naruto and a little bit of Inuyasha. Meanwhile, smut is associated with Western media, real people, and yaoi. (That seems a bit funny when you consider that yaoi originated in anime fandoms.) SNSD, by the way, appears to be a Korean band. You'll notice these are looser connections, however, dipping around in 35% relatedness whereas the naruto terms were over 70%. This suggests that while "lemon" is a highly Japanese-media-fandom term (and potentially even just a Naruto fandom phenomenon), the use of "smut" is widespread enough that the "Related terms" field looks kind of like a fandom size chart. Notably, given its association with (asian) real people and yaoi, we know it's not restricted to simply being a western counterpart to "lemon".
One might theorize that the decline of "lemon" had to do with the way the anime craze boomed then faded in the early 2000's... but it has to be something deeper, because searches for anime have remained pretty constant, and searches for Naruto peak around 2008-2010.
All right, but this is all pretty big-picture. What about the Fire Emblem fandom?
I searched for the keywords "Lemon" and "Smut" on FFN and AO3. (You must capitalize them on FFN or it'll refuse to search for some reason.) I coded hits for world, last update date, and made note of weird uses of the word and prolific authors. Here's my data.
"Lemon"
FFN
FE13 8/3/13 (Crossover with non-FE)
FE13 7/30/13
FE13 7/26/13
FE13 7/23/13
FE13 7/7/13
FE13 7/3/13
FE13 5/16/13
FE13 5/5/13 (French)
Tellius 5/1/13
FE13 4/14/13
FE13 3/13/13
Tellius 2/20/13
Elibe 12/30/12 ("no lemons")
Tellius 12/24/12 (Crossover with non-FE)
Magvel 5/8/12 ("no lemons")
Tellius 4/7/12 ("NOT lemon") FP
Tellius 3/26/12 FP
Tellius 3/5/12 FP
Not Distinguishably FE 3/5/12
Tellius 3/1/12 FP
Tellius 2/26/12 FP
Tellius 2/26/12 FP
Tellius 1/28/12 LL
Tellius 1/2/12 LL
Tellius 12/30/11 LL
Elibe 12/24/11 LL
Tellius 8/13/11
Tellius 5/18/11 ("half-peeled lemons")
Tellius 5/15/11 LL
Tellius 5/10/11
Tellius 4/25/11
Tellius 4/25/11 ("No lemons")
Tellius 4/6/11 ("half-peeled lemon" same writer as before)
Smash Bros 1/6/11 (used as pun in title)
Elibe 12/26/10
Elibe 11/29/10 (possible parody)
Elibe 11/23/10 ("Day of Lemons" used as parody)
Magvel 10/11/10
Tellius 10/9/10
Tellius 10/7/10
Tellius 8/6/10
Tellius 7/14/10
Tellius 7/12/10
Tellius 6/26/10
Tellius 6/25/10
Archanea 3/26/10
Elibe-Tellius 3/9/10
Elibe-Tellius 3/8/10
Tellius 2/27/10 ("Rated M for lemon")
Tellius 2/17/10
Elibe 2/9/10
Tellius 2/5/10
Tellius 2/3/10
Tellius 2/1/10
Tellius 1/22/10
Tellius 12/9/09
Tellius 11/27/09
Tellius 11/18/09
Tellius 11/18/09
Crossover 11/18/09 (With non-FE)
Tellius 10/18/09
Tellius 9/29/09
Tellius 9/20/09
Elibe 9/17/09
Smash 9/16/09
Tellius 9/9/09 ("Not a lemon")
Smash 7/16/09
Tellius 6/18/09
Tellius 4/1/09
Tellius 2/14/09
Tellius 10/11/08
Magvel 9/30/08
Tellius 9/12/08
Elibe 8/15/08
Elibe 7/28/08
Tellius 7/6/08
Tellius 7/5/08
Elibe 6/29/08
Tellius 4/23/08
Tellius 2/22/08
Elibe 2/19/08
Elibe 1/14/08
Elibe 12/23/07
Tellius 12/20/07
Magvel 10/27/07
Elibe 4/15/07 (this is the oldest actual lemon)
Elibe 12/22/06 ("NO LEMONS")
Tellius 10/27/06 (ESL, "lemon in further chapters")
Tellius 9/5/06 (checked the fic, no actual lemon)
Tellius 9/4/06 ("Possible lemon, in future chapters")
Elibe 1/20/05 ("lemon in the future")
Elibe 12/25/04 ("No Lemons")
Elibe 10/24/04 ("Future Lemons")
Elibe 9/2/04 ("LEMON in later chapters")
AO3
Smash 8/1/13
Smash 5/30/13
"Smut"
FFN
All-Series 8/15/12
Tellius 1/4/12
Elibe 4/26/11
Tellius 8/15/10
Tellius 8/3/09
Tellius 6/16/09
Tellius 6/11/09
Tellius 5/30/09
Magvel 9/30/08 (also lemon)
Tellius 2/22/08 (also lemon)
AO3
Smash 8/1/13
FE13 5/10/13
Tellius 9/18/12
Smash 9/9/12
Tellius 7/6/12
Tellius 7/7/11
I also flipped through a few pages of adultfanfiction.net. It's worth noting that everything on that site is explicit so people tend not to tag it as such, and by this point I was tired so I wasn't taking detailed notes on fandom and date, but there are 9 uses of "lemon" in 2005-2007 and 1 use of "smut" hailing from 7/1/05. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at the early dates in general, because AFF's heyday was back when FFN was actually purging content, but the fact that the only "smut" is from way back in 2005 is pretty interesting.
The results are immediately striking: the Fire Emblem fandom as a whole favors "lemon" significantly, and most of it is for Tellius.
The Tellius result may be biased for two reasons: One, FFN does not actually allow explicit sex on its site and used to enforce this strictly, but then got lax in its moderation in recent years. The oldest actual lemon I found, searching by the term lemon, is from 2007, which is the year of Radiant Dawn's release. Unlike Awakening, Tellius fandom has time on its side -- most fanfic for something gets written several months after its release. Although in Tellius's case, it looks like its lemon fic is spread out somewhat equally over the years. Given the tremendous surge in Awakening porn after its release, I expect it will be a pretty porny fandom in times to come. And it uses the word "lemon".
It's worth noting that, although nothing stands out to me chronologically, there's a hint of a demographic split. "Smut" on FFN is extremely rare compared to "lemon," yet the only FE porn on AO3 (that's not from Smash fandom) labels itself using "smut." Naively, it looks like there's not that much data to go by on the AO3 side, but the results are tremendously statistically significant. If we assume a null hypothesis that AO3 follows the 89-to-10 ratio of lemon to smut usage for non-crossovers, then its result of 0-to-4 gives a chi-square value of 36, which is far far beyond the 5% significance threshhold for one degree of freedom (3.84). Or, in other words, if on average one out of ten porny FE fics is labeled smut, then there's a one in ten-thousandth chance we got so lucky as to have all four of AO3's labeled as smut. This is not even remotely close -- we could toss out all of the fics by prolific authors on FFN and still end up with an incredibly strong conclusion. So -- we definitely have people who use different words over at AO3.
I mentioned earlier that the demographic that uses "lemon" is strongly Japanophile while the "smut" demographic is more widespread. So does the use of these words suggest more and less anime leanings on FFN and AO3? Since "lemon" is used much more often in FFN, we would be justified in saying that FFN is "more anime," though it takes more work to get a picture of just how anime that is. For what it's worth, in the present day, "lemon fanfiction" gives 168* non-redundant google hits while "smut fanfiction" gives 227, so the word "smut" appears to be used slightly more often. FFN FE fandom's prolific use of lemon, then, is a pretty distinct phenomenon and probably is support for a greater overlap with Japanese fandoms than Western fandoms -- though we knew that already. Perhaps more interesting is the observation that the AO3 FE FFN writers linguistically distance themselves from Japanese fandoms.
(* When you search these terms it'll try to tell you that it found millions of hits, but if you persistently click to the last page, you'll find that actual hit count is in the hundreds.)
And what does it say about me that I thought people stopped using "lemon" in 2007 when in fact it was being spammed right under my nose?
Well, it probably says I'm a snob. But we knew that already, too.
no subject
no subject
It's probably accurate to say that the people we hang out with stopped using it.
no subject
But honestly I'd thought the whole lemon/lime stuff peaked even earlier... they were becoming somewhat meaningless categories even in '02-'03 and virtually nobody used "orange" that I saw across multiple anime/manga fandoms.
This suggests that while "lemon" is a highly Japanese-media-fandom term (and potentially even just a Naruto fandom phenomenon)
Well, yeah, it came out of anime fandom to start with and was a distinctly different beast from Western slash 'n' smut in the late 90s. IMO, Google's datapool starts too damn late to give the full picture. You need the full-on juicy data from the Sailormoon/Gundam Wing explosion to really see how things have tracked.
no subject
My memories of early fandom terms are somewhat muddled because I read articles from Japanese and Western fandom without noticing which side they belonged to. Though I probably had the most exposure to the Japanese side.
It's worth noting the direction of osmosis though -- orange et al were Japanese and stayed Japanese, but smut and slash were Western and are trickling over to the Japanese side.
Actually, if I had to baselessly conjecture about this, I'd say that Western fandoms have had a greater reputation of sophistication and therefore its terms are generally the more prestigious variant of any given concept.
no subject
The terms never bothered me but I think at the time it was a nice way to discuss it without actually saying what you were writing, if that makes sense. I mean, a "lemon" is usually a "bad one" so if someone else heard you talking about it or saw chat logs they'd think (with no other information) that you had written something and it just hadn't turned out well.
Interesting post though. I saw a sharp decline in use of those words around 2004.