Lemon Discussion Thread [try to keep it SFW~ish]

[AngelNo13Bardiel]

As I posted elsewhere here, I gave Hands All Over/The Trick is to Keep Breathing a third and final part. More of a long post-script than a full chapter, but I got to do a few (vanilla) things I'd neglected doing in an A/S lemon so far. At least I think it came out okay. It's best enjoyed at a medium pace.

...I think that may not have been the best way to phrase that. Oh well, enjoy.

[amitakartok]

Does anyone know where AO3 draws the line for "too explicit"?

[jcmoorehead]

I don't really think there are any lines. As long as you tag everything appropriately. Can't really say I've pushed things too much mind, most of my stuff is fairly vanilla.

[AngelNo13Bardiel]

I wasn't aware there was ever a line in the first place.

Or, to quote a phrase: "There is no line, people draw that line in afterwards to fuck you up."

[amitakartok]

Well, I wasn't exactly planning on posting loli!Sakura stuff there. I have a reputation to keep.

[AngelNo13Bardiel]

I get that, I was just being a glib asshole.

[amitakartok]

FYI, it was my Kensuke/Mayumi fic I was thinking of posting there. Mostly vanilla; although the two are into some slightly kinky shit, nothing BDSM-level.

[jcmoorehead]

I'm sure that would be fine to post over there, AO3 pretty much accepts anything.

[amitakartok]

Something that came to me earlier today: Asuka listens in on Shinji and Mana doing it after he snuck the latter into his room one night when Misato wasn't at home due to work (it was Mana's idea and Shinji had no advance warning about why she suddenly phoned him in the middle of the night and asked him in a mischievous tone to unlock the front door). She lets it slide that one time but when it keeps happening, she brings it up during a sync test in front of everyone purely to make him squirm as punishment for him apparently taking her for a deaf idiot. Reactions are varied: Misato does a spit-take, Hyuga sputters incoherently, Aoba makes a complimentary whistle but doesn't comment, Maya turns beet red, Ritsuko becomes progressively more and more annoyed at the tangent until she finally snaps at everyone to cut the BS and get back to work because that test isn't going to complete itself.

Yet the next time the couple do it within Asuka's earshot and the door is left ajar after Mana had to go to the toilet, Asuka can't resist the temptation to peek at them. Except not only Mana sees her, but maintains eye contact while continuing to ride Shinji until Asuka retreats to her room, leaving the redhead thoroughly flustered and confused about why the hell did she find that so damn hot. With the image having irreversibly burned itself into her mind, she eventually slips into a fitful sleep to the unmistakable sound of Mana having an orgasm.

The next morning, Asuka comes out of her room and glances into Shinji's (the door is still ajar) to see Mana giving a half-asleep Shinji oral attention obviously in preparation for more sex, so she goes to the living room and turns up the volume on the TV to drown any sounds of it out. But when Mana later goes to the bathroom for a post-sex shower, Asuka insensitively (and deliberately) goes into the bathroom herself to use the toilet while Mana is showering, staring at the other girl to provoke a reaction. Asuka's rationale goes like this: if Mana ignores her, it proves that she's a perverted exhibitionist while if she takes issue, it proves that she's duplicitous and two-faced in addition to being a perverted exhibitionist. For her part, Mana is visibly tense at the attention but stays silent for several minutes before finally remarking with exasperation that she finds it rather strange that it is Asuka who calls Shinji a pervert. As expected, that comment ticks Asuka off and the two girls proceed to have an argument in the bathroom, including tidbits such as Asuka yanking away the towel Mana tries to dry herself with because of "look me in the eye while you're talking to me!", as well as Mana succinctly answering Asuka's assertion of her not being a "perverted exhibitionist" by simply pointing downwards to reveal that Asuka was so focused on the argument that she got off the toilet without even noticing that she didn't pull her underwear back on.

Point is, Asuka insists that Mana leave Shinji alone because "that idiot isn't worth it" but Mana retaliates that based on the way Asuka treats Shinji on a constant basis, she's obviously not interested in him herself, so why the interference? The argument is interrupted by Shinji knocking on the bathroom's door and asking them why they're yelling at each other. Asuka is about to yell at him in turn to mind his own damn business but gets interrupted by Mana saying that they should talk this over later because Shinji doesn't want them to fight either.

Said talk happens a few days later when Mana shows up at the apartment while Shinji is at a harmonics test; Asuka flatly tells her off and tries to slam the door in her face but Mana wedges her shoe in the doorway and replies that she didn't come for Shinji this time. See, the core of Asuka's problem can be summed up in three bullet points:

1. She didn't really see Shinji in a sexual way until he was snatched up by Mana, by which point it was too late to make her own move. Not to mention that she doesn't even have the guts to tell him to his face that she wants to sleep with him.
2. As we all know, Asuka has issues with wanting to be seen as an adult, hence why she was so aggressive at pursuing Kaji in canon. Not only is the girl she's jealous of got there faster than she did, but is apparently far more comfortable with it than she is, based on her behavior that night.
3. She is currently sexually confused as hell because that was her first time personally seeing another girl naked in an explicitly sexual context and honestly can't decide whether she's jealous of Mana for having gotten to Shinji first or jealous of Shinji for having scored with Mana.

In the end, partial success is achieved in the form of Asuka grudgingly agreeing to not take her frustrations out on Shinji because it's really not his fault this time around. In fact, the girls come to an informal, unspoken deal where Asuka tells Mana when Misato isn't going to be at home and Mana deliberately leaving the door of Shinji's room ajar so that Asuka can watch.

And after a while, Mana cheekily but completely honestly offers to a mortified Asuka to ask Shinji if he'd be willing to consider a threesome...

[ChaddyManPrime]

Needs Yandere Asuka

[Guy Nacks]

I like his idea as it stands. The realism is the selling point. I can't stand lemons that that are either without plot or entirely unrealistic. It smacks of laziness in the author and doesn't draw me into the world of the fic. This--as all lemons should be IMO--uses sex as a storytelling device to propel development between a character or characters.

As p!mpM@ster G. Lucky once said:

[AngelNo13Bardiel]

I might be putting out another lemon sometime soon. This one's just gonna be a one-off thing, however. I had an idea, and...well, I ran with it. Don't expect it to be like HAO/TTiTKB/IOTWCS and have a set canon placement and progression, though: this will be more in the realm of PWP (which I haven't tried yet).

-insert really long summary as seen above here-

Hm. I'm...not completely against this idea. Like Guy said, it has good realism to it (something that does, sadly, lack in many of these things)...and it has great potential to be hot. I say go for it, I'd certainly read it.

[Rommel]

Long post

Not bad, but I feel it lacks Asuka getting naked.

[amitakartok]

Asuka, of course, retaliates against Mana's earlier stunt of almost tauntingly looking her in the eye while riding Shinji.

By not only voyeuring at them, but touching herself to it and doing it where Mana can see it.

Needs Yandere Asuka

Not while I draw breath.

[Guy Nacks]

Serious question for all you professional lemon writers:

Why has there never been a serious effort at an Asuka/Kaworu pairing?

I'm not talking about a threesome featuring both Asuka and Kaworu. I'm talking about just the two of them. This wouldn't be hard to set up either if you wanted to stick to canon as closely as possible.

This is going to be an epic post, many of this will be spitballing, but I feel relatively confident about 90% of this.

Firstly, you could take Shinji out of the equation in several different ways, not limited to, though I prefer the first option:

-Never having him re-emerge from Unit 01 after Zeruel; Asuka doesn't get mind-raped, and Rei still sacrifices herself after Armisael.
-Shinji is the one who gets mind-raped and put in a catatonic state.
-Shinji is the one who sacrifices himself to defeat Armisael.

In all instances, Hikari would have left Tokyo-3 by this point, like she does in canon, and it is Asuka who wanders aimlessly with no real human connection left, with the same emotional problems and issues that she has in-series, but not being completely broken by them due to being mind-raped. If you choose the third option, she still thinks she has some use for herself as she was the one who defeated Arael, yet losing Shinji to Armisael is weighing on her heavily.

She meets Kaworu in similar circumstances to Shinji, and is unnerved by his directness (and his subliminal similarity to Rei), but there is something about him that she finds comforting. He is, after all, the only active pilot--and perhaps person at this point--she doesn't outright loathe, and his personality and warmness are disarming (as he was with Shinji, in-canon.) She talks about her interactions with Shinji and Misato, after Kaworu inquires about the Operations Director and former pilot, but over the course of this story, more and more personal details about how Asuka truly feels about them will be revealed.

You could proceed to a lemon scene from this point in several different ways; however, it is essential to always make Asuka the initiator. Kaworu is about as versed in human interaction and coupling about as much as Rei is (re: not at all) and his perspective has always been that of an outside observer of humanity and its customs. It would not make any sense for Kaworu to jump Asuka's bones. If he has no inkling that his actions in the manga (his "CPR") could have be interpreted as sexual, then he is more than likely oblivious to human sexuality.

Asuka, on the other hand, is the one who always talks the talk about wanting to be an "adult" but, with the death of Kaji and the disappearance/death of Shinji, never got a chance to walk the walk. Kaworu, she reckons, is her final chance before--in all likelihood--she dies during a conflict with an Angel. She's experienced mortality enough firsthand in the past 6 months to know that her time is limited. However, this does not mean that Asuka would suddenly act hyper-sexual towards Kaworu and jump his bones without warning. There would have to be a trigger for such an event to happen. Perhaps the CPR scene in the manga takes place, but with Asuka instead of Shinji. She reacts the same way Shinji does at first--by pushing Kaworu aside and asking what the fuck's wrong with him--but it's clear from how genuinely innocent and serene he had been behaving with her before that his intentions were not lecherous. In a call-back to episode 15, she asks Kaworu if he's ever kissed a girl before. He responds no, and she challenges him to kiss her. They kiss, and although Kaworu doesn't know what he's doing, he doesn't run reacts as terribly as Shinji does by holding his breath the entire time. He responds that it was nice, and Asuka slowly moves things on from there, little by little, scared but determined, working up to a lemon scene.

After this initial scene, you could have additional scenes with things getting increasingly kinky with Asuka finally getting to act out all those things she heard about from the other girls at her college if you wanted to go that route. Or you could have Misato discover them and the fallout from that. But I think it's important that the story flows as it does in canon, with Kaworu being revealed to be the final Angel and Asuka having to be the one to kill the one person she was closest to in her time of need, the one person who she was finally able to become an "adult" with. And now, Asuka has to do the truly adult thing: Save humanity at the expense of her friend, because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one.

Afterwards, Asuka is suicidal. As in episode 24, she runs off, strips naked, and is found by section 2 in a bathtub after having slit her wrists. While resting in the hospital, she hears of Shinji's re-emergence from Unit 01 and is overjoyed and relieved. They end up sharing a hospital room together and, after a brief scolding from Asuka that's more a put-on than anything, she finally drops the haughty exterior and opens up to Shinji about how thankful she is that he's back, because Kaworu had made her realize in their discussions how much she had truly cared about him. Shinji, marveling at how so much has changed in Asuka's personality asks what happened in the many weeks that have passed. She smiles, tears in her eyes, and says that she was visited by her guardian angel...and there's your fic title.

[NemZ]

Guys, instead of writing these giant TL:DR posts about hypothetical fics... maybe just write the damn things?

[Mr. Tines]

Serious question for all you professional lemon writers:

Why has there never been a serious effort at an Asuka/Kaworu pairing?

Because it's a minority interest ship at the best of times, with very few fics of any sort (though there has been a noticeable uptick in fan-art in the last few years). The pairing has its own thread.

[amitakartok]

Serious question for all you professional lemon writers:

Why has there never been a serious effort at an Asuka/Kaworu pairing?

While I can't call myself a professional writer (more like a hack...), I'll add my two cents. I actually planned to put in at least one lemon scene involving the two in SCE but dropped that idea years ago because due to... special circumstances, Kaworu would really not be in the mood for it. Recently though, I started considering having them do it off-screen instead, explicitly mentioning that they had to take it easy (including Asuka being on top) because he got gored by Zeruel a while ago and his torso-spanning injury is not healing properly for some reason (and never fully heals because being tanged in the middle of being ripped in half from shoulder to waist burned the injury into his metaphysical self-image, so his body's natural regeneration considers the injured state as normal instead of the healthy state and keeps renewing it instead of healing it).


But to return to canon... I honestly, genuinely cannot see Kaworu having any kind of sexual thoughts. It just doesn't fit his personality. Hell, I'm unsure whether he'd even be able to get an erection without physical stimulation.

[Glor]

Guys, instead of writing these giant TL:DR posts about hypothetical fics... maybe just write the damn things?

Considering most of the ideas rolling around in this thread, better they stay hypothetical.

[Guy Nacks]

But to return to canon... I honestly, genuinely cannot see Kaworu having any kind of sexual thoughts. It just doesn't fit his personality.

By that rationale, Rei shouldn't either, since they're both sort of cut from the same cloth, so to speak. Not that it's stopped the hundreds of lemon fics with her involved.