The F Plus

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Podcast
Title: The F Plus
Created by: Lemon
Date(s): October 1st 2009 - ongoing
Focus: Humorous internet writing
Fandom: Any
External Links: https://thefpl.us

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The F Plus is a comedy podcast with the tagline "Terrible Things Read With Enthusiasm". The main host is Lemon, who is a website developer in his day job. Each episode features a rotating cast of co-hosts (known as "Ridiculists") reading out a selection of "bizarre" content from the internet (or, on rare occasions, from printed works), and riffing on it. Given the nature of the internet, content often is fandom-related, and there have been many episodes devoted to badfic, kink memes, original character descriptions, forum roleplays, etc. Each episode is themed around a single site, or several sites on one topic. For example, episode 98, titled Can't Say I Approve Of Your Methods, Mister Holmes, was entirely made up of readings from the LJ community SherlockBBC-Fic.

Fans of the podcast itself have also made fanart and fanfiction inspired by the show.

Ethics

The podcasters have a strict rule that nobody should harass the subjects of their episodes. As Lemon said in the intro to one episode:

The F Plus finds our own niche in reading the words of weird people. It's what we've done, and it's what we'll continue to do because it's fun for us. We're never fair in our portrayals, but it's our approach of presenting the world that we live in. We read what they want the public to know, we make our own jokes, and we stop there. Because anything after that is abuse, and that behavior is unethical and destructive. We want people to be happy. Which is a weird thing to feel the need to say out loud, but we can recognize things in others that we find appalling, and still want them to live contented lives free of harassment. And to you listening to this right now? I think that you​ think that too. But if you think that tolerance for others is a view that shouldn't be shared, FUCK YOU. Fuck you, and unsubscribe from this podcast immediately, because I am not interested in hearing your counterargument against a level of compassion that you should have learned in kindergarten.[1]

This rule that they use is based upon The Prime Directive from Star Trek and rules that were come up with on the Something Awful forums. The premise is to center around the concept of "atrocity tourism". Don't interfere with the websites or people who are features in the podcast. You don't want to bother the subject matter.

Origins

Many of the main Ridiculists met on Portal of Evil, which had a similar ethos to what The F Plus would become: showcasing strange sites on the internet, but highly discouraging anyone from "invading" the showcased sites. Another inspiration cited is Mystery Science Theater 3000. Later, the group from PoE started to meet up in a dedicated Team Fortress 2 server with open voice chat, where the players would read out strange things they'd found online, such as My Immortal. Lemon described this server as "a poker game, basically," meaning that there was a game being played, but the real purpose of being there was chatting. Eventually, the number of people who wanted to listen exceeded the maximum that a TF2 server could hold. Another limitation was that the server couldn't handle too many people on audio at the same time: Acierocolotl related that "if you made a good joke, everybody would laugh, and the server would crash." So they began to do recorded readings outside of TF2.[2]

Events

"F Plus Live" shows took place in 2010, 2011, 2013-2018, and 2020 at clubs in Minneapolis and Seattle. They also have done 24-hour livestream events which raised donations for the Southern Poverty Law Center: "24 Terrible Hours" in April 2017, and the first "Garbage Day" in April 2018. In 2019, they switched to raising money for the National Network of Abortion Funds for their garbage day events in April 2019, October 2020, and September 2022.

Advertising

The F Plus has a strong stance that they don't want advertising on their podcast. Having a podcast for over a decade and not putting ads on it is nearly unheard of. Having this stance is great for the podcasting world. The money they have made from live events and from merch have been donated to charity.

Drama

A few people have accused The F Plus of being mean spirited or looking down upon subjects that they talk about. These accusations have mostly come from twitter and tumblr and aren't very frequent.

The F Minus

The F Minus also called extra credit is a spin off podcast starting in August 2016 by fans of the podcast. The main host of The F Minus has changed overtime and is currently ShellGame. Many of the older F Minus episodes are deleted due to quality and ill-advised content that the readers no longer support. It's entirely fan made, but sometimes features readers from The F Plus. They have their own documents they read as well as using fan submitted documents

Quotes

Bumpgrrl (reading): "Wincest is also used as interchangeable with Sam/Dean or Dean/Sam when describing a fanfic pairing."
Acierocolotl: What's the difference?
Lemon: I would assume it's top/bottom relationship.
Portaxx: Yeah that's what my guess is.
Acierocolotl: Oh I thought maybe it was like whether you prefer them be alphabetically or numerically sorted. - Episode 45: It's Only Supernatural
Lemon: I love that I had this nickname before I knew it meant explicit sex. - Episode 276: im•`prüv yər lek•sə•`kän

Example fanworks

Links

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Lemon (13 November 2016). "Episode 232: Myers' Frigs". The F Plus. Archived from the original on 2021-07-25. Retrieved 19 January 2019.
  2. ^ The F Plus Retrospective, January 17, 2016
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