Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2021: Week 16
The Theban Band is the name used by a pair of fanworks creators, ned and leny, who are perhaps best known in online slash fandom for their homoerotic photo manipulations depicting popular slash pairings. Due to their name (and prolific output), they are sometimes wrongly assumed to be a larger fan collective.
Their slash art website has been online since 1999 and started out as a page with Mulder/Krycek manips, originally part of TER/MA, the Mulder/Krycek archive, which was also hosted on Squidge.org. Altogether, The Theban Band have created artwork and manips across 22 fandoms of various sizes, and have also maintained a number of archives and a mailing list as well as producing an ezine.
The Theban Band's artwork is renowned due to its high quality, as well as its visibility and accessibility to fandom outsiders, has frequently been referenced and shown off outside of fandom, causing some tension due to this breach of the fourth wall - although reactions from actors were largely positive. Manips by The Theban Band have also appeared in, or been used as inspiration for, other fannish works.