Walking The Plank
| Archive | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Walking The Plank, WTP |
| Date(s): | January 2002 – early 2005; December 2005 – present |
| Archivist: | Tradescant, Alicia Masters, Shadowess, and Ketsurui |
| Founder: | Aspen, Telanu |
| Type: | Snape/Harry slash fanfic and fanart |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
| URL: | http://www.walkingtheplank.org/; previously:
|
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Walking The Plank is a fanfic and fanart archive for the pairing of Harry/Snape. As of June 2021, it hosts 1591 stories, 643 pieces of fanart, 13 meta essays and 5 other media works.
History
Walking The Plank was started in January 2002 by Telanu and Aspen as part of the Snape Slash Fleet. It was initially hosted at JayKay's SlashCity page. Tradescant joined the archivist team in January 2003,[1] and later became the sole archivist.
In December 2004, Tradescant gave the new Harry/Snape archive Detention permission to incorporate stories from the WTP archive,[2] which had not been updated since August 2003.[1] The WTP web address was redirected to Detention in early 2005.[3]
When Detention was shut down suddenly in December 2005, Walking The Plank was reopened by Tradescant and Snapetoy, with help from many others.[4] It opened to submissions for works previously hosted on Detention in February 2006, then to all submissions in April 2006.[5]
Archivist's Comments
Once upon a time, in the dark and treacherous seas of the early Harry Potter fandom, there were few writers brave enough to venture onto the ship of Snape/Harry. Each wrote in obscurity, wondering if she were the only one to see the glory in the pairing, and each waited patiently for the day when her OTP would be recognized for the force of nature we all know it to be today.
And then Telanu began her immensely popular Tea Series, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's [sic] Stone hit the theatres, and Luthien and Tboy launched the Severus Snape Fuh-Q Fest, not necessarily in that order but in a kind of free-floating press-gang unit, and things were never the same again. With Yahoo mailing lists springing up and dozens of new S/H stories to fuel a fan's burgeoning addiction, the ranks of the faithful grew. But new stories or no, new fans or no, to love S/H in those days was to harbor a bit of an embarrassing secret. And so when Aspen and Telanu in a fit of we-don't-know-what-we're-getting-into decided to design and launch an archive site for the aformentioned [sic] faithful ranks, they as a group dubbed themselves Walking the Plank--in the world of ships, the one most likely to be used as shark-bait.
The archive--longtime fans will remember the controversial red-and-white-on-black color scheme--started off small, and grew slowly at first, but with the stories from the Fuh-Q Fest (and later fests as well) released for archiving and more and more writers joining ranks, Tradescant joined Telanu and Aspen to help archive the flood of new fics, and stayed on as first Aspen and then Telanu retired. Tradescant herself retired a few months later, and the archive stood unupdated for a while, and then eventually disappeared quietly from the Internet, to be replaced by the much larger and more heavily trafficked Detention. (And there were always multifandom archives for fans to satisfy their S/H cravings, as well.) But it wasn't until Detention was pulled off the Internet that Snapetoy contacted Tradescant about reopening WTP and the new, supercharged archive you see before you today was conceived and launched, with the help of many able hands.
The H/S ship reached unprecedented popularity through the Detention archive, and under Snapetoy's captaincy, Walking the Plank, far from being the streamlined little sloop it was back in the days of furtive H/S appreciation, has become a worthy successor to both the original WTP and Detention: a fully-equipped and tightly-run ship of the line, a veritable man-o-war. May it sail the open fandom seas for many years.
Tradescant
14 February 2006[6]
References
- ^ a b Walking The Plank: Updates, archived 08 February 2005 by the Wayback Machine.
- ^ Detention - Index (archived 06 December 2004 by the Wayback Machine) and Detention - About (archived 01 December 2005).
- ^ See Wayback Machine captures of http://www.subumbra.com/plank/: 06 March 2005 (site online) vs. 03 April 2005 (points to Detention).
- ^ tradescant at LiveJournal. News of the death of Snape/Harry has been greatly exaggerated., posted 14 December 2005, and TWO POSTS IN TWO WEEKS OMG., posted 22 December 2005. (Accessed 09 May 2019.)
- ^ snapetoy at LiveJournal. A Valentine's Day Gift to Snape and Harry from Walking the Plank, posted 14 February 2006.
- ^ Tradescant. History of Walking the Plank. 14 February 2006. (Accessed 13 February 2013.)