a conspiracy of cartographers

[Nb: this is a gift for a fanworks exchange my D&D group is holding, but it is ALSO a sincere show primer for the fake TV show we have too many feelings about, and you should read it! YES YOU.]


I've been yelling about my new favorite TV show for months, but I haven't actually given an explanatory write-up! I realize that, sitting down to write this literally a minute after finishing my rewatch of the finale (with the tears still drying on my cheeks, I kid you not) I am ... perhaps not best equipped to give a sane and nuanced Show Is Awesome post. Nevertheless.

So there's this show. It started as a vanity project and a love letter to D&D, and especially in first season it feels like a pleasant romp through a fairly generic fantasyland -- though even then, the characters are delightful, and it's already playing hard with ye olde fantasy tropes -- and somehow spiraled into one of the best apocalyptic epics I've ever had the joy of watching. There was a certain magic to watching it week by week as it aired, and also a certain terror, because something this good couldn't possibly get renewed for all four seasons the show bible had mapped out -- but then, this show was clearly the best thing SyFy had on air since Battlestar Galactica ended (and lbr it was way better than BSG at never going off the rails for more than an episode). I turned right around and watched it all again as soon as it was done, and mainlining the whole thing is also wonderful -- good foreshadowing, lovely character arcs.

Seriously, this show. As I mentioned, it plays with fantasy tropes (some harder than others, my personal fav being "the half-orc introduced as a minor villain in episode two ends up being one of the protags by the end of the show"); it has, I am entirely serious, eight out of nine main cast members who are women; it has a higher percentage of POC in the cast than almost any other show I can think of; it is so queer. So, so queer, not only in the sense that it has m/m and f/f canon pairings, but a main cast member who is trans*, and several who are canonically ace, and a canon poly relationship configuration. (This last is ... kinda problematic, and there's plenty of meta out there about that one, but hahaha I love the Disaster OT4 so much, I don't care.) This show is straight-up amazing.

Also, if you don't actually want to read a huge primer about it, I was yelling with filiabelialis about the show in chat, and they said, "I was just thinking about how I'd pitch it! Like if you took Rat Queens and gave it character dynamics and a plot like Fullmetal Alchemist, but live action with a staggeringly awesome cast." PRETTY MUCH. But if that isn't enough to intrigue you:

The show is Planeshift, and I'm here to tell you why it's so awesome. Hopefully I can accomplish that without too many major spoilers, because I deeply enjoyed navigating the show blind.

( So five D&D PCs walk into a bar... )

Planeshift only just finished airing, too! You can probably still find most of it on Hulu, so run, don't walk, and buy the full boxed set when it comes out, IO9 tells me there's going to be tons of delightful behind-the-scenes cast adorableness and a few deleted scenes and I wouldn't miss it for the world.