I do have to make one (1) cogent post about Transplanar before I start doing the verbal equivalent of that thing dogs do where they shake a toy to death in some kind of feral, tactile joy. I'm already so clearly not normal about anything but I do need to be slightly coherent once because I know the creators check the tags on even this primordial soup of a website.
I have been a fan of TransplanarRPG since very close to its debut, and watching the channel, the cast, and even the audience change and grow has been such an honor. Their work has fed a part of my soul I didn't know needed care, and truly inspired my creativity again. Though it is 1000% the baby of those who are actually a part of the channel, it feels like the space and project they have created were made for me. In the sense that nowhere else do I feel the specific joy their stories and fan space has created in my life. I will always feel that finding Transplanar, especially during a very hard time in my life, was a monumental gift.
This actual play has changed me in a fundamental way, and I mean that so genuinely its a little unsettling. As a mixed person, who is both diaspora and was raised outside of my ethnic culture, a trans and queer person for whom those identities have held both immense joy and immense pain, as someone who has always wrestled with the idea of spirituality and divinity both in and outside established religion, I've spent a good portion of my life undoing and unlearning.
The world Transplanar offered me came after doing so, so much work to destabilize the colonial, imperialist thinking that has been background radiation in my life since birth. And what it offered me was somewhere not only devoid of the -isms and tangled up fears that exist in my real life, it was instead so full of what could be built in their stead. A world of care, and respect. A world where what it means to be a person is limitless, the choices of who to become and how as uncountable as the stars. Rich culture, and language, so many shapes that family can take. Magic, yes, and the wonder and horror that comes with it. People, oh so many people, who are wonderous and fragile, broken and beautiful and treated as full beings who contain these multitudes. Divinity, vicious, kind, bloody, hopeful, human divinity. A world where queer love can shake the sky, change Fate and Time and Doom.
The art that Transplanarrpg creates makes me feel alive, and in love with humanity and hope.
All that said, I am not and have never been a physical media artist. I wish I was talented in that direction, but it is just not my area. However media analysis is absolutely my bag and every once in a while I have a big brain moment where I'm briefly posessed by a spirit of poeticism. So i'm just gonna do what I do and yap about Transplanar, both to create fanwork in the area I am gifted in and also in the hopes I bring more folks to their specific flavor of incredible ttrpg stories.
