i'm absolutely eating up your watcher grian fanart rn like HELLO?!!? yes it's so good tsym for making it i'll take everything you've got

-🌺

AJNISIJNIIOJI THANKS IM GLAD U LIKE HIM

He's glad too :>

your oneshot au looks very cool! i know nothing about the og game but the au is very intriguing

one question! what was grian's life like before he woke up here?

Ahh! Im so glad u like it!

Grian’s life before waking up there is actually pretty normal! He works the evening shift at an old gas station and does various other jobs on the side in order to save up for collage,

He’s a fairly introverted guy and spends most of his time working and studying, however he does have 1 close friend (and roommate), Taurtis, who went missing without a trace about a month earlier, and is part of why he needs to get home, so he can help in the search for him.

The watcher likes hearing about Grian’s life before, despite how utterly boring Grian thinks it was

(extra: Oneshot’s a super great game, it’s actually my second favorite video game ever, it does cost money but i really recommend watching a playthrough of it or something cause it’s genuinely just a really great game. But also you don’t really need to play/watch it in order to understand this Au, as while the main premise is the same, the actual plot is very different and has it’s own seperate worldbuilding stuff)

for some reason ao3 decided to be rovinphobic today and doesnt let me comment on htbahb properly? so i thought id just paste the comment here :o

when i saw u talking abt this fic on tumblr and when you started uploading the first few chapters, i was so so excited for this story. cant believe i hit a reading slum exactly as you uploaded most of it </3 but! im back now and i immediately went back to binge read this over the last two days, it has been so much fun :D first of all, yeah the concept is genius obviously. season 8 really dumped the wildest things on all of us and just expected us to be normal abt it huh. really glad somebody picked up the souleating storyline again, it had soo much fun potential and yeah you hit all of it. the themes?? and narratives?? in this story?? have been driving me insane theyre so good. going from what it means to be human to is this really me if im always wearing a facade to my identity not as a human or watcher but as a hermit sososososososo good. i have developed all the feeling for the way you portray mumbos and grians relationship like. yeah. yeah they really are that close huh. of course they end up soulmates with the most unfortunate timing possible. of course they do. i dont think ive ever felt as soft as when reading the preening scenes. ALL THE OTHER CHARACTERS TOO THO like skyduo!!!!!!!!! siblinghood is real they invented it. impulse scar everyone!! adored scar taking jellie to the void with him bc ofc. ofc he would. and the scene with jimmy ooo he really is Your Guy huh. "Jimmy held his secrets so close to his chest that people never even knew he had them" ough ough ough ough ough my man my boy my lad. i think having read the listerner!jimmy fic before that also added soso much. grian really saw the dream smp and said no thank u <3 and i think that was very correct of him BUT YEAH overall? amazing writing epic characterizations so many little lines that made me stop and just rethink how i think abt these characters haha. i am afraid i must plagiarize all of your ideas in my brian 😔 ur watcher concepts are simply too good to not be canon I HOPE U HAVE A GREAT TIME WRITING THE SEQUEL I CANT WAIT TO SEE IT

ROVINNNN MY ABSOLUTE BELOVED <3333333 first things first thank you so much for this ask i have read it over and over and i love it <333 also i would have replied to it the day you sent it but you send it like. just a few hours before i got on a plane to go to canada so i ended up a Bit Distracted and did not answer so so sorry

IM SO GLAD YOU LIKED THE THEMES!!! i go a bit insane everytime anyone comments on them because it is by far my favorite thing that i did with the fic, which was explore that concept of humanity/inhumanity/self-identity.

mumbo and grian's relationship...they make me ill! they make me ill. it's like...idk as much as LOVE desert duo, when it comes to my own writing i seem to just write mumbo and grian over and over again. they're just so. yeah. <3 im glad you like the preening scenes there will likely be more of them. it's just such an easily intimate type of scene you know? and the fact that grian up until this point has most done it alone (minus pearl helping sometimes), which is pretty uncomfortable and tedius when he can't easily reach his own back. and im so glad you appreciate scar taking jellie into the void he would never abandon her <3 it was one of my fave funny/lighthearted parts of the series

SLDFKJSLFJSFKFSF YEAH. YEAH JIMMY IS MY GUY. in a fic about grian and mumbo i manage to still insert jimmy solidarity brainrot into it. he'll be in the sequel too--not in any major role but i promise you he will There at some point because empires minorly factors into it. I'M SO GLAD THAT YOU LOVED THAT LINE. i know that i say every line someone quotes is my favorite but that might actually be one of my favorites in the whole fic. the Lonesome Dreams backstory for jimmy was in the works for a long time before I ever wrote the fic, since i came up with that before i even came up with htbahb. so I absolutely intended everything from that fic to be implicated in that line <3 also you're right, i think lonesome dreams does add to it. i may or may not put it in the series, but lonesome dreams is also planned to work with other series as well, so idk

AND YESSS THE DSMP REFERENCE i had a lot of fun with it. i chose blue and gold for the door because it reminded me of l'manberg uniforms and was less obvious than green for dream. i also like my other slight dsmp-adjacent throwaway in mcc too, where when mumbo joins the server tommy comments in chat about seeing him as a father figure (mcc19 does take place after that one collab video...just sayin')

thank you for this review i loved every second of reading it <3333 i hereby give u and other authors permission to take my headcanons and ideas. if u like directly copy/reference a bunch of things, i'd like a shoutout but otherwise i dont care because i dont own ideas and anything anyone writes is likely to be different anyway because it's their brain you know? so def feel free to use anything here <3

i am having a great time writing the sequel!! i actually have an update (not...chapter update. status update) to post no it later this week :eyes: because i finally reached a point where i can make proper progress on it. aka i was able to work out a lot of details and planning and am in the midst of writing it as fast as i can