#castys asks

i don't post my fic to tumblr, but i'd been meaning to publish at least the first chapter (which is 95% complete) to ao3 a while ago, and then forgot. my motivation has been entirely elsewhere lately.

I DID NOT SEE THIS FOR SIX DAYS. oops. yeah so i wrote this au back in the peak of my decked out hyperfixation, and the plot ended up heavily revolving around it because it was basically all that was on my mind at the time. i was thinking about how in certain fields of academia, professors aren't just teaching, they're also working on their passion research projects as long as they can get funding/investors. this would ABSOLUTELY hold true for tango, who does enjoy teaching, but is really in it for the resources and the opportunity the university offers him to build a giant redstone-powered dungeon game.

decked out is very much still under construction when jimmy meets tango, and it's generally well-known among the student body, especially redstone majors. tango makes it a collaborative project, inviting building majors to design interiors for certain rooms, and inviting student test runners to help him test the game. jimmy ends up being one of those test runners, and it gets him a lot of one-on-one time with tango. it's also a convenient excuse to be hanging around him all the time. and yes, they DO fuck in that dungeon.

you didn't ask about this part but i wanted to talk a little about some other professors and different majors in this au. i don't go super in-depth with anyone but jimmy and tango, but the characters that are also professors in this au are impulse, who also teaches redstone, doc, who probably teaches some redstone classes and some other less-common high-concept game-breaking nonsense shit, cleo, who teaches armor stands/sculpting, and bdubs, who teaches building. etho is NOT a professor but he's a legend in the field of redstone and all the other professors and redstone majors are obsessed with him. he's probably done some very laid-back guest lectures, and he's always hanging around the campus server because that's where decked out (and bdubs) is. i just can't see boat boys getting together in this au. i think the taboo element with jimmy and tango is lost if everyone else is regularly fucking people with significant age gaps.

gladly! so i've never thought of myself as a ranchers guy. they're fine, i'll read fics with them. but for...certain reasons, last winter i found myself with a professor/student dynamic on the brain. i had to think about who would fit this dynamic best, and i landed on these guys, purely because of the age gap. turns out i'm into that. who knew.

the problem is, for...certain reasons, i wanted the student to be the dom. now i'm not a dom jimmy truther whatsoever. to me, that guy is exactly what 90% of fanon says he is. but i'm almost equally incapable of seeing tango as a dom. he's a silly squeaky guy to me, now and forever. so i ended up with this version of jimmy who takes an intro to redstone class (because what else would tango be teaching?) and looks at his sexy old professor and experiences something of a switch awakening.

the dynamic between them is very silly and self-indulgent. jimmy doesn't really question any of his desires at any point, and just rolls with the punches. this trait of his comes directly from me. tango is a horny bastard that thinks he's effortlessly concealing this fact from the student body, but he'd never consider dating a student. he's just not that kind of guy. the student in question would have to throw themselves at him, and also take the lead on just about everything, because otherwise the guilt would eat him alive. and no, he's not going to accept blowjobs for better grades, what kind of monster would do such a thing? (lol. lmao even)

this whole thing was written on a whim. everything just came to me and i typed it all out. there's some background info, but most other characters are passing mentions and brief cameos. grian's probably the 3rd most common character to pop up in this fic, followed by joel, and then mumbo and impulse both have a few speaking lines. scar, scott, and lizzie are name-dropped several times. i'm trying to keep cameos to a minimum and not have pixlriffs driving the bus or something, so all mentions have to genuinely add something to the experience. i don't know why i kept the standard so high in a fic i was writing for myself only, but hey, saves me time editing.

decked out is a central theme in this fic, it's actually the reason that jimmy and tango get together. i love minecraft realism and i'm going wild with it here. i was really into decked out at the time of writing this, and i wrote almost all of it prior to jimmy's visit hermitcraft to play decked out.

Just wanted to tell you, because your writing is very good. Excited for the final chapter of lovegame :D

Sincerely, someone who ALSO has way too many wips and does not need to start an erotica fic rn because those always take so much longer to write than any other type of fic, and therefore is just trying to infect other people with the brainrot so that I don’t have to do anything about it 😂😂😂. Why is nobody on AO3 writing Joel/Grian??? They have such good chemistry!

I’m thinking either primal top Joel x brat Grian or some kind of stricter gleeful dominant Grian with a still feral submissive Joel who’s doing his best to obey. I love your Grian from insatiable who’s theoretically a brat until he brats too hard by accident and ends up punting his partner into subspace. And then he’s a dom. Oops. And I love your Grian from lovegame who’s ever so frightening and everyone is TERRIFIED of him going red.

Also Joel like a tamed wolf etc… going insanely feral as a red life and being desperately, devastatingly loyal to whatever teammates he can scrounge up vs Grian who sees his allies as necessary sources of power and leverage but also as ultimately temporary, who is fully ready to strategically abandon his teammates as soon as it becomes advantageous to do so.

Anyways. Dynamic of: Joel being absolutely feral with bloodlust but trying so hard not to kill Grian and be the best teammate he can so that Grian doesn’t abandon him VS Grian who knows logically that he should drop Joel as soon as it becomes too costly to keep him as a teammate but who keeps instinctually protecting him + accidentally getting too fond of him anyways. Because one-sided devotion my beloved.

Sorry for the long and clinically insane ask. Just wanted to let you know. All my love!

this ask could not have found me at a better time. i'm in exactly the right mood to talk about insane red-life sex. (little sidenote, lovegame chapter 5 is about to drop very, very soon!)

i've written joel/grian before, both in a published fic where grian was afk and an unpublished fic i actually forgot existed until this very moment, but both of those fics were set in limited life, and this kind of dynamic feels straight out of last life to me. if i were going to write this (and i'm actually quite tempted, but i won't make any promises as my WIP pile is ridiculous right now), i'd definitely want to set it in last life. joel killing grian because he's lonely and desperate for a friend? the two of them wreaking havoc on the server together? it's perfect.

also, to me, the version of grian that's actually cold enough to hold joel at arm's length could only exist in last life. in every other season, it's clear that grian thinks he's the type of person to prioritize his own personal victory over taking care of his team, but he keeps getting emotionally attached anyway. he may pretend otherwise, but he always reveals his hand in moments of panic. i can see him overcompensating in last life and stringing joel along with the promise of companionship, putting off any actual vulnerability until it's too late... okay, i'm definitely doing a last life rewatch now.

as for the dynamic between them, i have a heavy personal bias toward dombottom grian as well as an undying fondness for joel getting his shit wrecked (and loving every second of it). that being said, i don't think joel would take it lying down. if he were on green or yellow i'd just call him a brat, but we're talking about red joel at his most violent and out-of-control. whether he'll actually successfully flip the script on grian remains to be seen, but the underlying possibility is always there, and grian is very uncomfortably aware of it.

profoundly based of you btw. i'm not calling you a liar is still one of my favorite dsmp fics as a character exploration of c!quackity and the effect torture and self-isolation has had on him. life among the dead has some really good exploration of mental illness/delusion (one of the few fics i've read that actually lets cwilbur be delusional!!!) and the concept of resurrection/coming back wrong/cwilbur's feelings about not deserving to live, and the way we see his slow recovery process through the kink progression. bitter/sweet being about stereotypes and trauma and society. genuinely your fics are REALLY GOOD at showing themes and characterization and so on through sex. i don't know hermitcraft or traffic life as well but Your Fics Are Good And You Should Feel Good

THANK YOU!!!! no okay listen the goddamn themes. they are so important to me. they plague me. why do anything if you are not going to put passion and drama and painfully realistic character interactions into it? i started writing porn because i wanted to make something that would contradict the misconception that all smut is meaningless horny garbage. not that i don't have the utmost respect for people writing meaningless horny garbage ("garbage" used affectionately here)—i read it all the time and i like it! it's just, character analysis is my bread and butter. can't really call it intimacy if you're not baring your soul too. okay that's cheesy as fuck but who cares

i'm definitely feeling this as i wrap up chapter five of lovegame, which is, as you've said, not your area of interest, but it's definitely the most recent thing i've worked on that this applies to. wilbur and quackity bring out the worst in me in this respect, and my other hermitcraft/life series fics are very lighthearted in comparison, but lovegame is the exception. it's built up to this monster of a final chapter that's easily more plot than porn, and i can't bring myself to apologize for it because i can't imagine not thinking it's better this way. all my fics end up being longer than i expected, and i wouldn't have it any other way.

yeah! honestly, i'm not calling you a liar (i have got to find a way to shorten that, this is why i didn't want to make it so long grrr) is the fic i wanted to make when i made hunger wayyy back in december 2021, though i wouldn't realize it until a while later. the connection between them is largely unintentional, but also very obvious. i only really noticed it in the editing stage. hunger is handled with much less precision, since it was my first porn fic and i was more focused on just making shit i thought would be hot, but the pieces are definitely there.

i have a lot of wips on my plate at the moment and i'd really prefer to get some of those knocked out before i start on anything new, but i'm really tempted to revisit wilbur's pov in this context. whether that's in connection with one of these two fics or its own separate thing, it's a good candidate for a new fic if i get a burst of inspiration. i try not to force a fic concept on myself, because if i let it stew for a while, the results are always much better. (which is why ten nights may end up with slower output than i'd like unfortunately)