#my fic won't spoil the game or vice versa

[quaranmine]

Um I don't know how to ask this but what does a firewatch au mean? Is firewatch a film or job or era? I've never seen the word firewatch before? I'm not American that might be why idk

No problem! Firewatch is a video game that I played last year and got minorly obsessed with due to its story and beautiful art, but it is also based on a job and era so you're somewhat right on all accounts. I believe the job does exist outside of the US, but I think it was a lot more widespread and well-known in the US. The actual terminology for the job is being a lookout, not a "firewatch," but that's what the game was called.

Basically, fire lookouts were employees often employed by the US Forest Service and paid to sit in towers on mountaintops all day during fire season and pay attention to where wildfires start. They are often located in remote wilderness areas or national forests, and sometimes the lookout towers could take days of hiking on foot to reach. These locations are most often in the American west, in areas like New Mexico, Colorado, California, Idaho, Wyoming, etc. Places where the landscape might be dry and prone to fire if lightning strikes or a backpacker's campfire gets out of hand. I think fire lookouts exist in most US states but they're way more concentrated in the west than in the south or east because the risk of devastating wildfire is greater there. Lookouts keep watch on the horizon to notice any smoke, use a tool to pinpoint its location, and radio it in to the Forest Service so that the fire can be contained and suppressed as soon as possible, or allowed to burn in a controlled way for the good of the ecosystem.

The job technically still exists in 2023, but a lot less of these lookouts remain and a lot of them are simply staffed by volunteers instead of as a seasonal job. The golden age of the job was in the early to mid 1900s and technology took over some of the job duties. The story takes place in 1989, however.

Anyway, it's a very interesting job? I've always been drawn to remote places where human contact is far away. I have a tendency to spend hours on Google Maps finding these places and wondering what it would look like to explore these random mountains. I also really enjoy hiking and nature. So the idea of a job where you're essentially living in one room on a mountaintop for several months completely alone in the wilderness is very interesting to me and I latched onto it immediately after playing the game. The game makes comment on this too--the type of people who take the job are they type of people who don't mind being completely cut off from society for a while, for whatever reasons they may have. In the game, your only real contact with other characters is with Delilah, purely over hand-held radio. It's a game about aloneness, in many ways.

The basic summary of my Hermitcraft Firewatch AU is that Grian and Mumbo were best friends and roommates in Colorado, until Mumbo goes missing while hiking/mountain biking alone in a national forest (Shoshone, just like the game.) Grian, convinced he's still alive, decides to take matters into his own hands to find him. He takes a job as a fire lookout in the same national forest Mumbo went missing in the year prior with the intentions of using his off days to solve the mystery of his disappearance. It's there that he meets Scar, who is the next lookout on the horizon, and their friendship develops over the course of the fic through their daily conversations over the radio. Grian begins to let him into his life and the mystery he's dead-set on solving. This fic might also have the inclusion of fanart embedded within it, since half of the game's appeal is the atmosphere it creates visually, but that just depends on if I'm satisfied with how it comes out lol

Thanks for asking!