Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Lunatics
Humanity's relationship with the insane and mentally challenged over the millennia has been a complex and often disturbing one. In the earliest societies, lunatics were often either shunned (or worse), or celebrated as prophets, shamans and mystical spirits in touch with the gods.
In fact, most mad folk throughout history have been shunned. In medieval times, while some were elevated to the status of court jester, many were considered to be just the village idiot. But even village idiots are capable of doing useful work and having fulfilling lives.
Once the Industrial Revolution came along, that was no longer possible. An idiot in charge of a machine was a danger to themselves and their fellow workers. So Bedlams were created, terrible asylums where the staff were often as mad as their captors. In modern societies, the mentally challenged stand no chance; asylums have been deemed inhumane and closed, their inmates pushed into "Care in the Community" or similar schemes, but with limited abilities to use mobile phones or the internet, they struggle to function in society and live awful lives of drink, drugs and homelessness.
How are the insane treated in your fantasy or sci-fi setting ? Are they treated, revered or reviled ? Are there unusual or effective treatments for their condition ? How do they survive, and who (if anyone) looks after them ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged; @sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂