r/writingprompts is the saddest subreddit I’m still subbed to. I’ve been there for years, it’s just getting less and less active. What little activity exists is just marvel and fantasy tropes. Superhero this, elves and Paladins that. The replies are frequently run-of-the-mill cliche fests. The saddest part is that the rare gem, the most interesting and unique prompts and the most curious approaches to meagre yet popular prompts get basically no attention.
I just opened it up, top 2 posts are elves and necromancers. It’s beyond unfortunate considering what the community could be.
It’s just bots masturbating bots. This is why everything is so generic.
This describes Reddit as a whole honestly. I log onto that website maybe once a week and everywhere is same posts on repeat every time.
Yeah it can still be useful as a news aggregator. But as a community, a place for real discussion? That’s dead and buried.
Man, what’s wrong with Elfs?
Specifically? Nothing at all. The issue is the deluge of the same stuff, most of the prompts being marvel and Tolkien “inspired” and most of what’s written under them being the most mainstream interpretation possible.
I remember in 2011 my girlfriend was taking a creative writing class at community college and the teacher had a no 9/11 plot twist stories. Apparently kids were writing mundane uninspired slop about families eating breakfast and having a normal morning and then one of them would go yet clapped in 9/11 and it would be a sad plot twist reveal at the last second
“…and then after a breakfast he got on the plane and took off. The day? 9/11/2001. The flight? United 93… The end.”
too many people want to fuck them and own them as slaves, not enough people want to write about elf john brown
Free my people ✊🏻🧝♀️
Maybe we should make our own writing prompt community here? Do you think it would work?
I’d totally be on board with that.
Come to think of it, we could use c/writing for the purpose. That comm could use more love.
I like this idea.
It cannot be overstated how cult like Reddit was about
a few years agoReddit is a great indicator for what not to support
Indeed
Oh hey! That sounds a little like a super shitty version of mobiles from Ursula K LeGuin’s Ekumen! If anyone is interested in an actually good version of this, I would suggest reading just about the entire Hainish Cycle, they’re all really good! For this trope in particular I would recommend specifically Left Hand of Darkness (might be my favorite book ever written, really, it’s just so, so good), The Telling, and Rocannon’s World.
Seconding LeGuin. But Comrade, if you haven’t read The Culture series yet, you’d probably really enjoy them.
I haven’t read Rocannon’s World yet. I’ll have to that check that out. I’ve still gotta read the Earthsea Cycle too, I’m afraid.
I hadn’t even heard of The Culture series! I will indeed read those, they look great! Thanks for the recommendation!
The first Culture book is more of an action story that introduces some elements of the Culture. You can probably skip it initially if you want the headier stuff, but it’s a very good grounding into the setting and the events of the book, the Idiran-Culture War, is the in-universe event that moves the Culture from non-interference to a “guiding hand” model which informs the motivations of the civilization in later books.
Player of Games is an excellent Culture book that uses its whole chest to critique imperialism.
Use Of Weapons requires a lot of focus to parse through because it’s telling two stories in opposite chronological order and outlines more of the real human cost of the Culture’s policies of interference.
Hey, I’m currently publishing the audiobook of “the player of games” from the culture series on my peertube in 15-ish minutes bite size parts. I have the first 5 up right now if you’re interested.
Awesome! Welcome, hope you like them!
Does anyone else have this issue? I love sci-fi, avowed commie, but I just can’t get hooked on Le Guin’s writing. I don’t know what it is, I like the concepts, the plots, but it just doesn’t hook me. I haven’t tried Left Hand of Darkness though and I’ve heard that’s her best.
Left Hand of Darkness is wonderful but personally The Dispossessed resonated with me quite a bit more, just found it breathtakingly human in a way that totally broke me down. probably my favourite book now.
It probably depends on what hooks you. I bounced off Left Hand of Darkness at first. Later read The Dispossessed (now my favorite book), The Lathe of Heaven, The Birthday of the World short story collection, and I’m trying to get into Left Hand again now, which I’m finding a bit easier to read after becoming comfortable with Le Guin’s writing style.
She’s certainly got an older feel to her writing. I feel like it requires more work to get into, but I find the payoff is usually worth it. This might sound weird, but I think she had higher expectations from her readers than most authors have nowadays.
It does have that feel, I can tell she is a great writer. I’ll have to give it another go. It takes a little effort to fully visualize what she writes probably because it is just more advanced prose than most things I read, I read a lot more non-fiction these days than novels so it’s a little tricky at times to interpret the more poetic/metaphoric style, especially when I am stressed and can’t focus well.
I totally get what you mean; Starting off, her books always have a dimmer picture in my head. As if the images were being illuminated by a flickering candle that could go out at any time. It takes quite a few chapters before I feel like I’m getting the full picture.
This might sound weird, but I think she had higher expectations from her readers than most authors have nowadays.
Just an aside, but I strongly suspect this is like a literary equivalent to shows being made for second screens.
lmao the author of that post became a GenZong leftist a few years later, their comment history is a ride
Top 10 anime redemption arcs
Going from writing one of the cringiest reddit posts imaginable, to a pro-soviet Finnish leftist is one hell of a turnaround
[WP] You are made of star dust like Carl Sagan said. Every element that makes up your body originates from the origin of the universe. When you cum it is galaxy-goo. It is big-bang-batter.
One time at my old job one of my managers got trolled by a guy in the deli who told him a customer was asking if we carry a certain product. He came up to me with his phone in hand and asked me entirely straight faced and just a little frustrated if I ever heard of Gluten Free Baby Batter and I almost died laughing. He turned BEET red and it was one of the funniest things to ever happen to me at any job in my entire life. Apparently he had been walking around asking our coworkers about it for at least like 10 minutes and nobody told him.
Agent Elon Musk tries to accelerate contradictions of capitalism to achieve communism faster.
This is kind a great writing prompt in retrospect, if you consider that we’re slowly coming to realize that the Galactic Federation thinks of itself as behaving in an idealistic way, but is in fact a nightmare society that destroys the soul of everything it touches. In such a scenario, we (the uncontacted tribe) might initially be curious and optimistic about the Galactic Federation, but are slowly starting to realize all the contradictions in the promises and advice the Envoy is giving us, and are starting to suspect that engaging at all with Federation was a monumental, possibly fatal mistake.
Alternatively: Elon is a massive fuckup who managed to bluff his way into his station, and at some point the Federation shows up and says “oh god we’re sorry you guys were supposed to have gay space communism by now, please turn this dipshit over to us so we can lock him up for life”
Now that’s a writing prompt.
It is pretty much the plot of Hard To Be A God.
The federation is what most European colonial projects used to justify themselves taken to its more idealistic extreme, handwaving the material emiseration and genocide inherent in colonialism with vague notions of ‘post-scarcity’.
As far as I know there are no indigenous civilizations in the star trek universe who look at the federation and think “nah I’m good, leave us alone please”. Because to the liberal mind sovereignty of their ‘inferiors’ is a foreign concept, so they must be in awe and reverence at the federstion and there can be no differences that can’t be reconciled by assimilation into the dominant culture.
There are examples of cultures which chose to be left alone by the Federation. They do not exist to challenge the liberal zeitgeist from which Star Trek sprung, but its interesting to note that 90s trek could abide things which today’s american culture might not. The civilization with the dying sun, for an instance, is simply isolationist. They’d rather be left alone and the Federation leaves them alone. Helps them when they call for help, but leaves them be afterward. The key issue of the episode is that the locals choose to die at the age of 60 so as to unburden their family and society, which causes the story’s main personal conflict.
The episode as a whole too isn’t limited to showing them as xenophobic backwards people, which they aren’t portrayed as. Rather, the ultimate reading of the episode is that while a liberal struggle for freedom and lives is more than worthwhile it may not be worth people’s livelihoods and community. ‘It will take a courageous person to change things but I can’t be that person’. I think it’s an interesting example because it comes from a time when american liberal hegemony was so sure of itself and so comfortable about its future that it could ‘afford to wait’. As far as it is concerned, the arc of history bends liberal so if some people aren’t ready for it yet then you can let them be.
Then the war on terror happened and now we have rainbow imperialism playing musical chairs with imperialism classic.
As far as I know there are no indigenous civilizations in the star trek universe who look at the federation and think “nah I’m good, leave us alone please”.
That’s literally a plot point of one of the most critically acclaimed episodes of Last Generation, an alien race tells the Federation to fuck off because they’re not ready for contact
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As far as I know there are no indigenous civilizations in the star trek universe who look at the federation and think “nah I’m good, leave us alone please”.
There’s an episode in The Next Generation, I think called First Contact, in which a civilization on the verge of FTL travel is covertly contacted for Federation membership but they ultimately decline. The reason they decline though is because a lot of their population is very reactionary and their worldview would’ve been completely shattered by knowledge that they weren’t the most advanced and important species in the universe, and the head of state decides that such a thing would cause far too much social upheval and declines the invitation.
At least they have the prime directive which states they won’t interfere with less technologically advanced societies, so they aren’t just straight up space imperialists. I can’t recall the specific episodes but I feel like there have been people they met once or twice that were like “we got our own thing, we don’t want your federation here.”
There are many examples of aliens not wanting to join
As far as I know there are no indigenous civilizations in the star trek universe who look at the federation and think “nah I’m good, leave us alone please”.
sounds like it’s time for a re-watch
Subtly influencing now means making empty promises about space colonization every 6 months and being one of the most notorious human beings on earth.
Of course, it’s reddit, they know nothing about subtlety
Honestly still a good prompt if you want to flip the trope and have the galactic federation fucking suck.
This is the easiest Invader Zim throwback of my life. But I just wanted to say real quick that it’s so annoying to imply that Melon Lord is science minded at all. That he has any basis in understanding computers, natural sciences, engineering, or frankly business is such a crock of shit
I guess it could be a bit like when Saruman was sent to help Middle Earth and ended up doing a 180? Question is, who is gonna be our Gandalf?
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