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 - sorry I'm late with this one, I was away at the weekend helping with a Bastille Day celebration.
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Remembering The Fallen
Almost as soon as humans invented organised warfare (one of the best spurs to technological development we've ever come up with...), victorious commanders started setting up stands of arms and armour captured from the enemy to commemorate their victory.
It didn't take long for these to transition into ways to mark the mass graves of their fallen heroes. As civilisation developed, we started making memorials of all types to remember our fallen warriors. Some were on battlefields; cairns, statues, or temples. Others were in capital cities; triumphal arches listing the names of all the fallen, or public squares named after famous battles.
But towns and villages would also erect memorials for local folks who perished in war, whether a single grave, or a marker for those whose bodies weren't recovered, up to the crosses and war memorials for the first and second world wars listing the dead from each town or village. Finally, we have intangible monuments; blog and social media posts made online, and more and more countries are adopting the Russian concept of the Бессмертный полк or Immortal Regiment, parades carrying the portraits of fallen ancestors.
How are the fallen remembered in your setting ? Are they a source of pride, or the reminder of a terrible defeat to be swept under the carpet ? Is their remembrance a personal thing, or organised by the state ? Are specific days set aside as public holidays, and what kinds of ritual or commemoration take place ?
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 🙂