Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #138 - Diplomatic Insults
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 - Diplomatic Insults
The history of diplomacy is full of imaginative and sometimes amusing insults conveyed from one ruler to another. Sadly they were often lethal for the poor messengers caught in the middle. In many cases the insults were treated as the cause of a war, but the reality is that they were usually just an excuse for a conflict which was inevitable
The episode at the beginning of the film "300" is surprisingly close to the truth; Persian messengers seeking earth and water as a token of submission from Sparta were indeed thrown down a well and told they could find both there. The French Dauphin sent Henry V a box of tennis balls, implying that he was young and should stay at home playing games. Henry's response was that he'd answer them with cannon balls, and we know how that went ! My all time favourite is the Reply of the Zaporizhian Cossacks to the Sultan (although there are several variations on both the story and the exact text). Just Google it, it's hilarious.
Tell me a story of a famous diplomatic insult from your setting. Who insulted whom, and why ? Did the messengers get away safely ? What caused the situation, and what was the end result ?
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 🙂