Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #151 - Greens and Blues

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 - Greens and Blues

In ancient Rome, there were initially four influential chariot racing teams; Greens, Blues, Reds and Whites. Think, the chariot race from Ben-Hur. Few modern sports can match the excitement of these races. Their fans adopted the names of the team colours to form factions.

By the time of the Eastern Roman Empire (commonly, and erroneously, often called the Byzantine Empire), there were just two teams left; the Greens and Blues. Their rivalry was intense, and violence between them was quite common, occasionally escalating to serious rioting. The worst case was the Nika riots of 532 AD, where the factions joined forces and tried to depose Emperor Justinian. In the ensuing rioting and suppression of them, it is estimated that some 30,000 people died and much of Constantinople was burned down.

The line is often very blurred between a club supporting a sports team, and the fan clubs taking on social and political roles. This is sometimes the case with the supporters clubs of football teams. They look after their own and have a strong sense of identity. If they choose to get involved in politics, they can bring significant and unified manpower to bear, on anything from industrial action to outright revolution.

How do sports fans in your setting organise themselves ? Are their rivalries friendly, or intense and violent ? Do they get involved in social projects and politics ? If they are politically oriented, do they act on their own or come out in support of particular factions ?

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:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

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 🙂