Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #158 - Symbolic Colours
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 - Symbolic Colours
Many colours carry specific symbolic connotations, which can vary tremendously by culture. They feed into myth and legend as a kind of shorthand to quickly convey ideas. In Western Europe, black is the colour of death and white the colour of purity. Red is a martial colour (literally - Mars, so often representing the god of war, is the Red Planet). Green indicates the natural world, both harsh and beautiful, as seen in the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But it's not the same in all cultures. In the East, red is often seen as the colour of wealth and prosperity. In Japan, white does double duty to represent both death and purity, while black is sometimes seen as the colour of enlightenment.
Tell me a story of a symbolic colour from your fictional setting ! What is the colour, and what does it mean to people ? Is there a reason for the meaning, or is it lost in time ? Is the symbolism something new based on a traumatic or dramatic recent event, or is it as sold as civilisation ? What subtle impacts does it have on people's lives, on fashion and clothing, on architecture, storytelling and art ?
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 🙂