Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #165 - Really Big Statues
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 - Really Big Statues
I learned the other day that one of North Korea's biggest earners is the design and creation of massive monumental statues. Mostly built in a socialist realism style, they generally depict assorted (mostly African) rulers, and more abstract representations of patriotic liberation struggles. But building massive anthropomorphic statues isn't a new idea. The Egyptian pharaohs loved doing it - just look how many statues of Ramesses are scattered around, and the British Museum might as well rename it's Egypt gallery as "fan club of Amenophis III". The Romans and Greeks, too, loved their huge statues although sadly some of the most notable have long since vanished.
Tell me a story from your setting of a massive statue ! Who does it represent, or is it symbolic or religious without showing a specific living person ? Did a ruler commission it for themselves as a huge act of ego, or was it created after the death of the person it represents ? Who was the artist who designed it, and what is their story ? How is it controversial (all art is controversial, for example the recent horrific discovery of inscriptions on the inside of the Terracotta army left by the sculptors telling of their appalling working conditions). How did people react to the monument ? Is it still standing, or was it torn down in some subsequent revolution or religious purge ?
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 🙂