Creative Jam

[ysabetwordsmith]

Welcome to the ninety-third Crowdfunding Creative Jam! This session will run Saturday, July 18-Sunday, July 19. The theme is "War."


Crowdfunding Creative Jam

Everyone is eligible to post prompts, which may be words or phrases, titles, images, etc. Prompters may request a specific creator, but everyone else may still use that prompt if they wish. Prompts may specify a particular character/world/etc. but creators may use the prompt for something else anyway and post the results. Prompters are still encouraged to post mostly prompts that anyone could use anywhere, as this maximizes the chance of having creators make something based on your prompt. Please title your comment "Prompt" or "Prompts" when providing inspiration so these are easy to find.

Prompt responses may also be treated as prompts and used for further inspiration. For example, a prompt may lead to a sketch which leads to a story, and so on. This kind of cascading inspiration is one of the most fun things about a collective jam session.

Everyone is eligible to use prompts, and everyone who wants to use a given prompt may do so, for maximum flexibility of creator choice in inspiration. You do not have to post a "Claim" reply when you decide to use a prompt, but this does help indicate what is going on so that other prompters can spread out their choice of prompts if they wish.

Creators are encouraged, but not required, to post at least one item free. Likewise, sharing a private copy of material with the prompter is encouraged but not required. Creative material resulting from prompts should be indicated in a reply to the prompt, with a link to the full content elsewhere on the creator's site (if desired); a brief excerpt and/or description of the material may be included in the reply (if desired). It helps to title your comment "Prompt Filled" or something like that so these are easy to identify. There is no time limit on responding to prompts. However, creators are encouraged to post replies sooner rather than later, as the attention of prompters will be highest during and shortly after the session.

Some items created from prompts may become available for sponsorship. Some creators may offer perks for donations, linkbacks, or other activity relating to this project. Check creator comments and links for their respective offerings.

Prompters, creators, and bystanders are expected to behave in a responsible and civil manner. If the moderators have to drag someone out of the sandbox for improper behavior, we will not be amused. Please respect other people's territory and intellectual property rights, and only play with someone else's characters/setting/etc. if you have permission. (Fanfic/fanart freebies are okay.) If you want to invite folks to play with something of yours, title the comment something like "Open Playground" so it's easy to spot. This can be a good way to attract new people to a shared world or open-source project, or just have some good non-canon fun.

Boost the signal! The more people who participate, the more fun this will be. Hopefully we'll see activity from a lot of folks who regularly mention their projects in this community, but new people are always welcome. You can link to this session post or to individual items created from prompts, whatever you think is awesome enough to recommend to your friends.

Comments

Open Playground: Schrodinger's Heroes

[ysabetwordsmith]

Everyone is welcome to play with Schrodinger's Heroes. (If you're new to this project, you can start here.) This is an imaginary fandom for an apocryphal television show. A team of heroes practice quantum physics and other hijinks to protect Earth against invaders from other dimensions. The team is racially, sexually, and culturally diverse. Because the subject naturally deals with alternate realities, it lends itself well to crossovers and alternate-universe interpretations; you can use my version or make up your own.

Prompts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Image Prompts:
Syrian civil war
Centaur cavalry
Space war

Title Prompts:
"The Dogs of War"
"Battle Standards"
"Rules of Disengagement"

Text Prompts:
* What is the nature of war?
* At what point did WWII become inevitable?
* Can humanity exist without war?

[ravan]

Song Prompts:
"War, what is it good for?"
"You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars"

prompts

[alexseanchai]

[Homer] never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem, though that war had a beginning and an end. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view. If, again, he had kept it within moderate limits, it must have been over-complicated by the variety of the incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion, and admits as episodes many events from the general story of the war—such as the Catalogue of the ships and others—thus diversifying the poem.

—Aristotle, Poetics, tr. S. H. Butcher

In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. […] A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general—arguably even philosophy.

—stilleatingoranges, "The Significance of Plot Without Conflict"

Jacques Derrida, probably the best known post-modern philosopher, infamously declared that all of reality was a text—a series of narratives that could only be understood by appealing to other narratives, ad infinitum. What kinds of narratives, though? Perhaps a benign, kishōtenketsu-esque play between disconnection and reconnection, chaos and order? No; for Derrida, the only narrative was one of violence. As a Nietzschean, he believed that reality consisted, invariably, of one thing dominating and imposing on another, in a selfish exercise of its will to power. The "worst violence", he thought, was when something was completely silenced and absorbed by another, its difference erased. Apparently, Derrida was uncontent with the three-act structure’s nearly complete control over Western writing: he had to project it onto the entire world. Eurocentrism has rarely had a more shining moment.

—stilleatingoranges, "The Significance of Plot Without Conflict"

"When it comes to the safety of your people, you don't fight fair."

Zuko reddened. "A great name must be noble, and benevolent, and honorable beyond reproach," he quoted old lessons, "because the great names lead and defend the clans in war. And war is none of those. War is death."

—Vathara, Embers chapter 23

"We don't all study history, your majesty. And there's a lot of history in your library." Shirong smiled wryly. "It's not only possible you know something we don't, it's likely."

"…Oh." Kuei looked chastised. Straightened his shoulders, and took a deep breath. "There's a saying I ran across, in a book from Avatar Yangchen's time. If you want to besiege a city, use waterbenders. If you want to hold it, use earthbenders. If you want to take it, use firebenders. If you want to destroy it…"

He didn't have to finish.

—Vathara, Embers chapter 36 (an Avatar: the Last Airbender fanfic; the principles undoubtedly apply to unrelated worldbuilding with a similar four-classical-elements basis)

Poem

[ysabetwordsmith]

"See the Other Side" is the freebie, inspired by an anonymous prompt.