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 
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Clowns and Jesters
Clowns are a strange thing. They entertain us and make us laugh, but they also hold a mirror up to our own peculiarities. They can be objects of pity, but a subtle change to their makeup can turn them into horrifying creatures of nightmare. In times past, a court jester was a kind of clown for the rich. They had to navigate an incredibly fine line between being entertaining and offensive. Some jesters became a source of wisdom for the ruler, speaking truth to power when no-one else would dare to. Others were what we could today call disabled or neuro-divergent, with an incredible grasp of detail and pattern-comprehension, and able to mirror to fit into a society they were excluded and different from.
Tell me a tale of clowns or jesters from your fictional setting ! Who do they entertain ? Who fears them and why ? What is their background - are they jolly showmen or sad maladjusted folks making a way through life the only way they know how ? What cultural conventions (if any) protect them when they cross the line from humour to offence ?
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
- 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;
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂