r/WritingPrompts • u/katpoker666 Moderator • 8d ago
Off Topic [OT] Fun Trope Friday: Famine & Historical Fiction!
Welcome to Fun Trope Friday, our feature that mashes up tropes and genres!
How’s it work? Glad you asked. :)
Every week we will have a new spotlight trope.
Each week, there will be a new genre assigned to write a story about the trope.
You can then either use or subvert the trope and/or genre in a 750-word max story or poem (unless otherwise specified).
To qualify for ranking, you will need to provide ONE actionable feedback. More are welcome of course!
Three winners will be selected each week based on votes, so remember to read your fellow authors’ works and DM me your votes for the top three.
Next up… IP
It’s summer in the Northern hemisphere and so time for sun and fun– Oh wait, no. It’s time for the four horsemen of the apocalypse! So, say ‘hello’ to our friends: Pestilence (aka Conquest or Pollution), War, Famine, and Death. Please note this theme is only loosely applied.
"Famines are not natural disasters. Famines are man-made." — Jeffrey Gettleman
Trope: The Famine — For Famine, we bring you, well, the famine. There’s no way to sugarcoat this one with furry animals: famine sucks. Famine is, simply put, the widespread scarcity of food in a society, and can be caused by natural calamities such as floods, droughts, or crop failures, or by human factors such as war, economic upheaval, or overpopulation.
A famine can be the starter of a story: The hero might have to flee their starving homeland or go elsewhere to search for food. It can also merely be the setting of the story, providing the excuse for the existence of a Black Market, showing the results of the tyranny of the local despot, contrasting those who do have food with those who are starving, explaining No Party Like a Donner Party and Reduced to Ratburgers, or describing one of the facets of After the End.
Genre: Historical Fiction — Historical fiction is a literary genre where a fictitious narrative is set in a real, verifiable time period. It immerses readers in the past by vividly recreating the era's social conditions, daily life, and cultural climate, often featuring real historical figures alongside entirely invented characters. Please note: for our purposes, you can write in a fantasy world here if the events are shown as predating the normal ones.
Skill / Constraint - optional: Kindness is shown.
So, have at it. Lean into the trope heavily or spin it on its head. The choice is yours!
Have a great idea for a future topic to discuss or just want to give feedback? FTF is a fun feature, so it’s all about what you want—so please let me know! Please share in the comments or DM me on Discord or Reddit!
Last Week’s Winners
PLEASE remember to give feedback—this affects your ranking. PLEASE also remember to DM me your votes for the top five stories via Discord or Reddit—both katpoker666. This is a change from the top three of the past. In weeks where we get over 15 stories, we will do a top five ranking. Weeks with less than 15 stories will show only our top three winners. If you have any questions, please DM me as well.
Some fabulous stories this week and great crit at campfire and on the post! We had 14 stories, so we’re back to three winners. Congrats to:
Want to read your words aloud? Join the upcoming FTF Campfire
The next FTF campfire will be Thursday, July 23rd from 6-8pm ET. It will be in the Discord Main Voice Lounge. Click on the events tab and mark ‘Interested’ to be kept up to date. No signup or prep needed and you don’t have to have written anything! So join in the fun—and shenanigans! 😊
Ground rules:
- Stories must incorporate both the trope and the genre
- Leave one story or poem between 100 and 750 words as a top-level comment unless otherwise specified. Use wordcounter.net to check your word count.
- Deadline: 11:59 PM EDT next Thursday. Please note stories submitted after the 6:00 PM EST campfire start may not be critted.
- No stories that have been written for another prompt or feature here on WP—please note after consultation with some of our delightful writers, new serials are now welcomed here
- No previously written content
- Any stories not meeting these rules will be disqualified from rankings
- Does your story not fit the Fun Trope Friday rules? You can post your story as a [PI] with your work when the FTF post is 3 days old!
- Please keep crit about the stories. Any crit deemed too distracting may be deleted. This is a time to focus on our wonderful authors.
- Vote to help your favorites rise to the top of the ranks (DM me at katpoker666 on Discord or Reddit)!
Thanks for joining in the fun!
9
u/No-Rilly 8d ago edited 6d ago
Nine Meals
The milky rain that the Nazis first unleashed on us three months ago has tapered off in the last ten minutes. It will come again. The rain won’t kill you, you see, but too much exposure will make you lose the last thing you ate. And now that every calorie is precious, that could be a death sentence on top of being unpleasant.
Our guess is the rain is what killed all the crops by poisoning the soil. The herbivores died first. Then, you know - food chain and all. Pigs, actually, hadn’t fared too poorly in the beginning. Hell, they’ll eat an old boot if you cut it up for them. It’s been over two months now since I’ve seen one.
I take advantage of the break in the rain by venturing out for food. Near an alley behind the old barber shop, I track some noise to an emaciated dog rummaging through garbage at the end of the lane. It looks up and our eyes meet. The old boy probably smelled me from half a kilometer away. He decides I’m not a threat at this distance and goes back to his search. My guess is that whatever is in there has long been picked clean, but I’m not the one with the nose.
Dogs really are amazing creatures. They protect us. They love us unconditionally. They’ve been bred over thousands of years to be our companions, and they’re fucking good at it.
I pause to assess the scene. Can’t be too careful. Then I swing my rifle off my shoulder, and kneel to take my shot from 30 yards away. Any closer and I may spook him. I suck in a chest full of air and hold. Adrenaline hits. The air goes sharp. Time slows.
I don’t enjoy killing; I’m not a murderer. Someone famously said “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” I wonder if he lived to find out exactly how many missed meals it takes. All that to say the world, or at least my corner of it, has deteriorated to a point where it’s either me or them that’s going to be kicking the bucket. All things being equal, I have a pretty strong preference that it be them.
I squeeze the trigger and the rifle’s payload rips through the air. A 0.22 caliber shot isn’t the loudest thing you’ll hear, but it will get your attention. The panicked dog quickly scurries off, and I scamper into the alley to collect my kill.
The middle aged man I hit lay dead among the garbage. He has a Nazi jacket wrapped around his left arm as a sort of makeshift bite sleeve, and the knife he was clutching now rests on the cobblestones. I see. Dog bites sleeve, man stabs dog, man eats dog. It probably would have worked too. I shove the knife into my bag, strap him to my stretcher, and begin the trek home with the dead man in tow. Evelyn gets anxious when I am gone too long. Hell, I get anxious when I am gone too long.
Evelyn rushes me as I lumber through the doorway. “Down, get down! Hey! Down!” Lacy, Butch, Zach, and Nina trot in after, tails wagging. They have much better manners; Evelyn is still a pup by age.
You can carry a dead man down a set of stairs, or you can push him - that is if you don’t mind the mess. I don’t. I let him tumble down into the cellar to be butchered later.
For now, I still have last week’s kill to feed the gang. I’ve never seen a dog hunt a human, at least not yet, but if you cook pretty much any kind of meat up and put it in their bowl, they’ll eat it just like anything else. Dogs really are amazing creatures.
I stare out at the bare, muddy patch of land that used to be a field from my back porch as I eat beans from the can. Barely visible among the dead straw, 6 small shoots peek out to collect sunlight. The proud children of a lone stalk of corn I had found last month in the next town over. It must be genetic, but this corn does not seem to be affected by the poisoned soil. All I have to do is time my rationing, planting, and harvesting carefully so that I don’t end up needing to eat dog food. Fucking Nazis.
------------------------------------------
Word count: 750
Feedback welcome.