The 2025 Prompt Nominations Post: "I haven't seen you like this before, not in 800 years."

[brightknightie]

As discussed, we're playing challenge-style, and we'll elect a shared pool of 3-5 prompts (maximum 30 words each). Each story (minimum 500 words) must use at least one elected prompt.

When to nominate: By Friday, March 14, 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Who may nominate: All FK fans! Readers as well as writers are invited to nominate and vote! Nominations are not a commitment to play.

How to prompt:

• Definition: For our game, a prompt is a word, set of words, phrase, sentence, question, stanza, lyric, trope, canon reference, etc. meant to inspire an FK story.
• Success: We'll likely get the most from prompts that can flex across different interpretations, while also being specific enough to spark reactions.
• Limits: Up to 3 nominations per person. 1-30 words. If a quotation, include a citation (not part of the word count). You may re-nominate 1 unused re-run prompt from a previous year among your 3. No vulgarity, incivility, that kind of thing.

How to nominate & elect:

1. Nominate (March 8 - March 14): Reply to this post with up to 3 prompts you'd like in the game. You may post all in one reply, or each in its own reply.
2. Vote (March 15 - March 21): On the to-be-posted poll, number all the prompts from your least to most favorite.
3. Calculate & announce (March 22 - March 23): Any prompt that gets 25% of the 1st-place votes outright wins one of our slots. Then, the prompt with the fewest 1st-place votes is eliminated, redistributing its votes to what was the 2nd-place preference of its voters. Repeat until 3 prompts each have 25%+ of the votes (or, as far as I can see in the rankings, the final 4-5 would reach more players than the final 3).

Stories come due no later than May 24 on the AO3 and start releasing on May 26.

Questions? Advice? Please share!

Comments

[senmut]

1 is calling for a father daughter fic...

[dlyt]

Not necessarily, although that may be the first impression, and could inspire a great story. However, there are a number of blonds in canon … 😏

[brightknightie]

Just for the curiosity:

I've been trying to look up the history of hairbrushes for this, but while the internet is full of evidence for hair combs dating to Paleolithic times and being common in Classical civilizations, the first modern hairbrush began manufacture in the 1700s, and is often claimed to have been a new invention then (for use on human hair being new, supposedly inspired by brooms) at that time. All the easily-found online references to hairbrushes being found in Egyptian tombs seem to go back to a single blog post about hair care, and not to any museum or Egyptology site.

If we elect this prompt, I may look into consulting better resources more directly...