r/WritingPrompts • u/katpoker666 Moderator • 11d ago
Off Topic [OT] Fun Trope Friday: Evil Landscape & Gothic Horror!
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 October. The time of falling leaves, jack o’lanterns, and candy. And blood… so much blood. This month will be focusing on all things horror with maybe a treat or two to sweeten the pot. Please note this theme is only loosely applied.
"The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls." — Edgar Allan Poe
Trope: Evil Landscape — The trope is where a cemetery, temple, forest, etc. is considered holy... to the forces of evil. Whether it was the site of great and terrible crimes, incredible bloodshed, unholy rituals to malevolent beings or other atrocious acts, the very ground itself and any surrounding lands are now cursed. Exact results vary, but the most common are that evil is stronger, good is weaker and things buried here don't stay down for long.
Genre: Gothic Horror — Gothic horror is one of the oldest of the horror genres. Darker, edgier and on the Romanticism end of Romanticism vs. Enlightenment (in fact, it quite literally emerged alongside the Romantic movement in the late 18th century as a reaction against the values of the Enlightenment), it tends to play on both the thrill and the fear of the unknown and places a great importance on atmosphere. It's usually heavily symbolic, sometimes even dreamlike.
Skill / Constraint - optional: Smelling salts are required.
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 11 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, October 22nd 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 by next Friday at 11:59 AM EDT 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!
8
u/psilocybediatribe 9d ago
Cold Blue
White hallways and white sheets interspersed with tinted curtains staffed by color-coded people who run about like headless chickens whose plumage assigns meaning. Black and navy-blue to hide blood and body fluids, surgical green to contrast sanguinous secretions, burgundy meant urgency, while teal held many meanings and sometimes none at all.
Triage, triage, triage. A conveyor belt of the sick and dying, the cacophony of coughing, wheezing, sneezing a chorus only interrupted by the transition from sinus rhythm to arrhythmia to asystole a ringtone chiming death. Code Blue. Code Blue. Cold Blue.
Behind closed curtains lay prostrate bodies immortalized in their last gasp, stained by stigmata of occlusive lesions against cyanotic skin, chained by breathing tubes and venous lines to machines gone reverently quiet.
Start compressions, pushing Epi, stop compressions, rhythm check, no shock. Resume compressions. Swap. Two-minute cycles. Asystole and stop.
Doctor Sandiri curses in frustration. Then she’s pressing through the overflowing suffocation of the waiting room into the flooded ER basin awash in lights and sirens around the corner where refrigerated morgue trucks stand in silent vigil. Sandiri stands alone, desperate to catch a breath and replace it with smoke and ash.
Blue lights, red cross. They interrupt her thoughts. Trauma 2 needs an attending. Trauma 3 is drawing lots.
A man in black scrubs and an N95 stands alone beside a patient. She doesn’t recognize the silhouette and stops to say hello but a resident shouts for her. By the time she returns the room is quiet, curtains closed.
Her shift ends at 11. She leaves the hospital at 1. The drive at least is quiet, a sound she has forgotten in less than fourteen hours and only associates with the dead. If dreams hold any meaning, they are violently forgotten, washed away through pure exhaustion, and never recalled by morning.
She doesn’t need the news ticking deaths and infections to tell her she is losing, they are failing, they’ll soon be overrun.
Triage is shifting outside into rapidly assembled disaster-relief tents, and the three-ring circus inside is being divided into zones. It has been mere days since the pandemic was declared. She is assigned to the red zone, the hot zone.
She sees him again, the man in the N95, his black scrubs matching her own, who seems oblivious to the frantic bustle around him, and the bustle oblivious to him as well. She blinks and he is gone, but something of him lingers in the cold sweat upon her body, and the chill inside her soul.
Elective surgeries are canceled the next day. Labor and delivery allows no visitors. Mom and baby do not meet. Just a hello through divided glass before baby is whisked away into neonatal isolation and mom is left alone while dad waits in the car. For a single midnight, all three sleep alone.
The lockdown is anticipated. Children on vacation, parents home from work. The only difference for Sandiri is she now drives through empty streets past shuttered businesses and traffic lights whose colors hold no meaning in the apocalyptic darkness of the city.
In the hot zone she rarely sees mild cases, they seldom get past triage and are immediately sent home. Only cases of acute respiratory distress visit her. And the man in the N95.
She watches countless patients come and go, live and die, trying not to become numb, trying to remember that every person she encounters is entering the hot zone alone, devoid of friends and family, cared for by strangers, and the only peace is an ICU, where they spend 16 hours facedown to facilitate their breathing.
Another cold grey morning, this time accompanied by a cough. She calls the hospital, drives to the nearest clinic for a vicious nasal swab, while she imagines the spike proteins penetrating her cells, injecting their malicious payload, hijacking her body and reproducing inside her.
At night she shivers until she’s sore. By day she aches all over. She spends her isolation watching The Great British Bake Off and Tiger King.
Seven days later she returns to work.
Her residents greet her like normal. Masks hide their sad smiles, but cannot hide their horror or their tears and shaking hands. She watches them push the sedative, tells them she will be okay, but the last face that she saw, as she slowly closed her eyes, was the specter of the man in the N95.
WC: 735. Crit and feedback welcome. Cheers!