Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #80 - Idiots

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 @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Idiots

Humanity has a complex and often awful relationship with it's less intelligent members. Historically, the mentally challenged have suffered fates as awful as being killed as soon as their idiocy is known, to being enslaved or cast out. But sometimes we've been kind. Some ancient idiots were revered as being divine messengers. The medieval village idiot was maybe mocked a little, but the community would care for them and look out for them. Some so-called idiots became jesters, although I suspect the successful ones were not stupid at all, just neurologically divergent.

Tell me a story from your setting about idiots ! How are they treated ? Do they get looked after, and if so, is this down to their family, the community, or the state ? Do they have any special significance or status ? Although it's a challenging topic, how a society treats it's less fortunate members can really illuminate how a world works !

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 @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• 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.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.