Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #126 Prelude to Revolution

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 - Prelude to Revolution

Revolutions don't happen out of thin air. No two revolutions are the same, but whether successful or not they tend to come from a complex mix of factors which build up until a revolution is the only possible outcome. Before it happens, people often don't expect it and think that the old political methods will fix everything.

It doesn't need a tyrannical government, often revolutions happen when the government is weak, incompetent, indecisive and seen as only working for the ruling class or a foreign interest. A poor economy can cause the discontent leading to a revolution, but when things are at their worst people are too busy just surviving, so the explosion will happen when things finally start to recover and no-one expects it. Likewise, revolutions are popularly thought of as a working-class phenomenon, but the reality is that it's the middle classes and intellectuals who have the education to create the philosophies and structures that enable a revolution to happen.

Tell me a story from your setting or world building about what came before a revolution ! Was it an "inside job" between ruling factions that got out of control ? What broke the economy, and what did the government do to fix it which actually made things worse ? Was the government tyrannical, or just incompetent (or perhaps both) ? What were the leaders of the revolution doing before it all licked off ? Finally, what was the spark that turned background discontent into a Bastille moment ?*

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.
• 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:

• 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.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂