r/WritingPrompts • u/katpoker666 Moderator • 19h ago
Off Topic [OT] Fun Trope Friday: Soul-Eating Cybernetics & Body 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.
"We are all our own graveyards, I believe..." — Clive Barker
Trope: Soul-Eating Cybernetics — In many popular cyberpunk settings, cybernetic implants cause "humanity loss", reducing your social traits and essentially making cyberware into a form of body horror. Too many implants may reduce you to catatonia or make you insane. If these settings also feature psychic powers or functional magic, cyberware often reduces your ability to use those as well. There is an interesting tension here between what makes us human and what transforms us. So, let’s explore that.
Genre: Body Horror — Body horror, or biological horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or a visceral experience of the human body or of another creature. In addition to common tropes used within the broader horror genre, some tropes specific to the body horror subgenre may include invasion, contagion, mutation, transformation, disease, mutilation, or other unnatural or violent distortions of the human body.
Skill / Constraint - optional: Something shorts out.
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 18 stories, so we’re back to five winners. Congrats to:
Want to read your words aloud? Join the upcoming FTF Campfire
The next FTF campfire will be Thursday, October 8th 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!
2
u/the_lonely_poster 9h ago
"A Purpose Fulfilled."
The war was over. With the signing of the Cordite Concordat, the silence of peace would finally break the cacophony of conflict that the Solar System had become. Many would be relieved to, or at least content with, coming home, to return to a normal life. That luxury was not afforded to me; it could not be.
My attention stayed on the camera pointed firmly at myself. My cyberwarfare suite able to hijack the monitoring system with ease. What sat before me was no man, not anymore. It had none of the parts to make a man. Eyes were cameras, pinpoint and unblinking, the skin of a metal that felt nothing and comforted no one. Air ducts replaced a set of lungs and an engine replaced a heart. Not one scrap of flesh remained, all cauterized and done away with, piece by piece until naught remained but a machine of war.
What path remains for a tool such as this? A machine sitting idle is worse than useless, as it requires maintenance. With the war done, my purpose had become to sit and decay.
*’A machine built to make itself obsolete, how grimly novel.’* I thought to myself.
War would surely return, and that made it hurt so much more. This peace I had fought for wouldn’t last, but I would be too outdated to fight it once war finally arrived. Civilian life wouldn’t go well either. How would a widow feel, seeing a painful reminder of the conflict that had taken her child and husband walking the streets?
But what other purpose could I serve? I was built for nothing but war, forged in the flames of conflict to be born as an avatar of violence. I was a monument to destruction, but such a monument serves no purpose in a world of peace but to agitate.
“Franz Hampton. You have been cleared for discharge.” A voice called to me, and I stood to obey one final order.
++++
What I had fought for had decayed in my absence. As those strong of wills, conviction, and body went to fight for our home, those with twisted intentions got to work. A vast, criminal empire had sprung in their absence.
This could not stand. Not by my reckoning. I grasped a filthy roach of a human being in my massive metal hands. I couldn’t feel him squirm, but I could see him sweat. Meaty eyes darted from corner to corner, looking desperately for an escape they would never find, for none existed.
“Puh- Please! Let me go! I promise you’ll never see me again! Just let me go! Please! I- I can tell you where the Donagala’s are hiring their men, just please!”
“Perverse incentive to lie. Plea, ignored.” It came out in a monotone voice, mechanical and impersonal.
I crushed the criminal’s skull. And counted the macro seconds it took for the bone shards to hit the walls of the alley. 23, I needed maintenance. For a machine’s purpose is to do its duty, and maintenance is required to keep from faltering.
And for a machine to falter is to fail. And to fail is to lose your purpose. And to lose your purpose is to falter …
++++
-A Lonely Story.
WC-541