[WP] You were first exposed to r/WritingPrompts when it became a default subreddit. Infuriated by its potential to develop young writers who could compete with yourself, you set out to sabotage it by submitting endless prompts about Batman, the Devil, and Time Travel.

They were all spineless nothings. A product of the digital world around them. Products of the Internet itself, if you could even imagine that the depths of it could actually produce something! Suburban teens and twenty-somethings that had barely stepped out their front doors, let alone had an original thought. This was my forte! The power of my mind could breathe here! A chance to feel like my creativity could bloom and blossom here amongst the monotony of everyday life! How dare the mass populace be privy to my little secret? My solace away from the noise and the rabble?
It wasn't such that the place had gotten crowded. I mean, who doesn't love an audience? Especially an artist. It was that they had the gall to challenge me! ME! At first, I welcomed it. What was a little competition? Obviously, the cream would rise to the top, and by cream, I mean me. I mean, who could be better? I'd been out there! I'd seen the world! Experienced the ends of the earth itself! A veritable cornucopia of knowledge to draw from. The middling idiots wouldn't stand a chance.
But they did. They thrived. Their karma counts were skyrocketing! How could this be? My responses were thought-provoking. You could never have seen the end coming. Even if you did, there was always a cliffhanger or two to keep the audience wanting... These nothings wrote without poise or purpose and they were loved by each other! Their ideas were banal, boring, blasphemous to the art! Cliches and tropes for days! Frauds of the highest order!
That was when the idea hit me... If they were going to take the garden where my mind grew away from me, I would salt the Earth and ensure nothing could grow there again! A slow mental poison to make their statuses as amateurs as bold as the front page itself. Prompt after prompt of the same topics over and over. Make them run out of their canned ideas as fast as I could and watch their reputations take the brunt of the blow. Make them realise themselves that they had no business in the business of originality. I trawled through pop culture and the worst fan fiction to find the most popular characters, the worst possible paths for them to take, smashing together universes that had no right to interact! Let them work with nothing! Shackle them into the same storyline in perpetuity! Vengeance would be mine!

But it failed. As I made prompt after prompt from EU to EU, making Hitler face off against the Devil through multiple dimensions and spaces and times, their fame only grew. I had not destroyed and made plain their plainness but had played into their strengths. They could write the equivalent of a re-post, in the manner of their choosing, and wipe the table with me, who had no knowledge of what I was even posting. In the end, I simply gave up the fight. I hid in the unpopular prompts, praying that something would break 10 points. I gave the front page to those I had armed. In my fury, I had watered down the part of me that I wanted to improve. My mind weakened and I couldn't even come up with something witty as a response.
I gave it one more shot. I'll give them one more to remember me by. Clicking 'Submit a New Prompt' for the last time, I would let the community judge my actions. I've left it here. Maybe someone will read it. Maybe someone will respond... Maybe the originality will come back. All I could do is hit 'save' and wait.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread