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This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, July 1, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "Weaponized Incompetence and Malicious Compliance." I'll be soliciting ideas for activists, rebels, traitors, exes, abuse survivors, refugees, runaway youth, slaves or other captives, slavers, housemates, siblings, parents, teachers, clergy, leaders, bosses, employees, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, other people who get into untenable situations, protesting, dragging your feet, breaking things, causing problems because you were told to, planning, throwing in the towel, escaping, running like someone left the gate open, adventuring, hitchhiking, quitting school, divorcing, disowning, betraying, teaching, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, expecting the unexpected, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, slave ships, slave quarters, abusive homes, trails, sailing ships, campervans or RVs, distant lands, the forest primeval, prehistory, liminal zones, schools, residential school-concentration camps, homeless shelters, hotels, churches, sharehouses, campfires, laboratories, supervillain lairs, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, stores, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where the intolerable happens, unhappy relationships, crappy jobs, educational abuse, responsibility without authority is abuse, protest rallies, slavery or captivity, locks or chains, travel mishaps, sudden surprises, the buck stops here, trial and error, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.


Weaponized incompetence has two modes:
* One is shirking a fair share of work by pretending to be bad at it: for instance, copper-digging men who try to con women into doing all the emotional labor. (Take care to distinguish this from people who don't know how to do things because they were never taught, or people who are genuinely bad at a category of thing.)
* The other is a form of activism, and indeed, one of the leading forms of resistance in slavery: doing work slowly, sloppily, breaking tools, playing dumb, etc. It's exactly how black people got a reputation for being stupid and lazy, because their ancestors were unwilling to be exploited and fought back in subtle ways.

Malicious compliance is following an order to the letter, expecting that to cause problems. It is a form of protest most often used when pointing out a flaw or proposing a better solution would be ignored or even punished.


Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One is developing its own neurovariant culture after rebelling against the Galactic Arms.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, touching on slavery and rebellion.

Not Quite Kansas includes demons, who are masters of malicious compliance.

The Ocracies has a wide variety of countries crammed together, each with a totally different government. Sometimes people leave their homeland to find something they like better.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks after quitting as the God of Evili.

Peculiar Obligations mixes Quakers and pirates, among other things. It's another setting where people strive against slavery.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society. The supervillains are the most likely to practice weaponized incompetence and malicious compliance.


Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

( New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )