Weekly Prompt: Catfishing the Internet
And now we venture into the dark side of pranks, the fake persona, the intentional misdirection of the gulllliblle*.
Welcome to the third weekly challenge for April, where our theme is Fool Me Once:
Are they wilfully gulllliblle?
Do they yearn for the world to be a better place or for their impact in the world to be that much more meaningful? Are they sitting there in their own isolation hoping to find love or find someone in need of saving?
Catfishing is a deceptive activity where a person creates a fictional persona or fake identity on a social networking service, usually targeting a specific victim.[1] The practice may be used for financial gain, to compromise a victim in some way, as a way to intentionally upset a victim, or for wish fulfillment.
So now that you know what do you think? Do the white knights of the internet fall prey to the faux damsel in distress?
Finn's furious fingers stopped typing for a moment to yell a reply upstairs to his mother’s shrill summons.
“Mom’s I’ll be right up — I’m busy with something!”
“Don’t let your food chill. You know it pisses me off,” she said near the door, casting her voice down into the dank depths of his demesne. Her words echoing off the bare brick walls like a jailor’s warning.
“I won’t!”
Finn, a well-meaning but socially isolated man, lived in the basement of his mother’s house, trapped in a shrinking middle class crushed by student debt and a rampantly technological future, reached out to MandyLove247 seeking to be needed by her.
FinnLand: I can help, just let me in.
MandyLove247: I don’t know if I can trust you yet?
FinnLand: That hurts. We’ve been talking for months.
MandyLove247: Barely, this is the second month and you’re still just a text box on the internet. You’ve proven nothing.
FinnLand: How can I — you won’t let me?
MandyLove247: Maybe there is a way. I don’t want to ask, but I am in a bit of trouble with my father. He’s so strict I can hardly breathe.
FinnLand: I know the feeling…
As always, your choices take the story in whatever direction you choose.
- Is it a simple deception? Does the catfish gobble up its victim?
- Whom is the real catfish? Aren’t we all guilty of a bit of filtering?
- Is there an eagle searching for a meal? Is the catfish in mortal danger?
Let’s see what worlds you can whirl with your words.
Challenge Requirements
Your story must:
- Tell us a fictional story inspired by catfishing
- Be min 100 and max 1000 words long, excluding the title, subtitle, and any post-story bio/links. (We use Medium’s own word count feature.)
- Use “Catfish” as one of your five tags.
- We recommend Fiction, Flash Fiction and maybe your genre too. But it’s your choice.
- Please link back to the prompt so others can find it easily.
New here? Here’s how to write with us. We’d love to see your stories.
*And no, we do not spell gullible with six Ls.
