Dystopian writing prompt: The Ministry of Affect has converted feelings into taxable commodities, and every twitch of a lip is admissible evidence. In the rain-glossed avenues of a city the color of old coins, citizens queue beneath antiseptic teal floodlights while latticework scanners comb their cheeks for tremor, blush, quiver: the invisible braille of emotion. Joy accrues penalties. Grief is deductible only if pre-approved. Rage has a surtax. The air tastes like recycled peppermint and copper as drones hum like sleepless wasps, projecting your mood-debt above your head in thin arterial red. In the amphitheater of the Micro-Expression Tribunal, you stand under a crown of sensors that maps the atlas of your face into a glowing filigree, each micromovement cross-checked against a baseline you never consented to set. The adjudicators wear porcelain masks polished to a tyrant’s shine; their voices come filtered, like a verdict spoken underwater. You were trained since childhood to hold a neutral mask—count to four, relax the zygomaticus, don’t let the tear crest—but tonight a single unlicensed quiver could cost you a year’s wages. Your case: defending a loved one flagged for “unsanctioned grief” at a state memorial, their ledger blooming with forbidden sorrow. Outside, a black market of face-coaches taps out metronomes in windowless rooms, teaching people how to breathe without paying for it. Somewhere, a crowd has learned a different trick: mirrored masks that reflect the scanners back into static, a swarm of blank faces that refuses to be priced. When the court demands your baseline—your naked, uncoached self—you feel the tax meter climbing in your pupils. Do you counterfeit calm and pay later, or let the truth ripple and risk being rendered bankrupt of feeling forever?
Key visual motifs to emphasize
- Clinical surveillance: lattice light patterns on skin, heads-up displays of EMG graphs, porcelain masks, chrome sensors, drone halos.
- Economic dread in design: ticker-like mood-debt counters, stamped ledgers, barcode tears, signage with tariff tables for joy/anger/grief.
- Palette and texture: mercury gray, antiseptic teal, bruise-violet shadows, arterial red accents; glass, cold steel, polished stone, rain-beaded surfaces.
- Human fragility: adhesive electrode marks, trembling hands, breath condensate, close-up tear meniscus, micro-twitch maps.
- Architecture of control: brutalist amphitheaters, symmetrical queues, corridors of gates, banners hissing with static.
Midjourney visual prompts (copy one per image)
- Emotion Tax Bureau checkpoint at dusk, corridor of chrome gates scanning faces, fine lattice light across cheeks, citizens holding translucent ledgers showing tariffs for joy/anger/grief, rain-speckled glass, antiseptic teal glow, brutalist towers looming, steam rising from vents, cinematic long lens, shallow depth, volumetric haze, hyperreal detail --ar 16:9 --style raw --stylize 150 --chaos 12 --seed 42 --no cartoon, lowres, text, emoji
- Micro-Expression Tribunal courtroom, circular amphitheater, defendant beneath a halo of sensors, holographic HUD projecting twitch maps, porcelain-masked adjudicators, laser-thin red lines counting tears, mercury gray with arterial red accents, glass+steel+polished stone, dust motes in cone light, dramatic rim lighting, 35mm film grain --ar 21:9 --style raw --stylize 200 --chaos 8 --no emoji, slapstick, cutesy faces
- Black-market face coach in a mirror, threadbare apartment, humming neon, adhesive electrode scars, metronome ticking to train a neutral face, peeling paint, condensation on window, sodium streetlight slant, nervous hands, tactile close-up, macro skin texture --ar 3:4 --style raw --stylize 100 --chaos 10 --seed 1337 --no glamour, fashion makeup, beauty retouch
- Tax Day parade of forced cheer, identical gray suits with painted half-smiles, drones spraying confetti that stains like ink, digital banners tallying collective mood-debt, overcast sky, oppressive symmetry, wide angle, bird’s-eye view, austere civic square --ar 16:9 --style raw --stylize 250 --chaos 18 --no pastel, kawaii, balloons
- Rebel surge of blank masks with mirrored surfaces, reflections scrambling scanners into static, phosphor-green emergency lights, rain and flying sparks, cracked visor on wet pavement, dynamic motion blur, ultrawide, high contrast, kinetic composition --ar 2:1 --style raw --stylize 300 --chaos 22 --no gore, mutilation
- Intimate macro: protagonist’s eye as the tax meter climbs, cascading HUD digits reflected, tear held at the rim, zygomaticus micro-tremor mapped in glowing filigree, near-silence implied, photoreal macro clarity --ar 9:16 --style raw --stylize 120 --no extra fingers, deformed anatomy, text overlay
Prompt formula you can adapt
- Subject and action: who/what is central + what they’re doing
- World anchors: emotion tax systems, micro-expression scanners, ledgers, porcelain masks, tribunal architecture
- Sensory mood: light, weather, textures, palette (mercury gray, antiseptic teal, bruise-violet, arterial red)
- Camera and composition: lens length, angle, depth of field, motion
- Rendering detail: film grain, volumetric haze, hyperreal vs painterly
- Constraints: negative elements via --no, aspect ratio, stylize, chaos, seed
Example structure
[Subject + Action], [Key world elements], [Atmosphere + Palette], [Textures/Materials], [Lighting + Camera], [Composition cue], [Detail level] --ar [ratio] --style raw --stylize [value] --chaos [value] --seed [num] --no [unwanted]
Variation controls
- Realism vs stylization: lower --stylize (50–150) for strict realism; higher (200–350) for expressive, metaphor-rich visuals.
- Predictability: adjust --chaos (0–30). Lower for consistent iterations; higher to discover unexpected visual metaphors.
- Focus: use portrait ratios (3:4 or 9:16) for character micro-twitches; ultrawide (21:9 or 2:1) for tribunals, parades, or city control-scapes.
- Clean faces: include --style raw and modest --stylize to keep facial micro-details intact; add --no makeup, --no beauty retouch for authenticity.
- Weighting: emphasize core ideas using multi-prompt weighting, e.g., Emotion Tax Bureau::1 Micro-expression scanner halo::0.8 citizen queue::0.9 rain::0.4 brutalist architecture::0.7
Use these to generate a suite of images that visually ground your story: the clinical machinery of pricing feelings, the theater of the micro-expression trial, and the fragile human face trying not to betray the truth it was born to show.
