Once upon a time, there was a bard.
He lived in a time when bards were a little out of style as a form of entertainment, as there were others more popular that got more attention, but there were still plenty of bards around, singing their songs for spare coins.
Still, this bard thought he needed a little something to make him stand out from the pack,.
His songs were middling, his voice okay, his lute playing competent, he was pretty good really, but he still wanted to be the most famous of all the bards.
It burned in his breast, that other bards were getting attention that should have been his.
So one day, sitting on a chamber pot, he grew sufficiently annoyed at some rodent scurrying around the corners of the room to grab up a nice fistful of his own poo and throw it at the beast. This was a rather stupid thing to do as it didn’t get rid of the rodent and didn’t make his own circumstances any better and in fact got his hand dirty and made him look like an idiot, but as it happens this act was witnessed and it attracted the attention of some of the fouler residents of the castle, who started talking among themselves and cheering the bard who throws poo.
Delighted, our bard said to himself, “That’s the way to build a following!”, and for a time started throwing poo on a daily basis, each time to the cheers of that percentage of the plebeian public who thought this was great. He even formed an alliance with other bards who flung poo, and between them they harassed all the bards who didn’t throw poo, even getting some of them to throw poo back.
For a time, the musical culture in the kingdom was an exercise in poo being volleyed back and forth.
But as it happened, this craze died down after a while. There was poo all over the castle walls and the bards who flung poo didn’t emerge as much more popular than they would have been if they’d never flung poo, with the added impediment that there was no longer any chance of them getting any of the listeners who thought throwing poo was a terrible way to behave. They found themselves known not for making music, not for helping the hours pass, not for brightening the kingdom’s days with song, but for the throwing of poo, and nothing else.
And the bard we speak of, the one who helped originate it all, found himself in a hell of his own making: the only way he could keep the audience he had built was to regularly throw some poo.
This, it turns out, is the real risk for bards of building a reputation on throwing poo. From now on, every time you take out your lute, your audience is really just waiting for the poo. You are not only expected to throw poo. You are required to throw poo.
And soon, your music is just a footnote from you throwing poo.
This, my friends, is about a specific person.