Make no mistake, that’s happening here too, but the majority of the people pretend to be outraged about it so when they’re told they’re wicked they can say, “I’m not murdering people! I’m not raping anyone! I’m not evil like the people who do that!” But their hypocrisy is shown in how little they do to prevent such things. People only cry about murders if they knew the person murdered, and often people outright celebrate it if a prophet happened to be one of the victims. As for rape, it’s the same deal. They only care about it after it’s happened. “Rape culture” is very much alive here. And bestiality is definitely not frowned upon in this society.
Funny you mention Zeus because the Greeks also have a flood myth and they left fewer than eight people alive if I’m not mistaken. And in my version far more than eight will survive the flood.
My protagonist. In the story, it’s been about ten generations since the creation of the world (but the average lifespan is about a thousand years, so there’s a large population.) When they story begins, one of the prophets has been killed by a terrorist, leaving my protagonist as the last one. At that point the Allfather says, “Right, I’ve waited till the last possible minute and the people still aren’t listening. If I don’t do something this whole mankind thing is going to be a bust.” Funny you should think I was talking about modern prophets because I actually do believe in those. There hasn’t been a prophetic martyrdom since 1844 but in Jeremiah’s day prophet-killings were rampant. By the second century all the prophets were dead and God decided to let the world wander in their own self-imposed blindness for a little while.
Yeah, that post just wasn't real clear you were not talking about our world. I don't know if this would help or not, but consider your story as if the Allfather is not a god at all, but powerful man like the Wizard of Oz. To make this work, it really has to seem okay that the Wizard is going to kill millions men, women and children, so the moral high ground is going to have to be crystal clear to the reader - because this isn't God, but just deity-like figure with none of the moral authority of our God.
Speaking of universals, you want a weird one? Look up elves, fairies, vila, nymphs, dwarfs, daemon, jinn, etc. The original descriptions are incredibly similar. Almost every ancient culture on the planet has mythology/folklore about semi-ethereal magic trickster beings who look almost exactly like humans (before modern fiction changed their sizes and gave some of them wings.) They always live on a slightly separate plane, so they can interact or disappear. They have their own societies, and usually live in the woods, the mountains or whatever's nearby where people don't build houses. Some cultures thought they were more spirit, some more physical, but it's hard to find a mythology without them on any continent.
Vampires, werewolves, the trickster and zombies are similarly common, but I think all of that goes back to how people didn't use to think the way modern humans do and were awestruck by unexpected behavior, like how Cortez took over the Aztecs. Check out The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Fair enough, and I'm not someone who believes in elves, but compared to various folk monsters and shape-shifter spirits and whatnot, the near ubiquity of elves/fairies/whatevers is eerie, and for some reason less recognized than other far less universal similarities in mythology and religion (trickster gods, the underworld, etc.) One of the best explanations I've read is that people basically found their ancestors' trash and thought it belonged to invisible people. During the iron age in Europe, they called stone arrowheads elfshot and thought all stone artifacts belonged to elves. They even decided elves were either allergic to or magically repelled by iron. Bizarrely though, the stories are the same in areas where people never advanced beyond paleolithic era technology. The stories go way back before all of that anyway. Even demon and jinn stories far predate the religions that feature them now, and the original versions were almost identical to elf and fairy stories. I don't know. I think it's neat that everyone had such a specific, similar idea.
