The Goddes of Love is Evil

Ah, that's true.

But this society would still kill off a lot of acceptable emotional displays and tropes, since the OP explicitly stated that DEVOTION ITSELF is seen as evil. Aside from the ubiquitous tendency to rationalize things or find loopholes, where would the line be drawn between "normal/rational" devotion and "irrational/evil" devotion?

Is the justice system a literal Cycle of Revenge / Equivalent Exchange where "if someone harms or kills your child, it's acceptable to kill/harm the perpetrator proportionately"—so while you can't intentionally KILL someone who crippled your child, you are within legality to cripple the perpetrator because that's what they did to your child? And how do they treat people who snap and go berserk? Do they have a "crime of passion" clause where unusual violence from an otherwise reasonable person is viewed as "temporarily incapable of normal reason," or do they just lock people up for being "possessed" by the goddess of love?

Or, alternately: The Artisan Formerly Known As The Goddess Of Love gets a bad rap because of a number of mass mind control incidents. (Imagine if one of those old sword-and-sandal dime novel cults succeeded, basically.) What the Artisan represents isn't inherently wrong, but a bunch of extremists went and made them wrong while trying to do right, so now society at large thinks poorly of them.

This gives the society solid, actual reason to avoid loving attachments, in addition to whatever tenets the local religion or mythology follows.

...or did I misunderstand things here?

Well, she's already considered evil for losing the godly civil war, so that's more of enforcing an already negative view already held by society.

I'm going to put on my world-history hat and start digging into this situation.

Even if the goddess of love lost a divine war, many people have pointed out that love and devotion are almost always seen as GOOD THINGS. Before the war, they would logically have had the same view because history as well as mythology is FULL of romance, with both good and bad endings. It would take a long time for them to ACTUALLY view her as representing the negative side of human nature because after losing the war, you still have to make sure the losers convert to your side.

I really only see this happening as a cult/sect/bunch-of-kooks-that-nobody-pays-attention-to outright using the divine war as propaganda to go "I Knew It!, THE GODDESS OF LOVE IS EVIL BECAUSE SHE LOST THE WAR." And then they'd start getting demoralized people onto their side or outright CAUSE a mass Despair Event Horizon to start getting a foothold, but they'd NEED to use force to gain any sort of traction against the human tendency to form attachments to people. I mean, humans are social beings. Being isolated for too long has documented affects on your sanity; being the child of neglectful parents has a HUGE range of negative effects; and people who have NO capacity for love and devotion are routinely seen as Complete Monsters.

So yeah, the cult that hates love would need to 1) destroy her temples and kill her clergy to demoralize people, and 2) kill the most outspoken members of the population to Make an Example of Them. I'd say this needs to take place over at least a hundred years (1-2 generations), but more realistically 200-300 years for the society to turn out the way you intend it to.

Basically, this is going to function like colonization.

And even after the dominant views have taken over, there's going to be three HUGE aspects you need for a sense of realism.

• Holdouts, secret or otherwise. Some of the clergy survived and teach people the old ways in secret. Some people converted in public to survive, but in private, they do whatever the fuck they want. People will hold secret/disguised congregations if there's literally ANY CHANCE to do so. Plus, maybe some people caught wind that their side might lose, and this sparked a HUGE migration of devotees into 1) an isolated region that the government doesn't know about or simply can't reach (bodies of water, forests, or mountains are really good defenses), or 2) a friendly country that adopted them as immigrants. The secret holdouts could be an underground movement all the way up to an Open Secret, while the openly-known holdouts would eventually get ignored/forgotten about or outright UnPersoned.

• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters. Self-explanatory. People will inevitably see the Fridge Logic of calling a goddess of love "evil" just because she lost a war. People lose wars all the fucking time, so what's different about a goddess? There's going to be a whole lot of The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified going around, especially if that revolution LITERALLY advocates for love.

• Serial Numbers Filed Off. A lot of times, the dominant religion will syncretize/adopt SOME aspects of the old religion, either because it doesn't do any harm, because there's something like it in the dominant culture anyway, or because they tried to get rid of it before and everyone started rioting. Maybe a particular goddess/saint is SUPPOSEDLY different from the "evil" goddess of love, but everyone with half a brain knows that the love-goddess just got a new name and/or appearance. Or maybe a deity from the dominant religion conveniently took over the sphere of "acceptable" love/devotion shortly after the proper love-goddess lost the war, and everyone knows it's because people started rioting when the takeover religion declared EVERY aspect of romantic love as evil.

Yes, I mentioned rioting a lot. People don't like it when you say they can't love other people.

edited 14th Jul '16 12:07:15 PM by Sharysa

Agreed.

The goddess of knowledge being considered evil wuld have similarly huge impacts on the society.

I'll point out that Ancient Greece had a MASSIVELY negative view on love (they viewed it as a form of insanity) yet none of THAT happened to them.

In practice, the Greeks don't act nearly as hostile to the concept of love as their "official" stance of "love is insanity" would entail. Their mythology's still got SCADS of people falling in love with beautiful strangers, brave warriors rescuing princesses and then living Happily Ever After, awesome women doing shit because their husband/lover/family is in danger, a surprising amount of heartwarming moments in a mythology where the gods are frequently seen as dicks, and so on.

Regardless of what the official stance is, love for the Greeks seems to function more as a two-sided coin of "healthy love makes people do great things, but Love Makes You Crazy if things go wrong." Like, you know, real life.

But the OP is describing an all-out SHIFT in society. In our world, that usually doesn't happen without SOMEONE conquering another group.

edited 14th Jul '16 2:31:49 PM by Sharysa

See the bit about the godly civil war.

Also, a small point about people only marrying for political gain and such for most of world history, that only really happened for nobility. The common folk who had very little to gain via such marriages married as they pleased, and often quite late, much like we do today. So in this world where marrying for love seems to be banned, most people would probably never get married at all

As for ancient greeks and love. It was mostly love between a mand and a woman that was considered so so, somtimes. They loved love between two men.

But yeah, banning love is hard cause humans are literally wired to love. So one possibility would be that the government or local simply organizes breeding pairs, say, pair a man and woman togheter, they have sex and go their seperate ways, and then when the baby is born, take the baby away from the mother so they can't bond. There would possibly be quite a few orphanages around where children are raised by rotating personell. Can't have them forming attachments after all.

edited 14th Jul '16 5:41:09 PM by Clawthewolf

Then why were so many of the female characters in Greek mythology so fanservice-y?

So, it's basically The Giver, but with gods?

Hmm... an interesting way to try and go about it...

Demetrios: Because Everyone Is Bi in Ancient Greece. Girls were pretty sweet, but guys were EVEN BETTER.

I heard that the "Everyone Is Bi" part of ancient Greek culture was mostly the rich aristocrat types.

Actually thinking about it, I doubt even nobility would marry in a world like this since there would be no political benefit to those unions. The basic idea is to unify the dynasties and form alliances and so on. If everyone just adopts their kids (potentially when they are already adults) and are not expected to have any emotional attachment to them, that whole system collapses. Unless being allowed to keep your children as part of your is one of the privelieges of the nobility, but that would just raise even more jealousy amongst the commoners and further increase the risk of rebellion an revolts.

In this setting the whole idea of "bloodlines" and dynasties would be pointless, except for possibly breeding desired traits

Add to that that people would be much less motivated to do progress, or great things since the desire to create a legacy is essentially shunned. Also of note is that according to a study the absolute majority of Victoria cross recipients (the GB's finest military honor, like the US's Medal of Honor) come from a background of responsible older siblings. Those who had to take care of their siblings when their parents couldn't or wouldn't, was then drafted and then saw their unit as their new family, performing extraordinary and almost impossible feats of bravery and skill in order to protect their new family.

edited 16th Jul '16 8:46:24 AM by Clawthewolf

Btw, I mentioned the godly civil war a LOT in my "colonization/takeover" theory. I literally said "priests would jump on the chance to use the divine civil war as propaganda to cause a mass Despair Event Horizon in the country," and there would inevitably be people going "wait, why does losing a war automatically mean she's EVIL?"

edited 16th Jul '16 4:06:53 PM by Sharysa