Nightmare Fuel / The Metamorphoses

• The birth and emergence of Bacchus. It starts with Jupiter raping Semele. Then Juno manipulates events, forcing Jupiter to burn her alive and bear her infant son in his leg. After the baby god Bacchus is born, he intimidates Acoetes into becoming his high priest heads to Thebes. There, he whips the entire female population into a frenzy and forces them to rip the king Pentheus limb from limb. The crowner? The leader of this group is Agave, Pentheus's mother.
• The story of Erysichthon, a king who chops down a tree in the sacred grove of Ceres and is punished with never-ending hunger. He ends up selling all his possessions to buy food, down to selling his daughter into slavery (though she escapes through her Voluntary Shapeshifting). And in the end, he dies trying to eat himself.
• Dear gods of Olympus, Medusa's backstory. She was originally a beautiful priestess of Athena, but was raped by Poseidon in the goddess's temple. Even worse? Poseidon never suffers any punishment for the act. And for the crime of being raped, Athena transforms her deflowered priestess into a horrifying monster.
• Ovid's take on Hermaphrodites' origins—originally, Hermaphrodites was a young boy, born to Hermes and Aphrodite (hence his name), but one day, a nymph fell in uncontrollable lust with him. Hermaphrodites wanted nothing to do with her, but she refused to take no for an answer. Eventually, she called out for the gods to let them be together forever. What did the gods do? Well, they decided to answer the request...by merging them together into a single entity. So now, poor Hermaphrodites is forced to share a body with his attempted rapist...forever. Did we mention Hermaphrodites was underage when this was happening?
• The fall of Phaeton. When he tries to drive the chariot of the sun he swiftly loses control and realises what a huge mistake he's made, veering wildly off course and spreading fiery chaos across the heavens and the earth, causing mass death, rivers and seas to boil and the land to burn, even making the gods panic until Zeus is forced to intervene and blast the terrified Phaeton out of the sky to prevent the entire world from being destroyed.
  Then, truly, Phaeton sees the whole earth on fire. He cannot bear the violent heat, and he breathes the air as if from a deep furnace. He feels his chariot glowing white. He can no longer stand the ash and sparks flung out, and is enveloped in dense, hot smoke. He does not know where he is, or where he is going, swept along by the will of the winged horses.

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