Okay so check it out.
Basically Oedipus is this dude who is the king of this city called Cadmus. He has a pretty sweet deal, because he happened to show up right after some dudes in the desert murdered the old king and then he freed them all from this evil sphinx by answering that riddle from ghostbusters which made it inexplicably kill itself and so naturally everybody made him king and he got to bang the queen Jocasta. Like essentially the best day ever.
Except now days are not so good, because Cadmus has just completely gone to shit. Not that it is Oedipus’ fault or anything, because it’s not. Just like, everyone is dying of plague and all the crops are dead and none of the women are putting out or anything.
So Oedipus does what any greek king does in this situation, he calls up this prophet Tiresias (oh man tiresias. I’ll tell you about him later) and he’s like “Hey man why does my kingdom suck so many balls?” And tiresias says “well you should probably figure out who killed the king and then maybe that will solve everything. By the way you are going to kill your father and fuck your mom.”
Obviously Oedipus is not very happy about that answer so he just tells Tiresias to GTFO and then vows to find the dude who killed the old king. But here’s the problem:
OEDIPUS killed the king. Because like, he was walking through the desert, and he ran into this royal procession, and the royal procession started getting all up in his grill and so he MURDERED EVERYONE and then never thought to mention this to anyone. Oh, also, the king? Totally Oedipus’ dad. Because when Oedipus was born the Oracle at Delphi was all like: You know what your son is going to do? kill you and then sex your wife. Basically every prophet in the entire goddamn universe knew this shit was going to go down. So the king did what any greek king does and he stapled Oedipus’s feet together and sent him to the top of a mountain to die, only the guy who was supposed to take him there actually took him to some foster parents instead cause he felt bad. And then Oedipus heard a prophecy that he was gonna kill his dad and rape his mom so he left his foster parents so as not to rape and murder them and just charged STRAIGHT INTO the real rapemurderfest.
So obviously when Oedipus hears about this he gouges out his eyes and then his mom kills herself and everybody is fucking miserable forever despite the fact that all anyone was trying to do was avoid raping each other. The end.
Thanks a lot Oracle.