I'm gonna sound basic, but dragons. Seems like almost all cultures have come up with their own ideas of dragons, from vile monsters to wise sages. Often with fantastical powers, like fire breathing and the like.
I especially like stories with dragons as villains, but working off some humanly inscrutable motivation, just intelligent, powerful beings seeing us as ants.
Also, dragon-adjacent creatures like wyverns, wyrms, drakes and others, there's a lot of diversity in dragon folklore.
It's a moralist in the colloquial, pejorative sense