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Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu
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alt title(s): Punch Out A God  
"He's a god; it'll take more than one shot."
So, along comes the Eldritch Abomination: incomprehensible, insanity-inducing gods; alien beings that don't even notice humanity, let alone care; technological beings whose thoughts encompass the universe. You know the type. Eternal, infinite, impossible to even understand, let alone oppose...
And then along come a couple of plucky heroes, who didn't get told that the Abomination is impossible to beat (and even if they were told, they wouldn't care). Through some combination of skill, brains, courage and occasionally raw world-shattering power, maybe some kind of incredibly circuitous strategy, maybe trap, and/or sheer dumb luck, or hey, When All You Have Is A Hammer they go to work and... they beat the abomination.
In short, you just killed a God. Not a Mook, not an Elite Mook, not The Dragon... a GOD!
This appears in quite a few videogames (especially RPG's), where the Final Boss is inevitably some kind of Ultimate Evil unleashed upon the world, or the Big Bad has ascended to godhood and gone One Winged Angel... only to be defeated by the heroes by whittling down its health points. Particularly jarring if the Horror in question is allegedly so powerful that the Precursors were only able to seal it away, or if the heroes claim it was defeated via The Power Of Friendship (when it's obvious they won via the Power Of BFS, More Dakka and Nuke-Level Summon Magic). Sometimes you actually do kill God, which is commonplace in JRPGs.
A common Hand Wave in video games (RPG's in particular) is to have something happen that relates to the story and limits the Big Bad's power and/or brings the heroes up to its level... then pummel it with BFSes and Nuke-level magic.
Maybe the heroes may have found some rules that the power in question has limits or a Necessary Drawback, and then proceed to exploit it ruthlessly. Maybe Cthulhu Had The Flu. Sometimes what they defeated was just part of the being in our reality at the time, in which case reducing its Hit Points to 0 just temporarily banishes it; they were Fighting A Shadow.
This is generally the result of whenever you put an Eldritch Abomination in the same room as a Super Hero, or anyone or anything else capable of hitting For Massive Damage. Do not expect this trope to appear in any Cosmic Horror Story worth its salt, except perhaps as a Hope Spot.
Compare Power Creep Power Seep, Strong As They Need To Be, New Powers As The Plot Demands, Gods Hands Are Tied, Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu, Staring Down Cthulhu, Always A Bigger Fish, Summon Bigger Fish (the latter two are when it's essentially Yog Soggoth punching out Cthulhu), Lovecraft Lite.
Contrast Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu, Did We Just Have Tea With Cthulhu, Punch Punch Punch Uh Oh.
Not to be confused with The Worf Effect.
Also see Do Not Taunt Cthulhu and Olympus Mons.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- Many Doctor Strange and Fantastic Four comics.
- Ghost Rider has an ability called Penance Stare, which forces people to experience the suffering they have wrought on others. In one Fantastic Four cartoon, he uses this power against Galactus. This trope probably applies to every time that Galactus has gotten driven off or defeated, but this example may take the cake.
- Heck, he's even fought Lucifer (not Mephisto, Lucifer) and won.
- Reed Richards (the world's top Galactus driver-offer) killed the Dreaming Celestial, a SSPAAACE GOD, trying to destroy the universe, combining this with Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu.
- The Authority, when they killed the Maker of the World.
- And more or less literally in the first four pages of The Authority: Prime, a miniseries of, admittedly, debatable quality.
Hawksmoor: What the hell is that thing?
Doctor: Your basic elder god, returned from a dimension it was banished to millennia ago, here to turn Earth into its own personal slaughterhouse.
Hawksmoor: So we're talking...
Doctor: Two minutes.
- Pretty much every superhero in the DC Universe has punched out the Evil New God Darkseid, the ruler of Apokolips including nonpowered superheroes like Batman and Green Arrow.
- Darkseid isn't quite in the Cosmic Horror category though, and it is often hinted at that Darkseid isn't really trying or isn't at full power when he is fighting the Superheroes. When you consider the ease in which he takes over the world in Final Crisis, this gives those old theories some credence.
- Or just says something about the Anti-Life Equation, which he's been searching for for at least 30 years of comic continuity. He was easily defeated time and again without this weapon, and takes over the world in a fingersnap once he has it. Guess that's why he wanted it so bad.
- Darkseid has a history of keeping enemies alive if they've put up a good fight. This isn't as stupid as it sounds, considering his "defeats" tend to be more that the opposition's just capable enough that the current plan's no longer worth the effort, and Darkseid has had no few occasions where he converts heroes into his footsoldiers. The trouble of when he brainwashed Supergirl and when his underlings tried to use Batman as a soldier template can attest to that.
- The Martian Manhunter explained how things work in the DC Universe in New Maps of Hell when they discovered the "god" they were fighting (who'd ravaged Mars in the distant past) was merely a highly advanced artificial intelligence with, well, a god complex.
"We're the Justice League. We've beaten up real gods and made them cry. You are nothing to us."
- The Legion of Super Heroes occasionally go beat up the Time Trapper, essentially an Anthropomorphic Personification of a force of entropy. Particularly notable is the time that Mon-El (a Captain Ersatz of Superboy) killed the Time Trapper and, as a result, rebooted reality.
Legion Abstract: Doesn't sound noble, until you think about it: for Mon, the Time Trapper isn't a person so much as he's a force of entropy; if you kill him, is it murder or experimental physics?
- Another DCU example is Trigon. Big, unspeakable, cosmic horror. Has multitudes of worlds bowing to him in abject fear. Yet, in their first outing a group of what had, up until that point, been "mere" teenaged sidekicks and new characters take him down. A couple years later, they do it again.
- Runaways: Technically, they only have to survive long enough for the Gibborim's time on this world to run out and wait for the baddies to fade away, but given that the fight involves Molly throwing Victor at one's face, it still qualifies.
- The Goon and Hellboy are both pretty much based on this trope. In the latter, while admittedly many of the supporting characters often use more traditional methods of dealing with monsters, the main character's usual approach is to punch them really hard with his giant stone hand and shooting them with his Hand Cannon. This is Lampshaded in the Goon/Hellboy crossover issue found in the Heaps of Ruination trade paperback. When confronted with the Communist Airborne Mollusk Militia, and specifically their champion, a massive octopus with a hot-air balloon strapped to his head, this bit of dialogue ensues:
Hellboy: Stand back! I do this for a living!"
Goon: Oh yeah? When I come across somethin' like this I just try ta punch it in the head — what do you do?"
Hellboy: Pretty much the same thing.
The two heavyset heroes go on to do just that.
- Justified when Captain Atom beats up Nekron, one of three Anthropomorphic Personifications of death itself, since the whole reason Nekron is fighting him in the first place is that Captain Atom's power comes from the life energy of the universe. (So when Cap later beats up another personification of death, the Black Racer, it's a little anticlimactic, frankly.)
- Squirrel Girl's special ability appears to be punching out Marvel Universe Big Bads.
- As long as they are off screen anyway.
- Rex Libris has this sort of thing as part of his job. As a public librarian. He even calls Nyarlathotep a wuss.
- In the 1970s, veteran scribes Marv Wolfman and Len Wein wrote The Incredible Hulk: Stalker From the Stars, wherein the Hulk crosses paths with an Eldritch Abomination attempting to escape its prison beneath the Earth so it could conquer and enslave humanity. In this case, the Hulk doesn't punch Cthulhu out so much as rip him to pieces and burn him alive. Ouch.
- Hulk often invokes this trope, whether he's smacking around Thor and Hercules, or smashing some multiversal threat with the Defenders. One early foe of his was the Galaxy Master, whose most common form was a huge gaping maw hanging in the middle of space. Hulk's answer? Jump inside it and smash it from within.
- In the current Hulk book, Red Hulk punched The Watcher, and in a recent issue he punched an Elder of the Universe to death.
- Wein also gave us The Lurker in Tunnel 13, a Swamp Thing story featuring M'Nagalah the All-Consuming, the shoggoth-like father of life on Earth and and fountain of all human knowledge. Swamp Thing causes a cave-in at the mineshaft where M'Nagalah is awaiting the proper alignment of the cosmos that will allow him to conquer the universe, destroying him in the process (at least temporarily, anyway.)
- Slainé (Mac Roth) from 2000AD does this more than once. Admittedly, the biggest Eldritch Abomination that he faced, the High Cythron Grimnismal, was just finishing off his regeneration when Slainé and his party arrived, and could be brought down by the cutting of a few feeding tubes.
- Circuit Breaker, in the classic Transformers comics, was able to cause the universe-ending god, Unicron, to scream in pain by attacking him with cybernetic implants she made herself. Granted, she was left catatonic afterward, but still...
- The Wretch, a little-known superhero, uses Satan's Literal Genie status against him and, using a birthday card, turns Satan into a crayon. Which he puts into a packet, which contains Beelzebub, Bhaal and Lucifer crayons as well.
- In Dojon, Herbert kills the Absolute Evil with just two fingers. Of course he can do it with anyone who's green.
- In Green Arrow, back while Hal Jordan was the Spectre, Oliver met his friend after coming back from the dead. He was stunned and Hal shrunk to normal size to approach him. That's when Green Arrow punched Spectre.
- Atomic Robo volume 3 has Robo facing down an Eldritch Abomination from outside the universe multiple times across the 20th century, with the help of cars, lightning, guns and Carl Sagan. Existing outside space and time, it keeps coming back, but the end of issue four suggests that all the Robos from each Cthulu encounter have teamed up for a cross-time beatdown.
- In Sonic Universe #4, Shadow, Rouge, and Omega travel to the Special Zone and challenge Feist for his Chaos Emerald. When they fail (for the second time in two days) he taunts them, and invites them back tomorrow because they amuse him. Omega responds by pumping him full of every round of ammo he has. It doesn't kill him, but it does stun him long enough for the trio to grab the emerald and teleport out of there.
- It seems to be a common occurance in Sonic Universe. Four issues later, Sonia and Manik did this to Perfect Tikhaos.
- Conan the Barbarian does this about once a month or so, depending on the writer.
- A lot of Marvel Comics fans felt this when Superman knocked out Thor in JLA/Avengers.
- The Batman does this to Metron, a God. He tells Metron that he knows more than him because of his human form. Metron Shapeshifts to a Human and says "What's so special about THIS?". Batman punches him. Pow!
- Let's not forget Earth's 2's Superman finally beating The Anti-Monitor in the finale of Crisis On Infinite Earths by punching the flaming, shrieking, enraged head that was left of him.
- Wonder Woman finally killed Ares the God of War in a recent arc. She didn't just "beat" him or "banish" him — she killed him. By smashing in his skull with a battleaxe. Of course, Ares isn't completely out of the story yet. Even gods have a hell after all.
- In The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home, Sheemie manages to knock down the Crimson King, who is - for all itents and purposes - the universal personification of evil in every single conceivable form of existence.
- In Preacher, the protaganist has the nerve to use his Word power on God himself. I'm not kidding. He actually tries to make the Creator of everything do his bidding!
Film
- Ghostbusters: The eponymous busters have to Cross The Streams to do it, but they defeat Gozer the Gozarian, an ancient god worshipped by the Hittites, Mesopotamians, and the Sumerians around 6000BC that would take on a Destructor Form from the thoughts of humans in the area and wreak havoc once it was summoned into our world.
- "We came, we saw, we kicked its ass"!
- Conan the Destroyer: what to do when you involuntarily helped the return of an ancient monstrous god? Wrestle him and rip his horn with bare hands, of course!
- Spock blasting the God imposter in Star Trek V.
- Freddy Vs Jason: Lori Campbell, probably both series greatest example of Took A Level In Badass, sets the docks on fire, blowing both of them into the lake, then decapitated Freddy Krueger with a fucking machete.
- Since when have Freddy and Jason become gods, and how come no other Final Girl in these movies deserves a mention if they are gods in the first place?
- From whence you came you shall remain until you are complete again!
- In Dogma, when Silent Bob kills the demon Azrael with Cardinal Glick's driver.
Literature
- The main man himself is (temporarily) thwarted in The Call of Cthulhu when he is run down by a steamship (he begins regenerating but becomes stuck in R'yleh).
- In August Derleth's Trail of Cthulhu, the above sequence is one-upped when Cthulhu is thwarted (again temporarily) by having a nuclear bomb dropped on him.
- There's also "The Dunwich Horror". While the horror may not actually be a god (he's a spawn of one of them), the characters manage to banish him. As all three characters neither die or become cripplingly insane (they're not so bad off as to be locked up), this is probably the only happy ending in the Cthulu Mythos as penned by Lovecraft.
- Eskarina Smith kicked her way through the Discworld Dungeon Dimension creatures in Equal Rites. Also, earlier, in The Colour of Magic, Rincewind accidentally beats Bel-Shamharoth with Twoflower's picturebox's flash.
- Mind you, Discworld Dungeon Dimension creatures are described as being very weak against purely physical threats — they do, however, eat magic that is used against them to become much stronger.
- Rincewind knew this when he wound up in the Dungeon Dimension in Sourcery. His weapon of choice? A brick in a sock. It worked.
- The Witch-king of Angmar in The Lord of the Rings was thought to be unbeatable, because Glorfindel had prophesied "not by the hand of man will he fall." Funny what will happen when a woman gets her hand on a sword. Not to mention the Hobbit with the conveniently anti-Ringwraith-enchanted dagger.
- Michael Moorcock's The Elric Saga series (and the Eternal Champion, et al.) have great fighters slaying sons of gods, and then eventually the gods themselves, in an escalating arms race.
- In the Dragaera series, Morrolan kills a Physical God with a Great Weapon, and a Jenoine goes the same way at the hands of Vlad and Godslayer. Tazendra manages to defeat a Jenoine in single combat without a Great Weapon, and Devara, in dragon form ate one.
- Justified in the Conan The Barbarian novels. It is explicitly stated that Eldritch Abominations and demons lose much of their power when they enter reality. They still tend to be the strongest opponents Conan faces.
- In CS Lewis' Perelandra, Dr Ransom acts as the Good Angel when the Queen of Venus is tempted by a literal demon towards falling from grace. With the salvation of the entire planet hanging in the balance, Ransom realizes the demon's possession of an astronaut (which enabled it to enter the planet in the first place) was its Achilles Heel — he could simply pummel the thing into submission.
- Subverted and played for a good laugh in John Dechancie's Red Limit Freeway. After traveling for lightyears along roads built by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens the heroes meet a handsome, slightly androgynous man in flashy clothes. One of the heroes, convinced the man is responsible for his alien abduction, hits him with a sucker punch. Cue the protagonist: "I think you may have just punched out God." Other guy: "Nah, God has a beard."
- Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy sets up god, AKA the Authority, as the enemy of free will and human interest, but in the third book he proves to have been so weakened by old age that he gets turned to dust by a strong breeze. A more threatening villain is his Second, Metatron, who himself can only be defeated when he is hurled into the void between universes, and thus destroyed forever.
- John Taylor from the Nightside books does this approximately every five minutes. No sooner does he hype how much of a terrifying unbeatable badass so-and-so is, then half a page later he beats them.
- Admittedly, it's usually through the Inherent Gift inherited from his vanished mother who eventually turns out to be Lilith, who was the ancestor of 95% of the Eldritch Abominations in the series in the first place. Given that his Gift enables him to find and hit any beings Achilles Heel, it's interesting that the series managed to maintain the necessary Dramatic Tension to keep going.
- Done repeatedly in Robin Jarvis' Deptford Mice, Deptford Histories, and Whitby Witches series.
- In an eventually undone timeline in the third novel of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy, Raistlin, a mortal man, albeit the most powerful wizard in the history of Krynn, had killed Takhisis, the chief goddess of darkness, whose primary form was a five-headed dragon.
- In The Dresden Files, part of Harry Dresden's backstory is that, at the age of sixteen, he beat a kind of demonic bounty hunter sicced on him by his Evil Mentor. He later discovers to his shock that the demonic bounty hunter called He Who Walks Behind is an Outsider—in Dresdenverse terms, an Eldritch Abomination. Fully trained wizards spend centuries learning how to defeat Outsiders.
- To avoid accusations of Beginners Luck, Harry's mother specifically had Harry under the appropriate signs which give him the ability to affect Outsiders in ways that normal wizards can't. Any wizard born under similar circumstances would have the same abilities.
- When Morgan gets his Character Development we find out that he killed a skinwalker by luring it to a military testing range in Nevada then teleporting out just before they set off a nuke
- In a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for humanity in The Salvation War: Armageddon, the U.S. opens up a portal to Satan and fires two anti-ship missiles at him. One of them gets a headshot. Justified, since demons are just flesh and blood lifeforms, just like us.
- "I have always been fortunate in my enemies-" *shhhnk* "hurk -" "Happy Assumption Day, fucker." *stab*
- In Glen Cook's series The Instrumentalities of the Night, the main character, "too ignorant to know he can never prevail over such a thing," discovers that even the most powerful gods are vulnerable to a mix of iron and silver hurled — this is the key point — by the newly developed gunpowder weapons. After a while, he's got troops trained to do it almost routinely.
- In Skulduggery Pleasant, they manage to kill the Grotesquery, a creature partially constructed from the corpse of a Faceless One, albeit with great difficulty and several casualties. In the third book, Valkyrie kills two Faceless Ones using a weapon designed to do so. Skulduggery manages to force one back through the door to their prison using a stron gust of wind. In the process, the weapon is destroyed, and Skulduggery is dragged along with the Faceless One.
- In Paradise Lost, Abdiel hitting Satan. Although an Angel, in Paradise Lost Abdiel is far below in glory the illustrious figures of Lucifer, Michael, Raphael, etc. His only distinction is loyalty, being the one angel to hear and reject Satan's offer to revolt. In the opening salvo of the War in Heaven, mighty Satan appears bedecked in his warrior-king regalia, ready to smite on all sides. Instead, Abdiel pops out of the fray and clocks him on the head, knocking him cold before he can strike a blow.
- In a Night Watch series novel Face of the Dark Palmira by Vladimir Vasilyev, a powerful Other (i.e. wizard) is in a magical stand-off with the agents of the Odessa Day Watch. He is punched out by a half-dazed, naked Dark Other with a regular torchiere over the head. It is explained later that the baddie attempted to maximize his magical potential by entering the Gloom (the magical dimension) half-way, which, ironically, left him vulnerable to physical attacks.
- The Everworld series of novels has several instances of humans attacking gods, with varying amounts of success.
- In the Doom novels by Brad Linaweaver and Dafydd ab Hugh, Flynn Taggart quickly realizes that the stereotypical "demons" he is encountering are nothing of the kind, by virtue of the fact that guns will kill them.
- At the end of the story Interlink, Trent, the villain, and Lonny, the protagonist, fall from a plane and hit the ground, creating a crater. Lonny gets out, unharmed since Trent broke his fall, and reunites with Maggie, Kay, and Jack. Although Trent seems to be dead, he gets up and is about to kill the four when Lonny tells him that his cell phone, which gave him his godlike powers and the ability to control the Interlink, shattered after the fall. Trent's eyes scream "Oh Crap" as he realizes he is now only human, and is suddenly shot in the back of the head by Evan, who was believed to have died earlier. After shooting him, Evan says "God Mode...deactivated."
- None of the gods actually die in Dan Simmons's Ilium, but the Greek heroes send several teleporting away with injuries, Hockenberry tasers Hera with 50,000 volts, and Mahnmut (who is a kind of sentient non-combat android) steals a flying chariot by jumping in kicking out the goddess driving it.
- Actually, in Olympos Hector decapitates Dionysos and feeds his body to the dogs and Paris's funeral pyre.
- At the end of the first book of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the protagonist (a 15-year-old scullion with barely any formal training with weapons, noted by several characters as having not stopped growing) kills or at least seriously wounds one of the last remaining dragons in the world, which had already killed two of his much stronger/faster/more skilled/generally better at killing things comrades.
- In the Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels novel Deus Sanguinius, Rafen manages to kill the Lord of Change Malfallax. However, to do so he had to use the Spear of Telesto to do so and Broke His Arm Doing So.
- In the 'Magic: The Gathering' Kamigawa saga, we have Hidetsugu, an ogre warlord who has every qualification to be categorized as a badass, including serving a ancient demon-god with the conspicuous moniker of 'All-Consuming Oni of Chaos'. Eventually, Hidetsugu turns on his employer-unspeakable horror for wussying out of an epic fight, and thus proceeds to fist said Oni into submission. In an subversion of breaking his arm while doing so, he actually merges with the god and takes his place.
Live Action TV
- The Doctor Who 2-parter "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" sees the Doctor and Rose defeat The Beast, an ancient evil who claimed to serve as the basis for the Devil in every mythology and religion in the universe. Granted, it took a whole Black Hole to do so.
- Definitely not the first time the Doctor has defeated such an enemy, either; see Sutekh, Fenric, The Black Guardian and Omega.
- And the Gods of Ragnarok, Morgana Le Fay, and Rassilon himself!
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer: For one villain (the Judge), all the mystical texts declare that "no weapon forged" can stop him. However, as Xander realizes, those texts predate modern weapons. And thus, Buffy takes the Judge out with a rocket launcher.
- Some of their Big Bad's were essentially demon gods, who they eventually had to defeat to go on to the next season. By the end they faced against The First Evil.
- Let's not forget Willow. She hurt the Egyptian God of Death when he refused to bring Tara back from the dead. She hurt a god!
- Willow did this to Glory long before Osiris. Twice. Once in a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge via lightning and a bag of knives, and the second when she restores Tara's sanity, and blew Glory away like she was a piece of paper. Granted, Glory got back up seconds later, but seriously weakened.
- Literally occurs in Star Trek:Deep Space Nine, in which Q creates a boxing ring and begins taunting Sisko, and when Sisko had enough of it he flat out punched Q. Q remarks, "You hit me. Picard never hit me!"
- More of an in-joke, since Picard is the Pacifist while Sisko is a gritty kill everyone type action hero. Consider that Kirk would have done the same, or had Spock try to Vulcan-Nerve Pinch him.
- Also, in the Grand Finale, Sisko takes out Gul Dukat after he's imbued with eldritch power as the emissary of the P'ah Wraiths with an extremely crude bull rush.
- Well, an extremely crude bull rush into the fires of hell. That probably counts for something.
- This is a recurring theme in DS 9, albeit mostly metaphorical. The Gods of the Dominion are the main antagonists for much of the show (although they are in fact changelings just like Odo.) And they stated that a type of radiation is harmless to humanoids but kills non-corporeal life forms, such as the Gods of Bajor in the wormhole and their Evil Counterpart, the Pah-Wraiths. You'd almost think they introduced religion into an entirely secular setting just to make this point.
- It is an accepted part of Klingon culture that ancient Klingons found the gods to be troublesome, so they slew them. According to Klingon myth their Gods were destroyed by the beating of the hearts of the first two Klingons and set the heavens on fire.
- In Star Trek: Borg, a Full Motion Video game where Q assists the player in taking revenge against the Borg, the player is given the option to either punch Q in the face or deliver a Groin Attack to him.
- In the Red Dwarf finale, The Grim Reaper himself shows up to claim Rimmer. Rimmer kicks him in the nads and runs away.
- Happens damn near literally in Farscape — the invincible space vampire Maldis is defeated in his second appearance with a couple punches and gunshots.
- In Torchwood, Owen beats Death in a wrestling match.
- Technically, he just held Death until it died of starvation for lack of souls to consume, as at this point Owen himself is technically dead.
- Let's not forget the time that Captain Jack Harkness kills Abaddon by having him absorb Jack's immortal life force until he overdosed (or something).
- In the season 5 finale of Lost, Benjamin Linus kills Jacob. Yes, that Jacob; the guy who's pretty much been played as God since his offscreen introduction to the series.
- The made-for-TV movie Fallen on ABC Family, where the hero is the Antichrist, and he exists to redeem his father Satan, but instead, he kills him.
- The Power Rangers do this very, very often:
- In season one, Rita Repulsa summons this ancient spirit Lokar (in the original Japanese series Zyuranger, Lokar's name was "Dai Satan." Yeah). The Power Rangers defeat Lokar and send him running, screaming in pain. That's right. The Power Rangers beat the devil in a fight. In their first year (!).
- In season three, Rita's father Master Vile arrives. Vile is described as the most evil being in the Universe. The Power Rangers deliver such a beatdown that Master Vile runs back to his home planet within about five episodes.
- In season eight, the Lightspeed Rangers' major arch-enemy is a demonic elder being named Queen Bansheera. Bansheera's ultimate plan is to open the gates to monster hell, and have demon spirits lay waste to planet Earth. Carter, the Red Ranger, manages to defeat Bansheera in hand-to-hand combat, then drops her into monster hell, and seals her in.
- Admittedly, Carter DID have a bit of help as the other 5 Rangers were trying to pull him OUT of the portal to hell whilst Bansherra was pulling him IN, until Diabolico got her to let go and pulled her in whilst Carter was pulled out and the portal sealed.
- In season ten, the Wild Force Rangers spend the season up against Master Org. In the finale, when Master Org gains an upgrade, he manages to kill a god, the deity Animus. But through the strength of the Rangers' belief, they summon one hundred zords who focus their ultimate attack on Master Org and turn him to dust.
- In season thirteen, the final villain that the Power Rangers Space Patrol Delta face is a giant sentient space-ship named Omni (who had been forcing the other villains to rebuild him all season-long). The SPD Rangers bust out their respective zords (including a sky-scraper that gets up and walks around), and you can guess what happens.
- In season fourteen, the final villain for the Mystic Force Rangers is a Cthulhu-esque demonic entity named the Master, who eats magic. After murdering the Rangers' family and mentors, he consumes their magic. But the belief in the Rangers (from the town they had spent the year protecting) restored their powers (and their dead mentors). The Master exclaimed, "Give me that magic!" The Rangers oblige, channeling their powers into a limitless blast of energy, that they force down the Master's throat until he explodes.
- In season fifteen, although it was done very badly, and was absolutely anti-climactic, the villain Flurious donned the Crown of the Gods in the season finale, brought down a glacier on the Rangers' hometown, but the Operation Overdrive Rangers manage to kill him.
- In season fifteen's yearly team-up episodes, a particularly vicious and powerful giant monster is thrashing the team's zords. Mack, the current Red Ranger (although at the time, he'd resigned) runs towards the monster holding the magical sword Excelsior, and manages to kill the 30-storey-tall monster, using nothing but the sword. Only three Rangers in the entire history of the show have ever managed to defeat a giant monster without using their zords (Eric the Quantum Ranger, and Tommy as the Black Brachio Ranger being the other two). But Mack is the only Ranger to ever destroy a giant monster without even morphing.
- In season sixteen, the Power Rangers Jungle Fury team spend the season fighting Dai Shi, an ancient elder-being. Once Dai Shi manifests physically, the Rangers team up with Dai Shi's pawns (Jarrod and Camille), and Jarrod lets himself be consumed by Dai Shi to destroy the entity from the inside out. Jarrod survives. Dai Shi doesn't.
- In the first few seasons of Stargate SG-1, the eponymous group is the main thorn in the side of the Goa'uld Empire, who fancy themselves gods. The Goa'uld are beaten soundly at the end of the second part of "Reckoning", though they manage to survive but are currently warring amongst themselves. Then there are the Ori in the last two seasons, who are the closest thing to godly that the series can get. They're all killed by a MacGuffin, but their physical embodiment Adria gains all of their power. She, however, is apparently occupied in an unending battle with Morgan Le Fay.
Music
- In Leslie Fish's filk song Where, Oh Where, Has Cthulhu Gone, the Great Old Ones pack up and leave Earth, frightened by the invention of the atom bomb (and man's eagerness to use it).
Where, oh where are the Old Ones gone?
Scrambled back to their darkling lands
They have fled with a rare good sense
The lightnings held in human hands
- This Ear Worm about narwhals has a lyric that claims "they stop Cthulhu from eating ye", then it shows a a octopus-like creature (most-likely Cthulhu) attacking a boat then being impaled by a horn of a narwhal.
- The song Intergalactic Planetary by the Beastie Boys has a music video that depicts what appears to be a robot made of Erector Set taking on what looks like Cthulhu. Erector Bot wins by punching the Eldest One into some power lines.
- This is just a tribute! You gotta believe me!
- In the Charlie Daniels Band song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", Satan challenges a violinist named Johnny to a violin-playing competition. A solid-gold violin against Johnny's soul. Johnny takes the bet, warning the Devil, "I'm the best that's ever been." Once they play, the Devil doesn't even need to be told that he lost, handing over the gold violin without a word. Johnny responds with one of the most badass lyrics, ever. Ever. "Just come on back if you ever want to try again. I told you once, you son of a bitch, I'm the best that's ever been."
Mythology
- In The Iliad, Diomedes goes on a god-stabbing rampage with the help of Athena. First he slashes Aphrodite when she tries to spirit away Aeneas. Feeling his oats, he attacks Apollo two times, but Apollo just tells him to cut it out. When Apollo and Aphrodite return to Olympus complaining about Diomedes, Ares descends on the battlefield on a mission. Athena leads Diomedes towards the god of war and guides his spear cast to take him directly in the gut. Ares screams and flees the field. Diomedes thus becomes the only mortal to wound two gods in a single day.
- One of the two Navajo war gods, Naayéé Neizgháni, has a name that means "He Kills Hostile Gods" or, in other words, "He who punches out Cthulhu." How tough is he? Death himself had to reason his way out of getting killed by him.
- Herakles (Hercules) visits Admetus, a man famous for his hospitality. Learning that Admetus just lost his wife, he decides to pay his host back by beating up Death, thereby bringing her back to life.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- Basically every game that includes some sort of metaphysical or otherwise supernatural force as an antagonist will have the heroes beating it into submission like they would the random encounters right outside the first town.
- The final boss of the Another Centurys Episode trilogy is Shin Dragon, from the Getter Robo series, which is capable of obliterating celestial bodies like Jupiter's moons with ease and can punch holes in reality. You can potentially beat it with anything in the game, from Shin Getter all the way down to the RX-78 Gundam or a VF-1 Valkyrie.
- In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, the final battle pits the epic-level protagonist and his party against Amellisan, traitorous priestess of Bhaal, charged up with about 99% of Bhaal's power. Your protagonist has the reminaing 1%. You win.
- Happens for both the protagonist and antagonist in the first Blood Rayne as both Rayne and Jurgen Wulf can do significant damage to Belial before time runs out and he gains convenient plot-armour with which to smush the both of you. If you find a place to hide so that Jurgen ignores you and focuses almost solely on Belial (he'll still come across you every now and then while gathering weapons), he'll nearly beat him before the time expires, at least 70% on the hardest difficulty IIRC. Since for some reason blades do more damage than guns, as usual, Jurgen will eventually fail in this battle without your help, despite the fact he moves too fast to take damage from the clumsy devil.
- Don't forget Breath Of Fire III, where the final boss is Myria, the resident creator goddess.
- She isn't a real goddess, since at the end she says "If there is a god, answer me! What should I have done with the Brood?".
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth tries to maintain the bleak, hopeless atmosphere of the Mythos, and the player spends much of the game either unarmed or with insufficient ammo, forced to run away from the monsters trying to kill him. However, at the end, the main character ends up fighting and killing Dagon (the 100-foot tall Deep One god) with a battleship's main cannon. When examining a statue of Dagon later on, he even cockily remarks "It's a statue of Dagon, minus the missile I lodged in his face". He later goes on to kill a pair of Flying Polyps, and Mother Hydra herself. And before that, he had single handedly taken out a no less a creature than a Shoggoth (yes, a freaking Shoggoth!). So it's kind of jarring that, after such a string of incredible victories, and finding out he's half super-being he decides to kill himself because of his alien heritage, which he just can't come in terms with at the end of the game.
- To be fair, deep ones are never stated to be Immune To Bullets, Jack had to use an alien BFG for the flying polyps, and Ctuhulu itself only appears by proxy.
- Castlevania lets you beat the crap out of Death on a regular basis, not to mention some of the more notable Bosses like the personification of chaos in Aria of Sorrow, and all sorts of high-level demons.
- Castlevania Symphony Of The Night: Shield Rod + Alucard Shield = Did You Just Eat Cthulhu? Especially with Galamoth, who's two screens tall, and you consume him like so much dim-sum.
- Chrono Trigger, in which a teenaged boy and his friends amass enough power and allies to be able to destroy, in direct combat, a being that renders planets nearly uninhabitable and shatters civilizations.
- And one of your party members (the most awesome one) fights with her fists, so yeah.
- Mortal Kombat has Raiden, the God of Thunder. However, he is no stronger than every other fighter, human or not.
- The first game explains this somewhat, as it is said that he was only allowed to compete in the tournament after taking a mortal form. Eventually, however, the creators just said "the hell with it" and would go on to introduce more gods to the series like Fujin and Shinnok, who are also no stronger than every other fighter.
- He gets punched out at the beginning of Deception, then you punch out the almighty Onaga at the end.
- City Of Heroes usually avoids this — big threats need big groups of superpowered individuals to take on — but there are a good few moments where really big threats can be taken out with rather questionable means. The comic strips, for example, have two instances of superpowered hordes being taken out by flashbangs on arrows; in the first case a bunch of ancient deathless ghost mages, in the second case a group of psychically enhanced and deranged lunatics about to tear apart a powerful hero. In-game, while not common, it's quite possible for a group of "natural" origin heroes with powers on a normal human's level to take down Lanaru or Ruladak, beings that make up major aspects of a sentient dimension's awareness. That's made worse by requiring that group to spend upward of six hours going through the lore behind those opponents, describing how they literally broke their planet. Even more fun is going home and getting your backside handed to you by a next-gen SWAT team.
- Then there is Hequat, Goddess of the Mu, who can be taken on and defeated by a lone villain. (They do at least say that she is in a weakened state, which is why you have to go and attack her now.)
- Pretty much the point of Diablo.
- In Warriors Orochi, you get to punch out the Serpent King Orochi and, of course he returns. He becomes even more badass in the sequel when you see just how many people he punched out, including an example where Orochi himself punches out a Cthulhu even bigger than himself-The Gods.
- An "Did You Just Make Out With Cthulhu" example (see also the Suzumiya Haruhi example) occurs in the good ending of Disgaea 2, when Adell stops the real Overlord Xenon, Rozalin, by Frenching her. Did You Just Make Out With Cthulhu is now its own trope (sort of) - see Divine Date.
- A straighter example would be when Adell pulls a Get Ahold Of Yourself Man on Rozalin's Superpowered Evil Side, an Omnicidal Maniac that just finished thoroughly trouncing a level 1200 (in standard RPG levels, by the way) overlord without even breaking a sweat. Did He Just Bright Slap Cthulhu? Yes, and it worked.
- Also in Disgaea 2 you can fight and defeat Laharl (the aforementioned level 1200 overlord). To put it into perspective, Laharl is the protagonist of the first game with enough power to blow up a planet out of hand. And in the PSP remake of the original you can fight Zetta, who is stated to be the most powerful being in existance. Then there's Baal or The Dark Sun...
- In the third game, Raspberyl prevents Mao's unleashing of his REALLY evil side (a borderline Cosmic Horror in his own right) by hugging him. TWICE.
- Basically, in the Disgaeaverse, there are a number of characters who are fully capable of punching out Cthulhu.
- Doom is one of the legends in this department. The hero, an ordinary Space Marine, with an arsenal of powerful but in no way supernatural weapons, kills his way through hell, defeating archedemons and such.
- It ends with Hell exploding. The Marine does not go in for half measures.
- In Dragon Quest VII, after you've beaten the game, you could enter two bonus dungeons, the boss of the first of which is God. He will be at the end of the second dungeon, where you can ask him to be a resident of your immigrant town. You can fight him infinitely many times there.
- Hastur from Earnest Evans is, indeed, taken down by a puny human whip.
- Subverted in Earthbound, in which Giygas's final form cannot be killed through sheer damage but instead only through Paula's 'Pray' ability, which calls upon even the player to help win the battle.
- Which makes him the strongest boss ever created, as it's the only one who had the player themself step in to help. This was what killed him.
- Averted with the Daedra of The Elder Scrolls seemingly fall into this category. They actually possess no real body, instead creating avatars with which they can then interact with/brutally murder mortals. When destroyed, the physical body remains but their essence returns to Oblivion.
- Averted in Battlespire. When confronting Mehrunes Dagon you do not in fact kill him; rather, your weapon allows you to sever his connection to reality, collapsing the bubble dimension and forcing him back into Oblivion
- Averted in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The plan ends up not being about killing Dagoth Ur, which would never work according to others, but severing him from the source of his power - the heart of the dead god Lorkhan; cut off from his power source, his once-again mortal body dies.
- In a literal sense, this aversion makes the trope possible, many, many times; a player with high unarmed can literally punch out Dagoth Ur over and over. It keeps him disabled for longer than deadlier weapons.
- Happens in the Bloodmoon expansion to Morrowind too, but probably justified since the Daedric Prince Hircine is patron of the hunt and only enjoys a fight if there's a chance he can be defeated.
- Averted nicely in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion when the player finally confronts the Big Bad, Mehrunes Dagon. As you're up against an evil god who just tore reality a new one, the actual fighting is left to your companion, the descendent of a god himself. The best your character can do is stagger Dagon for a few seconds to buy time for Martin to complete his transformation. Unless, of course you hit him with some special attack or your custom-made sword of mob destruction.
- Seemingly played straight in the expansion. In fact, you are merely replacing the avatar of a Daedric Prince; the essence of Sheogorath, his madness and power, are eternal and simply moves to new avatars when he becomes bored.
- Justified in Eternal Darkness — humanity defeats the Ancients, but they have not one, but two Eldritch Abominations backing them up — one's behind the scenes, and one is summoned to do the actual ass-kicking.
- Actually, once you've played the game three times, you find that thanks to the nebulous reality-bending of the situation, you defeat all three simultaneously (despite it being a rock/paper/scissors relationship), and the only one left is dying anyway.
- One could argue the interpretation is that the remaining god is in fact recovering to overtake earth. The game in fact explains only the corpse god Mantorok is still alive, "festering in its tomb... plotting".
- Kefka, having usurped position as the sole source of magic in the world of Final Fantasy VI and become a god/Become God, is defeated largely by blasting him with magic. Particularly jarring, as the Warring Triad, the gods who had this position before he took their powers, were largely immune to magic. Well, before he demoted them.
- Bit of a clarification. The Warring Triad projected a field which absorbed all magic while they were in perfect alignment. It was the precise combination of their powers that negated magic, not an innate quality of the powers themselves. Kefka upset that and drained off the raw power of magic from them, but was still vulnerable to magical attack.
- This is the case with most final bosses in the Final Fantasy series. Notable examples are II, where the heroes basically off Satan, and IX, which concludes with killing Necron, the god of death (or something like that, the game is not particularly clear as to what he is exactly).
- Final Fantasy III: The Cloud of Darkness is an actual God which manifests as a roughly female avatar from a swirling, multicolored fog. It has no purpose, no reason, other than to consume all the reality of the World of Light itself. It's beaten back by four kids with a penchant for onions.
- Final Fantasy IV: Zeromus is a grotesque, shapeless thing with a vaguely crustacean appearance, and the embodiment of the primal force of Hatred itself. Although Cecil and company defeat it, it claims to be eternal, or, at least, that it will exist as long as humanity does.
- Final Fantasy V: Neo-Exdeath is a melange of Eldritch Abominations sealed or sent to sleep within the Dimensional Rift. Its appearance is as of dozens of corpses and demons blindly sewn together.
- Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy VII is said in a Word of God case to be "the strongest character in the Final Fantasy VII universe. There is nothing above him, and it would be impossible to make a character stronger than he is." He's defeated a couple of times by sword combos. Albeit lengthy, very impressive sword combos that attack him from virtually every angle. The eldritch abomination part comes in when you consider Jenova.
- However he never really dies, since he came back for Advent Children, and can probably come back again. He can be defeated, but he will come back, that makes him terribly dangerous.
- Far stronger than him are the Weapons, in particular the Ruby Weapon, which can instant kill two characters, has incredible defense, and looks kinda like a eldritch abomination with all the tentacles. He can be defeated with a single level 7 character. It's pretty easy, with the right materia and heat resistance. Takes half an hour, but what can you do? It is an unstoppable force representing the life force of the earth.
- Averted in Kingdom Hearts and its sequel where he is much harder to 'beat', since you don't really kill him.
- While the final boss is totally a One Winged Angel, a great deal of the side quests in Final Fantasy XII basically amount to this trope. Particularly Zodiark, who is of the Sealed Evil In A Can variety, and Yiazmat essentially a huge, ancient dragon with 50 million hit points.
- Final Fantasy XI In the Chainsof Promathia expansion/storyline, You eventually fight the Twilight God Promathia, who is attempting to eliminate all life. To make this slightly more reasonable, you do have two almost-gods helping you in the fight.
- Final Fantasy Tactics has a cabal of six Eldritch Abominations (seven if you include Elidibus) that are either sealed in magical crystals or using said crystals as a gateway into the mortal realm, and each of them is defeated by a group of mere mortals. If you fight them with a Monk in your party or with the Monk's "Brawler" ability equipped, you can literally punch each of them out of existence.
- Chaos, the Final Boss of the original Final Fantasy, can be killed in a single punch by a high level monk, making this a literal example of this trope.
- This ended up happening in Final Fantasy Legend when the heroes got pissed at The Creator for daring to toy with his own creations.
- Not to mention that that series had a tendency to base bosses on various mythical deities, and not just the final ones. In the second game you beat the crap out of Venus and Odin (who had been resurrecting you for most of the game. On the final world a reanimated statue of Isis joins your party, and you take on a security system built by the ancient gods.
- Fire Emblem 10 requires you to kill a god with a mercenary and his posse. Granted, one important member of said posse is a vessel for the equal and opposite half of that god.
- You still have to land the killing blow with The Hero's Infinity Plus One Sword, or else the aforementioned god will simply regenerate. Justified because Ragnell was one of two swords created by the goddesses back when they were one deity. It is also powered up by said equal and opposite god during Ike's finishing attack.
- Even that doesn't kill Ashera. It does destroy her physical form for a several hundred years and during that time Yune is able to recombine with her and they become Ashunera again.
- At the end of Irrational Games' brilliant Freedom Force, the team must contend with Timemaster. Timemaster cannot be defeated until you've destroyed his four Energy Crystally Thingies, but once you have, the Lord of the Timelines is in for a good face-kicking.
- Basically the stated goal of God Of War is to... punch out the God of War. Sure, Kratos needs to go on a very long quest to retrieve a Mac Guffin to give himself temporary godlike powers, but ultimately those "godlike powers" turn out to be "make me really big so I can beat this guy up."
- As the original Greek Gods didn't always defeat human heroes (Ares in particular got beat up by Hector in one book of the Illiad) this is not entirely unreasonable.
- God Of War 2 basically takes this to the extreme: Kratos punches out gods, the gods parents, and everyone that gets between him and the gods. All because he hates Zeus. And because Zeus is totally a jerk.
- Also his father, who apparently sired him specifically to take out any other Olympian that rebelled. Zeus is fully capable of this level of Jerkass, especially in this game series. Number Three is coming out, people, and it looks like the Titans are just letting him come along for the hellride as they continue their ancient war against the weakened Olympians, but Kratos is going to do the work. Going beyond Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu for Did You Just Crash Reality, in fact, as the Deicide goes for the hat trick.
- Possibly more impressive than the above is that he KILLS THE FATES! And this is after they tell him they've seen the future, and in it he fails. This isn't even possible for Olympus.
- Word Of God has it that God Of War 3 will eventually explain why the greek pantheon of gods no longer exists. Based on what we've seen in the franchise up until now, we're guessing Kratos basically just punches out the entire population of Mount Olympus.
- Most of the big bosses in Kirby games can only be described as an Eldritch Abomination, but of course Kirby thrashes these folks on a regular basis.
- The anime actually implies that he's a good Eldritch Abomination, so perhaps it's not so surprising.
- In King Of Fighters 97, you take down the legendary Orochi, who is treated as the equivalent of a world destroying god in this series.
- In the SNES strategy game Der Langrisser, the party, which starts off as only a pair of friends from a small village, eventually grows powerful enough to challenge Lushiris, the Goddess of Light. More accurately, the main character can one-hit kill her if built right. Rohga puts it quite bluntly, in fact: "Holy shit... Incredible! You've even killed a deity!"
- Occurs in the endgame of Legacy Of Kain: Defiance, where Kain uses the newly aquired power of the Soul Reaver blade to take down the Elder God.
- At the end of the prehistoric chapter of Live A Live The shaman is eaten by a gigantic dinosaurish thing that the villagers worship as a god. It spits out the shaman's skull and then Gori throws it at him. It's also possible to kill the dino-god with two attacks from the Staff Chick.
- In the Lunar game Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Complete, the party of heroes defeats Zophar, the God of Darkness, by whacking at him with weapons and magic — and the power of Humanity, of course.
- Anybody in Marvel vs. Capcom can beat Onslaught. Even Badass Normals like Jin Saotome, or any Street Fighter. Keep in mind that in the comics, Onslaught is more or less the most powerful psionic being in existence, and killed a lot of people before being taken down, which in itself required the efforts and Heroic Sacrifice of several incredibly powerful characters.
- The best fighter against Onslaught is the robot girl—not woman, girl—whose day job is maid. That's right, Mega Man's sister Roll. It's fun to take her in against Onslaught and wipe the floor with him.
- Was anyone else just a tiny bit peeved that they had the nerve to give Thanos the Infinity Gauntlet; effectively making him omnipotent, and then make him suck? Tier rankings place him at 5th to last, only out-sucked by a nerfed Zangief and 3 Joke Characters.
- Before that, in Marvel Super Heroes versus Street Fighter, one of the playable characters is Shuma-Gorath, who in the comics is an incredibly powerful Eldritch Abomination but of course had to be severely toned down to maintain balance. Same for Blackheart, son of Mephisto himself.
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance has the same issue. Your little super team fights nearly every supervillain in the Marvel Universe over the course of the game. As a result, a skilled player can defeat Mephisto, Galactus, Gladiator, Ymir, Loki, and Dr. Doom coupled with the stolen god powers of Odin all with Badass Normal Nick Fury.
- Then again, one of Fury's alternate costumes IS Samuel L. Jackson.
- This does reflect comic book "reality", in which Badass Normal heroes regularly trounce super-powered foes that in a realistic fight would leave them as a stain on the floor.
- Somewhat justified in that the fight with Galactus consists entirely of the team running for their lives, and then distracting him while the Silver Surfer turns Big G's own powers against him. And the fight with Mephisto is impossible to win until the X-Man you didn't save forces him into the void with him/her.
- With Galactus it's more of a case of Breaking Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu because at the end of the game he's seen swearing revenge while enveloping the entire Earth with his hand
- The final confrontation of Mass Effect pretty much consists of exposing the resident Eldritch Abomination, the Reaper Sovereign, and letting the Human Systems Alliance shoot the bajeesus out of it. However, given that it was only ONE of a race of Eldritch Horrors, and it was being attacked by the combined forces of half the space-faring species in the galaxy, and even then it only barely worked, it's relatively justified.
- It's also assumed, in the game, that the thing didn't just reveal itself from the beginning precisely because it was afraid that something like this would happen.
- Not assumed, it's said outright. By the Prothean VI very near the end of the game.
- Mass Effect 2 on the other hand, You fight a Reaper, on foot, an unfinshed reaper, It was 'EPIC!
- This is the whole point of every game in the Megami Tensei series. In SMT2 you can even make Cthulhu one of your mons.
- The final boss of that game is YHVH. Yahveh. Yehovah. GOD. And you team up with either Satan or Lucifer (yes, they're seperate beings) to kill him. And in neutral path, you have neither of them.
- Persona 2 In which the last boss literally IS Nyarlathotep himself, and while he wins in Tsumi/Innocent Sin, in Batsu/Eternal Punishment he loses and you literally Slice, Shoot, and of course PUNCH the ever loving crap out of him before he is forced to retreat.
- Persona3 sets this up for the latter half of the game... And then subverts it after the presumed final battle with a Hope Spot, as it turns out the Eldritch Abomination was impossible to kill after all. Only the The Power Of Friendship and a Heroic Sacrifice manages to ultimately drive it off, and even then it's implied to only be temporarily.
- Persona 4 takes this trope more literally than Persona 3 does - the protagonist literally kills Izanami, one of the Japanese gods of creation, single-handedly (Izanami herself says before dying "Power enough to erase my existence...").
- Nocturne averts this with its bonus ending. The final boss is Lucifer — yeah, that Lucifer. But he isn't going all out on you, he is just testing if you are good enough. Because once you've 'defeated' him and showed your potential, you become his Dragon and lead the Armies Of Hell in a battle against God. That means he probably had to set the bar pretty high...
- The final boss of the Xbox remake of Ninja Gaiden wields the Dark Dragon Blade, which is supposed to give him the power of the "Devil incarnate". While he is a rather tough fight, our Charles Atlas Superpowered Highly Visible Ninja Badass protagonist still defeats him anyway. Admittedly, Ryu was using the True Dragon Sword, which was meant specifically to counter the DDB, but still. Ryu also takes down multiple Greater Fiends, each of which is worth quite a number of regular fiends in power, as well as the released Archfiend.
- This is the entire point of the old Bungie game Pathways Into Darkness — you play as a special forces operative sent to nuke a gradually awakening Sleeping God unconscious before it can awake fully and unleash unimaginable havoc.
- The last game in Bungie's Marathon trilogy averts this by having the protagonist travel through dimensions and/or back through time to prevent the Eldritch Abomination from ever being released in the first place.
- Subverted in Peasant's Quest (from Homestar Runner): "beating" the game consists of the protagonist getting closer than any hero ever has to killing Trogdor - deflecting one gout of flame, stabbing your sword an inch or two into Trogdor's nigh-impenetrable hide, hearing The Burninator speak, and finally being almost effortlessly devoured. A really cool monument is built to honor this feat.
- In episode 5 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, Strong Bad actually does defeat Trogdor by hitting his weak spots, which Rather Dashing failed to notice. Sure, Strong Bad transforms into a big, muscular version of himself with a gigantic knife (displayed in ridiculously awesome next-gen graphics) to accomplish this, but he's still just hitting him... And then it turns out that it was all a dream and Trogdor is still destroying the countryside.
- Played for laughs in the first episode of Penny Arcade Adventures On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Inciting Gabe to tackle a very Cthulian being, Tycho asks "Do you want to punch a god?" Gabe: "..." Tycho "..." Gabe: "..." Tycho: "..." Gabe: "Yes!"
- Then again in the second episode. PC: "Gods? Again?" Gabe: "Yeah, it's like... I don't mind fighting gods? It's just I'd like a little warning first."
- Just to put things in perspective here? The first God is defeated through a combination of a radio tube, absolutely pure urine, and the soul of a mime. The second is defeated with a giant robot doll piloted by a thirteen-year old girl.
- In Perfect Dark Zero, Joanna Dark defeats Zhang Li with early-21st-century weapons though the knife/machete comes in handiest despite the fact that he uses the Graal to gain superhuman powers and "become a god".
- In the Pokemon games, you are able to capture legendary one-of-a-kind (per game) Mons that are often forces of nature. The last game contains Arceus, who apparently created the universe.
- This makes it more Did You Just Stuff Cthulhu Into A Little Tiny Ball, unless we want to start with the sealing in a can stuff.
- Don't forget that to capture Mons you have to attack them, lower their health, and give them status effects. So it still Punching out Cthulhu, more or less.
- Two words: Master Ball. Apparently, what amounts to an exaggerated can created in a lab is more powerful than God.
- All Poke Balls act as a Power Limiter. Of course, how it's supposed to work on the creator of the Pokemon universe is another matter... maybe Arceus was just toying around?
- The anime, or at least the movies, handles this more "realistically", with only the weakest legendary Pokemon (e.g. Celebi, Jirachi, Manaphy) capable of being harmed by humans. The more powerful legendaries (e.g. Mewtwo, Kyogre, Darkrai) are more-or-less invulnerable to anything less than other legendaries, and the truly powerful ones (e.g. Dialga, Giratina) are essentially indestructible.
- The second movie also gives us world-ending consequences for capturing the three Legendary Birds.
- The So Bad Its Horrible 2D fighting game Pray For Death had Cthulhu himself as a normally playable character. So Yeah.
- Your final opponent in Puzzle Quest is Lord Bane, the god of Death (who responds to his defeat by basically saying he'll just regenerate in a century or so and wipe out your descendants... just like he did last time.)
- In the first Shadow Hearts game there are two different villains who try to summon a God, the first to destroy the Japanese army and the second to cleanse the Earth of sin by destroying the wicked. By the start of the second game the new villains refer to the hero Yuri as "Godslayer".
- The videogame Shining Force subverts this in the final fight with the Dark Dragon. Even after depleting its hit points, it's still not technically dead, and the best that can be done is for the main character to stab his sword into the back of its head, and hold it there while the rest of the party escaped the collapsing castle.
- The final boss of Shining Force 2 is a demon who is effectively the equivalent of Satan. More humorously, there's an exploit involving the master's monks where you cast their buff skill, earning 48 exp, than leave the battlefield. You can keep doing this till the monks are lv99, at which point, they will be stronger than said demon, leading to a literal Did You Just Punch Out Satan.
- At the end of Silent Hill 3, Heather takes down God. With a lead pipe.
- It should be noted, however, that the games are hardly clear on what exactly is the "God" of the town's religion, and indeed it's entirely likely to be yet another hallucination (which is one of the more reasonable Epilectic Trees concerning the game).
- The local Eldritch Abomination gets punched pretty much once per game, but what the result is depends on which of the endings you get.
- In the UFO ending, aliens laser-carpet-bomb Silent Hill itself (i.e., the entire town) from orbit.
- Sonic The Hedgehog and his friends have gotten really good about this in recent games.
- The first non-Robotnik final boss Sonic fought was the watery god of destruction, Chaos, in the first Sonic Adventure. Granted, he didn't actually destroy Chaos, but he did use himself as a projectile and shot through his brain a couple of times.
- Kinda justified, since at that point Sonic and Chaos were using the exact same power source, just a different attitude to activate them.
- Metal Sonic becomes nearly as powerful in Sonic Heroes, absorbing Chaos's and all the heroes's lifeform data. Super Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles take him out with ease because they're SONIC HEROES!
- Black Doom wasn't quite a god, but he was the leader of an alien race and distinctly Cthulhu-like in voice and appearance. Shadow whips his ass in super form by himself.
- It never actually happened, but Sonic, Shadow, and Silver teamed up to "stop the consciousness" (whatever that means) of Solaris, the god of the time-space continuum. Which meant smacking him in the core For Massive Damage.
- In Sonic and the Secret Rings this trope is also shown (quite literally), where The genie and evil villain the Erazor Djinn uses all the rings to turn into a Horrific monstrosity called "Alf Layla wa-Layla", and begins to recreate the world in his own image, only to be stopped by Darkspine Sonic. Meaning, you knock his own attack back at him, fly up, and start punching the holy hell out of him.
- Sonic Unleashed (the 360/PS3 version, at least) is notable in that someone - namely, the Gaia Colossus/Chip - literally does punch out the game's local Cthulhu; at the end of the fight, it rears back, zooms forward, and delivers the left haymaker of justice to Dark Gaia's face, stunning him long enough for Super Sonic to deliver the final blow.
- In the Wii/PS2 version, you have to make him punch out Dark Gaia manually. Emphasis on the words "Punch Out".
- The Soulblazer trilogy has a trilogy of this trope - In Soulblazer, you kill the powerful demon/god(?) Deathtoll with the Soul Blade (admiteddly the most powerful sword in the whole world. In Terranigma, you defeat the evil god Dark Gaia with what is essentially a SPEAR, and most heinously of all in Illusion Of Gaia you also defeat the evil god Dark Gaia with nothing but your own ectoplasmic arm (as Shadow)!
- Even if you use the gothic lolita in Soul Calibur IV, you can defeat a Physical God who not only tamed Soul Edge, but actually created its counterpart.
- Splatterhouse sees Rick doing battle with living embodiments of evil and all that serve them... with his fists. And on occasion baseball bats and two-by-fours. Thing is, this is presented in a much more serious manner than usual - the only way Rick can do all this is that the Terror Mask is backing him up, and the Mask is using him as a tool.
- Dark Brain from Super Robot Wars and the related series Great Battle IV can travel multiple dimensions using his own powers, grows larger based on the despair of the people fighting it (which, in retrospect, may not be a good thing when fighting mecha pilots), and can destroy planets easily. He seeks the 12 keys of the Super Robot Wars Multiverse, and he created Dynamis the Big Bad of Super Robot Wars R to search and destroy Fighter Roar. You have an assload of giant robots. Guess who's not walking away from this fight?
- Same with Irui Ganeden, the spirit of the earth, in Alpha 2, and Keiser Ephes in Alpha 3.
- Well, one might say a lot of Super Robot Taisen games feed off this trope. Other games have the Super Robot team go up against villains who, in their respective series, proved to be impossible to defeat... and win all the same:
- In the Alpha series and in MX, during the Neon Genesis Evangelion storyline events, the heroes manage to defeat the Seele's Mass Produced Evangelions. Yes, exactly the monsters who, after having been defeated by Asuka, simply regenerated and tore her to pieces as if nothing happened. The Super Robots managed to kill them all. Not only that, but, in Alpha 3, they follow it up by fighting -and defeating- the fusion of the nine white Evangelions with a berserk Unit 01 and the Tree of Life... also known as God! And it's not even the final stage!
- Super Robot Wars Alpha also gives a few villains from other series their own moments against the Angels. When the Third Angel appears over Tokyo-3, out steps a man in a suit smoking a cigar. This man proceeds to pound the Angel flat with his bare hands. The man in question? Alberto the Shockwave. There's a reason why it's on the Crowning Moment Of Awesome page for Super Robot Wars.
- In Alpha 2 and J, during the final assault on Orphan, the Super Robots defeat Baron Maximillian's Hyper Baronz from Brain Powerd. In the series proper, the Hyper Baronz was so powerful that all Hime managed to do was damage it somewhat, and she and Yuu had to wait it out and survive until Baron exhausted all of her energy.
- In the last two episodes of Alpha, the heroes also go up against Yami No Teiou, from the Mazinkaiser saga. And manage to destroy him, when all the Mazinkaiser team could do in the series was to seal it away.
- In Tales Of Legendia, the heroes beat Schwartz, supposedly a destroyer of universes. To be fair, she needed the negative energies of people to power up, and was weakened by positive energy, ala Earthbound. So her status might have been *very* exaggerated. Or she was just an avatar of the real one.
- In Touhou, Plot Armor has allowed Reimu and/or Marisa to defeat and subsequently befriend beings that while not eldritch or abominations are certainly comparable to them, including but not limited to an Enfante Terrible with the explicit power to destroy anything, one of the four Oni Devas that hurls black holes and is capable of tearing apart mountains, the millenia-old ruler of the netherworld, a Reality Warper with likely limitless power, one of the Judges of the Dead, and a nuclear-powered hell raven that uses miniature suns as a weapon.
- Tohno Shiki from Tsukihime has a power that is very conducive to this. He arguably does this by making Roa Deader Than Dead, which is one hell of an achievement considering the man regenerates from just his ankles at one point; to add insult to injury, Shiki destroyed Roa's concept of existence, which prevents him from reincarnating as usual.
- In the backstory of Tsukihime, the mage Zelretch is famous for being a True Sorceror, known for travelling between realities at a whim... and for killing Brunestud of the Crimson Moon, also known as Type Moon, the Moon's Ultimate Being, the greatest life form created by the Moon with the total power of that celestial body behind him. The details aren't explained, but apparently it involved dropping the Moon on Brunestud's head. He might have gotten turned into a vampire for his trouble, but he still defeated one of the most powerful beings in the universe, by himself, using only raw power. For contrast, Type Mercury, known as ORT, is a giant crystal spider, powerful enough to override reality with its own internal Mental World and obliterate vampire kings in an instant. It is also explicitly the most powerful being in the present Nasu Verse timeline. Types are also alien enough that even Shiki, that Cthulu-puncher extraordinaire, would be unable to kill them, because their concepts of death are so unrelatable to Gaia; the only way to kill ORT is by pure force, which nobody in the Nasu Verse can currently bring forward.
- Actually, to clarify this a bit, Type Mercury/Ort technically has the "highest raw attack power". Take that how you will.
- In Valkyria Chronicles, with Squad 7's defeat of Maximillian. He had equipment that mimicked the powers of the Valkyria and unlike the fight with Selvaria, Squad 7 decided not to rely on Alicia's Valkyria powers.
- Happens more than once in the Warcraft universe:
- World Of Warcraft raids let players duke it out with all kinds of eldritch horrors and the mightiest beings in the game lore (only short of Sargeras), only with larger numbers than usual. Granted, some of them are said to be in a weakened state or to be merely banished when defeated, and many of them put up a hell of a fight, but still...
- This is especially relevant in the case of the Old Gods of Azeroth that have been turned into raid encounters. The first and most notable was C'thun who, even with the massive power increase for players since his release, remains a dangerous opponent. He is still killed on a fairly regular basis, however.
- However, C'thun's worshippers have recently enacted rituals to possibly revive the slain god. And you just know he's going to be even more powerful than before.
- Another Old God, Yogg-Saron, was added in a recent patch. In this case only the hardiest can defeat him without help from super-powered guardians left by the Titans.
- In addition, many bosses are all but undefeatable if you go about fighting them the wrong way. No, the Indy Ploy is not the right way to go about it.
- The Dragon Aspects were super-powered dragons created by the Titans to act as guardians of some of the pure essences of the planet (earth, life, magic, etc). As of Wrath of the Lich King, one of them — Malygos — can be killed by ten level-80 adventurers whittling down his hit points.
- In The Witcher Dagon getting killed by Geralt at the end of chapter 4 is pretty inevitable, as you can get him in the bestiary by chapter 2. Interestingly, the god isn't defeated directly, but by killing his worshipers, depriving him of prayer.
- Not to mention you're also able to fight the King of the Wild Hunt, a supposedly immortal personification of death itself, after beating the Big Bad if you completed a certain quest during the fourth act.
- In the World Of Mana, high-tier supernatural beings are common boss battles:
- X-Com: Terror from the Deep has a partially justified version of this. The "Ultimate Alien" cannot be defeated once he wakes up, but you can kill him by blowing up the power generators to his cryogenics system first. The explosive result, however, makes the earth uninhabitable.
- The biggest threat to humans and Vasudans in Freespace is a powerful Shivan dreadnought, the Lucifer, with nigh-impenetrable shields, which devastates Vasuda Prime and is looking for Earth. It is only defeated in the last level through the use of LostTechnology by chasing it in subspace with fighters/bombers and destroying its generators while its shields are down. The explosion does, however, cause Earth to be but off from the rest of the galaxy for many decades.
- The sequel had the Shivans go Beyond The Impossible in terms of threat level: your biggest victory in the campaign comes when you destroy the Sathanas, a ship far more powerful than the Lucy ever was, at great cost (the one ship capable of tackling the Sathanas is drydocked for extensive repairs). Then the Shivans reveal that they have over 80 more such ships en route to Capella. The Alliance does not walk away with a victory.
- The Super Smash Bros series has actually inspired intense forum debates for its bizarre use of this. According to the running backstory, Master Hand and Crazy Hand represent the twin gods of creation and destruction, yet it is still possible for players to beat them. Until Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it could have been explained away as a friendly sparring match where the hands could win if they wanted to, but would rather train and play with fighters, but in Brawl, Master Hand is visibly subdued and enslaved by Tabuu, whom the player can also beat.
- A possible explanation is that the two hands are essentially the gods of Subspace, while Tabuu is more of a devil figure. The hands' behaviors towards the fighters in prior games could be deliberately training them in anticipation of when they'd need their help stopping Tabuu.
- Brawl is made by Mashahiro Sakurai, who also did Kirby, so it makes sense.
- Heinrich I in Return to Castle Wolfenstein is an ancient sealed evil in a can. Supposedly indestructible, the only way to defeat him was for a wizard to seal him in the ground. Of course, that was way back around the year 1000, so when the hero shows up in 1944 it quickly becomes evident that being invulnerable to swords and spears is not the same as being invulnerable to nazi superweapons
- The third campaign of Guild Wars, Nightfall deals on how the human heroes manage to overthrow the fallen god Abaddon, even when in the penultimate mission the other gods themselves decline to directly intervene, arguing that the humans have all the strength they need.
- Given the fact that humanity's ability to fuck up the plans and creations of gods is why the gods basically went into retirement, this kind of makes sense. "Well, they shat all over everything we did before, just give one of them our blessing and they'll probably find a way to fuck things up for the Big Bad as well"
- And Guild Wars 2 will involve defeating at least one of the ancient dragons (Eldritch Abominations at least as powerful as the gods). In fact, getting back to the other two continents (as we'll inevitably do in expansions) will require it: Zhaitan (set up as the Big Bad by the trailer) has pretty much blocked off sea travel by way of his zombie pirate Mooks, and another dragon (Kralkatorrik) is blocking the land route to Elona.
- It's quite possible that Grenth did this when he overthrew Dhuum, as well.
- They're both gods, so that's more of a "Did Hades Just Punch Out Thanatos?"
- The otherwise excellent Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, which is set during the events of the movies but tells a distinct story, jumps the shark at the last minute when the party is instantly transported to the top of Barad-dur, where they fight spotlight-eye Sauron (who is a lesser god, remember), and beat him into submission using swords, spears, and arrows. Why?
- Look, within the preceding five minutes you'd already havee killed fourteen ringwraiths or so. At that point, who cares?
- In Thief: The Dark Project, Garrett kills the Trickster, a forest god who resembles Pan. With a magical bomb. At least it was an inventive way to defeat the end boss, which fit well with the style of gameplay.
- Garrett even lampshades it in the stage intro to "The Maw of Chaos", saying "I've never robbed a god before".
- In Dead Space, the final boss is the Hive Mind Cosmic Horror that is controlling the Necromorphs; it has to be at least over 100 meters tall. Isaac Clarke is an engineer with a headful o' crazy and a cutting tool. Guess who gets owned?
- Upcoming Nintendo DS platformer Scribblenauts will allow you to summon not only Cthulhu himself, but several hundred other entities to fight him. That's right, you can set up your own "Did ___ Just Punch Out Cthulhu" scenarios. For the most fun, pit Cthulhu against God. With a shotgun. On a skateboard.
- In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, the boys take out several entities that their scans classify as "Deity [Supreme Being]", including the Imprisoned Juvenile Slor, several ascended humans such as Azetlor and Shandor the Architect and, of course, the returning Destructor Form of Gozer the Gozerian himself, aka the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (although they claim that Stay Puft is weaker than he was when they fought him before, in the movie).
- The final boss of Neverwinter Nights: Hordes Of The Underdark is Mephistopheles, the second strongest devil in the universe.
- The fight against the mighty Nihilanth at the end of the first Half Life. A giant bio-mechanical psychic being of unimaginable power that controls an entire dimension's worth of aliens... taken out by a scientist wearing a fancy suit.
- Also carries over to Opposing Force, in which a living biological resource factory that literally sucks matter from our world to make more Race X... is destroyed by one Marine with a sniper rifle.
- Both of those are nothing compared to the beginning of Half-Life 2: Episode One, when the previously unstoppable GMan, capable of casually manipulating time and space to his (its?) whims, is renderred completely powerless by a group of Vortigaunts (the face he makes is priceless, by the way).
- Shirou vs Angra Mainyu. Who is basically the devil. Kind of. It's not his fault, and he gets better. He takes out the Grail while also being busy dying horrible due to his body turning into swords and his brain into swiss cheese. Also manages to take out Servants in single combat in several routes, which are damn near godlike.
- Ever Quest has a long-standing tradition of making the game universe's gods into major or final bosses. Of course, since they generally don't stay dead in the game's storyline, some have come back for more (and more, and more) as the game has had expansion packs added to it.
- Mario And Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has Bowser go up against a being of pure darkness using his form that has more than enough power to destroy the world, and repeatedly overpowers it with brute strength alone. The only part the Bros. play in the battle is helping to make sure it doesn't get back up again after Bowser has knocked the core out of its gut (he wins at inhaling the thing, too). Did you just prove yourself better than Cthulhu at everything he tries?
- In Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, your Rival Solitaire gets disqualified from the Monster Scout Championship Finals by jump-kicking your Olympus Mon. (A Berserk Button was involved.)
- Averted in Fossil Fighters. When the leader of the Terrible Trio pulls out an Olympus Mons (out of nowhere, we might add), it's completely indesctructable. The only way to stop it is to go find an Olympus Mons of your own, and pit them against one another. They annhilate each other with their godly powers, leaving the bad guy stuck (and you with the Aftertaste Of Power in your mouth).
- But it's later played straight with Planet Eater Guhnash. It's justified by the fact that you're attacking his weak point, his brains, For Massive Damage, but it's still just one kid and a couple of dinosaurs taking out a being the size of a planet by scratching at it.
- In Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 1, after Tycho learns what the mimes are up to, persuades Gabriel and the Player to help stop them from incarnating an Eldritch Horror. To convince Gabriel, Tycho asks him, "Would you like to punch a god?" Gabriel is immediately up for it.
- They do manage to beat Eldritch Horrors in both released episodes. With naught but their fists, garden tools, and a Tommy gun.
- The Lufia series revolves around the hero Maxim and his descendants repeatedly killing the four Sinistrals every time they reincarnate.
- Bayonetta PUNCHES A GOD FROM PLUTO TO THE SUN PEOPLE!!
- Cryostasis does this at the end: Over the course of the game, the main character has altered history so many times that by the end of the game, the Timey Wimey Ball has finally had it and decides to do away with the player character. How, you may ask? By throwing Chronos, the goddamn God of Time at him.
- Inverted slightly in Heavenly Sword: in the end, Nariko temporarily becomes a god. To defeat her, Bohan becomes a deity himself. Of course, since he's the villain, it doesn't work out as neatly as he'd hoped.
- The major Big Bads in Titan Quest are Typhon, supposedly the mightiest titan to fight against the gods, and Hades, god of the dead. Zeus Lampshades this after the player defeats Typhon, noting that if mortal heroes are capable of such feats, the gods can no longer be of any relevance in the world.
- Princess Maker 2: Lizzie Shinkicker killing the God of War in the LP anyone? In the actual game its more just knocking him out long enough to nick his sword and run past him.
- In one of the branching paths in Guardian Heroes, God appears as the final boss...and yes, can be killed.
Web Comics
- xkcd #521: "Where did you get this Christmas tree?" "Nowhere." "Did you cut down the Yggdrasil?" "...Maybe."
- Irregular Webcomic features a crocodile hunter named Steve who has wrestled with Cthulhu on more than one occasion, and has yet to lose once. He also wrestled the Death of Being Wrestled to Death by Steve to death. Twice. Try not to think about that one.
- Don't forget the time a salt-water croc ate Cthulhu.
- Steve also successfully wrestles a balrog, despite Terry's claims that it is impossible, to death in this strip.
- Dr McNinja PUNCHED OUT DEATH.
- The Seven Deadly Sins did so as well. Considering that the Sins arn't as powerful as you might think, this makes it more epic. Or would, if a certain Virtue didn't come in and make the finishing blow.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: Kat punched the psychopomp Muut in the
gut beautifully sculpted abs after finding out what Muut and the psychopomps had done to tick off her best friend Annie. It didn't do anything to Muut, but more importantly nothing happened to Kat, who basically attacked (a) Death with her bare hands. As the author said, "Do you have a friend that would do the same for you?"
- In 8-bit Theater, Red Mage cut open the head of a being capable of boiling the atmosphere. They would have achieved this again towards the end, but Sarda was beefed up from the orbs and had his power further amplified by Black Mage's super evil.
- Sluggy Freelance (mind the spoilers for each story):
- Chapter 10, "K'Z'K": Riff and Torg have just released the über-demon K'Z'K who is supposed to end the world. Then they hit him with the time blaster, freezing him in place. (But then he gets sent back in time to conquer the past.)
- "The Storm Breaker Saga": K'Z'K is about to squash Torg and Zoë personally to keep them from preventing him from conquering the past, and swipes away the Book of Güd that they were about to use against him from Zoë's hands when she says she can't read it. The power of the pictures in the book reduces him into a bug-like creature, and Zoë steps on him.
- "That Which Redeems": The Talking Sword Chaz, which when powered with the blood of the innocent can kill pretty much anything, suggests that Torg use it to destroy the Demon King. He doesn't actually follow on this plan, but during their escape, the Demon King intercepts them and strikes down at them with a sword formed out of his own darkness. Torg parries with Chaz, and just that is enough to throw the Demon King off and scar him.
Western Animation
Web Original
- In the Whateley Universe, Sara Waite fights The Kellith in dreamspace with a knife. And wins. Even if Sara Waite is The Kellith, or one is part of the other, or they're a duality, or something.
- It actually makes sense in context: the 'Kellith' in the dream represents the magical brainwashing her supposed high priest was trying to inflict on her. Of course, that technically makes it not quite an example of this trope — but then the Whateleyverse also has Tennyo, who apparently eats Eldritch Abominations, demons, and the like. (The jury's still out on whether she counts as one herself.)
- Narwhals stop Cthulhu eating ye
- In The Salvation War, this trope is definitely in play. In Armageddon?, the human race kills off Satan and in Pantheocide Yahweh is next on their list.
- About 8 minutes into this dramatic reading of a fanfic on TGWTG, Robin Hood kills Cthulu. With a bigger arrow. In the eyehole. To be fair, the guy who wrote this fanfic was the demons.
Professional Wrestling
- Vince McMahon once booked a tag-team match between himself and his son, Shane, again Shawn Michaels and God. Yes, God. And yes, of course Vince's team won.
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