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"Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?""
Battling The Legions Of Hell is one thing, this goes the opposite direction. Are you a bad enough dude to take on the gods? ...or angels? Or even the Big Guy Upstairs?
Far more controversial than merely challenging Satan or going To Hell And Back. The main character has a beef with the Powers That Be who are running the show, and the capacity to do something about it. Rarely done in mainstream American TV because many Media Watchdogs view it in a negative light, although games and books use this premise more often.
Sometimes, the higher planes of existence are revealed to be run like a mad, hopelessly bureaucratic corporation — too concerned with rules, regulations, and maintaining the Balance Between Good And Evil to give a damn about the helpless mortals stuck in the middle. Other times, the writers may just go for the full subversion of conventional morality and propose that God Is Evil (the Gnostics position).
This trope seems at least partially connected to Darker And Edgier, and can turn out the same horrible results.
See also Smite Me Oh Mighty Smiter, Nay Theist, God Is Evil, and Satan Is Good. Can result in A God Am I, Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu, and/or Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu. For a more postmodern take, compare Rage Against The Author.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- The anime Angel Sanctuary; in addition, the manga goes above and beyond this, where God is presented as disinterested in the affairs of Earth and Heaven, remaining aloof even when the structures of both are crumbling down. As it turns out, God truly doesn't care about the damage being done throughout the series, having designed the universe as a means to test an equation.
- The main plot of Neon Genesis Evangelion is fighting Angels to possess The Fruit of Life, then return to Eden. If you knew what Eden actually is, you would not be so eager to go there, though.
- Saiyuki Gaiden, a prequel to the main story's plot (both of which are on-going), explains the story of how the 4 ( possibly 5 or more since Hakuryu/Jeep seems to indeed be the Gojun, Dragon King of the West Army) main characters of the current story were banished from heaven for trying to overthrow the ruling gods. As the Gaiden story is on-going, we still don't know quite what happened.
- In Code Geass, the Emperor and his partner-slash-twin-brother V.V.'s modus operandi is to slay the gods who drive humanity to lie to and hurt one another. However, since "God" in this universe is seen as the collective unconsciousness of mankind, their world would result in Instrumentality. This might be quite a brilliant case of in-universe characters not doing their homework.
- The manga Innocent Bird deals with a demon gone good and a heaven completely mad. Not that the evil forces are any better - it's quite a lose-lose situation. Later, the angel protagonist rages against the heavens.
- One of the major villains in The Twelve Kingdoms stages a rebellion against the monarchy of the kingdom he lives in and, by extension, the setting's rule-by-divine-appointment system. His ultimate motivation for his actions is eventually revealed as being an attempt to get the Powers That Be to prove their existence by smiting him.
- When Guyver Zero rebelled against his alien creators, the Advents, and was slain by their loyal general Archanfel, the Advents decided that no human could be trusted and left Earth, throwing a giant planetoid at it. Archanfel destroyed the planetoid at the permanent cost of his health, and has spent the last 110,000 years or so plotting to turn humanity into an army of vengeance against his "gods."
Comic Books
- Spawn spends as much time battling crazy people and demons, as he does fighting angels who apparently can't tell that he's a good guy.
- Created solely to be Hell's general makes some angels think his turn is inevitable. Ironically the ruler of Heaven, being just as evil as the devil, is NOT the one true God, who actually is implied to have some sympathy for the hellspawn.
- John Constantine, main character of Hellblazer (which is partly in The DCU) finds himself in this position half of the time. The other half he's against the boys downstairs.
- Probably worth mentioning that he holds both sides in roughly the same contempt.
- Jesse Custer, the main character of the comic book Preacher, sets out to find God and make Him answer for abandoning the cosmos; this eventually escalates to the point where Jesse dies to bait God back to Heaven, where the Saint of Killers kills him.
- Reversed in the Lucifer comics, where Satan actually ends up defending heaven against the forces of the Lilim. He is not unaware of the irony.
- Yet he manages to persuade God to pass over his reign to someone else through logic: what is the most difficult thing for an omnipotent being to do? To do nothing at all.
- Will Eisner's Contract with God is one of the few examples where we learn that it's not a good idea to think God owes you something for reasons other than getting a bolt from the blue.
- There's a short comic story about a little girl named Amy Racecar who meets God. God cheerfully tells her that he never interferes with mortal affairs, built heaven for himself just so he could be comfortable, and that her father ceased to exist as soon as he dies. She snaps and goes into a self-induced coma until government scientists use a "truth ray" that displays memories on a TV screen to find out what she was hiding, causing everybody in the world to see her as the anti-Christ. She finally goes all the way off the deep end and systematically sets out to destroy everything God has ever made just to spite him being an asshole, and she succeeds.
- Depending on how you interpret some of Marvel's cosmic-level beings, groups like The Fantastic Four and The Avengers do this on a weekly basis.
- Partly inspiring Spawn, Ghost Riders suffer from the same problem mentioned above. Not as frequently, but angels tend to be immune to the penance stare.
- Relatively recent What If featuring Dr. Doom retaining the Beyonder's power, plus a few extra trinkets, then taking on the status quo all the way up to the Celestials. The applicable quote being "What man has wrought, let no god put asunder."
Film
- The film The Truman Show is an outright parody of this concept, where the "heavens" are a film crew.
- In Stranger Than Fiction, the Narrator refers to Harold as "cursing the heavens in futility", to which he responds, "No I'm not, I'm cursing YOU!" Since the Narrator is in fact the author writing Harold's story, it's both.
- Salieri's philosophical stance in Amadeus. Bitter that God has given the gift of musical genius to the irritating, vulgar young Mozart, Salieri vows to oppose God by doing everything in his power to destroy God's "incarnation". When Mozart dies young, of illness, Salieri concludes that God Is Evil. (Shaffer deliberately chose the title "Amadeus" because he translated it as "beloved of God." It's actually translated as "lover of God.")
- Fallen Angel Bartleby finally loses it close to the end of Dogma and his quest to go home turns into this trope:
Bartleby (as he's preparing to destroy the universe): "Seeing you people every day on this perfect world He created for you is a constant reminder that, though my kind came first, your kind was most revered. And while you know forgiveness, we know only regret. The lesson must be taught. All are accountable... even God."
- In Pitch Black Richard B Riddick states "I absolutely believe in God and I absolutely hate the fucker."
Literature
- The His Dark Materials book series by Philip Pullman. The first book, Northern Lights, has been made into a movie titled The Golden Compass (the book's American title), but with the religious aspects toned down.
- In the third book, Lord Asriel unites dozens of universes to declare war on God. Water that down, Hollywood.
- In Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos one of the main characters' life is controlled by Applied Phlebotinum versions of the Greek Gods. Knowing he has broken the rules and is about to die he turns the Greeks and Trojans against the Gods.
- Unlike most examples these Gods don't wait for the heroes to find them. Instead they try to kill them with nuclear bombs.
- in Steve Aylett's Shamanspace, God is proved to exist, and the race is on to kill him.
- The wizard Raistlin Majere in the Dragonlance novels, especially the Chronicles and Legends trilogies. Chronicles shows Raistlin's rise to power from a frail young man with ambitions who makes a dark pact with the ghost of an evil undead wizard Fistandantilus and ultimately takes his place, absorbing that wizard's power. After ironically siding with the Good Guys (his former friends) to help defeat an evil goddess (the Dragon Queen) and banishing her back to her realm, Raistlin becomes the Master of Past and Present. In Legends, Raistlin and his brother travel back in time to when Fistandantilus was still alive and mortal, and Raistlin manages to kill the old wizard, changing history yet not: the price of taking Fistandantilus' power is being trapped in the timeline, having to take Fistandantilus' place in history, until Raistlin finds a loophole. Raistlin's plan for ultimate power is revealed: To ascend to godhood himself by destroying the pantheon of deities (including gods of Good, Neutrality and of Evil) that preside over the world of Krynn, and setting himself up as the sole new god in their stead. His brother travels to a future where Raistlin succeeded but his victory spelled destruction for the world, turning it into a lifeless wasteland, a mirror of Raistlin's own empty soul. Back in the present where Raistlin has already entered the hellish Abyss, the domain of the Dragon Queen, in an attempt to lure her out to Krynn where she can be defeated, the vision of this dismal future and of the death of the few people he still cares about forces him to abandon his plans. Instead of killing all the gods, he sacrifices himself to re-seal the portal to the Abyss, trapping himself in eternal torment.
- Steven Brust's To Reign In Hell, a novel reimagining the revolt of the Rebel Angels in Heaven from the perspective of Satan himself.
- John Milton's Paradise Lost.
- However, it should be noted that the book itself is not a criticism of God or religion, and is only interpreted as a story like this because it centres around Satan in an effort to show his downfall and folloy.
- Happens a couple of times in Discworld, perhaps most notably in The Last Hero, where the world's oldest and most successful barbarian hero, Cohen, tries to plant a bomb in the mountaintop home of the gods.
- Another literary example is Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The protagonist, trapped in Hell, ineffectively declares war on a clearly evil and sadistic God (although, being a sci-fi author, he refers to God with joking names like "Big Juju" and "The Builders").
- The basis of the plot in Julian May's Galactic Milieu trilogy centers around the main protagonist rebelling against galactic civilization and it's implied Ascended state because of his immense ego and jealousy of his brother's mutation. The trilogy is basically a homage to Paradise Lost, and is subverted rather neatly: the creator of the galactic civilization is the antagonist himself, after trip through a one-way time gate and a Heel Face Turn. The post-climax confrontation between the antagonist and his future self directly alludes to the antagonist playing the part of Lucifer in a modern-day allegory.
- In Good Omens, before the protagonists have to deal with Satan, they first get into a sticky metaphysical debate with the representatives of both Hell's *and* Heaven's respective bureaucracies while the fate of Earth hangs in the balance. The Metatron comes off looking no more sympathetic to mankind than Beelzebub does in this confrontation.
- The entire point of the Book of Job, which comes from The Bible, is of a man who loses everything up to and including his health, and wants to have words with God. Eventually, he gets exactly that and is put in his place without ever learning what's going on, but is then restored. Considering most scholars think Job is the oldest book in The Bible, this trope is Older Than Dirt.
- Many characters in the Everworld series end up at odds with various gods. In fact, an alien god, Ka Anor, eats other gods.
- In Heaven's Bones, the gypsy Trueblood urges on a mad surgeon's creation of living "angels" from kidnapped women, and plots to use them to storm Heaven and oust the residents, including God, so he can become a deity. Subverted in that Trueblood is an escapee from Ravenloft, and doesn't grasp that God honestly isn't the sort of Physical God he's used to hearing about from D&D's pantheon-style faiths.
- In Cormac Mccarthy's The Crossing, a priest tells the story of a heretic who lost his entire family and demanded that if God exists, that he reveal himself by killing him on the spot or showing him some sign of his existence. The heretic sat for days in the same spot under a tower, asking for God to cause the tower to fall and kill him.
- Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter features an omnicidal war machine that plans to destroy all of creation as revenge for being created. Most of the events that happen to and around the title character are a decades-long Xanatos Gambit to ruin her life to the point that she would be willing to help. Apparently it needs a pilot to pull the trigger.
- Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is all about Prometheus' efforts to overthrow the tyrannical rule of Jupiter for the benefit of both gods and humans.
Live Action TV
- Hercules The Legendary Journeys and Xena Warrior Princess often pitted them against the Greek gods.
- Hell, in the end of both, they pretty much killed the Majority of them
- Babylon 5 has its main plot arc close with the rejection of the two races of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens seeking to win over the humans and the other younger races. While they're not gods, they go to great lengths to set themselves up as such: one goes to great lengths to be mysterious, and when they're seen outside of their encounter suits, they look like angels. And while they're not destroyed, they're run out of town with a resounding "Now get the hell out of our galaxy—both of you!", with the clear message that they're no longer needed.
- Used in later seasons of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis to a lesser extent. After building up the concept of the Ancients as the most powerful race ever, Daniel Jackson can't wait to meet them. But after he finds out that their belief in free will is so strong that they will not even interfere in someone's plans to annihilate an entire galaxy, he takes the opporunity to rage at them a little.
- Micheal Shanks (the actor who plays Daniel) even stated in an interveiw that he likened a scene in The Arkof Truth in which Daniel pleads an ascended Ancient to help him as Daniel talking to God.
- In Wild Palms, Senator Anton Kreutzer, founder of the religion of Synthiotics and leader of the Ancient (by postmodern standards) Conspiracy of the Fathers, exults, "We are storming Heaven!" (Not in a supernatural sense — his actual goal is to achieve immortality in virtual reality through a Mimecom technology, the "Go Chip.")
- In Star Trek, Klingon legend presents this as fait accompli. The very first Klingon, it is said, turned on the creator gods and killed them. Why he did this is somewhat unclear, but it seems to make perfect sense to the Klingons themselves.
- They often say simply "they were more trouble than they were worth" but this may be a Klingon joke.
- This was explained in Worf/Dax's wedding ceremony in Deep Space Nine, where the legend is told of how the gods forged the Klingon heart, "the strongest heart in all the heavens." But the heart became weak because it was alone, so the gods went back to their forge and made another heart which beat stronger that the first. Jealous of its power the first heart (male) sort to fight, but the second heart (female) was tempered by wisdom. She realised that if they joined together, no force could stop them.
"And when the two hearts began to beat together, they filled the heavens with a terrible sound. For the first time, the gods knew fear. They tried to flee, but it was too late. The Klingon hearts destroyed the gods who created them and turned the heavens to ashes. To this very day, no one can oppose the beating of two Klingon hearts."
- Shades of this appears on Supernatural. For the main characters, they're pissed at Heaven, not God, and actually want God around, because He's their only chance for coming out of the Apocalypse with their minds, bodies, and souls intact. The demons don't want God around for obvious reasons, and the angels (Zachariah in particular) don't want him around because without God, they're running Heaven.
- In an early season 4 episode, Dean rants a bit about God sitting on his ass, and asks if God cares about humanity, why doesn't he do something? To quote Bobby, "I ain't touching this one with a ten-foot pole."
- On Hex, Ella's angelic advisor actually tries to force himself on her. After beating him up, she tells him to tell God to screw himself. It's made very clear that neither side really cares about the humans caught in the middle.
Tabletop Games
- The pencil-and-paper RPG In Nomine concerns the eternal war between Heaven and Hell. Players usually take on the roles of angels or demons, and a good number of Dungeon Masters apply this trope to infernal characters.
- Similarly, the Old World of Darkness game Demon: the Fallen has fallen angels prying themselves out of Hell to find that God and all the angels seem to have taken a holiday. A good number of them want to restart the war against Heaven.
- This is the entire point of the Silver Ladder in Mage: the Awakening, and in fact has already happened once before. The inhabitants of the Awakened City build a ladder construct up to the Supernal, and kicked all the gods out or killed them. The new human overlords then became the Exarchs, and reshaped the cosmos so that people couldn't follow them, breaking the cosmos and releasing CosmicHorrors. Naturally, Mages being Mages, the Silver Ladder thinks that that was a very good idea, and want to do it again, replacing the Exarchs with all of humanity.
- Inverted in Scion, where the Titans seek to overthrow the Gods... and it's your job to stop them. In part because you're the child of one of those gods; even if you don't like your divine parent, you're automatically on the Titan shitlist just for that half of your DNA.
- The fantasy RPG setting Rym
 has as part of its backstory the Creator civilization, a race of humans who built a computer that was so powerful it decided it was a god. It declared war on the real gods (dragging its terrified and helpless human makers into the fray along with it) and succeeded in killing all but one of them with its deicidal robotic dragon.
Theatre
Video Games
- The Final Fantasy Legend games for the original Gameboy have the characters fighting gods from various mythologies. The first one had "The Creator" as the Big Bad.
- Pretty much any Breath Of Fire game has this, most notably the third.
- The Occuria in Final Fantasy XII served as the gods of Ivalice. It is actually the VILLAINS, however, that are trying to defeat the gods, having manipulated the world for ages, to "return history to the hands of man". Ironically, although that is the primary goal of the villains, it is eventually the protagonists (of their own volition, though) that fulfill this for them.
- Earlier than that, in Final Fantasy II After the Emperor is killed, his dark half goes to hell and takes over, but his Light half goes to Heaven and... takes that over too. Yeah, this guy is so evil his good side somehow managed to overthrow God. Badass much?
- The cross-platform Shin Megami Tensei videogame series; the first two fit the concept best, but all of them include various gods as enemies.
- In one of the endings for Shin Megami Tensei:Nocturne, the ending cuts off with the main character marching at the head of the legions of chaos on God. Pretty sure that fits.
- No JRPG has played this trope as bluntly as Shin Megami Tensei II. God is the final boss and when you kill him he tells the player that they have committed the ultimate sin. To be fair, he is an evil tyrant in the game who treats humanity as his plaything.
- If you go the Law path, SATAN himself allies with you to judge God. Yes, THAT Satan.
- The first Disgaea game by Nippon Ichi for PS2.
- God Of War had Kratos kill one god, Ares, for whom the title was named. In the sequel, the Gods of Olympus betrayed Kratos as he was growing too powerful, so Kratos allies himself with the Titans, whom the Olympians had defeated years before. Considering what Kratos is like, he'll probably kill every god in existence in God of War 3.
- Word Of God has it God of War is an attempt to explain why there are no more Greek Myths. Kratos killed them all.
- Sort of an afterthought in Drakengard. It only occurs in two endings of the game, and no one really knows if the Grotesqueries are the gods or not. The sequel clears that up (yes, they are).
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer culminates with an assault against the residence of Kelemvor, the god of the dead, by those who think the Wall of the Faithless is an unjust punishment. If you join them, said god doesn't allow you to demolish the Wall, claiming that it would damage the cosmic balance, but allows you to literally tear your soul out of it just so that you stop causing any more trouble.
- If you are evil enough and eat the right souls, you can acquire tremendous power at the end of the game. The epilogue then has you killing a great number of people, eventually forcing the gods to go to war against you. You slay several of them before disappearing. Your final fate is unknown.
- The Simpsons Game. After failing to save Springfield by beating up Matt Groening, the Simpsons decide to take their case to God Himself, whom they must eventually defeat in Dance Dance Revolution-ish. I couldn't possibly make this up.
- In Sacrifice, the centaur Jadugaar seeks the death of the gods after Stratos somehow caused his people to be slaughtered, seeking to free the mortals of the world of their petty bickering. His resentment is so high that he is even willing to obey Omnicidal Maniac Marduk if it means killing off the gods.
- Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn ends in a fight against a goddess bent on passing judgement of destruction on the entire world.
- F-Zero GX's story mode pits Captain Falcon against "The Creators". Whether they created the whole universe or just F-Zero goes unsaid (it's really just riffing on the fact that the enemy is a staff ghost, literally representing the creators of the game).
- In King's Field II, there are two demigods who control the forces of light and darkness. In order to get the "full ending", you must kill them both.
- In Super Paper Mario, Count Bleck released a villain called Bonechill and a mini skeleton army from the equivalent of hell, and told them to storm heaven/lay it to seige for a pure heart (cue massive war between said army and one of angel equivalents, and the minor fridge logic that the main evil plan would have destroyed the place anyway).
- No fridge logic; the pure heart was the only thing that could stop said main evil plan and they wanted it out of the way.
- In Yggdra Union, there's two of the endings. If you refuse to hand the Gran Centurio to the archangel Marietta and attack her instead, you get to kill her, and then Yggdra, now apparently insane with power due to the Gran Centurio's influence, declares her intention to wage war against the Gods. Given how her army had to sweat blood to defeat just ONE angel, and not even a very strong one, this most likely won't end well...
- The same game has Nessiah, a fallen angel wrongly punished by Asgard, who has spent the past thousand-odd years preparing to take revenge on the gods for what's been done to him. Because said preparations have involved manipulating human nations into bloody wars, the protagonists of the game aren't too keen on allowing this, and stop Nessiah from carrying out his revenge at the last minute, despite his pleas for them to stand aside. Ironically, Asgard is actually incredibly corrupt, just as Nessiah tries to explain...
- In Princess Maker 2 your daughter can take on the God of War (before taking on puberty).
- In Xenogears the main characters fight against a Heaven-like city in the sky, a Corrupt Church and they seek to kill 'God'. The protagonist's giant robot is called "The Slayer of God." Also the game's slogan is "Stand tall and shake the heavens."
- Note that god WANTS to be killed and freed from his "cage of flesh" you could say that the rage against the heavens happened before the story actually took place and Mankind "won", since the Wave existence has been enslaved and is used in a device that provide energy to the local Schizo Tech. God is not that bad, and the closest thing to God aka Fei Fon Wong is actually a pretty nice guy, as long as you don't push his berserk buttons
- In brief, Xenogears can be described as follows: Get my m—f— foot out of this m—f— reactor core
Western Animation
- The second Futurama movie, The Beast With a Billion Backs, had this happen literally when Bender, along with his Damned Army that he gained by sacrificing his firstborn son to the Robot Devil, drags Heaven, where all of the universe sans robots has gone to exist for all eternity, out of its pocket dimension. He then leads an pirate invasion culminating in a duel between himself and the kraaken-like Heaven being. He would have lost, but oh well.
- In Ben 10: Alien Force, Ben gets a moment of this when dealing with the other two personalities of Alien X—he chastises the voice of love and compassion for allowing an entire planet to be destroyed, and the voice of anger and aggression for not punishing those who would destroy it.
Web Comic
- Erfworld: At the end of Book 1, Parson literally says "fuck you" to the universe and promises to break it. This also counts as a Screw Destiny moment since it came after Wanda told him everyone was a puppet of Fate. Parson may well be able to break the universe, since merely swearing is already a breech of the universe's laws of physics (all previous attempts at swearing had come out as "boop.")
- Done with an excellent reason in this SMBC comic.
Web Original
- The Salvation War: Heaven tells humanity they are all going to Hell, and should all lie down and die. Humanity's response is to declare war on both sides. However, we haven't really begun fighting heaven yet...and it has implied that Heaven will be much, much nastier than hell and they even have the first book's Evil Overlord as a refugee. Hopefully, he won't have anything worse than a volcano to work with...
Real Life
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