Sandbox / Evil Gods

Created according to crowner decision in Trope Repair Shop thread for God Is Evil.

These gods go beyond just being jerkasses. They delight in tormenting mortals or even their fellow gods in the pursuit of horrific goals or just their own sadistic pleasure.

Evil gods are frequent antagonists in Heroic Fantasy stories, for what could be a more impressive heroic feat than slaying a god? Evil gods also provide the story with much higher stakes; wiping out all of existence can easily be within their means. Their own heavenly realm may even be exempt from such destruction, allowing them to be Omnicidal Maniacs with total impunity. If you're particularly unlucky, the entire heavenly pantheon may be rotten to the core, save perhaps for a Token Good Teammate.

You can probably expect a lot of Nay Theists and Raging Against The Heavens in settings with gods like these, but note that, as with God Is Evil, the god itself has to confirm the mortals' negative opinion of them.

Truth in Television: this viewpoint is Older Than Feudalism. Already some Greek philosophers considered the Olympian deities to be nothing but malevolent bullies. Lucian (2nd century AD) wrote a lengthy essay on why the Greco-Roman deities were evil, to boot. Likewise, the Norse sagas were full of description of Vikings who were goðlauss (godless)-they actively disdained the Norse deities, instead relying on themselves.

Compare and contrast with the more specific tropes God Is Evil (the Top God of a setting is evil, not just any one) and God of Evil (a god who explicitly embodies evil). See also Jerkass Gods for a lighter version.

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Examples:

Video Games

• Onimusha: In this game's verse, the Creation Myth is different than the usual world. The Genma race was the one that existed since primordial chaos and then sired mankind as a Slave Race for their own, and they think it existed only as nourishment and slave for them. And their leader, Fortinbras, wants to make sure that it stays that way, when the humans started gaining free will and rebelled against it.
• Dishonored plays with this trope like pipe organ. The dominant religion of the setting is the Abbey of the Everyman, which recognizes only one deity, the Outsider, but claims that it is very evil indeed, directly responsible for all human sin and the source of all witchcraft. Corvo's experience with the Outsider, however, proves that while he is indeed the source of all magic (and most magic-users really are bad news) he is also by-and-large an observer, and that he imposes no demands on those he empowers. Apparently, he has just chosen a lot of untrustworthy people to empower, probably because power corrupts and the world is most often changed by ambitious bastards.
• The Golden Sun series subverts this. Yes, the Wise One can be a very harsh taskmaster and is not against setting people trials that would shatter lesser minds. However, it has a very good reason for being something of a Knight Templar: namely the fact that it's already seen what kind of Crapsack World Alchemy can create. As such, it wants to make damn sure that it's used for good and that nobody screws the world over again with it. Now, the actual Ancients on the other hand - who possessed even greater power, given that they created the Wise One are far more morally ambiguous given that they were the ones who ruined the world in the first place. The Wise One is in fact simply a powerful golem created for the purpose of keeping Alchemy sealed. The reason it went to such lengths was because it was re-evaluating its original directives in light of new information (mainly that keeping Alchemy sealed would doom the world to a slow death anyway), but needed to make sure that people were ready for the potential problems Alchemy would bring if it was brought back.
• In the Legacy of Kain games, the Elder God is in many ways the Big Bad of the series; it tells Raziel it resurrected him and that its Wheel of Fate is a force of life, but the time-travelling Raziel notices that it seems to grow as the land deteriorates, and eventually concludes that it parasitically feeds on the souls of the dead and manipulatively causes death and destruction in order to provide itself with fresh souls. However, since serious questions are raised about the full extent of its power (Raziel suspects that it might have simply been there when he recovered of his own accord and simply claimed responsibility for his survival, and it heavily relies on agents for much of its success,) it is debatable whether it can really be considered a god, especially since Kain takes the supposedly omniscient being completely by surprise and kicks its ass at the end of the series.
• Viking: Battle for Asgard: You know Freya? Yeah, she's kinda evil. The kind of evil that brings you back to life with the promise that she'll give you a chance to enter Valhalla if you kill someone for her and then realizes the benefits of having a personal assassin and promptly stabs you in the back. Skarin was not pleased and suffice it to say, it did not end well if you happened to be a God.
• In Drakengard, The World Is Always Doomed because of this. The gods that the hierarchs in the Crystal Dragon Jesus religion pray to for salvation are in fact the ones trying to destroy the world. When they show up towards the game's finale, they appear as giant, man-eating babies. Yeah. As far as who created the world, the debate is out whether the gods did or the dragons did.
  • Drakengard 3 sheds some light on the Cult of the Watchers and exactly what it is that they're worshiping. The goddess that the cult worships is none other than the Intoner One, with the cult being started by her Opposite-Sex Clone "brother" in order to honor her after her death. While One is a benevolent individual, as an Intoner she is destined to destroy the world unless she and her sisters are killed.
• Odin in Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria is ready to destroy the entire mortal world rather than face the possibility that humans will stop serving the gods unquestioningly. Lezard doesn't seem that bad all of the sudden. He is somewhat Lawful Evil in the first Valkyrie Profile, too. After all he is fine destroying the order of the mortal world by stealing its sacred treasure just to have a mighty artifact for himself and to help Lenneth to recruit more Einherjar.
  • Odin and the other gods are also shown to be completely apathetic towards Midgard. They sit on golden thrones in magnificent castles, while the world underneath is one of the darkest, most dismal worlds you can imagine.
• Mortal Kombat let's just say doesn't exactly portray its gods in the best light.
  • The Elder Gods certainly qualify; while hiding behind an Obstructive Code of Conduct of non-interference with their own creation, they've either downright ignored imminent threats to the Realms and breaking of sacred laws (like they did with Shao Kahn's invasion of Earth in MK 3), or manipulated proxies into doing their dirty work through elaborate Gambit Roulettes that have as much of a chance of succeeding as a snowball surviving in the burning heart of Hell, with wonderful non-rewards for doing a "good job" (have pity for Scorpion and his family and clan, or Taven and his family and friends). And when one of their own does decide to interfere, they're punished violently, regardless of whether their intent was malefic or innocent. Makes you wonder why no one's gone up there to kick their deific asses, yet...
    • Of particular mention when it comes to the Elder Gods is Shinnok and Cetrion, with Shinnok being one of the main villains of the franchise with tons of horrible crimes under his belt, also while Shinnok is a traitor he did still commit evil actions during his time as an Elder God. Cetrion is not much better as she betrays and kills all her fellow Elder Gods and was secretly a mole for Kronika.
  • Even Raiden could also qualify, depending on the game. In his Armageddon ending, he became increasingly aggressive in his protection of Earth, going as far as to destroy all other realms (both threatening and non-threatening ones) to prevent them from being a danger to Earth. And in his ending in the original game, Raiden wins the Mortal Kombat tournament, but soon becomes bored with human competition and invites other gods to participate in the tournament, which ends up destroying the planet.
  • The Elder Gods are motivated less by malice and more by fear of the One Being, the true supreme being whom they rebelled against and separated into the Realms. Everything they do is meant to keep the One Being from ever coming back. The One Being would qualify as an example of this trope as well, since the reason the Elder Gods rebelled against it was because it was eating them (and would likely do the same to everything else in creation if it came back).
  • Mortal Kombat 11 reveals that The One is NOT the only Titan. The game's main antagonist, Kronika, is the Titan of Time (and the mother of one of the Elder Gods). Her ultimate goal is to set up a Forever War that ensures neither side will ever win, and will hit the Reset Button when she doesn't get her way. Repeatedly. Scorpion's ending reveals images of other Titans who also mess around with mortals, and are the reason why his family's death is a fixed event in time.
• Xenosaga has a subversion. While Dimitri Yuriev believes the Dimension Lord Energy Being U-DO is evil, and it does have a tendency to cause people to go insane when it touches their minds, it isn't evil, just alien.
• Record of Agarest War has the six Dark Gods/Goddesses, five of which are sealed within the false world of Agarest's five pillars located on each of the five continents. Mercury for Lucrellia's pillar, Mobius for Graccea's pillar, Deeth for Fendia's pillar, Nemesis for Enhambre's pillar, and Mayastia for Aegisthus's pillar. The sole exception of the six is Chaos, the highest among them, though despite his title, he is not "completely evil", since while he embodies his title, he is sealed in the Boundary Plane, a realm of existence outside of Agarest. He still can be considered "evil" for what he intends to do to roughly gouge out the "truth" of Agarest in his own image, had the Oathsworn legacy and their trusted companions not stopped him.
• God of War had a recurring theme that the higher Gods of mythologies were actually evil, self-serving assholes that used their powers to toy around humanity while ruling the land, they are now incapable of doing good deeds like the original mythology did. While the resident god-killer/protagonist Kratos is definitely no saint and can get really murderous when he's pissed off, he came off a lot better and humanized than these evil Gods that paraded as champions of mankind and protectors of the world. To name a few:
  • Ares; not only did he trick his champion into murdering their own family, but subsequent games reveal he wanted to conquer Olympus with an Ax-Crazy champion, and abandoned his own son when he didn't live up to the standards of a war god. The other Greek gods got fed up with his constant raids on their patron cities and tasked Kratos with taking him out. Kratos also regresses into Ax-Crazy when he takes Ares' position, gleefully torturing and brutalizing his defeated enemies and innocent civilians for no reason beyond stress relief.
  • Zeus from God of War II is particularly paranoid and vengeful, attacking Kratos for the possibility that Kratos might kill and usurp him in the future. To be fair, though, Zeus was the same way in classic Greek myth, and Kratos would probably do it. In III, it's revealed that Kratos corrupted Zeus when he opened Pandora's Box in the first game to defeat Ares. To be frank, the Gods did EVERYTHING necessary to deserve Kratos' wrath. They assumed his brother would destroy them, so they kidnapped him and made him Thanatos' prisoner. Ares then manipulates and fools him into killing his own family. After 10 years of service, Kratos kills Ares both for his revenge and their last mission, and they refuse to relieve him from his nightmares. He tries to commit suicide, but rather they turn him into the God of War. Then Kratos finds out about all Deimos, they have his mother cursed into a monster, forcing him to kill her, and kill his brother minutes after they made up. When Kratos snaps and goes on a conquest, Zeus responds by slaughtering his army, and the rebels trying to fight back against Kratos, in an arrogant display of power, and destroys Sparta just to rub it in. Really, they EARNED their karmic punishment! In God of War (PS4), Mimir outright states that the Greek Pantheon had it coming.
  • And throughout the series, the Greek pantheon is shown to have control over the world itself and its suffering, yet they obsess over torturing the weak, and bicker in their spare time. Those monsters that fight Kratos throughout the series? Those are created in the underworld from human souls to periodically terrorize the world of the living. Whenever the gods bicker, they wage horrendous wars with little care to the cannon fodder and civilians that get in the way. The gods killed all the Titans "for the sins of just one", then they locked up the souls that survived to be tortured for eternity, because they could.
  • The Asgardians in God of War (PS4). All of the lore that is found throughout the game revolves around Odin and/or Thor being ultra-racist, murderous jackasses. Mostly confirmed by their victims. Only averted by a few members, such as Freya/Frigg, Thrud, and Sif.
  • God of War Ragnarök cements Odin as a textbook sociopath who runs Asgard like a mega-corporation. Every sentence that comes out of his mouth is either a brazen lie or meant to mislead, he constantly abuses/manipulates his sons and generally views them like employees or tools (hence the reason they're all so screwed up), and frequently murders anyone who dares to resist his constant control, which includes multiple genocides. He enslaved the dwarves to make him personalized war weapons, and then used mortals as meatshields for psychological warfare. To 'hammer' in how truly empty he is, Odin murders Thor in a fit of rage during Ragnarok for daring to defy his father's increasingly brutish orders. And all of this somehow pales in comparison to a sick project he greenlit, where his unhinged fanatic cultists hung their own children, whose souls were then reforged into spirit animals and Odin's personal spies.
• The fal'Cie, from Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels. While some just have Blue-and-Orange Morality, nearly all of them doom humans by unwillingly turning them into l'Cie. Their creator isn't any better.

  • This goes even further in the final game, Lightning Returns. The god Bhunivelze orders the Heroine, Lightning, to save as many souls as possible from despair, in return for her sister's resurrection from the dead. But Lightning later discovers he intends to leave everyone else behind and murder anyone he doesn't deem worthy to live in his ideal world, which leads her to defy him and try to become the new goddess whom will give all souls a second chance.

• Final Fantasy XII has the Occuria, a pantheon of very powerful godlike spirits who have manipulated the development of mortal life on Ivalice for centuries in an ongoing Gambit Roulette, selecting and manipulating various humans as their champions, including the player characters. Ironically, they are opposed by one of their own, a rogue Occuria who has allied with the Evil Overlord in an attempt to break the Occuria's domination over humanity in a Gambit Roulette of their own, unfortunately causing tremendous misery and destruction in their attempts to do so.
• The Elder Scrolls series has several types of deity, which play with this trope in different ways:
  • Lorkhan, the creator deity who tricked/convinced some of his fellow et'Ada ("original spirits") to create Mundus, the mortal plane, is viewed as a malevolent entity by most of the races of Mer (Elves). They consider creation a malevolent act which robbed the pre-creation spirits of their divinity and forced them into the prison of the mortal world where they experience death and suffering. (The races of Men, on the other hand, generally see Lorkhan as benevolent entity who freed the pre-creation spirits from a prison of unchanging stasis.)
  • Those et'Ada who aided Lorkhan in creating Mundus would become known as the Aedra ("Our Ancestors" in Old Aldmeris). Due to being severely weakened by the act of creation, they rarely influence mortal affairs directly. They tend to be worshiped by mortals, both Men and Mer, for their contribution as the "Divines" and are mostly believed to be benevolent. One possible exception, depending on the interpretation, is Akatosh, the draconic God of Time and Top God of the Nine Divines pantheon. According to one prominent theory, the dragons, including Alduin, are fragments of his being. Dragons are beings of destruction and domination, with Alduin having the responsibility of "eating the world" at the end of every "kalpa", or cycle of time.
  • The et'Ada who did not aid Lorkhan are known as the Daedra ("Not Our Ancestors"). Of them, the 17 most powerful are known as the Daedric Princes. Each has a particular sphere, which the are said to govern from their planes of Oblivion (the infinite void around Mundus) which they inhabit and rule. Though most are considered "evil," scholars are quick to point out that they are really beings Above Good and Evil who operate on their own Blue-and-Orange Morality. The "Good" ones only seem that way because what they seek to accomplish is generally beneficial or benevolent toward mortals, while the "Evil" ones are more likely to harm mortals with their actions. For instance, Mehrunes Dagon is the Daedric Prince of Destruction, but can be considered no more "evil" than a tidal wave or an earthquake.
  • Morrowind:
    • In the main quest, Big Bad Dagoth Ur is a true Physical God, having tapped into the power of the Heart of Lorkhan. He channels his power from it, and has essentially become an Eldritch Abomination. The implication is that Dagoth Ur has discovered an unspeakably dangerous middle-ground between CHIM, Amaranth and Zero-Sum where he exists in a godlike state because of his awareness of Anu's Dream but, unlike CHIM where he exists as one with it and maintains his own individuality, Amaranth where he exits the Dream to make his own, or Zero-Sum where he simply fades into the Dream, Dagoth Ur's twisted, traumatized and broken mind is being imprinted on the Dream of Anu. Naturally, the Nerevarine must sever his (and the Tribunal's) ties to the Heart in order to stop him.
    • In the Tribunal expansion, the main quest ends with the Nerevarine having to kill Almalexia, one of the Tribunal gods. The loss of her divine power has driven her mad. She has already killed another Tribunal god, Sotha Sil, and wants you to die as a martyr.
  • In the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion you find out that Jyggalag, the Daedric Prince of Order, became so powerful he threatened the other Daedric Princes, and thus was cursed with madness, transforming him into Sheogorath. You then free Jyggalag and take the mantle of Sheogorath.
• In the backstory of Dwarf Fortress (insofar as a fantasy world simulator can have a backstory), the supreme deity, Armok, God of Blood, loves conflict and creates worlds in order that conflict may occur. As the world approaches stability, Armok destroys and recreates the world anew. In a meta sense, Armok is the player, who is likely to generate a new world when their current one becomes peaceful (and therefore boring).
  • The regular gods in the game are no better, cursing mortals with vampirism and therianthropy, bestowing slabs containing the secret of animating the dead, and raising demons from the underworld, all in the name of creating further conflict.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, Archdemons that lead Darkspawn hordes are Old Gods of the Tevinter corrupted by the Blight. The Maker himself is also an asshole of a god, as instead of just killing the Tevinter mages that attempted to breach the Golden City, he cursed them to spread devastation in their wake and sent them to destroy the mortal world.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Act III reveals the Awful Truth that the Seven Gods actually created the mortal races as a power source and eat their followers' souls as soon as they arrive in the afterlife. The player characters kill their Patron Gods when they try to do the same to them.
• Blasphemous has the Grievous Miracle, a fickle phenomenon affecting the miserable land of Cvstodia. It specializes in granting its followers' wishes... which in Cvstodia's Martyrdom Culture, often comes through the creation of Body Horror monstrosities referencing the means through which its faithful wish to be punished for no real purpose other than making them suffer. The High Wills, creators of the Miracle, made it explicitly for their own benefit, shaping Cvstodia's culture along with the Miracle to provide them with a perpetual-motion machine of prayer and pain, and the horrible fates they visited upon Laudes, who loved their prophet more than they, and the Fourth Brother, who discovered the whole charade, show that they don't practice what they preach.
• Bayonetta has Jubileus, the Goddess who controls the realm of Paradiso and its Angels, and who drives the plot of the first game in that she is the story's Greater-Scope Villain, with the Big Bad's goal being to recover the two reality-shaping "Eyes of the World" to awaken her with the power to destroy and recreate the mortal world in her own image as a "perfect world". The second game makes her worse, by revealing that what she was doing was a power-grab; there are at least three Creator-Gods in the Bayonetta universe, one each for Paradiso, Inferno and Earth. Jubileus was hoping to steal the power of Aesir, the Creator-God of Earth, and use that to destroy every world that isn't Paradiso before recreating them as part of Paradiso, making her the only Creator-God to still exist.
• Bastion: The gods idols only make the game harder, in fact, there is a song called "The Pantheon (Ain't Gonna Catch You)" telling how the different gods will kick you in the floor.
• Asura's Wrath has The Golden Spider/Chakravartin. The omnipotent ruler of Gaea, he is the one responsible for the Gohma being unleashed upon Gaea and many other worlds, and makes everyone in these worlds suffer just to find his next heir. He thinks this is saintly of him, but Asura calls him out on this while punching him in the face repeatedly. The Seven Deities are a less powerful example of this. Of them, only Yasha, Deus and Augus are not outright sadistic, violent, arrogant beings who look down upon mortals and use them as they see fit, and Augus only because he cares not for domination but simply a good fight. Even Yasha and Deus was willing to be Necessarily Evil.
• The Tower incarnation of the Princess in Slay the Princess. She is a towering figure who proclaims herself a goddess, and certainly has the powers to match: she can control the Hero with a Compelling Voice, read his thoughts, and even control the Narrator. She is delighted to learn she is destined to end the world and forces the Hero to grovel before her, degrading him as nothing more than a pet even if he chooses to serve her. And if he doesn't, she teaches him a lesson by horrifically torturing him to death. This is, however, only one face of the Princess; her true self, an amalgamation of all her possible selves, is closer to a Benevolent Abomination.
  • It is possible to Kill the God, but this transforms her in an even nastier example: The Fury. This version of the Princess is a gruesome, demonic titan whose only desire is to make the Hero suffer — and she very much can, reducing him to Ludicrous Gibs with only a thought.

Anime and Manga

• Digimon:
  • Digimon Tamers has Zhuqiaomon, a phoenix god who is one of the four Holy Beasts that rule the Digital World. He sent his servants, the Devas, to the human world, to wreak havoc and eventually kidnap one of the heroes' friends, a small Digimon with the power to trigger evolution. However, this trope is inverted once the other Holy Beasts intervene, and explain that Zhuqiaomon was only trying to use their friend's special powers to fight the D-Reaper. Of course, Zhuqiaomon really dislikes humans as it is and isn't very apologetic to the children, so while not evil per se, he's still kind of an ass.

Literature

• Nasuverse:
  • Within the larger franchise, while not quite Gaia is the creator of the earth gods and by extension humanity, and is the manifestation of the planet itself. She also wants to knock humanity back to the Stone Age, if not outright obliterate them, for daring to rise above the natural order.
  • The central conflict of both Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night revolves around priests and magi trying to gain control of the Holy Grail, which will grant their greatest wish. It turns out towards the end that the Grail has a will of its own and may do anything from twist your wish to outright refuse it. That said, the church has their doubts that this artifact is actually the Grail (according to background materials, it is not), and other works in the Nasuverse establish that the Grail has been corrupted ever since the entity Angra Mainyu was sealed in it. So, it may be a subversion.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero: In the webnovel version, the final antagonist (and the one behind most of the catastrophes in the story) is Medea, a self-proclaimed goddess that causes the waves by merging multiple worlds together, so she can drain their energy for their own use, and causes untold levels of suffering for her own entertainment, especially through fragments like Malty, the twisted sadist Naofumi and company have had to deal with for much of the saga.
• The Cthulhu Mythos draws most of its horror from this trope. There is no benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God shepherding humanity. Instead, humanity exists on a bubble of foam in an endless cosmic ocean of darkness, surrounded by predators so horrific, that their appearance alone drives their prey insane. The gods who rule this cold, hostile universe are omniscient and omnipotent. But their scale and their knowledge make them utterly alien and impersonal. The greatest of them barely notices humanity at all. As for the ones who do take an interest...
  • The actual creator of the Universe, Azatoth, is not even sentient, and is referred to as the Blind Idiot God, and exists as a formless mass of chaos outside reality.
  • Nyarlathotep, the "Crawling Chaos", is the closest to what humans would understand as a divine being, being possessed of sentience and personality rather than something resembling an amoral, rampaging hurricane. Unfortunately, he's more of a sadistic, malevolent Trickster God than anything else, and has some nebulous purpose for humanity.
  • Finally, there's Yog-Sothoth, who even the Old Ones view as a God (he is also the "grandfather of Cthulhu"), and, like God's, has spawned hybrid offspring on Earth with human worshippers.
• Dragaera: Vlad Taltos ends up discussing morality with another character, especially with regards to the behavior of the gods. He eventually decides that an evil act/action, even when done by a god, is still evil; while he does learn that they have their reasons, it doesn't mean he won't disagree with their methods. Some of the later books have him (somewhat idly) considering assassinating a particular one, especially after certain of her actions resulted in a 'peasant' rebellion/uprising, and him on the run and divorced.
• In The Eschaton Series, there is a God-like entity called the Eschaton, which spread humanity over three thousand years of space and responds to any attempts at Time Travel by almost completely destroying the offending planet. Slightly subverted, however, because the Eschaton specifically states that it is not God. Also, the Eschaton is not evil — it acts only from self-preservation (ensuring that the timeline leading to its own creation takes place correctly), not from sadism. This doesn't stop some people in-Universe from seeing it as evil, but they tend to the villains in-story.
• Paul Kidd's Greyhawk trilogy ends with Queen Of The Demonweb Pits, in which two characters convince the rest that all the gods are, at best, really morally dubious. It is obvious that gods like Lolth (whom they spend most of the book working on killing) are evil, supposedly good gods like Thoth are proven to be right bastards as well, since Thoth enslaves the souls of his worshipers to operate his temple, library, and farms, intentionally mind-wiping them and keeping them ignorant so they don't think of rebelling.

Comic Books

• In Ghost Rider, and thus the Marvel Universe as a whole, the evil angel Zadkiel finally succeeded in his violent coup to seize the throne of Heaven. The horrors of a Heaven run by Zadkiel are so great that many who are in the know would sooner kill themselves and take their chances in Hell.
• Loki of The Mighty Thor is often called and self-titled the "god of evil." Other gods or godlike beings from the Marvel Universe are very much about evil including Seth and the elder god Chthon. However, the actual highest being of the Marvel Universe is almost certainly benevolent, and is usually referred to as The-One-Above-All, though it's debatable if he's ever actually been seen (though an entity that may or may not have been Him bore a striking similarity to Jack Kirby). His higher subordinates (whom all three of the above characters would be like dust mites too) have been known to drift into Lawful Neutral Jerkass Gods on occasion, though.
• Darkseid of the New Gods is the "God of Evil" and revels in it. He runs a hellish planet dedicated to this with all his lieutenants being other evil gods.
  • And by Final Crisis, when he's the only New God left, he gives us this little gem (as well as ample proof of statement):
    I AM THE NEW GOD.
• Supergod: The concept of God or gods, and especially the desire for them to exist, is described as a glitch caused by human sapience, and the creation of superhumans is a modern substitute. Even the ones that could even be remotely described as benevolent such as Krishna or Jerry Craven (J.C, get it?) are Blue-and-Orange Morality at best. Krishna was created with the purpose to "save India", which he did... by massacring 90% of it's population, then rebuilding the entire country to allow the survivors to live in a technological utopia. And that's not even touching on the ones that could be described as actively malevolent such as Gajjial who destroys the world and dooms mankind because he can see alternate timelines and Krishna and J.C's utopia would be boring.
• Wonder Woman: This has been played with over the decades, with Zeus and the other Olympians being at best Jerkass Gods.
  • In The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) Zeus tries to pass himself off as the Big Good in opposition to Ares as the Big Bad but Diana is proven right in her distrust when he proudly commands that she help him massacre most of humanity and subjugate the remnants, proving that even though Ares is a jerk he's not nearly as cruel or self obsessed as Zeus.
  • In the New 52's Wonder Woman (2011), Zeus is missing and presumed dead so his children fight over his throne, the callous Apollo ends up king of Olympus before being killed and overthrown by "The First Born", who is bloodthirsty and unapologetically evil.
• This trope is shown rather than told in The Adventures of Mark Twain through the presence of The Mysterious Stranger. Although the Stranger is explicitly Satan, he nontheless represents a malevolent God-figure as opposed to the benevolent God featured in an earlier segment. When the children meet him, he brings a civilization of clay figures to life on his planet. However, when he notices a few of the clay figures having a petty argument over property, he grows angry, and kills them all in a rage. The children are horrified, but the Mysterious Stranger doesn't show any remorse at all, since he can always make more clay people if he wishes. His musings as the children leave are especially creepy:
  The Mysterious Stranger: Life itself is only a vision. A dream. Nothing exists, save empty space and you. And you... are but a thought.

Tabletop RPG

• The Dark Eye at first glance has a "gods = good; demons = evil" divide. Apart from the Nameless God, who was a traitor to the good gods. Then you find out about some more obscure (demi)gods, particularly the bloodthirsty Kor, who is the patron of mercenaries and likes to get cut off fingers of slain foes as sacrifice. Of course the fact that some misguided people worship demons as gods doesn't mean anything. Until you get deeper into the ancient history/mythology and find out that at least some of the Archdemons that rule Hell used to be gods, and are only demons now because their number of worshippers diminished and they were supplanted by newer, more popular gods. Or they just did it For the Evulz.
  • Plus, the gods really only care about the existence of creation. Mortals are only interesting for them for their effect on creation and for reaping their souls (every god gets the souls of mortals that live by his ideals) to strengthen the armies of creation in the last battle when the aforementioned Nameless God rips the outer sphere open, letting in the hordes of uncreated demons. Some of them seem to be curious about mortals that live by their ideals, like Phex (essentially god of tricksters) or Hesinde (goddess of wisdom and art), but that could be a ruse to get more souls. Others, the hard liners, were ready to nuke a region to stop a renegade from damning all mortals (signing their souls over to the demons), even if it meant reaping tens of thousands of souls prematurely. Luckily the largest army of mortals in the last age stopped the renegade before that.
  • The "evil" (demi)gods are implied to be falling gods, going over to the demon side. The Nameless God didn't go over to the demons' side, he just weakened creation, letting the demons in more easily, gaining control of some of them, and taking creation for himself.
• Practically every Dungeons & Dragons setting features evil deities, though most settings primarily have those evil deities in conflict with good deities. Some settings, on the other hand, only have evil gods. Although it's unclear if they're gods or not, the Dark Powers of Ravenloft are either out-and-out evil, or so inscrutable and/or indifferent to the innocents caught up in their playground that they might as well be.
• Exalted: All the major gods are addicted to the Games of Divinity. What the Games are is left up to the individual ST but it is known that they are incredibly addictive, with only the original makers of the world, the Primordials, immune. Thus a common Internet meme states "The Unconquered Sun is on Celestial Crack". Then again, so are Luna, the Five Maidens, several of the head divisions, many God-Blooded (children of major gods, minor Gods don't get access) and even anyone who has seen the Games of Divinity Form of the Prismatic Arrangement of Creation Style of Sidereal Martial Arts.
• In Magic: The Gathering, the gods that are worshipped by the people of Zendikar — Cosi, Ula, and Emeria — were actually inspired by distorted memories of Kozilek, Ulamog, and Emrakul, the three Eldrazi titans. One cleric has a crisis of faith when the truth is revealed.

  Ayli, Kamsa cleric: I believed in a beautiful god. But this is the true face of the divine.

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • All WH40K gods are evil. In WH40K the only really relevant gods (as in, the ones controlling the endless hordes of ravenous daemons and who have the ability to spread their "blessings" liberally upon their mortal followers as opposed to simply being a generally ineffectual focus of worship) literally embody the worst parts of sentience.
  • Disturbingly, the Gods of Chaos also embody positive qualities:
    • Khorne is the embodiment of rage, so both berserkers and honorable warriors fall under his purview. Trying to gain favor with him by slaughtering the defenseless is not going to get you a lot of points.
    • Slaanesh is desire incarnate, and while hedonists are the most represented among his followers, artists and musicians can follow him as well.
    • Nurgle is one of the few gods to be actually nice, and is a Friend to All Living Things... literally, all living things. He loves plague-causing bacteria just as much as he loves his followers, and sees infecting the latter with the former to be a good reward.
    • Then there is Tzeentch, a God of Manipulative Bastards...who is the Warhammer universe's God of Hope.
  • The Gods of Chaos are entities created by the Warp, which is psychically connected to the minds of sentient species throughout the universe (not all of them, but several enough). The Warhammer universe is a Crapsack World at best, outright Dystopia at worst, a place of perpetual ultraviolent warfare and every second alien race is Always Chaotic Evil- even the three "good" factions (Imperium, Eldar and Tau) are each an unhealthy mixture of Absolute Xenophobe, Manipulative Bastard, Scary Dogmatic Aliens / Humans and Moral Myopia on an intergalactic scale, all perfectly willing to eradicate entire planets and races that get in their way (or just on principle). So, essentially, this is a cosmic case of Create Your Own Villain- the reason the Gods of Chaos are evil is because they are shaped by the emotions of the peoples of the universe at large, and the universe at large is Hell. In a nicer Warhammer verse, Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh might actually be somewhat benevolent- of course, since they arent, the universe is even worse that it normally would be, making this and its consequences a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy to boot.
  • There is/was also Malal/Malice who is considered too dangerous even by Chaos Gods.
  • Gork and Mork, who are slightly less bad. Slightly. Since they are Gods of Orks, it by default means strong homicidal tendencies. However, in fact they don't actually do much, save for protecting the souls of Orks in the Warp and occasionally butting heads with Chaos Gods. So from the Ork point of view, even by human standards they look almost benevolent. They're more active in Fantasy, and not nearly as nice there.
  • The C'Tan? They're arguably not real gods (they're just hideously powerful Energy Beings with the power of gods, to whom the laws of physics aren't even guidelines), but they're active at the moment... and make the Chaos Gods look good by comparison. The Chaos Gods at least have positive traits even if they're, at the moment, almost totally overshadowed by vile evil. The C'Tan are a bunch of self-serving, duplicitous, genocidal bastards who want to wipe out all life in the galaxy because life energy tastes better than stars. Also, they reduced their entire race of worshipers into near-mindless cyborg undead robotic slaves. There are four of them left: the Nightbringer, the personification of death who burned his image into the psyche of virtually all life (big exception: the Orks) as such and made life be afraid of death; the Deceiver, Chessmaster par excellence; the Outsider, currently batshit bonkers and locked away in a cosmic prison; and the Void Dragon, currently napping. Information on the Void Dragon is sketchy, but he is said to be the most powerful C'Tan of them all, is believed to have total control over machines of all sorts, lightning, and may be the Machine God worshipped by the Adeptus Mechanicus — conveniently assumed to be sleeping under Mars.
  • The Deceiver in particular is one of the only entities so nasty that he's evil in both Canon Warhammer 40k and the fan-made Mirror Universe Brighthammer 40k. In the latter, he's known as the Soothsayer, and specializes in telling dangerous and harmful truths, and dispelling even the most harmless or beneficial lies.
  • The Eldar used to have a nice, normal, stable pantheon with many nice gods. Guess which ones survived the Fall? Khaine the Bloody-Handed and Cegorach the Laughing God.
  • And Isha the god of fertility and love, who seems to be the only total aversion in the series. Of course, she's kind of busy being held prisoner and tortured by the Chaos God Nurgle, who is otherwise a rather Affably Evil god.
  • What about the God-Emperor of Man? OK, he wasn't as bad as several of the above examples, but he regularly ordered Exterminantus of entire planets, including human planets that refused to join the Imperium on his terms or just weren't human enough, all in the name of reuniting the fragmented human empire and creating utopia. Not to mention that he also came up with the idea to wage wars of extermination against all aliens. And of course, the fact that half the Primarchs fell to Chaos in the first place can be directly traced to his complete ineptitude at seeing them as anything but tools in his conquest of the galaxy. Did we mention that a thousand humans are sacrificed to him every day to keep him alive on the Golden Throne?
    • Funnily enough, back when the Emperor was alive/awake, he was a Flat-Earth Atheist who outlawed all worship (including worship of him). He tried to Defy this trope and tried to fight it by banning any and all forms of religion. But since the Chaos gods are made of emotion, not faith, this failed spectacularly. Thus he was put on life support on the Golden Throne, worshiped as a God against his will.
  • The more powerful Daemon Princes reach Physical God levels, making them this trope to their enemies (though they depend on their patron god not changing their mind if they're killed).
• While Warhammer Fantasy has the same Chaos gods, many of its other gods are much more benevolent, if a bit more subtle. They tend to act more by creating or empowering a champion to fight back chaos, most recently Voltan.
  • Though the Fantasy version of Khaine has no redeeming qualities at all.
  • In WHFB, the gods are not necessarily outright evil as in WH40K; they are much more subtle. Chaos deities, however, are completely immoral. Likewise, goodness does not equate niceness - The Empire professes all the decandent, fanatic, militaristic and intolerant ingredients of the historical Holy Roman Empire, while Bretonnia is a feodalistic hellhole. Even so, the world of Warhammer is a world half empty, and its deities reflect that.
  • Even the Chaos Gods could be called misunderstood on a good day. Ever since his ascension, however, Nagash has become a god of death and has not a single ounce of goodness or morality in his undead bones.

Music

• The Dragonland Chronicles storyline by power metal band Dragonland details how "The Gods" pit the Armies of the Light (Humans, Elves and Dwarves) against the Hordes of the Night (Orcs, Goblins and Trolls) in a semi-apocalyptic battle once every century for entertainment; if the Light Side wins, the Hordes of the Night are driven back to whatever unholy place they crawled out of and peace endures until the next Battle of the Ivory Plains. If the Dark Side wins, Dragonland is plunged into a century of darkness and pestilence. One century after the triumph of the Dark Side, a hero emerges to defeat the Hordes of the Night decisively, ascends to the Heavens to slay The Gods who have been driven mad with power, and proceeds to become "one with the universe", achieving apotheosis and becoming the new, benevolent God of known existence.