Cumulonemesis

Prepare to get zapped.^note Clockwise from top left: Kirby Mass Attack, Big Fun in Furbyland, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Miitopia.

"Great clouds roll over the hills, bringing darkness from above."

— Bastille, "Pompeii"

Clouds are masses of frozen crystals and condensed water that hover into the atmosphere. While sometimes nothing more than fluffy white masses decorating the sky, some can be rather dangerous, most notably the cumulonimbus, which are the bearer of heavy rains, lightning, and hail. This is probably the reason why some works of fiction have introduced various living cloud enemies that do their best to make the heroes' lives miserable.

Such enemies typically attack with strong gusts of wind, ice, snow, and lightning, and may be able to split into smaller clouds and merge into larger ones. They frequently appear in a Level in the Clouds, often with solid cloud platforms. Sometimes their range downright prevents you from retaliating without taking a beating. Also, being Animate Inanimate Objects, expect them to have a face quite often. See also Elemental Embodiment. If a Personal Raincloud has its own violition and wants to keep its owner in a bad mood, it probably overlaps with this. Many of them have to be solid in order for the heroes to attack them.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cardcaptor Sakura: The anime-only Cloud Clow Card. She is depicted as a small child with puffy hair that resembles clouds and is able to create and manipulate clouds. While not necessarily a 'nemesis', Sakura and Syaoran have to capture her and transform her back into a card as part of their mission (and the anime's premise).
• Digimon Universe: App Monsters has a heroic example in Ouranosmon, whose body is a storm cloud with a metal sun for a head and metal arms. In place of legs, it has a zigzagging metal section wrapped in ribbons to resemble a tornado.
• Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: "A Dark and Stormy Knight" has King Dedede order Kracko from Nightmare Enterprises, arguably the biggest singular monster in the series.
• One Piece: Big Mom has a minion in the form of a cloud named Zeus, which has been empowered by a piece of her own soul. It turns into a thundercloud when it attacks, dispensing bolts of lightning. Nami ends up nabbing him, and her control of him eventually becomes permanent after Big Mom is finally defeated.

Comic Books

• The Beano: Calamity James's Personal Raincloud is sometimes presented as sentient and working to keep him unlucky. On very rare occasions it will help him; for instance, one strip ends with him having to Work Of The Debt at a restaurant: the cloud washes the dishes and he dries them.
• Immortal Hulk: The One Below All is consistently drawn as a big green cloud with an evil face. Normally, this would be underwhelming for an entity meant to be the ultimate evil of the Marvel multiverse, but the artists make it work.
• Monica's Gang: Cumulus is a small recurring antagonist who, due to losing a job opportunity after Smudge accidentally gets him dirty with mud when playing soccer, uses a potion he made to turn himself into a sentient humanoid cloud in order get his revenge by wetting the boy with rain. Unfortunately for him, something as simple as Smudge turning on a ventilator managed to defeat him in his first appearance. He makes returns and gets more serious in the teenage spin-off, however.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
  • "Rainbow Dash and the Very Bad Day" features drearies, living clouds serving as embodiments of bad moods. They hover over people's heads and spread when their hosts are rude or mean to others, and seem to delight in spreading sourness and bad blood.
  • My Little Pony: The Movie Prequel prominently features Strife, a being resembling a living storm cloud with lanky arms and a vaguely skull-like, mouthless face. He serves as the second-in-command for the movie's Big Bad, the Storm King.

Film — Animated

• The Ugly Duckling: The Winds of Winter are a trio of malicious snow-laden clouds with trollish humanoid faces, who come with winter and scour the land with freezing winds, snow, and icy gales.

Film — Live-Action

• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer portrayed the planet-eating, usually-Humanoid Abomination Galactus as a giant space cloud, to widespread mockery.
• Nope: The first teaser poster and a recurring image in the marketing is a single dark cloud, with a string of flags somehow dangling from it. It's where Jean Jacket hides between meals.

Literature

• James and the Giant Peach has the peach gang encountering a secret colony of cloud men living high in the sky. After inadvertently provoking them, the Cloud Men become hostile, first attacking with hail and later with anything they can find. The Rhino itself takes the form of a storm cloud.
• Xanth: King Cumulo Fracto Nimbus is a sentient storm who first appears in book 4, Centaur Aisle, and has appeared a number of times since then, usually as an obstacle for the main characters to overcome. He was eventually revealed to be a demon who stayed dematerialized a little too long and lost the ability to retake solid form. Now he's stuck in the shape of a thunderstorm cloud and drifts here and there with the wind, looking for people and events to rain on and ruin.

Live-Action TV

• Loki has Alioth, a gigantic cloud monster at the "end of Time" that devours all matter sent there by the TVA.
• Raising Dion has the Crooked Man; a giant, humanoid storm that consumes powered people, and is hunting Dion.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The episode "Obsession" featured the "Dikironium Cloud Creature", a cloud-like alien lifeform with a bunch of dangerous abilities that made it a serious threat to the Federation.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost: The True Fae Nergal is the Elemental Embodiment of the storms, and claims to be every storm in the Land of Faerie at once — which could even be true. As for his disposition, he's more commonly known as The Raging One.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Storm elementals are roughly humanoid masses of electrically-charged clouds, and in battle fight using electric shocks, full-sized lightning bolts and peals of thunder. When summoned away from the Elemental Plane of Air, they prefer to spend their time amidst raging thunderstorms.
  • The tempest is an elemental spirit in the form of a living storm cloud about fifty feet wide. A surly and aggressive being, it attacks with lightning, pouring rain and whirlwinds and feeds by killing living creatures and consuming their moisture.
  • Thunder worms, also called living storms, resemble tubular storm clouds shot through with constant lightning discharges. They can emit deafening thunderclaps and electrocute creatures that strike them directly, and can additionally engulf enemies within their cloudy bodies to expose them to constant sonic and electric damage from the thunder and lightning coursing through them.
• Exalted: The Yozi known as Hegra, the Typhoon of Nightmares, takes the form of an immense living storm that stalks through Malfeas on legs of lightning. She brings with her rain made from the condensed dreams of Creation's sleepers and is one of the few things that can block out the green sun that burns eternally in the Demon City's sky. Her thunder is the loudest sound in Malfeas, and one of the very few things that reliably keeps Adorjan the Silent Wind away. As Adorjan kills everything she touches, demons are very fond of Hegra and rejoice at her passage.
• Magi-Nation has both Lovians and Xyx. The xyx come in a variety of forms — not only the standard cloud creatures, but also the inferno xyx (incendiary), smoke xyx, and others.
• World Tree (RPG): Accanax, the god of destruction, periodically manifests in the World Tree in the form of a thundercloud, and terrifying things happen in his shadow.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has an archetype of monsters known as Cloudian, which are based on different types of clouds.

Video Games

• Adventure Island: One of the enemies is a grinning cloud that hovers above Master Higgins' head, tossing thunderbolts on him.
• Battletoads: The Revolution stage of the NES game has some clouds that blow deadly poison gas. Larger ones, which dwell at the edge of the screen and can't be attacked, will blow you right off the tower if you haven't grabbed onto a pole.
• Big Fun in Furbyland: One of the minigames has a flying Furby wandering in the heavens trying to avoid mean-looking, threatening clouds.
• Commander Keen — Secret of the Oracle features one of these^note They are not given an official name in the game itself but are referred to as "thundercloud" on the Keen wiki. Initially, they look just like the other clouds in the game, but when Keen walks past them they open their eyes and begin to chase him, trying to strike him with lightning. They are immune to Keen's neural stunner, but Keen can easily outrun them and even if they catch up, it takes a few seconds for them to unleash their lightning.
• Daze Before Christmas has sentient snow-clouds as enemies, including one of the bosses.
• Dragon City: The Storm Dragon is made entirely out of grey clouds, loves stormy weather, and fights with rain and electric attacks.
• Dragon Kingdom: The Big Bad is a giant storm cloud who suddenly appears one day and shatters the sun and the rainbow into shards. The player must play as one of two dragon characters and collect these sun and rainbow shards, as well as defeating the giant storm cloud and its minions.
• Dragon Quest has recurring cloud enemies, such as the Cumaulus, the Freezing Fog, and the Hell Nino, that can do a lot of damage to unsuspecting players thanks to their multi-hit or paralyzing attacks.
• Drawn to Life: In the first stage of the final world in The Next Chapter, there are living storm clouds that shoot lightning projectiles downwards from their bodies.
• A Hole New World: One common enemy are storm clouds that drop icicles on your head.
• Iggle Pop!: One of the basic Zoogs is little more than a purple cloud with two oversized, angry eyes.
• Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass: There are cloud creatures to fight, like the Cloud Babies, Wisps, etc, in the first area.
• Kirby:
  • Kracko is a recurring cloud boss with a single eye and yellow spikes that made its debut in the very first Kirby game and appeared in nearly every subsequent Kirby platformer. According to Kirby Fighters Deluxe, the "nemesis" part of the trope is true in more than one sense. The reason why Kracko appears so often is because It Can Think and has a serious grudge against Kirby that only grows with each subsequent game. Kracko's grudge seemingly culminates in Kirby Star Allies when Kirby fights against Parallel bosses that were born from the originals' hatred. Parallel Kracko is among them, and he's one of the most dangerous.
  • Kirby's Dream Land also features a regular cloud enemy with glasses named Puffy. It is a dangerous foe that swoops down on Kirby, fires bullets, and moves at high speeds.
  • Kirby Mass Attack introduced the Flickerfloof enemy, a small grey cloud that attacks the Kirbys with lightning bolts. It's part of the page image.
• Legend Of Oasis: Inverted. Airl is the Wind Spirit, whose body is made of fluffy soft pink clouds, and is one of Leon (the hero)'s allies. She can still hurt enemies with her weather powers.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: In the second stage of its battle, Kholdstare, the boss of the Ice Palace, splits into three one-eyed, frozen clouds that chase Link across the Frictionless Ice.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: Smog, the boss of the Crown Dungeon, is a living cloud that attacks by spitting lightning bolts at Link, and which can split into tinier clouds and recombine.
• Mean Santa: One of the enemies that can attack Santa in-between houses is angry-eyed clouds who shoot bolts of lightning to the ground.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 3: Subverted with the Bomb Flier enemies. They look like clouds with eyes and a propeller on their backs, but shooting them dissipates the cloud to reveal a giant bullet.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 1 1 and 2 have the "Cloudy" family of enemies, viruses that look like clouds holding umbrellas. They attack by summoning moving clouds that rain down on Mega Man.
• Miitopia: Clouds that possess stolen Mii facial features are among the many bizarre enemies from the cast. Interestingly, they usually use their weathery traits to aid their allies in battle, as their rain can heal them and their partners. The Lightning Cloud can also, as one could expect, zap Miis.
• Portal 2: has the mentioned but never seen Sentient Cloud, which has conquered Earth in one of the parallel universes in the perpetual testing initiative. It hates getting its picture taken and is able to leech off peoples' skin.
• Shantae: The Storm Puff magic, found in Shantae: Risky's Revenge and Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, have Shantae summon a cloud with a face to attack her enemies with lightning.
• Skeleton Boomerang: One of the levels has a small cloud that constantly follows the player and periodically shoots lightning to damage the Hunter.
• The Super Mario Bros. series has plenty of these:
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has poisonous cloud enemies named Stonks living inside Bowser's lungs.
  • Mario Kart Wii introduces the Thundercloud item, a smiling grey cloud that ominously looms above the player for a short time before zapping them, shrinking them just like the regular Lightning item. The player therefore has to bump into other racers to transfer the vaporous threat to them. However, it has the redeeming effect of significantly increasing the player's speed before striking them.
  • Newer Super Mario Bros. DS, a Super Mario Bros. Game Mod, features a sinister thundercloud which relentlessly pursues Mario in the Cloudbolt Chasm level and tries to zap him with lightning. It looks a lot like the aforementioned Thundercloud item from Mario Kart Wii, albeit with an angry face.
  • New Super Mario Bros. Wii: Foos are clouds that blow opaque mist around them, covering the screen and blocking the player's and Mario's vision. They solely appear in World 7-5. They reappear in New Super Mario Bros. U in the Meringue Clouds level "Snaking above Mist Valley", and in New Super Luigi U in "Three-Headed Snake Block".
  • Paper Mario: Paper Mario 64 and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door have the Ruff Puffs, a species of living clouds with a threatening, haughty smile. They attack the plumber by zapping him with lightning or ramming into him. They have a number of variants, such as the Dark Puffs, which have a weaker lighting attack, the Ice Puffs, which have an ice attack instead and Poison Puffs, who have a powerful poison breath attack. The sixth boss of 64, Huff N. Puff, is a giant Ruff Puff who fights by blowing wind and causing lightning strikes, and who splits off smaller Puffs from himself when struck in combat and swallow them to heal off the damage whenever possible.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: An inversion. Madame Flurrie, implied to be a female Ruff Puff, is a wind spirit whose body seems to be made of clouds. She is one of Mario's partners in his fight against the X-Nauts.
  • Super Mario 3D World marks the debut of the Ty-Foos, Foo relatives that blow strong winds at Mario and his friends. They usually appear next to narrow paths, so their winds can send them over edges and cliffs. Ty-Foos reappear in Super Mario Odyssey, where they can be captured and used to blow enemies away.
  • Super Mario 64 has the Fwoosh, a living cloud located high up Tall Tall Mountain that blows gusts of wind to throw Mario over the cliff, sending him to his doom.
  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder: Smogrins are floating cloud enemies with sharp teeth that just float in the players' way. They also appear in larger sizes, but those aren't any more difficult to defeat.
  • Super Mario Land: Biokinton, the second-to-last boss, resembles a large cloud with dot eyes and fights by tossing birds at Mario. The game manual, notably, claims that he isn't actually a cloud — rather, he's a very shy being who hides behind a cloud and has never actually been seen.
  • Super Mario RPG:
    • The game has the optional boss Mokura, a green poisonous cloud that occasionally spawns in Land's End. Initially, Mokura appears as the invisible "Formless," which can only be damaged by special attacks, but after having its HP whittled down enough, it becomes visible and changes its stats so that it's weak against physical attacks and resistant (though not immune) to special ones.
    • An inversion with Mallow. He is a member of the Nimbus race, people who have cloud-like bodies. He is also one of Mario's partners and possesses weather manipulation powers.
  • Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 has a thundercloud named Pikkarikun that follows Wario throughout certain levels and tries to blast him with lightning bolts. Throwing enemies under his lightning rewards you with 10 coins, making the little jerk a rather profitable source of income.
  • Yoshi's Woolly World introduces the Fluffy Phantom, big sentient clouds that blow wind at Yoshi. While it can be useful to make Yoshi's Flying Carpet soar, some act as a hindrance as they tend to push the carpet towards Bottomless Pits. Also, direct contact with them is harmful to Yoshi.
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Subspace Army includes the Spaaks, bizarre cloud enemies with clenched teeth and beady red eyes that have dynamos on their back. The more they are hit, the more black, electrified, and damaging they get.
• Terraria has the Angry Nimbus, a Hardmode enemy that spawns only during rain, which tries to harm players with a rain attack. They have a small chance of dropping a Nimbus Rod, which allows players to create raining clouds of their own.
• Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap: On a few occasions, the protagonist is relentlessly pursued by clouds that shoot lightning bolts.

Web Animation

• Robo-san and Wan-chan: When he's looking for Wan-chan, Robo-san gets eaten by a living cloud.

Webcomics

• Aurora: Tynan, a storm god, began life as a living, roving storm, and technically that's precisely what he is now — his humanoid body is simply a form he creates to interact with the world — and is profoundly malicious in nature, using his rain, winds and lightning to spread death and destruction in order to create fear and despair to feed on.
• Poison Ivy Gulch: Parodied in this strip when local prospector Pickaxe Paul sees "threatening weather" in the form of a snarling cloud.
• Super Stupor: One of the middling-quality weather-based villains hanging around the comic's unspecified city is an animated thundercloud named Zondor the Living Storm, He Who Rains Hate.
• Unsounded: Stormies are essentially living clouds, that can create storms when grouped together. They have been keeping Litrya stranded and surrounded by a violent storm for months because there are artificers in the basement secretly torturing waterwomen.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: Masami is a living cloud. Usually she's just a Spoiled Brat and looks like a little, white cumulus. In the climax of "The Storm", she goes on a violent, weather-based rampage during which she changes to a darker storm cloud with sparks and Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• DuckTales (1987): In "Nothing to Fear", Magica DeSpell summons an evil cloud over the McDuck manor that brings the heroes' worst fears to life. After Scrooge and his nephews overcome their fear, the cloud turns against Magica instead (her worst fear) and chases her away, repeatedly zapping her with lightning.
• Fraidy Cat: Whenever the titular cat says a number from 1 to 8, a ghost of one of his previous lives would appear, and saying the number 9 (his current life) summons a small cloud that chases him and tries to kill him with lightning. While the ghosts can be helpful from time to time, the cloud is always evil towards Fraidy.
• Happy Harmonies: Old Man Winter from "To Spring", who is personified as a giant snow cloud with a face, beard, and arms, who uses his strong wintery gale to keep the protagonists, a colony of underground dwarfs, from bringing back spring by using their underground weather factory to melt winter away.
• Hilda has Weather Spirits, which are essentially sentient clouds with control over rain, wind, and snow. Normally, when left on their own, they are harmless, but if they run into one another you can expect a fierce argument, resulting in storms.
• Loonatics Unleashed: The villain Weather Vane can generate cloud monsters as mooks as one aspect of her weather control powers. The heroes discover that they're hard to hurt, being made of water vapor and air.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: Erebus, the villain of "Bright Lights", is a living, roughly humanoid cloud who delights in stealing shadows to power himself and can magically control wind and lightning in battle.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Princess Twilight Sparkle", the malignant, spiny black clouds that appear alongside the plunder vines may not have a face or an apparent personality, but they're clearly smart enough to close in and retaliate when Rainbow Dash tries to kick them.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In "Cloud, Cloud Go Away", Tigger insults and throws a rock at a cloud that got in his way, but the cloud turns out to be sapient and starts following him everywhere to rain only on him until Tigger apologizes. It also is able to shoot lightning and make snow and rainbows.
• The Pink Panther: An episode of The New Pink Panther Show has the title character chased by a small cloud as a result of a Gypsy Curse.
• Regular Show: Cloudy Jay (CJ) is a talking cloud with a humanoid shape. She's nice enough, but she's got a temper. When pushed too far, she'll form into a proper storm cloud and start doling out horrible weather.
• Snooper and Blabber: A human variant features detectives facing Nimble Nimbus, a villain who uses self-created clouds in his schemes and getaways.
• Star Trek: The Animated Series: "One of Our Planets Is Missing" has the Enterprise encounter a giant space cloud that can devour planets whole. The cloud is able to snag the Enterprise with tendrils and pull the vessel inside itself. There, the crew discover the cloud has chunks of antimatter that act as teeth to break apart planets and other matter, and receptors that function as villi, absorbing the energy produced by the matter + antimatter annihilations. The cloud also has the equivalent of a cerebral cortex, and Mister Spock is able to communicate with the cloud telepathically. It's discovered that the intelligent cloud isn't malicious, just hungry after a long journey, and planets happen to be its normal diet.

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