Reality Warper / Literature

Reality Warpers in literature.

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• Quite a few literary wizards have at least a mild form of this power.
  • Merlyn in The Once and Future King by T. H. White.
  • In The Chronicles of Amber, the Lords Of Amber actually do this in reverse. Instead of changing the universe, they move themselves into successive nearly-identical universes more to their design. Although the question of whether they actually travel into pre-existing universes or actually will them into existence, or even if they can grasp a fourth space-time dimension unknown to us (not unlike a 3-dimensional object would seen from the perspective of a 2-dimensional one) is never really clarified.
    • Corwin himself eventually comes to doubt the solipsism hypothesis, on the grounds that he'd long since played the game of traveling to the limits of his capacity to comprehend reality and has now found a path of external origin leading beyond those limits. In general there seems a granularity to Shadow; some changes aren't findable (such as a world exactly like the one you're in except with a certain person having a different personality or memories), Shadow-travelers with sufficiently similar destinations in mind will tend to end up in the same place, and many minor uses of the power behave more as if they're modifying the existing reality rather than moving the user into a subtly different one.
  • Wizards in Harry Potter have the power to conjure some things using their magic, but not others, such as food. How exactly "food" is defined and how it's fundamentally different from non-food in this account, is, of course, never explained or explored - though some fans have theorised that conjured items are more in the way of classical illusions (not stage ones), meaning that conjuring food might not be impossible, just not a very good idea as it has no reality. Also Voldemort apparently placed a curse that makes sure that every teacher appointed to the Defense Against the Dark Arts job only lasts a year. Without fail, at the end of every year something will happen to get rid of the teacher.
  • Wizards of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea universe can also Reality Warp if they were to use the Old Speech to change the true name of a thing. However, this is rarely if ever done, meaning that the magic actually practiced by wizards consists chiefly of illusions. This doesn't mean "illusions" as in stage magic, just "not actually creating things." For instance, you can conjure food and water—but if you do it with illusions, they won't fill you up or quench your thirst, and if you do it through reality warping, you've probably destroyed the universe, or at least put it in serious danger.
  • In The Dresden Files, magic and the power of wizards is inherently tied to belief, thus somewhat limiting what the average White Council wizard can do, to "things understandable to the human mind". So a potent wizard can absorb spiritual energy and become a demigod, or resurrect a dead person, but you can't end time or reverse physics. It's mentioned in passing that the emergence of a strong wizard who is insane in the "mentally detached from reality" sense (as opposed to the "homicidal maniac" sense which is fairly common) would essentially constitute a Reality Warper and is a very serious fear of the White Council.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: The Cheshire Cat has powers that other residents in Wonderland do not, like the ability to disappear and reappear at will, turn invisible (or turn parts of himself invisible), disassemble and reassemble himself at will, and levitate. He seems to only be able to affect himself, however.
• The Incanters and Rhetors in Anathem, both can alter the present while the former can alter the future and the latter can alter the past.
• The Ellimist, and his archnemesis Crayak in Animorphs, as well as Crayak's servant the Drode. Another version is Cassie, who's very existence collapses alternate timelines.
• Adam R. Brown's Astral Dawn series presents spirits that are so powerful, they can warp reality. However, while this ability is at its peak on the astral plane, on the physical plane, their ability to do this is considerably reduced. The Aash Ra and Aash Ra Ktah (hybrids) can manipulate reality to great degree on all planes of reality, including the physical plane.
• All magicians in Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love series - from Rufus O'Niall, Fiorinda and Janelle Firdous, the three who achieve fusion and potential Neurobomb status, to barely active crystal-swinging hippies like Anne-Marie Wing - are Reality Warpers with the ability to rearrange "the 0s and 1s" of the universe as it suits them depending on how many other minds' power they're able to hijack at the time. Since having full-blown functional magic in this universe also invariably means having severe forest-fire brain damage and schizophrenia, this is definitely not a comfortable thing to be dealing with.
• In Bubble World, Ricky can do whatever he wants and get whatever he wants in Bubble World, essentially making him a reality warper.
• Aslan of The Chronicles of Narnia is one of these, being literally Jesus in the form of a lion according to the author, though he chooses to let events play out naturally for the most part.
• Cradle Series:
  • Sages are those who have mastered their will to the point that they can command reality itself. To be more specific, each Sage manifests one or more "Icons," Platonic ideals of reality like Death, Sword, and Shadow. They can then use their will to affect the world in accordance with their Icon, a process which both requires unspeakable willpower and enhances it at the same time. While all Sages have a few shared abilities, such as spatial manipulation, their exact talents vary; the Sword Sage, for example, was great at creating Void spaces, but terrible at moving through space. Only physical beings can manifest Icons; spirits can't. This is also why Heralds, who are half spirit, find it extremely difficult to manifest Icons. In fact, it's basically impossible, but being a Herald and a Sage at the same time is what it takes to become a Monarch.
  • Heralds also manipulate reality with their will, but focused entirely inward. Instead of commanding reality directly, they infuse their will into their techniques and even their bodies, allowing them to do things like bend the laws of physics with a punch. This is also why they are true immortals instead of merely absurdly long-lived like Sages; a Herald cannot be killed except by an attack with actual will behind it, so time can't harm them.
• Cthulhu Mythos, despite being full of Eldritch Abominations, actually only has a few examples. This is because Lovecraft left it open to interpretation as to whether they are really supernatural or just have extremely advanced technologies. Regardless, the more notable examples are the Great Old Ones (who would be Physical Gods if they ever escape loose from their prisons), and the Outer Gods (all-powerful and all-knowing entities).
• The Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock shows Earth 1 million years in the future, where mankind is a whole civilization of reality warpers... well, a decadent civilization, their (our) numbers being reduced to a few dozen, and the fact that they (we) have used and abused their reality bending powers for 1 million years means that almost all the energy of the universe has been used up and the heat death of the universe is imminent until one of them discovers that, being part of a multiverse, the real amount of usable energy is endless: tapping a tiny bit of energy in a infinity of universes is harmless and allows the dancers to continue their dance, forever, and ever, and ever, and ever..
• Daniel from The Dangerous Days of Daniel X by James Patterson. He can do most of the things listed in the description, as well as create people. (The only "catch" is that the people must once have existed. An example is that he often creates his dead parents and his sister that his mom was pregnant with when she died.) He is also a Voluntary Shapeshifter. The problem is, there are plenty of bad guys around who can do the same thing, and some of them are better at it than he is. And he's just as vulnerable to sneak attacks, ambushes, and underhanded tricks as the next man, and when you're fighting other reality warpers, those tricks can be seriously underhanded. For example, the Big Bad of the book gets the upper hand on Daniel by taking the form of a girl, and making Daniel fall for her.
• Philip K. Dick:
  • Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Maybe. His ability appears restricted to what observers experience while high on his new wonder drug - making him seem more like a Dream Weaver able to control the mental worlds that users visit. It also causes them to gain Palmer's physical characteristics and think more like him. However, people start experiencing the distinctive reality warps while off the drug, throwing the whole thing into confusion all over again - it's that kind of story.
  • Emmanuel and Zina in The Divine Invasion. Either that or everyone's crazy, which is equally possible. The two characters have a disagreement over how the world should be run, reflecting perennial mystical themes and Kabbalah.
    • Actually, Manny and Zina are (aspects of?) God. So reality warping comes naturally, kinda.
• Discworld:
  • Coin the Sourcerer, in Sourcery. Whereas normal Discworld magic requires hours of research, lots of preparation and, due to innate physical laws, exactly as much effort as doing things normally, a sourcerer (so named because he is a living source of boundless magical energy) can alter the world with a snap of his fingers. The bad news is that once the wizards get their hands on this power, they start recreating the Mage Wars, which means Innocent Bystanders run the risk of being Reality Warped into a non-viable form. The really bad news is that all this Reality Warping weakens the fabric of said reality, allowing the Things From The Dungeon Dimensions in. The good news comes at the end: Coin realizes the Discworld is too small for him and in doing so reveals why the Discworld never keeps sourcerers for long—they make their own realities to live in.
  • Since people's beliefs and expectations are a supernatural force on the Discworld, any sufficiently thick-headed individual can become this through Achievements in Ignorance.
    • One such individual is the general Lord Rust. The man is a total incompetent with absolutely no tactical ability or military knowledge whatever and does not seem to comprehend the utter futility of attacking a vastly superior force on their home ground with virtually no provisions. While this has the obvious result of killing almost every man under his command, Rust is completely unharmed, even though he leads every suicidal charge from the front. By all laws of probability, he should have died long ago. However, Rust has the unusual ability of being able to completely and subconsciously ignore anything that contradicts or is outside his extraordinarily unrealistic worldview by assuming that it simply cannot exist, including physical danger. He has been reported as charging directly at enemy lines surrounded by projectiles without being scratched; arrows have apparently changed direction in midair to avoid him (which then hit his men).
    • There's also "Bloody Stupid" Johnson, an architect so incompetent his designs warp the fabric of space time. The things he designed include Empirical Crescent (a neighbourhood of houses in which you can travel from one house to another without leaving the house you were in despite the houses not being linked), a mail-sorting engine capable of sorting mail that hasn't been written yet or has only been written in alternate universes, owing to the fact that Johnson set pi equal to exactly 3 in order to make it, a pavement that went insane and committed suicide, and a triangle with three right angles (on the Disc, which is noted for being non-spherical).
    • In Hogfather, Jonathan Teatime uses all of the teeth collected by the Tooth Fairy and a spell to control every person those teeth belonged to. Due to belief shaping reality, this not only allows him to kill the Hogfather, which should be impossible, but, if his plan completely succeeded, would effectively make him this.
  • In The Science of Discworld, the thinking engine Hex uses the Loophole Abuse of potentiality to calculate his way into creating some new processing capacity for himself. The narrative Lampshades that this is "garbage, but not complete garbage".
• In The Death Gate Cycle, Patryn and Satryn magic both work by manipulating probabilities until the desired one comes into being.
• In The Divine Cities, all the Divinities created their own realities that they imposed on the part of the Continent that they ruled over; in Bulikov, these different realities overlapped, which is one reason the world still behaves oddly in some places in this city by the time the trilogy is set.
• In the Doctor Who novel Engines of War, Borusa briefly becomes this as he goes further into the Tantalus Spiral. Not only can he see possible timelines, he is able to pull possibilities into existence. At the Doctor's command he destroys all trace of the Daleks in the Tantalus Spiral.
• The Eyes of Kid Midas plays this quite darkly. The artifact that's used to change reality can do anything and everything, as tested when the main character says that two plus two makes five—but whatever it's done, it can't undo. The main character has even less self-control than Haruhi Suzumiya, so by the climax, reality itself is fragmenting.
• The Dark Gods of The Expanse are able to do this is very subtle ways. This is actually a problem, because nobody realises just how frequently they're staging attacks until they go looking for them and realise they're happening almost constantly. The Dark Gods manage to change light speed, gravity, electron mass and the strength of ionic bonds without so much as breaking a sweat, all with the intention of working out how to destroy humanity.
• In Fire and Hemlock, protagonist Polly and her adult friend Tom make up stories together. Those stories have the annoying tendency to come true. Annoying because they are heroes in them, and Tom is more of a Non-Action Guy, who, of course, wouldn't allow a child to come to harm, and therefore has to do the heroic deeds himself.
• In The Fold the math that makes transdimensional travel possible is subject to the presence of observers, which guide the connection based on their expectations. This makes any conscious mind a potential reality warper in its presence.
• "Mr. Sunshine" from Matt Ruff's novel Fool on the Hill. Retired God Apollo who writes fiction by manipulating the lives of people — and his preferred genres are drama and tragedy.
• Luna of The Girl Who Drank the Moon has absorbed so much magic in her childhood that by age five it's causing uncontrolled spells to affect everything around her at the merest suggestion, including transmogrifying people.
• Gone: Little Pete may be one of these, which means that the most powerful person in Perdido Beach is a severely autistic four-year-old.
• Good Omens:
  • Adam. Being a child, his unconscious alterations of reality are innocently whimsical at first, albeit with shades of Inferred Holocaust... until his destiny as the Antichrist calls. He manages not to end the world through Heroic Resolve and uses his power to prevent a showdown with the Devil himself.
  • Crowley and Aziraphale, being a demon and an angel respectively, also have reality-warping powers, though to a lesser extent. For instance, Aziraphale can turn cheap rotgut wine into "a perfectly acceptable, though rather surprised" fine older vintage. Crowley can turn the weapons of a management-skills-retreat paintball war into real guns.
• Harold of the children's picture book Harold and the Purple Crayon matter-of-factly shapes his world by drawing it with the crayon.
• Haruhi Suzumiya is an omnipotent being capable of bending reality, though she is not at all aware of this. The short list of people who are aware of this fact are her completely average and reluctant best friend Kyon, and a trio of supernatural creations of hers (and their respective employers). The four of them are forced to engage in random activities to keep her from getting too bored and causing The End of the World as We Know It by subconsciously wishing it were different. And telling her about her powers is not an option because who knows what she would do if she had conscious control.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Mostly Harmless: The Hitchhiker's Guide Mk-II. Give it a goal, and not only it has already been working on it, chances are it made so that you gave it that exact goal.
• Anthony Fremont from the Jerome Bixby short story "It's a Good Life". This story was later adapted as a famous episode of The Twilight Zone (1959). This depiction of Anthony may be the scariest example of a Reality Warper to date. In the sequel, Anthony's daughter is also a warper—in fact, she's more powerful.
• In the horror novel Jago, the leader of an Apocalypse Cult develops powerful psychic abilities that let him alter reality in his vicinity, which convinces him that his messianic delusions are correct and, once his range expands to encompass the whole world, will give him the power to bring about the apocalypse he believes in. In the meantime, just being within his area of influence causes unpleasant effects like people's worst memories taking on physical form and coming after them.
• Jeffty from Harlan Ellison's short story "Jeffty is Five". Albeit his power just works in a very specific way - he stays a five-year-old boy forever, and also preserves somehow the media he loves. His radio plays serial programs no longer produced on radio stations that no longer exist. They are contemporary, all-new shows, however; not re-runs. He can buy comics such as The Shadow and Doc Savage that are, again, all-new although they are no longer being produced, and long discontinued pulp magazines with new stories by Stanley G. Weinbaum, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard despite the authors being long dead. Jeffty can even watch films that are adaptations of old pulp novels like Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man.
• Stephen King:
  • It.
  • The last book of The Dark Tower series introduces Patrick Danville. Anything he draws becomes real. Also affects anything he erases.
• Keith Laumers's Knight of Delusions at one point pits two reality warpers against each other, which ends up reading a lot like a pair of little kids playing pretend at each other and shouting things like "NUH-UH, I'VE GOT NUKE PROOF ARMOR" to ward off attacks.
• Labyrinths of Echo — as adepts of the Invisible Magic say, "The future is pliable... and the past too." Max himself has a rare (and dangerous to himself) power of "the Arbiter": whatever he truly wishes, goes — "sooner or later, one way or another". An imperfect emulation of this is done via Invisible Magic. Also, as Juffin was told by his older advisor and was shown in side-stories, there are creatures using this for a weird rebirth cycle: anyone with power can give them opening and gradually call into life — from a wizard trying to create the ideal stand-in for himself to ladies talented in magic but unaware of its reality, who imagine one chair in the house they leased is haunted and invent stories about the ghost just for fun.
• Similar to The Matrix example above (but predating it), the main character in Sergey Lukyanenko's Labyrinth of Reflections gains superhuman abilities in a virtual world after interacting with an entity of unknown origin. He flies, is immune to attacks, and can erase any log he wants with a thought. His powers also extend to the real world, as he can connect to the virtual reality without the use of a computer or an Internet connection. Attempting to get rid of these powers can lead to some nasty consequences, as evidenced by the second book False Mirrors.
• David Rain from The Last Dragon Chronicles. Although he gets some help from several dragon companions along the way.
• George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin sometimes wakes up to find that the world has changed to match what he was dreaming about.
• In The Legends of Ethshar novels by Lawrence Watt-Evans, every other magical discipline follows rules and involves some kind of work, but warlockry, which manifests suddenly in a percentage of the population in Night of Madness, is an ability to do anything effortlessly just by willing it. This power is checked by the fact that every warlock hears an eldritch whispering in their head and feels drawn toward the same mysterious location, and both of these things grow stronger every time they use it. The more they use their powers, the sooner they will end up there, either of their own accord or kicking and screaming through the sky from anywhere in the world. Nobody knows what's there, because nobody ever comes back. Normals who get too close become warlocks and are immediately dragged in as well.
  • Warlockry seems more like Psionics, with most powers focused on the self, but Wizardy, even though not effortless, does seem to have less in the way of limits if you know the rituals to follow. And a single change can have massive unintended consequences.
• In James Herbert's The Magic Cottage, the titular cottage stands on a point of the Earth's crust which exudes the "ethereal vitality" which drives and shapes the universe. The structure of the cottage responds respectively to malignant or benevolent intent by reasserting its earlier state of decay or nurturing intimacy and creativity. Its previous owner channelled the power into remarkable healing ability. Challenged by malicious hands for tenancy of the cottage, the new owners undergo a battle which involves such feats as manifesting a python from nowhere, or transportation to a realm inhabited by bizarre creatures.
• In The Machineries of Empire, large amounts of people following the same calendar will alter reality, allowing for various exotic effects that don't have any basis in physics, like force shields or faster-than-light travel. Moving into a different calendric zone - the area where a different calendar is followed - makes the exotics stop working, unless you recalibrate them to match the new calendar.
• The title character in the H. G. Wells short story The Man Who Could Work Miracles does exactly what it says he does.
• The Marvelous Paracosm of Fitz Faraday and the Shapers of the Id: The protagonist discovers a way of bringing his thoughts into reality by using a device known as the cognitive resonator. The device was invented by the town quack and easily backfires on Fitz and his friends as they unleash all manner of chaos.
• Master of Space and Time by Rudy Rucker has a scientist invent a machine that makes him... Well, guess.
• The Minotaur: About three decades before the story, an unspecified accident in a research base in New Mexico permanently altered the world so that human dreams bleed into reality. Most manifested dreams are simply phantoms, which only affect human perception, but a small subset of people's dreams are physically manifested into reality — which, due to the difficulty in controlling one's dreams, can range from daydreaming a flame to light a cigarette to a person's nightmares manifesting as uncontrolled bleeding on nearby people or as a rampaging, bloodthirsty monster.
• The Neverending Story: AURYN identifies what the wearer really and truly wants, and can then guide them on their task or, if they have memories of the human world to give up, turn those wishes into reality. Humans can also warp reality in Fantastica without assistance; since Fantastica is the land of imagination, peopled with beings who cannot fashion anything new, anyone from the real world with a little creativity can do it. If you actually tell a story in Fantastica, it will become true, and will always have been true, even if history must be changed to accommodate that, because reality and fantasy are one and the same in Fantastica. Once Bastian finds AURYN, he starts to make very liberal use of its powers to create and reshape lands and creatures and casually rewrite history. This becomes one of the driving problems of the driving problems of the second half of the book, both because Bastian's cavalier attitude to rewriting reality to suit his needs, whims, and passing interests causes him to quickly develop a serious god complex and because overuse of this power starts to eat away at his memories and personality.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy: The Reality Dysfunction. The possessors use it to change their environments to fit the area they had lived in, and to form their new bodies to look how they once looked — but the latter turns out to be a rather bad idea, as mutating cells naturally leads to cancer. In general, though, the Dysfunction can create or alter anything the possessors like, fuelled by their wishes and emotions.
• Nightside:
  • Jessica Sorrow, who believes herself to be the only "real" thing in the world and can subsequently make anyone or anything not exist.
  • Madman was potentially even more powerful, as his Reality Warper abilities weren't limited to erasing things, but could alter them at will. His insanity barred him from directing his power to any specific purpose, however.
  • Hadleigh Oblivion is another extremely powerful warper, while his kid brother Tommy is a mild one: he can change things only so far as he can make an existential argument that they could've already been that way.
• The female lead of Of Two Minds comes from a society where everyone can do this. Most people deliberately restrain themselves, but both she and the villain believe that the power should be used to make life better (or at least more exciting). The sequel takes this a step further: everyone has the potential for this, but people grew sick of living in a World of Chaos, and most societies gave up the power.
• Damara, the protagonist of Tim Waggoner's Pandora Drive, has reality warping powers over which she doesn't have much control. She struggles to suppress her imagination so that she doesn't unintentionally turn her thoughts into reality, but her power slips out anyway and starts warping reality in accordance with the horrific thoughts of other people.
• The Pink, one of The Brothers Grimm's fairy tales. In the story, the prince is capable of granting his own wishes. Unfortunately he's not very smart. Upon finding out that the man he was raised by kidnapped him as a baby in order to exploit his abilities, the prince turns him into a poodle that eats hot coals until he belches fire. Then, instead of wishing himself to his real home, he turns his girlfriend into a pink (as in a Dianthus armeria plant) so it's easier for him to travel, and walks all the way there. Upon getting home, his mother, who was wrongfully imprisoned for his presumed death, commits suicide. His father then dies of heartbreak. The kidnapper is sentenced to death, placed in an iron maiden, and rolled down a hill into a river. The prince marries his girlfriend, becomes king, and lives happily ever after.
• The Librarian in Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain. The exact extent of her abilities is unknown, but it involves giving life to every book and story inside her library. The kids note that the superhero fan sites were seriously underestimating her power.
• Various characters in Quarantine (1992) gain the ability to arbitrarily collapse quantum wavefunctions, as long as no normals are watching. This ranges from the trivial (choosing the spin of an ion in a Stern-Gerlach experiment) through to the fairly useful (unlocking doors) to the disastrous (everyone warping reality uncontrollably at the same time).
• The Reader (2016) calls this manipulation, and it can only be done by those who can read. It's the second tier of illumination: first one is able to see the stories of people and objects, and when they reach Manipulation they can rewrite those stories. In most cases, this is presented as more similar to Mind over Matter, but the execution shows that the person is actually rewriting the destinations of objects. Like bullets.
• In The Reckoners Trilogy: This is the actual power of Firefight, aka Megan. Things are pulled into the world from a parallel reality where it was the case. However, the effect has a range increment and needs to be focused on or they go back, and the things pulled are often "shadows" that lack substance hence why David thought she was an illusionist.
• The Secret, a supposedly non-fiction book that supposedly teaches the reader to do this through Positive Thinking.
• In Seven Senses of the Re'Union, this is eventually revealed to be the true ability of Asahi's Prophet Art, rather than seeing into the future and acting accordingly, she instead chooses the reality that suits her the most.
• Sphere, by Michael Crichton, has the, well, sphere, which causes people who go into it to gain this power. Causes all sorts of havoc when people get it who are deathly afraid of giant squids, and so keep thinking about them. Interestingly, the only way to open the sphere up to get inside it is to visualise it opening.
• In Stormcaller by P.L. Blair, the main character, Kathryn Morales, gains this talent (called Shaping) when she crosses to the Otherside. She actually shapes herself to be Kathryn Half-elven, a former RPG character she'd played, and forgets she's not, unconsciously.
• Only the weakest characters in the Suggsverse do not possess this power.
• First-tier Sundered Ones in The Sundered have this power. Notably, one of them seems able to just rearrange the world willy-nilly.
• In one story in Lord Dunsany's Time and the Gods, a king offends the gods, so they decide to forget he ever existed.
• Warhammer 40,000 novels by Dan Abnett:
  • Ravenor: The Chaotic language Enucia is a powerful reality warper.
  • Gaunt's Ghosts: Soric's psychic abilities conjure up things, including messages in his own handwriting from the future. When he is imprisoned, they strip him of all effects and his room soon fills with paper nonetheless.
• Warp World: Almost every character has various versions of warping, but of course that is the whole focus of the novel.
• Well World: Anyone who gains access to even some of the power of the world-computer (or develops an analogous system). The human-built computer Obie has the power to warp a planet. The Well is the operating system for the Universe, and has been rebooted several times (thankfully by the good guys).
• Wicked: Elphaba's sighting of a sickly Chistery from across a river. Despite her famous allergy to water, she bucks up and steps into the raging river... only for it to freeze beneath her. When her son recalls this in the next book he cites it as "The world bending itself to meet her will."
• Xanth: Com Pewter is able to warp reality, but only in the confines of his cave.
• The "demon" of the Advina Avis (aka Ronnie Schiatto) from Baccano!. The full extent of his reality warping abilities hasn't been demonstrated, but so far has included materializing and dematerializing matter at will, bestowing forbidden knowledge, granting people immortality and other abilities (as well as slapping on whatever perks and restrictions he wishes), appearing anyplace at anytime, global mind-reading, and shifting in and out of human form at will. Generally, he doesn't go around doing these sorts of things very often, however, because nigh-omnipotence can become quite boring after several-hundred millennia.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Every single Esper. Their powers work by substituting their own reality into the real world using AIM (An Involuntary Movement) fields, which also acts as Applied Phlebotinum for many story arcs. The downside to this is that their "personal reality" must share a lot of characteristics with the "real reality", otherwise they will be isolated from reality completely, as with Kazakiri Hyouka in her initial appearances.
  • For that matter, any sufficiently powerful mythical beings are capable of this, with the Archangels being prime examples.
  • Aureolus Izzard. "Alchemist" my ass. Master of Illusion combined with Clap Your Hands If You Believe is his actual power. It does has its limits however, as pointed out by Stiyl. If he really could warp reality, why couldn't he just wish a vampire into existence?
  • Perfect Majins (Magic Gods) fall into this category, being able to recreate the world as they please with little effort (once they overcome the 50/50 success rate problem).
  • Aleister Crowley too, as he is a magician powerful enough to become a Majin, but he made some specific alterations to his body to prevent it. Well, if you can exist at more than one location at the same time and possesses a tool (called "Archetype Controller") which can manipulate TROPES of all things, and powerful enough to literally create the entire concept of "Science Side" and its espers, really, what's changed?
• In Date A Live the Realizer makes "human imagination into reality" and powers the setting. The result is a bit like a Standard Super-Hero Setting, where most tech is modern day, with a few organizations having access to much more advanced stuff. The Realizer is used to implement a variety of superpowers, but is implied to have a number of limits. The talent to be able to use it is very rare(used as a justification for Child Soldiers), along with having fairly significant limits with regard to the range and complexity of powers that can be created; clothing changes, flight, super strength and defensive shields can all be created, but the AST needs to have pre-made weapons rather than creating them themselves. It's also mentioned as the way to quickly reconstruct damage caused by various battles and supernatural events.
• Doraemon, with his gadgets, can warp reality to its full extent. Check out the "what if" phone booth. It's able to create a whole new world based on the wish.
• Haruhi Suzumiya. Up to and including omnipotence.
  • For that matter, the Interfaces, such as Yuki and Ryouko qualifies. Their powers aren't as rule-breaking as Haruhi's, but they can still launch MySQL injections into reality. To take this to a greater degree, in Disappearance they can even hijack Haruhi's unlimited power! The difference between Haruhi and the Interfaces is that Haruhi can create "data" out of nothing, while the Interfaces can "only" alter existing data. That's why, in-universe, the Interfaces are treated as Reality Warpers while Haruhi herself is considered, well, basically a God, if not "the" God.
  • Related to the trope notes above, there is a good reason why Haruhi can get away with being a protagonist and a Reality Warper; She has no idea what she is or what power she holds. Most of her warping is done through childishly wishing something to be different.
• Everyone in Sunday Without God has this power to some degree. Basically, if you wish for something hard enough (such as Resurrective Immortality, Improbable Aiming Skills, or resetting time to prevent a person's death), you might just get it, but you may not be happy with the results. The lack of true death is also strongly implied to be because people collectively wished for immortality, thus warping the reality of life and death.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: There is one absolute, unbendable rule in this universe that not only surpasses the laws of nature, but bypasses their roles completely: Ultimate Skills are the ultimate power. Anyone who possesses even one of these are able to treat the laws of reality like "unique cases", suggestions that can be ignored or manipulated at a whim, and can even ignore the effects of all but the most powerful Unique Skills that might as well already be on the level of an Ultimate. In most cases only an Ultimate Skill can counter another one. The Multiverse itself was created by a being who possessed and used his Ultimate Skills to do so, for the record.
• Yusuke in World Customize Creator gains the ability to "customize" anything, as if it were being edited in a virtual environment. Initially he thinks it works like the game it appears to be from, able to customize weapons and equipment, he eventually discovers it can edit anything.
• The Xeelee Sequence is a rare hard sci-fi user of this, as extremely powerful races like the Xeelee, Photino Birds, Snowmen and the Monads are able to bend space-time like silly putty on a multiversal scale. Even Humanity would reach this level once they evolve into the Transcendence, which are able to give the Q from Star Trek a run for its money.

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