Almighty Idiot

"So, isn't this terrifying? I'm terrified too... Giygas cannot think rationally any more, and he isn't even aware of what he is doing now. His own mind was destroyed by his incredible power... What an all-mighty idiot!"

— Porky Minch, EarthBound (1994), describing the Trope Namer

For some, the temptation of god-like power becomes too great. However, this type of power was not meant for mere mortals to wield. The prospect of cramming that much power into a mortal vessel destroys the recipient's mind, leaving them an Empty Shell of a human with unlimited power but the mental faculties of a half-wit child, or worse, a feral animal.

Conversely, some gods or other powerful entities may grow beyond their bounds, steadily losing their sense and reason as their power grows, in the end leaving them nothing more than creatures based solely on instinct, with untold powers behind them. This sort of tale is common in a Cosmic Horror Story: A monster can be even more frightening if there's no point behind his actions, just mindless aggression, rage, or even simple curiosity.

See also With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, Mad God, and Tortured Monster. May be a result of Touched by Vorlons or Phlebotinum Overload. Compare Goo-Goo-Godlike, when the holder of such power is literally a child, and King of All Cosmos, when the subject is merely eccentric. Not to be confused with Powerful, but Incompetent, which doesn't need the power to be godlike or the wielder to have next to no will, just someone unworthy of the great power they wield. If a mythical omniscient deity is depicted like this, then it's also Adaptational Dumbass.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• AKIRA: This is said to have happened to Akira in the manga series. The child does seem to have no real will or personality of his own.
• Attack on Titan: The Pure Titans are large, strong, and Nigh-Invulnerable except for the napes of their necks, but are incapable for complex thought or doing much else besides instinctively devouring humans.
• Berserk: When Emperor Ganishka attempts the forbidden ritual of giving himself a second reincarnation in order to gain the power to defeat Griffith, he ends up turning into a many-tentacled monstrosity which towers over the whole city of Wyndham. As Ganishka first emerges he's still himself mentally—albeit Drunk on the Dark Side—but by the time he reaches full height the transformation is already causing his ego to implode. He mistakes his own soldiers below him for tiny insects and starts stepping on them, thinking the "red flowers" that bloom when he crushes them are beautiful. A minute later he can't even remember who he is anymore, and does not comprehend the destruction he's causing by trampling and raining fire on everything in his path.
• Black Clover: Demons (not devils) are born when someone is corrupted by negative mana from the Underworld. The result is anything but pretty: they become towering, multi-armed giants with immense magic power, driven entirely by instinct. A demon is easily powerful enough to raze an entire country, and the transformation irreversibly alters their soul. They cannot be reasoned with, either; the only way to stop them is to seal them or outright kill them.
• Digimon:
  • Digimon Adventure: After Vamdemon is defeated and killed by the Chosen Children, his bats familiars consume his remaining underlings and fuse with his mask, allowing the vampire digimon to be reborn into his Mega form, VenomVamdemon. Unfortunately, VenomVamdemon is nothing but a mindless and feral beast whose only objective is to destroy and devour everything in his path.
  • Digimon Tamers: Megidramon, the corrupted evolution of the main partner Guilmon, is a legendary dragon Digimon so powerful that threatened to collapse the entire Digital World by existing. Unfortunately, it's a near-mindless feral animal too limited in intelligence to even use its attacks. All it was able to think of was trying to eat its opponents.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In Dragon Ball Super, Fusion Zamasu's One-Winged Angel form is an Eldritch Abomination and the most powerful villain in the series yet, however at the cost of what intellect and little sanity he had left, becoming a mindless force of destruction. Given he's assimilated the future timeline and has begun to leak into other timelines, him being this trope is a good thing as the only way the heroes managed to beat him is summoning Zeno and had no way to fight what he'd become.
  • In the Dragon Ball Super manga, Moro also becomes this for the final chapters of his arc. Though perhaps not quite on the omnicidal level of anime Infinite Zamasu, he copies angelic power from Merus, though because his untrained body cannot handle it, he merges himself with the Earth, with it being stated that if he were to detonate, the entire galaxy would be destroyed along with him.
• In Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure, the villain Daruizen is wounded after King Byogen tries to devour him and absorbs a large number of Mega Parts in a desperate attempt to save himself. This causes him to transform into an enormous One-Winged Angel, but also makes him lose his cold and cunning personality and become a mindless, raging beast.
• Towards the end of Naruto, Tobi becomes the host of the Ten-Tailed Beast, reducing him to this state. It gets to the point where he cannot remember his own name. Only by holding on to the memory of his dead comrade from his childhood does he regain his sanity.

Comic Books

• Doctor Strange: In one arc, Strange destroyed a primordial entity of Chaos by assuming its power—and then killing himself. This led to him briefly becoming an all-powerful transcendent being with no ego or identity. Ironically, it was one of Strange's old enemies who dragged him back into the "illusion" of self.
• Green Lantern: Larfleeze is a deranged Idiot Savant whose only concern is stealing shiny things. He's also the only Orange Lantern, meaning he has sole access to all of the Orange Light's power. This makes him one of the most powerful ring wielders in the universe, a borderline Physical God in comparison to The Chosen Many that compromise the other Lantern Corps. Fortunately for everyone else, his insanity and kleptomania means that he prefers to hide himself away and guard his loot rather than cause havoc.
• The Incredible Hulk: The One-Below-All from Immortal Hulk is a terrifyingly powerful Eldritch Abomination, but it gradually turns out that it has no real mind of its own. It has a drive and desire (destroying reality), but cannot actually focus or think to achieve that goal without a mortal host to direct it. As Brian Banner puts it, the thing is all id and no ego.
• Preacher: Jesse Custer is the host for Genesis, a potentially all-powerful newborn spirit that had no sense of individual will. It's repeatedly likened to a supernatural battery.
• The Transformers Megaseries: Thunderwing from the IDW series used himself as a test subject for his experiments with Pretender technology. These experiments made him extremely powerful and nearly indestructible, but also drove him mad, and the formerly brilliant scientist is now a near-mindless Person of Mass Destruction.
• Wonder Woman Vol 2: As Zeus' powers degrade (due to lack of worshipers and being unable to adapt to drawing power from concepts like Ares and Aphrodite) his mind starts slipping. He starts having dementia-like symptoms and he's unable to keep his different aspects contained, as a crazed Jove at one point takes over and claims Zeus is dead. His reaction is to double down on all of his worst qualities in a desperate bid to keep from fading out entirely.

Fan Works

• Animorphs Redux: David is essentially turned into this; he's not entirely stupid, but Cassie's displaced future self notes that David's new morphing power has driven him insane, making it even harder for him to come up with a coherent plan beyond "kill everyone I don't like".
• The Pony POV Series:
  • Azerhorse, based on Lovecraft's Azathoth. The Truly Single Parent of its "family", it and its spawn are the embodiments of the fears of the unknown, existing so mortals don't progress recklessly. Most of the time, it does not speak or act, with its children created by accident. It is not good or evil. It doing anything with intention is enough to shock even the Elders. The first time it does is it to let its children know how utterly royally clopped off it is for disgracing the family for letting themselves be beat and ruining the whole point of them be unknowing entities (the only ones it wasn't annoyed with were Fillimon and Ponythulhu) and thus banished them from the universe for several billions of years. The second time is even more shocking, since it lacks the explanation of the first reason... agreeing to resurrect Button Mash. Why? Who knows? Perhaps it felt like doing someting nice.
  • All Nightmares qualify for this trope, being the insane Superpowered Evil Sides of normal ponies. They have become far more powerful and dangerous than they originally were, but at the price of sanity and rationality. They usually believe that what they are doing is either the only right way or the only way, period, to accomplish things.
• Sonic Holograph: Planet-Eater is very much this. Hard to be anything else when you're a composite entity made of Eldritch Abominations who only somewhat recently felt the fear of death for the first time ever, causing their survival instincts to go into perpetual full blast and making them constantly... well, eat planets.

Films — Animation

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire: It's implied that Rourke's crystal transformation has subsumed what's left of his rationale. All the formerly crafty and cunning commander can do now is howl and snarl like an animal, and he lunges blindly into the propeller blades trying to get Milo. The novelization mentions that Rourke seems to be in "a trance, as if he did not see or feel the world around him."

Literature

• It's implied that most Eldritch Abominations in Chasing the Moon start out like this before finding its way into our world. Vom the Hungerer was once a cosmic apex predator of a dog-eat-dog universe before accidentally stumbling into our world, gaining the ability to speak, reason and self-control. In the case of Fenris, his more "human" self manifests as Calvin.
• Children of Time (2015): The semi-uplifted ants are the world's first superpower. They are an endless, implacable army that uses metallurgy, agriculture, and even siege weapons to advance and consume no matter what stands in their way. Except, unlike the spiders, they aren't intelligent. Each individual ant is little more than a biological machine executing orders based on pheromone controls, creating a massive Hive Mind that has more in common with a difference engine than an actual conscious being. All their "science" is simply a result of repeated trial and error with billions of bodies, but no mind; it does science in the way a river does erosion. In the end, it is defeated by the spiders using "null-scent" pheromone bombs to deprogram entire armies of ants at once, then reprogramming them with artificial pheromones. Overnight, it turns from a Hopeless War to a completely obedient Slave Race that has no concept of rebellion.
• The Cthulhu Mythos:
  • Azathoth from H. P. Lovecraft's work is known among Lovecraft fans as the "Blind Idiot God". He created reality by accident, and will be equally oblivious when he destroys it. He's really more of a metaphor for primal chaos than a being in his own right, though; he's quite literally mindless.
  • With the exception of Nyarlathotep, most of Lovecraft's Outer Gods, Great Old Ones, and other semi-divine beings have a bit of this, being so reliant on Blue-and-Orange Morality that they're barely aware humans exist. Even the Deep Ones, some of the Cthulhu Mythos' more-comprehensible and human-like beings, come across as oddly lazy and unmotivated in their duties, as if they know their bosses aren't really paying attention, and are more interested in making jewelry, their scholastic pursuits, and occasionally getting freaky with humans than in bringing about The End of the World as We Know It.
  ...but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved.
  • In Clark Ashton Smith's oddly comical short story "The Door To Saturn", a pair of Earthlings take the eponymous door and meet Saturn's Top God, Hziulquoigmnzhah — whose name is hard to pronounce even by Mythos standards. In contrast to his nephew, Tsathoggua — a small-minded, grouchy, lazy god, who appears prominently in Smith's other stories — Hziulquoigmnzhah is more serenely lazy, to the point where he comes across as stoned.
• In Discworld, most gods are like this; when you get power from belief and you mostly get belief from taking credit for things that happen anyway, you don't need to be that smart or sensible. Most of their direct interaction with the world is the equivalent of a kid poking an anthill with a stick to see what happens. Small Gods adds that this doesn't prevent the devout from having the potential to do great things in their name, but the gods themselves don't understand, and wouldn't care if they did.
• The Divine Comedy:
  • Although the giant Nimrod retains all his earthly size and strength while in Hell, he is the only soul who speaks humanity's original, pre-Babel tongue. As such, the world's greatest hunter is left completely unable to communicate with others, since no one speaks his language and he speaks no others. Although in this case, he retains his actual intelligence, just not his ability to express it.
  • Satan's arm is larger than the giants and reigns as emperor of Hell, but he is too consumed by his hatred for God to notice that he is the one creating the bitter cold trapping him in the bottom of the Ninth Circle. Even worse, he seems to have lost all ability to communicate and reduced his mouths to killing machines used to rip apart fellow traitors in a vain attempt to express his misery.
• Godzilla vs. Kong — The Official Movie Novelization: In the novel, Mechagodzilla's perspective once Ghidorah's remains make it sentient heavily implies that the Mecha is insane; perhaps on account of the fact it was designed to merely be a Remote Body, and its processors and cognitive circuitry were never meant to end up crudely and directly hosting a complex alien consciousness that originally had an organic brain. Despite the Ghidorah skull retaining enough of Ghidorah's soul fragment to make Ren feel "a million years of rage rising in him, hatred that transcended time and space", Mechagodzilla itself apparently has no idea who or what it is and it's just "full of rage and the black joy of finally being".
• It's a Good Life: Anthony Fremont has limitless Reality Warper powers, but intelligence-wise, he's very much a normal three-year-old. This is quite problematic for the people of his hometown as he doesn't realize that doing things like forcing a rat to eat itself or disappearing people who upset him is wrong.
• I was caught up in a hero summoning but that world is at peace: Downplayed in the case of Shallow Vernal. She is the Top Goddess of the setting and a nigh omnipotent being, but while she is technically nigh omniscient due to her position, being able to see the past, present, and future, and being able to become an Instant Expert at things without needing to see how they are done, she is nevertheless incredibly airheaded and lacks common sense, being nicknamed the "airheaded Goddess". She tends to display Womanchild tendencies, and generally acts like a Brainless Beauty despite having access to nearly infinite knowledge.
• Middlegame: The Doctrine of Ethos is a supernatural force that can grant godlike Reality Warping power to a human host. However, the host can't do anything with it other than stare mindlessly at the wall, utterly subsumed by it. The twin protagonists are a workaround, as they can share the Doctrine between them and retain their minds.
• In Shadows of the Apt, this is the true nature of the Worm; an immensely ancient and powerful thing that has no sentience to speak of and desires nothing but to feed and assimilate. The creature's sheer stupidity is so powerful it can actually affect other people; magicians exposed to it, or even its minions, will completely forget how to cast spells, and Apt will lose the knowledge of what their technology even is. The Worm doesn't understand magic or science, and its influence makes sure nobody else does either. Ultimately, the Worm's stupidity is its undoing, as the fact that it will mindlessly consume anything set in front of it allows one character to Feed It a Bomb. And after all, explosives blow up whether their target understands them or not.
• The titular being of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker qualifies as this. It's the creator of all universes that have been, are or will be but is essentially a child which is why the memory of previous universes are where the idea of Hell comes from. But is slowly learning. Ours is the first universe where the good and bad are in balance and the premonition of future universes is where the idea of Heaven comes from.
• Star Wars Legends: In the Enemy Lines two-parter, Lord Nyax is a Dark Jedi who was badly brain-damaged in a fight he'd had with another Dark Jedi, and was only saved because his mother was there to put him in a form of stasis. He was given treatment to boost his physical and Force-wielding abilities, but he woke up before the personality and mental restoration/improvements that his mother had planned could be implemented. As a result, he's an extremely powerful opponent with few weaknesses, but an extremely simplistic mindset and set of motivations. And then he successfully gains access to a wellspring of the Force.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, the Tradition is the magical force that causes tropes to be continually reenacted, oblivious to the harm that does at the mortal level.
• Worm:
  • Scion, the most powerful parahuman in the world and the first superhero, appears to be this. He doesn't appear to be able to prioritize, so he deals with flooded levies in Switzerland before dealing with the giant monster slaughtering superheroes and killing millions in New Delhi, and nobody can communicate with him to tell him about it. It's revealed that he's actually completely directionless with the exception of orders given by a homeless man in London, and the communication is infrequent enough that errors slip in. Many superheroes and villains refer to him as "the big golden idiot". Though is actually because he's a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and doesn't think the way a human would. Though he's still kind of an idiot, as he originally had a partner who did the planning, while Scion was the warrior of the pair. After his partner died, Scion simply didn't know what to do with himself, hence following the homeless guy's orders.
  • In the climax, Khepri fits this trope, having disabled the limitations on her power put in place to protect her mind. Over the course of the final parts of the story, her mind deteriorates even as she uses her boosted powers to save the world. By the end of the arc she's lost the ability to communicate with other people in any way, has lost nearly all her memories, and believes everyone is plotting against her - and very nearly becomes the setting's new Big Bad.

Podcasts

• The Entities from The Magnus Archives are immensely powerful reality warping Eldritch Abominations...and also animalistic, near-mindless creatures with no comprehension of the world and no way of planning for their goals. With one exception.
• Sauron, the Dark Lord of Middle Earth, is portrayed as senile in Plumbing the Death Star, having become so broken and delusional without his Ring of Power that even Saruman can't talk him into an actual strategy. Instead, the darkest force in Middle-Earth is reduced to simply screaming about throwing armies straight at his enemies.
  "OOOOORCS!"

Religion

• In Gnosticism, the name of the demiurge is Samael, meaning the blind God or God of the blind, making him literally a blind idiot god. The 'blindness' in this case refers to his ignorance of the Pleroma (the true, spiritual reality); his creation, the material world, is made without understanding of the spiritual and is thus inherently flawed. The Demiurge is an antagonistic force because he tries to force spiritual beings (humans) into material existence, unknowing (and/or refusing to acknowledge) the harm it does them since he's convinced he's the supreme being (that's actually the Monad) and his creation is perfect.
• The writings of occultist Aleister Crowley describe a demon named Choronzon who guards the Abyss. Choronzon behaves chaotically, babbles nonsense, and has no true sense of self, but it's also highly dangerous when summoned. Crowley's disciple Kenneth Grant wrote that Choronzon and what HP Lovecraft called Azathoth are basically the same being. In a way, Azathoth is the female form of Choronzon, and Choronzon is the male form of Azathoth. Note that some Thelemites (followers of Crowley's religion Thelema) think that Crowley's writtings are metaphoric, not literal, and that Choronzon is a symbol for the unconscious.

Tabletop Games

• Call of Cthulhu features Azathoth, the ur-example. In the classic BRP, he has an INT of 0 and is literally mindless; in the d20 edition, he instead has Intelligence 3, the minimum intelligence for a sentient being. Trail of Cthulhu lacks stats for gods beyond the damage they do to Stability and Sanity, but they offer some alternate interpretations of Azathoth. One possibility is that it's a supermassive black hole that developed a rudimentary sentience; another, that it's a mathematical anomaly whose existence is pure agony and which seeks to destroy the universe that forces it to exist.
• The True Fae of Changeling: The Lost. For all their vast power and genius intellects, they are not even truly sapient, though the oaths and memes that rule them are complex enough to fake it. They are incapable of true change or growth, instead endlessly playing out the stories and webs of contracts by which they bargained themselves into existence.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Banghtu, the orcish god of strength. While his physical might is almost limitless, he's known for being woefully stupid, one source giving him an Intelligence Score of only 3 (making him dumber than most mortal children, orc or otherwise). He values strength, and little else. The biggest benefit, however, is that his stupidity makes him completely loyal to his father Gruumsh, the head of the orc pantheon.
  • The Lizardfolk god Semuanya is a divine beast, thoughtless and only concerned with its own survival, like any animal. The Lizardfolk consider this to be holy, and their other deity Kecuala fell from grace because he thought too much.
  • Juiblex, the Faceless One: one of the most powerful demons ever, its mental attributes vary depending on sources with most of them giving it decent or superhuman levels of intellect, yet it still has the pathetically simplistic mindset of a slime, only thinking about engulfing, devouring and destroying everything on its way, to the point that other demon lords loathe it immensely.
• Pathfinder: While liches do become Stronger with Age, apathy tends to take over their minds as the years come by. They do less, and lose themselves in the process until their minds "decay", so to speak, due to sheer unrelenting apathy. Demiliches are the oldest of these, whose whole bodies aside from the skull have decayed from this process. They're possibly the most dangerous things an adventurer could ever face, able to rip your soul out with very little effort and carrying ludicrous magical might, but they're barely able to rouse enough thought to defend their possessions if touched, not even aware there's anything going on in their lairs otherwise.
• Princess: The Hopeful: The Queen of Storms has transcended even the quasi-mortal state of the other Queens to become a living embodiment of her Invocation, an eternal storm of destruction and holy hatred ravaging the Dark World. While this transformation has granted her and her followers unmatched power, it has also left her seemingly mindless, incapable of comprehending anything beyond her eternal rage.
• Games Workshop:
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The C'Tan used to be like this, being incomprehensibly ancient gas-clouds whose entire existence revolved around eating radiation emitted from stars. They weren't even aware of the existence of other life. Then the Necrontyr discovered them and gave them new bodies of living metal. The C'tan gained greater intelligence and awareness of the universe around them. Unfortunately, since they were still at heart creatures driven by the desire to consume, this only meant they now realized they could try eating things other than radiation — like lifeforce and souls.
    • The Chaos Gods, Depending on the Writer both In-Universe and out, also may be like this. Some depictions have them as very clever, sapient and in full control of "the game of chaos" they are reputed to play (in other words, toying with mortals for their own amusement), while other depictions have them as single-minded entities caring only about the concepts they are made out of — anger for Khorne, desire for Slaanesh, change for Tzeentch and stagnation for Nurgle. Tzeentch also has plans that forever crashing into each other and interrupted by other, equally long-spanning plans, especially if they would give him ultimate victory. He very much does not want that, since it would leave him with no one to plot against.
  • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Only a few Godbeasts seem to be self-aware; the rest are simply animals with phenomenal cosmic power. This has generally been to their detriment — as a rule, they fare against intelligent gods about as well as megafauna did against human hunters, and many have been slain or enslaved by armies or gods who, while less individually powerful, are smarter and better planners.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle: Morghur the Shadowgave, a Humanoid Abomination that only seems to exist to destroy and despoil all of creation, is completely mindless. His wanderings are almost entirely random as he corrupts all in his path and leaves nothing but ruin and Chaos Spawn in his wake, save that they inevitably lead him, in one way or another, towards Athel Loren.

Video Games

• In Bloodborne, a line from Micolash suggests Rom the Vacuous Spider may be one of these. A theory that shows some credence since the word "vacuous" essentially means "mindless". In one ending, you may also become one when you ascend to become a newborn Great One.
• Deathevan, the Big Bad of Breath of Fire II, is strongly implied to be this. He's been propped up as the godhead of the Church of Eva for so long that he believes his own propaganda, appearing before the party as an old man in white robes before giving Ryu reason to attack him in a berserk rage. Once he's wounded, Deathevan's facade falls away, and his monstrous final form is a screaming lunatic that can't even comprehend why Ryu and his friends would fight so vehemently against him.
• John DeFoe of the Chzo Mythos was formerly an abused child who became a vengeful, murderous revenant after Chzo infused him with power after his father beat him to death with a possessed wooden idol. He's nigh unkillable, completely mad, and can do nothing but lash out at everything he sees. The tie-in short story The Expedition has one character express this opinion about Chzo itself:
  "The King is a beast. That's the most foolish part of it. He has no sentience. His mind is nothing more than that of a fattened pig. He could be the most powerful entity in any universe and his actions are no more calculated than a dog chasing a bone."
• Control: The Hiss is an incredibly powerful and hostile Eldritch Abomination from outside conventional reality, but aside from minor asides about it having a genuine hatred for Polaris and the Dark Presence, it operates more or less like a non-sapient virus, being only focused on ensuring its own propagation.
• Cultist Simulator has The Heart Relentless, who does not permit conclusion. He is also the closest thing the setting has to a God of Good, as he beats ceaselessly to protect the skin of the world from the Worms and the Gods-from-Nowhere.
• Trope Namer Giygas is described as this at the end of EarthBound (1994). He achieved ultimate power, but went insane in the process, and what Ness and company ultimately confront is a babbling abomination in a constant state of self-inflicted Mind Rape.
• Elden Ring: The Prince of Death, creator of Those Who Live In Death and source of Deathblight, has godly power but isn't so much a god as a cancer on the Erdtree, corrupting it with influence that simply spreads without direction or purpose. The Prince of Death was a demigod; Godwyn the Golden. But when the Black Knives killed his soul and his technically-living but braindead body was buried under the Erdtree, it mutated into the Prince of Death and polluted the Erdtree with itself and its curse of unnatural half-death. It bears little resemblance to Godwyn's original self and is, for all intents and purposes, an object that happens to be theologically radioactive.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the series' primary Creation Myth, the God of Gods Anu and The Anti-God Padomay are the personifications of the forces of "stasis/order/light" and "change/chaos/darknesss", respectively. The interplay of these forces is what led to creation itself. From their "spilled blood" came the et'Ada, "original spirits", who would go on to become either the Aedra or the Daedra depending on their actions during the creation of Mundus, the mortal plane. Sithis, the "great void" embodiment of the force of chaos and said to be related to Padomay, is treated similarly.
  • Lorkhan, also known by many other names, is the et'Ada who (depending on the storyteller) convinced/tricked some of the other et'Ada into sacrificing large portions of their divine power to create Mundus. For this perceived treachery, these et'Ada who made sacrifices (Aedra) punished Lorkhan by "killing" him, removing his divine center ("heart"), and casting it down into the world he helped to create where his spirit would be forced to wander. Most races of Mer (Elves) consider the creation of Mundus a malevolent act, which robbed their divine ancestors of their immortality and forced them to experience mortal suffering and loss. According to their religious teachings, Lorkhan is a powerful but "barely formed urge" of a being. Similarly, as Sep in Yokudan/Redguard tradition, he was created by Ruptga to help guide spirits to the Far Shores, but being driven by the same Horror Hunger that afflicts Satakal^note the Yokudan/Redguard Composite Character of the concepts of Anu and Padomay (having been formed from the "worldskins" that Satakal leaves behind), he attempts to consume those spirits and then, after being stopped by Ruptga, devises Mundus as an easier alternative to reaching the Far Shores. However, his plan is flawed and actually makes it harder for spirits to get there.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Yu Yevon in Final Fantasy X is little more than a computer program, running on a policy of:
    10 PRESERVE Dream Zanarkand
    20 SUMMON Sin
    30 DESTROY Stuff
    40 GOTO 10
  • Omega in Final Fantasy XIV is an eons-old killing machine with one directive: to become stronger by facing down ever more powerful adversaries. Therefore, despite having the power to create entire worlds in his Interdimensional Rift, all of his efforts are spent organizing what amounts to a colossal tournament between the strongest beings in history and folklore in the hopes of producing a worthy opponent for himself. When confronted with a problem, his go-to option is lethal force: he nearly kills the Warrior of Light's allies on several occasions in an attempt to prod his "experiment" forward, and puts the Warrior of Light himself in a Death Trap purely to test a theory.
    • In addition, Zodiark, the dark god of the Ascians and Greater-Scope Villain of the first primary story arc till Endwalker, is effectively this. He is not an autonomous being or even an enigmatic precursor, but in truth an immensely powerful Primal summoned by the Ancients of the pre-Sundered world. Zodiark was not created with a consciousness; instead, he is akin to an organic mecha, and must be controlled by a willing host. For most of his existence, this is Elidibus, the Emmisary of the Ascians, who himself becomes a Primal to enact Zodiark's 'will'. When he's killed, fellow Ascian Fandaniel takes over Zodiark's body, and when 'Zodiark' speaks, it's Fandaniel speaking through him. To drive the point home, Zodiark isn't even the final boss of the expansion he's finally fought in; rather, his death is quite early in it and sets off the rest of the plot, as it turns out his existence was merely to shield the world from the influence of the being that becomes the true villain of the expansion. This only serves to drive his lack of autonomy and influence home.
  • In Dissidia Duodeceim, the aptly-named Feral Chaos is little more than a raging beast, the result of the game's main antagonist achieving even greater destructive power at the cost of his mind.
• The Big Bad of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, Nergal, gave into darkness to save his wife from some kidnappers. By the time he gets back, he's forgotten about her and is trying to corrupt his children into opening Dragon's Gate and starting the End of the World as We Know It. Badass Bookworm Canas also studies Dark Magic, and mentions that he must be careful, lest it consume him like his 3 brothers. If you find and complete the bonus chapters, Nergal mentions as he dies that he's forgotten something dear to him.
• Kirby Star Allies: Void Termina is described by the in-game flavor text as a being "born from the total absence of care" who has no sense of right or wrong. Sure enough, it spends the first quarter of its boss fight stomping around and smashing things with wild abandon. However, as the fight rages on, its attacks start getting a bit more strategic, and by the time Kirby and friends make it to Void Termina's core, it's "matured" into a living being capable of thought and emotion (but still corrupted by hate).
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Majora itself has possessed the Skull Kid and given him the power of a Reality Warper, causing him to drag the moon to Termina and cause The End of the World as We Know It. That said, Majora itself is both incredibly alien and incredibly childlike at the same time. It perceives everything it does as a child's game and Link to be a bully.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: Ganon becomes this due to a resurrection ritual that Link interrupts. Twinrova wanted to sacrifice Zelda, but when Link defeats her she sacrifices herself instead, bringing back all of the guy's power but none of his mind.
  • According to Hyrule Historia, Ganon never fully recovered from his botched resurrection in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games; his next appearance in The Legend of Zelda is described as a beast deprived of Ganondorf's genius intellect, explaining why the final battle of that game is more of a simple boss fight in relative comparison to other games.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Ganon is now a near-mindless monster incapable of speech who is only hate and malice incarnate. It's why he's known as "the Calamity Ganon" in this game: he's not a person or even a being, he's a destructive phenomenon, like an earthquake or a hurricane. Some characters, like the Old Man, go so far as to refer to Ganon as "it" rather than "him," due to Ganon's mindless nature.
  • Meanwhile The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gives us a few examples, all of them dragons: Swallowing a divine stone grants immense power and immortality, but costs the majority of your intelligence. This is the strongly implied origin for the three dragons flying around Hyrule that you spend so much time sniping with arrows for crafting materials. Zelda herself also uses this method to return to the present when sent back in time and at the game's climax, when a revived Ganondorf is backed into a corner and realizes that there's a very real chance of him being defeated by Link, he absolutely loses his shit and undergoes the same dragonification process, thus becoming an equally powerful and mindless dark dragon.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 2, Shepard boards a dead Reaper. The video logs from the researchers that previously investigated the ship bring this trope home:
    Researcher: A god — a real god — is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does. ...The god's mind is gone but it still dreams.
  • Mass Effect 3 also gives us the Catalyst — an A.I. created millions of years ago dedicated to a goal which the series has proved is no longer true, yet it continues to insist that synthetics and organics can never co-exist and thus, the Reapers are necessary to wipe out organics before conflict can grow out of control. No matter what arguments Shepard makes, whether they're a Paragon or a Renegade, this A.I. will not be swayed.
• Metroid Dread: The intelligent Raven Beak is reduced to a gibbering mess as he is fused with the other bosses of ZDR, including Kraid, due to the X Parasite copying and mimicking all their attributes and memories. The only thing the abomination is able to coordinate is their hatred of Samus.
• Haldos from Nexus Clash asserts that the true creator of the titular Nexus acts out of mindless instinct, and that the Powers That Be that players can align themselves with are lesser gods who came along much later. The latter is probably true, but Haldos is an Unreliable Narrator with an agenda to drive and it's unknown if he really knows the truth about the former.
• In RuneScape, Tuska the World Eater was once a boar-like creature who by random chance happened to kill a god once. Said god's divinity was then transferred to Tuska, who retained her animal instincts upon ascension; the result was a titanic boar-like monstrosity who rampaged across the universe ravaging world after world to sate her hunger. Things got arguably worse when the Airut became her followers and began controlling her with massive reins, allowing them to direct her towards specific worlds for her to devour while they pillaged what was left and enslaved the survivors.
• The final boss of Silent Hill 3, as in the first game, is the God of the town's Apocalypse Cult, born incomplete, vicious, and feral after the priestess Claudia ingests it as a fetus. It is possible that the God appeared this way because Claudia is not the intended vessel, unlike the protagonist Heather, who carried the God in her womb throughout the game.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Iblis is a godlike beast of phenomenal destructive power but no rational thought whose mindless rampage destroyed most of the world, ushering in a Bad Future. This is because he is the embodiment of the raw power of the sun god Solaris, while the conscious mind was split into another being, Mephiles the Dark.

Visual Novels

• Among the gods from the Shinza verse, Hajun from Kajiri Kamui Kagura stands out as an oddball. Whereas the other Gods reached their positions by forming a belief that warped reality and forms the core of their being, Hajun is more of a god by accident. Rather than any concrete belief, he is driven solely by an instinctive impulse to reject all that is not him. There is no higher reasoning or philosophy within his skull, just a blind drive. As a result, the other gods view him with little more than pity despite that in terms of raw power within the pantheon, he has them all beat, and that with interest.

Web Animation

• A Running Gag in Zero Punctuation is that characters whose quests are suposedly divinely inspired are actually madmen who hallucinated a giant, floating ocleot head who screamed at them to "Kill the Whores!" However, when the actual, capital-G God shows up, he's depicted as the classic Grandpa God, but it sure is strange that so many people have the same hallucination...
• If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device has Kaldor Draigo. In the Tabletop lore, this guy is the Canon Sue head of the Grey Knights Chapter, performing such insane feats of strength as banishing Mortarion pretty much by himself and carving his predecessor's name into the guy's heart while he did so, surviving on his own, completely unaided in The Warp itself for extended periods of time. TTS has decided to have some fun with this: while Draigo is even more powerful than he is in the lore, being capable of punching out Daemon Primarchs in One-Winged Angel mode in less than a second, slaughtering hordes of daemons effortlessly, cloning himself and eating a star, this is because he's so utterly insane that he just can't comprehend that he may ever lose or there's any limit to his abilities. As a result of The Warp suffusing him so thoroughly and it running on Clap Your Hands If You Believe, there really isn't any limit to Draigo's capabilities any more (except perhaps bad dice rolls)...at the cost of him being a hilariously incoherent wreck who goes off on tangents and barely seems to recognise what's going on half the time. It's very telling that when Leman Russ indirectly asks the stranded Karamazov if he'd even call Draigo a "sentient being", Draigo himself pipes up to yell "NOOO!!" in reply.
• JP of Terrible Writing Advice is capable of Rewriting Reality using his notebook (labelled “Best story ever!”). However, his personality is that of an internet pseudo-celebrity who relies primarily on his arrogant assumption that he is far too smart to make mistakes for dealing with mistakes, has been scammed so many times that his finances are shown to be somewhere in the lower circles of hell and he has been dunked in lava, had his script stolen twice, on one of the later occasions even being tied up at the time. Overall, JP’s godlike power is more often then not negated by his many, many flaws.

Webcomics

• Kill Six Billion Demons:
  • Aesma was the most favoured disciple of YISUN, the creator deity, and possessed enough power to pick up the entire multiverse and wield it like a club. She was also impatient, willfully ignorant, selfish, violent, reckless and brutish, and regularly made absurd decisions like deciding that her ideal husband would be a world-destroying demon. She is the creator of humanity, as a cack-handed rush job because she was jealous of the praise that another divine being was getting. It's noted that sometimes the "idiot" fed into the "almighty", as Creation is a place where Achievement In Ignorance is a thing and YISUN themselves acknowledged Aesma's greatest strength was being too dumb to know when to quit.
  • To a lesser extent, there's Mammon, one of the seven virtually-omnipotent Demiurges... who has succumbed to senility over his immortal existence and can barely remember large chunks of his past.
  • Gog-Agog is an inversion; despite her power and insanity, she's willfully weak compared to the rest of the pantheon and rules the multiverse's media industry. Word of God confirms she could become stronger than all the other Demiurges combined — but that would reduce her to the apathetic and/or non-sapient mass of worms she originally was.
• One Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip has the insane space monkey.
• In Stupid Snake, a textless webcomic, the title character is a stupid... snake with unlimited powers that randomly drive the plot that the poor main characters endure.

Web Original

• In Orion's Arm, such beings are known as "Animin". They are a class of transapients that have all the powers and capabilities typical of most ascended beings, but do not exhibit a rational, self-aware mindset. They generally are instinctive beings, and behave more like wild animals than humans or other sapient lifeforms, and are sometimes called Elementals.
• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-3740, also known as "Ashur, God of the Windswept Plains and Soaring Skies". He genuinely is a god, and has enough control over the wind and weather to qualify as a Person of Mass Destruction. However, Ashur is also absurdly gullible even by mere human standards, and is convinced the researchers in charge of keeping him contained (basically by just telling him it's really important not to wreck the place he's in, please, and partying with him like the Assyrians of old) are actually fellow gods of his pantheon. As an example, he thinks the site director is actually an almighty cosmic all-father with power over the entire pantheon, and the only thing the director needed to do to demonstrate his godly might was flick a lightswitch off. Another genuine god shows up to pick him up only to decide to leave him to the Foundation and keep the deception going, as they're handling him admirably and entire Pantheons (plural; it's even said Jesus was the next in line to take care but he flaked) are sick of babysitting the guy.
  • SCP-3004 is a more dangerous example. It was originally just the Cicada God of an unusually large and gruesome druidic cult, but once its followers converted to Christianity, the resulting turn of belief and general metaphysical confusion of swapping one completely incompatible pantheon with another seem to have scrambled its mind. It's now an entirely delusional deity that thinks it's the Judeo-Christian God and has entirely misunderstood both how mortals really work and all metaphors involved within its myth, believing quite a few cruel things to be what (it believes are) its followers actually seek. And a Reality Warper that believes its own lies is quite a dangerous thing indeed; SCP-3004 is doing its best to come back, spontaneously brainwashes congregations to partake in deadly rituals to itself, generated an entire line of Animalistic Abomination cicadas to fetch more faith to feed on and might inadvertently end up usurping the actual God if it continues. If that happens, the Foundation is prepared to wipe Christianity from human memory to starve it of believers.
  • The Sarkic cults have this view of their "deity" Yaldabaoth. They believe it is nothing more than a destructive force that wrecks entire worlds because of pure hunger, and has no other drive or any other thought that isn't this destruction. Their relationship with it is, seemingly, less "deity and clerics" and more "beast and parasites", believing they weaken it in consuming its power and this is what they should do, among others.

Western Animation

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: King Sombra in his shadow form, while very huge, powerful, fluid, and able to spread with only a single fragment of his horn, is only capable of speaking small sentences and phrases and charging forward, in contrast to the highly-prepared sorcerer he once was. Though that could be because of the thousand years he spent trapped in ice. My Little Pony: FIENDship Is Magic heavily implies it's actually due to him becoming far stronger during said banishment, but Hulking Out in the process.

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